Lake

Lake
No machine-readable author provided. Marius~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Wide still water, deep enough to hide what lives in it, ringed with reeds, woods or bare mountains. On calm days it holds the sky like a mirror; in wind it raises short, steep waves that sink small boats, and its shores smell of weed and wet stone. Pike, perch and char live in it, ducks, grebes and swans on it, and sometimes a seal or a sturgeon in the great northern lakes. Fishing villages line its shores, ferries cross it, and in the north it freezes hard enough to carry carts and fishing huts. People fear its sudden storms, its cold depths that give back no one, and the ice that cracks in spring. Lake Geneva, deep and long between the Alps and the Jura, is a lake of this kind.

Hear it

Adventure hooks

  1. Every seven years the lake gives back a bell from the drowned village under it, and the bell rings for a death in the valley. It has been six years, and the bell rang last night.
  2. An ice fisher pulled a pike out of a hole in the frozen lake with a gold ring in its belly. Now half the valley is out on the ice cutting holes, and the ice has started to groan.
  3. An old ferrywoman wants to row across the lake one last time, to the far shore where she was born, and needs strong arms. She will not say why nobody from her village has ever rowed back.
  4. A lord stocked his lake with pike to impress a visiting duke. The pike have eaten the trout, the ducklings and, this morning, the duke’s favourite lapdog.

What grows here

  • Broadleaf Cattail (herb). A wetland plant of 1.5 to 3 m with broad strap leaves and a brown sausage-shaped seed head, always in or beside shallow water. It grows across Eurasia and North America and more locally in Africa and South America, from sea level to 2,300 m. Nearly every part is edible, and its leaves thatch roofs and seat chairs. Food of: Horse. Gives: Cattail Rhizome, Cattail Leaf, Cattail Pollen.
  • Common Reed (grass). A tall wetland grass of 1.5 to 4 m, found worldwide, that forms vast reed beds in shallow fresh or brackish water, like the 1,700 km² of the Danube Delta. Its purple plumes turn grey and silky in autumn and the stems stand through the winter. It is the classic thatch of Europe. Food of: Goat. Food of: Cattle. Gives: Reed Stem, Reed Rhizome.
  • Papyrus (sedge). A tall sedge of 4 to 5 m whose triangular stems end in a green mop of thread-like rays. It forms vast pure stands in the swamps and on the lake and river margins of tropical Africa, and in deep water floats in mats that make the sudd. The Egyptians made paper, boats, mats and rope from it. Gives: Papyrus Stem, Papyrus Rhizome.

Animals

Kept here

Creatures

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

To gather

Cattail Leaf, Cattail Pollen, Cattail Rhizome, Reed Rhizome, Reed Stem, Crocodile Glands, Eurasian Beaver Pelt, Eurasian Otter Pelt, European Herring Gull Egg, European Herring Gull Feathers, Harbour Seal Blubber, Harbour Seal Pelt, Medicinal Leech, Moose Hide, Nile Crocodile Egg, Papyrus Rhizome, Papyrus Stem, Buffalo Hide, Buffalo Milk, Eurasian Beaver Castoreum, Green Anaconda Fat, Hippopotamus Hide, Hippopotamus Ivory, Nile Crocodile Hide, River Pearl Grit, Full Moon Reflection, Sturgeon Roe

To fish

Bullfrog, Freshwater Crayfish, Ice Char, Mirror Carp, Mud Catfish, River Mussel, River Trout, Swamp Leech Cluster, Reed Otter, River Pike, Singing Minnow, Tench, Drowned Delver, Lake Sturgeon, Quicksilver Carp, Sorrow Pike, Sunken Reliquary, White Lotus Bloom, Drowned Memory

Nearby biomes

River, Stream, Pond, Spring

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