Setting hub · D&D 5e · Building now
A bottomless, unexplored D&D 5e setting you can drop into any campaign: thirteen layers, three eras.
A classic sword-and-sorcery world is upended when a small expedition finds a bottomless Well on a remote island, and with it a new world of unknown beasts and impossible relics. Everyone wants to reach the bottom and come back. For most of history, no one has.
The era
More than five years have passed since the Day of the Light. Many expeditions have set out toward the rod, but none has returned with real evidence.
A few people try to make a name for themselves with false claims, passing off props as relics. Only the gullible believe them, and their lies make honest reports even harder to accept. How could the world hold a hole with no bottom? The island is called Lightrest. It has no inhabitants, but someone lived there once. Jungle has swallowed the ruins they left behind.
No one knows who built them.
Later delvers call these unknown builders the Keepers.
Rules and tools for running Era 1: [ERA 1 RULES AND TOOLS: what a DM needs to run the discovery era.]
Player-safe lore
Seen from Era 1 · Discovery
Below the Light is setting-neutral: a DM can drop it into the Forgotten Realms or any world. The surface is familiar high fantasy: knights, wizards, kingdoms and very little technology. Before the Well, life was "normal-ish." Money, prestige and the promise of unlimited possibilities now pull people of every kind from across the world to its island.
The island is called Lightrest. It has no inhabitants, but someone lived there once. Jungle has swallowed the ruins they left behind. Later delvers call the unknown builders the Keepers. The Well sits at its heart.
Map, places and creatures: [LIGHTREST: the map, the places and the creatures of the island.]
A rod of light runs down the middle of the Well. It seems to be powered by the sun, so the Well has day and night cycles all the way down. From the island, the light looks like a rod. Inside the Well, it flows. It pours down the middle in slow, bright currents, the way water falls from a lip of stone, and it never reaches a bottom. The air still blows outward from it, warm and constant, against the fall.
The light appeared out of nowhere, and no one knows why. It can be seen from a huge part of the planet. It is what drove sailors to cross the sea in search of its source, and what led the first expedition to the island.
The Well is a vast hole on an island as far from any land as anyone has found. No one has ever seen its end. Inside lies a new world of mystical beasts and mysterious relics. It has 13 layers, and each layer has its own theme, not just its own biome.
Going down usually means a jump or a rappel drop. Descending is dangerous but straightforward. Coming back up is the hard part: there is no curse, but anything jumping or flying upward is an easy target for flying predators, and the walls are unknown and unstable. Every drop feels close to one-way.
Interactive map
Walk a party across Lightrest under fog of war, hour by hour, until they find the way to the rim. Switch to Player view to share the screen.
Where you are
13 layers. Layer 1 is charted. Layers 2 to 13: [LAYERS 2 TO 13: not yet written.]
Layer 1 of 13
[THEME]
Named for the Keepers' road of devotion down into the Well. It is the closest layer and the "least" dangerous one. Almost everything the surface knows about the Well comes from here. At its end, thousands of Keepers kneel in prayer, turned to stone. A great lift stands at the edge of the Resting Place and leads to layer 2.
Black and grey rock streaked with gold where the light catches old mineral veins. Narrow steps zigzag down the face, sometimes only a boot wide, sometimes widening into landings. Below, the wall disappears into haze. The light rod fills half the sky, so close it seems you could touch it.
Shrines cut back into the rock: carved niches, small sunken courts open to the light, and stone basins once used for fire. Offerings still sit where they were left, bowls, figurines, bundles of dried flowers, under centuries of dust. Many shrines have a pool of milky, perfectly still water at their center.
Terrace after terrace of pale, overgrown green. Every plant leans toward the light rod: trunks curve, leaves turn, flowers face it like a crowd. Roots spill over the terrace edges and hang down for hundreds of feet. Some of the Keepers' terraces were clearly farmed once; low stone walls still divide them into fields.
Long galleries of dark stone, some wide enough for a ship, some barely wide enough to crawl. Lantern Grubs dot the ceilings like green stars. In places, the Keepers carved straight halls and stairs that cut through the natural caves, and their gold-seamed walls catch any light the party brings.
An immense drop of golden haze, with the light rod rising through the middle like a pillar holding up the sky. Shapes circle it constantly: herds of Light Rays turning slowly, Flying Eels coiling in loops, and sometimes a Drifting Bladder hanging motionless like a small cloud. On the far side, the opposite wall is a faint shadow, miles away.
A sea of tall, pale-gold grass stretching for miles, rippling in the outflow of the light rod, which towers overhead brighter than anywhere above. Shrines dot the plains in every direction: small ones no bigger than a doorway, and great sunken courts with gold-seamed walls. Roads of fitted dark stone cross the grass, and all of them run toward the same place: a platform at the far edge, jutting out over the void.
Habitat: Dim Galleries
A bark-skinned worm up to 20 m long, hanging from ceilings like a dead vine
Habitat: Shrine Road
A beetle with limbs of stone and a body of glass glowing red-hot, trailing embers when it flies
Wondrous item (non-magical), no attunement
A palm-sized compass in a plain casing of dull grey metal. Its needle is bare and bright. It has no north. Wherever you hold it, however you turn it, the needle points down: toward the floor, toward the bottom of a pit, toward whatever lies lowest. Hold it upside down and the needle swings to follow. Drop it from a cliff and the needle still points down while it falls. Nothing marks it, scratches it or bends it.
Inspired by the Star Compass from Made in Abyss by Akihito Tsukushi (homage).
Potion (relic), common, single use
A ball of dull gold the size of a plum. It is flexible, like thick clay, and always cold to the touch, even in a fire's glow. Pressed to a wound, it softens and spreads. Where it touches, torn flesh is replaced by gold, which closes the wound and stays. The new gold is flexible like skin and cold. It leaves a gold scar.
Mechanically identical to a Potion of Healing. Detect Magic shows a faint aura.
Properties
Wondrous item, rare, requires attunement
A heavy bracelet of gold alloy, plain except for a faint seam running around it. Only one has been found on the first layer. It was never meant to be worn for show: when its wearer wills it, the bracelet unfolds into a round shield of gold.
Properties
Wondrous item, rare, requires attunement
A long cloak woven from pale gold-grey thread, so light it seems to move without wind. In the outflow of air that blows outward from the light rod, it billows like a sail.
Properties
Wondrous item, rare, requires attunement
A thick ring of dark gold alloy with twelve small notches cut around its outer edge. Some notches are worn smooth, others are still sharp. Each notch is the size of a grain of rice. When the light is up, they catch it. It is warm when you put it on. The notches look like decoration, and no one has found a way to read them.
Properties
Wondrous item, uncommon, no attunement
A small bead of gold alloy, cool and smooth, found pressed into the stone palms of the kneeling Keepers on the first layer. Holding it, you feel quiet, as though someone has asked you to stop and pray.
Properties
Catalogue
6 relics catalogued. Deeper finds appear as layers are charted.
Rarity
Wondrous item (non-magical), no attunement
A palm-sized compass in a plain casing of dull grey metal. Its needle is bare and bright. It has no north. Wherever you hold it, however you turn it, the needle points down: toward the floor, toward the bottom of a pit, toward whatever lies lowest. Hold it upside down and the needle swings to follow. Drop it from a cliff and the needle still points down while it falls. Nothing marks it, scratches it or bends it.
Inspired by the Star Compass from Made in Abyss by Akihito Tsukushi (homage).
Potion (relic), common, single use
A ball of dull gold the size of a plum. It is flexible, like thick clay, and always cold to the touch, even in a fire's glow. Pressed to a wound, it softens and spreads. Where it touches, torn flesh is replaced by gold, which closes the wound and stays. The new gold is flexible like skin and cold. It leaves a gold scar.
Mechanically identical to a Potion of Healing. Detect Magic shows a faint aura.
Properties
Wondrous item, rare, requires attunement
A heavy bracelet of gold alloy, plain except for a faint seam running around it. Only one has been found on the first layer. It was never meant to be worn for show: when its wearer wills it, the bracelet unfolds into a round shield of gold.
Properties
Wondrous item, rare, requires attunement
A long cloak woven from pale gold-grey thread, so light it seems to move without wind. In the outflow of air that blows outward from the light rod, it billows like a sail.
Properties
Wondrous item, rare, requires attunement
A thick ring of dark gold alloy with twelve small notches cut around its outer edge. Some notches are worn smooth, others are still sharp. Each notch is the size of a grain of rice. When the light is up, they catch it. It is warm when you put it on. The notches look like decoration, and no one has found a way to read them.
Properties
Wondrous item, uncommon, no attunement
A small bead of gold alloy, cool and smooth, found pressed into the stone palms of the kneeling Keepers on the first layer. Holding it, you feel quiet, as though someone has asked you to stop and pray.
Properties
For the table
Rules for the climb back up, and advice for running a descent. No spoilers: secrets stay in the book.
| Layer | Effect of ascending |
|---|---|
| 1 | [EFFECT] |
| 2 | [EFFECT] |
| 3 | [EFFECT] |
| 4 | [EFFECT] |
| 5 | [EFFECT] |
| 6 | [EFFECT] |
| 7–13 | [EFFECT, OR “RELEASED WITH THE LAYER”] |