The Unfinished Oasis—print single-sided and cut along the dashed lines.
DM: hand one to each player privately after characters are chosen. Do not let players compare cards. Each card’s “temptation” quietly maps to a different ending of the finale—the disagreement is the point.
✂ — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Your mission: Something intelligent may be bound at the heart of these storms. No being should be owned—but no one should inherit its power, either.
Your temptation: Free it. Whatever it costs.
Your contact in the storm: Berrin Quill, a Harper courier traveling with the caravan that never arrived. Every hour the storm grows, his chances shrink.
Answer aloud when you introduce yourself: “You were once saved by a stranger who wanted nothing in return. Who were they?”
Your mission: These storms smell of fiendish work. Find the fiend’s hand and cut it off.
Your temptation: If this place can be made a sanctuary for the innocent—permanently—that is holy work worth any risk.
Your contact in the storm: Sister Maravel, a healer of your order traveling with the caravan that never arrived.
Answer aloud when you introduce yourself: “Name someone you failed to protect.”
Your mission: A mile-wide permanent sandstorm is a wound in the natural order. Restore the balance—even if the cure is letting something beautiful end.
Your temptation: The desert was whole before the oasis existed.
Your contact in the storm: Thornwild, a druid guide who was leading the caravan that never arrived.
Answer aloud when you introduce yourself: “What is something you loved that you had to let go of?”
Your mission: The trade route must open. Secure whatever is causing the storms—under lawful charter, if possible.
Your temptation: A permanent, chartered waystation here would make your patrons very, very happy.
Your contact in the storm: Factor Odessa Vane, a merchant princess whose caravan never arrived—along with everything she owed your chapter.
Answer aloud when you introduce yourself: “What rule have you enforced that you privately doubted?”
DM: during the opening skill challenge, hand one to each player on their turn—a half-glimpsed hint only their character catches. Any card can go to any player. The storm is blinding and deafening: no discussion of the cards, in or out of character, until the wind dies.
✂ — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
For half a heartbeat the sand parts, and something bright falls past you—a single drop of water, falling, still falling—gone before you could swear it was ever there at all.
You stumble through a stripe of sudden cool—the crisp shadow of a palm tree lying across the dune, sharp-edged as noon. You look up.
There is nothing above you but storm.
Something stands upright in the storm where nothing should stand—too tall, too thin, too still, and the sand will not touch it. The wind closes the gap before you can say whether it had turned to look at you.
Letters race across a dune face, written by no hand—a script you almost know, half a sentence long, ending in a gap. The gap stays with you afterward, the way a missing tooth stays with a tongue.
DM: hand this to whoever does the Medicine work on Vek Sarr—the mark hides at the collar line, invisible at a glance. (His Zhentarim tattoo, by contrast, is in plain view on his storm-bared forearm.)
✂ — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Branded into the skin, fine as a jeweler’s work: a jackal, curled nose-to-tail around a well—the way a merchant’s seal curls around his initials. The flesh around it is neither burned nor swollen. It looks less like a wound than like a signature.
Beneath it, in letters almost too small to read, a single word in a jagged script you do not recognize. Anyone who knows Infernal reads it easily: “PROVIDED.”
DM: hand this over when the party examines the rock. Read nothing aloud—let them pore over it in silence. It works better that way.
A sandstone slab the size of a cart, crowded with generations of carving—crossing, overlapping, in more hands and more alphabets than you can count. There is no title here, no sentence, no explanation. Only endings. And every carving, in every script you can read, begins with the same word.
(the oldest mark of all, worn nearly smooth—someone began, centuries before the rest, and carved nothing more)
“Then it lost them first.” (struck out in a different hand than carved it)
“Who judges?” (gouged so deep the stone nearly split)
(the chisel simply stops, mid-letter, and never resumes)
“No adult drank.” (the letters are scorched, as if the stone itself refused them)
“Need can be made.” (circled first, as if someone almost believed it—then struck through)
(fresh—days old at most. Half erased. Whoever began scratching it out stopped partway, as if they could not decide.)
(half-buried under drifted sand, as if the desert itself would rather not look at it)
…and dozens more, in scripts none of you can read—every one of them beginning with the same three letters.
DM: keep this page hidden until the party enters the chamber beneath the hearth. Then lay it flat in the middle of the table without a word. If a player picks up a pencil at any point—that is a character action, and the whole table should know it.
I wish that in this desert
there would always be a place
of water, shade, and safety
for
Written in pale sand that never scatters. The last letters tremble, and thin runs of loose sand creep toward the gap from every corner of the floor. Any phrase spoken in the chamber that begins with “for” becomes a rivulet—sand spelling itself out and crawling toward the blank. Sahra delivers the warning on the stairs: “Never begin a sentence you are not willing to finish.”
Five minutes of orientation. Your character sheet carries every number you need; this page carries everything else.
| The question | The answer |
|---|---|
| How does the game actually work? | The DM describes the world, you say what your character attempts, and dice settle anything uncertain. Roll a d20, add the number from your sheet, higher is better. That is 90% of the rules. |
| What am I allowed to try? | Anything you can describe. Swing from the kettle hook, bribe with your rations, insult the scorpion. There is no menu—the DM sets a difficulty and you roll. This is the whole reason tabletop exists. |
| How do conversations work? | You just… talk, in your own words, as your character. There are no wrong buttons, because there are no buttons. |
| What if I can’t picture the scene? | Ask. Asking questions is playing well. “What does the ash smell like?” is a great move, not an interruption. |
| What do I do on my turn in a fight? | Move and take one action (and sometimes a bonus action—your sheet says which). Stuck? Use your sheet’s go-to turn box. Nobody minds; speed beats optimization. |
| What’s a reaction? | A thing you can do off-turn. Don’t memorize anything—the DM will ask you in the moment: “It’s walking away from you. Take the free swing?” |
| Potions? Healing? | Drinking a potion takes your action, and you can pour one into a downed friend. At 0 hit points you are down, not dead—allies have time to save you. |
| How does resting work? | A short rest (an hour) lets you spend hit dice to heal. A long rest (a night) restores you—but the DM paces rests, and the story may punish napping. |
| Can I undo a mistake? | No saves, no reloads. Consequences stick—which is exactly why the victories feel earned. |
Three habits that make you instantly good at this:
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).