Originally posted on the official website on August 1st, 2019
Bottle of Endless Water Core v2.01
Table of contents
In our short adventure with the Drink to the Past podcast, they found a new Magical Tool: a Bottle of Endless Water. Endless decanters like this are classic fantasy items, with origins dating back to the dawn of history.
Today, we’re going to share our take on this archetypal Magical Tool, and share a few ideas for how you can use it in your own game!
Bottle of Endless Water
Also known as: Anahita’s Decanter, Flask of the Great Sea, Zora’s Infinite Carafe
Cost: 1 Magic (Spend / Burn)
Range: Melee
Standard Action
Effect: You open the Bottle, and pour out a single square’s worth of clean, clear water. This water can fill a one-square-deep pit. If you Burn the Magic used, the water is permanent; otherwise, it evaporates within five minutes.
Uses
The water from the Bottle of Endless Water may revive dehydrated or desiccated plants, bringing them back to full health within minutes. (This does not work on sentient plant-based creatures, such as Deku Scrubs.)
The water from the Bottle of Endless Water is potable, too, so you can simply use it as a source of fresh, clean water. This makes it exceptionally handy for crossing deserts, poisonous swamps, or wide oceans – all places where finding freshwater might be difficult, or just flat-out impossible.
Puzzle Ideas
Below, we have a few simple ideas for how you could encourage your players to make use of this Magical Tool, if they should find it. Of course, this isn’t the limit of possibilities – just a sip from the flask, as it were.
A long-forgotten waterwheel sits unused and abandoned. It might be in the middle of a stonework dam, or attached to the side of an abandoned mill, its driving creek long since dried up. This puzzle has a simple, obvious solution: just pour water on the wheel to get it moving again. However, it might serve as the beginning to further puzzles; once the waterwheel starts turning, it may bring other clockwork mechanisms to life within the structure – be they opening doors, moving platforms, crushing gears, or rolling millstones.
A cave of roiling lava stands between the Heroes and their goal. Using the Bottle of Endless Water to pour cool water on the boiling liquid rock, they can slowly create a bridge of solidified volcanic rock… but the lava will quickly reheat it back to an untraversable state. On its own, this is just a tense stroll over molten doom… But if you add a few fiery foes to the mix, and make sure that the Heroes know that they must keep pouring water on the lava to keep themselves from sinking in, and you end up with a tension-filled fight that they’ll not soon forget.
A sunken ship on the sea’s floor teeters on an underwater precipice. To maneuver through the broken vessel’s upturned corridors and overgrown kelp, the Heroes can use the Flask of Endless Water to fill rooms of the boat, causing the entire vessel to tilt forward or aft. Water-filled rooms might be easier to swim through, but harder to investigate. And of course, filling too many rooms on one side might cause the entire sunken ship to tumble into the abyss…