About the zhoraqi Basin
You’ve grown up in a dry world where everything depends on water.
People survive in hidden oasis-cities.
Most are too afraid to explore the desert.
But some say old magic, lost cities, and forgotten gods still wait beneath the sand.
celebrate water, Midland, July 6th to 31st
As part of the Canadian Museum of Water's Celebrate Water festival for the month of July, this table-top role playing game is designed to teach appreciateion of water through scarcity.
In the land of Zhoraq, the sun rules without kindness, and the earth has forgotten what it means to be green.
Once, so the old songs say, rivers sang through the canyons and shade covered the hills. But those days are long buried beneath dust and silence. Now, the wind blows across a desert of bones. The heat is not merely fierce, it is merciless, and to stray too far from shelter is to vanish into the sand as so many have before.
Ringed by mountains like the rim of a broken bowl, the desert basin lies hollow and dead. Only the oasis-cities, rare as scattered pearls, still give breath to life. And even there, water is hoarded, rationed, watched.
The dark priesthood of the Dry Lord, the Adat Mot sits in judgment over all. They decide who drinks and who thirsts. Who labours, who suffers, and who is worth the water they consume. And those found wanting are cast down—not into rest, but into a cruel mockery of life. Their bodies rise again, soulless and parched, to toil beneath the burning sky.
You have grown up in the shadow of these laws. You know the sting of dry air in your throat. You know the price of a full cup. You know to speak softly when the Inquisitors pass.
But you have also heard whispers—never spoken too loudly.
Of a city buried in the heart of the sands.
Of old gods who once sent rain in blessing.
Of secret springs, of living winds, of magic the Adat Mot fears to name.
Of wanderers who left the safety of the oases—and were never seen again.
Perhaps they perished.
Perhaps not.
Something stirs in the desert.
Something that has waited long, long years for the right hands to find it.
Water is life.
Water is hope.
And hope, even in a place like Zhoraq, is not yet lost.
The Zhoraqi Basin is a wound in the earth that the sky forgot to fill. Hundred of miles of salt, silence, and scarcity — ringed by nine oasis city-states locked in a war over the only thing that matters.
Compatible with Pathfinder 1e and Basic D20 systems. An open-world political sandbox where water is currency, undead walk the roads, and the real enemy might be the drought itself.
WATER WARS
416-999-2736
erik.schomann@canadianmuseumofwater.org
