I wrote about the Decanter of Endless Water being canon before and the consensus is that it was a mistake.
Is it possible that a Decanter of Endless Water exists on Athas as an artifact? I think it’s quite likely that it does. It has a “curse”. It’s not really cursed, but whoever holds it tends to get killed by people wanting it for themselves.
Perhaps the Decanter was held by the city of Kalidnay before that city’s sudden collapse. After that it disappeared, occasionally reappeared, each time bringing chaos and destruction in its wake.
Recently the decanter has been rediscovered, the source of water for a desert oasis. This has sparked “the war of the wastes”, with slave tribes, elf nomads, gith hordes, belgoi manhunters, thri-kreen clutches, dwarven clans and more all duking it out for the Decanter, with the Decanter changing hands every couple of days. The PCs are tasked by the patron to recover the Decanter.
Of course, even if the PCs manage to get the better of these rival groups, they will be up against the clerics of water, who believe that the Decanter is a holy relic of their religion and that it must stay in their hands. Even more dangerous than the clerics are the Sorcerer Monarchs, who would see the Decanter set up in their own city-state like it was in Kalidnay.
The Decanter would be an immense boon to the owner that can afford to protect it, but it would hardly change the fact of general water deprivation on Athas. Any ideas?
I would be willing to bend the rules and make a single decanter of endless water as a leftover from the Blue Age. It would be a major artifact of course, and it wouldn’t even need any special magical penalties to be a tremendously ruinous artifact that rocks the balance of power of the whole planet.
I’ve been working on an adventure for Adventures in The Dead Lands supplement that features the artifact. Of course, it comes with a heavy price tag, and it’s exclusively for a very special purpose. Any other use would bring all sorts of wrath and ruin on the character, their party, and all of their descendants…
I have 6 in my campaign centered in one region, but they do not spew clean water. They spew acidic, slimy, saltwater attuned to the 222nd layer of the Abyss, they are artifact cursed, meaning they cannot be uncursed without divine intervention or similar high tier effects (like wish), which is nearly impossible in this setting, and the stopper has been broken so there is no way to turn them off.
They have created large saltwater mangroves in the area, guarded by cultists and hags, where slimy and fungal things from the Abyss have gotten in through the tiny one way portals these decanters have created. As well as insidious parasitic aberrations.
They also have a hidden application in my campaign in that the one way portal has allowed one deity access to Athas and it has figured out how to get it’s spells to it’s followers as long as the portals are open, but is unconcerned with the fate of Athas as a whole. Of course, if the decanters are somehow shut off this would sever the connection.
There was a Nodwick comic strip where they used a decanter of endless water to create an ocean. In effect the warrior holding the decanter for 3 straight days only created an oasis because in his words " it’s not my fault, this place is just soaking up the water like a sponge!"