Lowmere — a free 5e-compatible setting

Three hundred years ago the lake drained overnight. People moved into the bottom of it, because everything grows there. They have been living on top of whatever the water was covering ever since, and they hold a festival almost every month to keep from thinking about it.

The old waterline runs three storeys up every wall in the valley. Everyone can see it from everywhere, and nobody mentions it.

A SETTING YOU CAN RUN WITHOUT A SINGLE ADVENTURE IN IT.

This is the whole valley, written so that reading it is enough. No adventure is required, none is included, and nothing in here is a teaser for something else.

WHAT IS IN IT — 21 pages

- The valley: forty miles end to end, two days' walk from anywhere to anywhere, and what the weather does to a party that did not plan for mist
- Marrowdown, and the eight places a DM needs to know in it — the Dry Quay, the Ninth Bell, the Deep Cellars, Bramm's, the Counting House, the Weir, the Waterline
- The rest of the valley: Nettlecombe, Saltless, Coldstile, Candle Fen
- Four people you will use every session, and a page of faces to use once
- A short history in four beats, and one page headed WHAT NOBODY IN THE VALLEY WILL TELL YOU
- The year's calendar — a festival almost every month, and what each one is really for
- The valley map: labelled, unlabelled, and a print copy

FOUR FILES, NOT ONE. A4 and US Letter, each in colour and in a printer-friendly build. The printer-friendly version is the same book in pure white — nothing removed. Plus the three maps as PNGs.

Compatible with Fifth Edition. Free, and free of any catch: there is no locked section, no "full version", and no email required.

If you run anything out of this valley, I would like to know what went wrong at the table. Not whether you liked it — what stalled, what you had to invent on the spot, what your players did that the page had no answer for. Comments are open below and I read all of them.

Made with AI assistance: the text and maps were written and generated with AI, then edited, checked and laid out by hand.