Taking on The Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2025, challenge #2 is from a list by deus ex parabola - "Selection of interesting wells, wishing or non-wishing". In the finest of tradition, these were drafted on the back of an envelope on a train with an odd guy staring at me.
Unusual water sources.
1. drawing on a cracked open insectfolk ruin - occassionally contaminated with honey-like nectars
2. runoff from an ice-elemental cooling system at the arcane university, inexplicable ice-chunks that look like melting scales
3. distillery condensate from a dwarven subterranean facility; mildly alcoholic
4. tapping a great root; faint taste of sap
5. well created by a giants blow - shattering the rocks below; brought water from tight rocks but now draw is exceeding inflow as people congregate
6. a bizarre system of a belt made of bear pelt running down into a filthy well with the rising, soaked pelt having water squeezed out with wringers. Tastes bad - both pelt and filth leaving trace tastes - but safe enough to drink
7. dwarven venturi jet pump - on a high wind day this dwarven windmill pumps water back down to a cunning venturi nozzle at the bottom of the well and lifts more water back out. Originally designed to combine with a now-missing wind-powered set of trip hammers and forge bellows, it is now a booster-pumped well that is dry (jammed with machinery) on a still day or a torrent on a windy day
8. furious air elemental imprisoned down-well throws off bubbles that reduce the density of the water column and allow the well to lift.
9. a pump operated by skeletons turning a windlass - incredibly squeaky, skeletons hiss and snarl at any who come close but only attack if the pump is interfered with
10. collosal archimedes screw descends huge distance down a 30 degree bore. Distant snarls and roars echoe up the bore and the screw occassionally shakes from impacts.
11. well is an opening into the top of a cavern containing under-sea. Buckets are lowered a very, very long way, sometimes come up with a fish
12. something lives down the well and trades water for things like feathers and leaves. Can be heard chirping happily when buckets with offerings are lowered.
13. beetle shell continuously sheened with condensate that drips into a pan beneath
14. well stands alone within a fetid swamp with a complex curved roof - a seethingly hot gem within the well sets steam rising that runs down the roof to a ring trough that surrounds the well. Gruesome smell of burning marsh mud surrounds it
15. shattered remnant of a wizards tower; twisted apparatus surround a borehole, blue flames leap continuously from the blackened stones of the tower but beneath the water is clear
16. partially buried giant ice-block, frozen around a trapped ice elemental. Hack off some ice.
17. well is a bowl where a salt-crystal thread is being constantly spun by invisible fingers; once all the salt is spun out, invisible hands toss the water and refill the bowl from the nearby sea - snatch the bowl before it is thrown to get the fresh water
18. barnacle encrusted artificers tower, the grumbling machine within sifting tiny grains of gold from huge volumes of seawater - sifts out everything in fact - with fresh water being dumped out by a pipe into what is now an anomalous garden
19. badly resealed portal to the elemental plane of water has flooded the basement of a wizards tower. Only slightly tastes of mold and reagents.
20. shattered tower of a once-mighty aboleth jitters between this reality and other times, occassionally passing through when this place was/is/will be a lake complete with thunderclap of displaced air/water and great splosh as the towers volume of water is displaced to here.
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