/Tabletop
The Unfinished Oasis.
A free print-and-play D&D one-shot I wrote for my own table and cleaned up for yours. A new trade route has started cutting too close to something old, and the desert has answered with sandstorms that behave like they’re thinking. Four faction envoys go in to find out why. What they find is green, generous, impossibly calm—and hiding something at its heart that asks a question nobody wants to finish.
The pitch.
Mystery-first, combat-second: one exploration sandbox, two fights that are really questions, and a finale where the most dangerous thing in the room is grammar. New players are explicitly supported—two of the six pregens are built for people who have never rolled a d20, and a one-page primer replaces the rulebook.
“The wind dies as if a door has closed behind you. Your ears ring in the sudden quiet—the first sound you hear is each other’s breathing. Ahead, impossibly: green. Date palms heavy with fruit, shade lying cool and sharp-edged on clean sand, and at the center a pool the color of deep glass. A mile behind you—in every direction at once—the storm stands like a wall of turning bronze. It is not chasing you. It is surrounding something. You are inside the eye, and the eye is a garden.”
Secret faction agendas give every player a private stake in how it ends. There are five endings. Your table will argue about all of them, and the argument is the point.
What’s in the packet.
Four documents, all print-ready from your browser (letter, portrait, default margins—page breaks are built in). Players: take the character sheets and stop there. Everything else belongs to your DM.
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For players
Six level-3 characters, one printed page each, with complexity ratings and a boxed “go-to turn” on every sheet so a brand-new player always has a safe default. Pronouns and gender are yours to choose. Any four of the six make a workable party.
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DM prints & distributes
Print-and-cut: four secret faction agenda cards, four storm-vision cards, two discoverable handouts, a table prop for the finale, and a one-page “new to the table?” primer. Contains each other’s secrets—players shouldn’t browse this one.
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Player map + DM key
A player-facing oasis map with a six-segment storm tracker in the corner (fill it in as things escalate—your table will watch it like a fuse), and a labeled DM key of the same map. Page two stays behind the screen.
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Spoilers, all the way down
The whole machine: a timestamped four-hour run-sheet, read-aloud boxes for every scene, the clue architecture, encounter math tuned for four level-3 characters, a finale mechanic you will want to steal for other games, five endings with consequences, a one-page cheat sheet, and full stat blocks. If you might ever play this adventure, do not open it.
The Unfinished Oasis is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC. Stat blocks adapt content from the System Reference Document 5.1 (CC-BY-4.0, Wizards of the Coast). Set in the Forgotten Realms by default; the DM packet includes a swap table for running it in any setting.