Elemental plane of water adventures?

[Miz_Liz]

I am about to start running a campaign in the Critical Role Tal'Dorei campaign setting, and one of the players is a storm sorcerer. His backstory is that his father was an alchemist and accidentally fused an ice elemental with his son's body, hence the powers. I am planning to give each player a personal arc more centered around them and their backgrounds, and I'm thinking this player's will have to go about balancing his life force with the elemental's. They will need to travel to the elemental plane of water and retrieve a powerful artifact (Cabal's Ruin (http://criticalrole.wikia.com/wiki/Vestiges_of_the_Divergence), changed thematically to be ice/cold damage instead of lightening) to help stabilize the two entities, but I am totally stuck on what to have them do within the plane. I noticed there isn't a lot of lore surrounding the elemental planes so it'll have to be mostly of my own design, but I am not sure where to go. Abandoned civilization (akin to Atlantis) dungeon crawl? rabid elementals protecting an ancient crypt?

Basically I would love some spitball ideas for underwater adventures/things that might be found on the elemental plane of water.

[The Cats]

tl;dr nothing that specifically caters to what you're looking for, just a description of my party's current adventures in the water plane.

My players are currently trapped in the plane of water trying to find a rift back to the material.

I used the water plane described in Paizo's 'Planes of Power' supplement. It has a good handful of landmarks, cities and inhabitants described.

As for adventures and encounters: They've gotten in way over their heads with the local fauna (a fun lesson in you-don't-have-to-kill-everything). They were invited aboard a marid slaveship (well, submarine.) to dine with the marid which turned in to them killing the entire crew of the ship because the party's face is intentionally bad at his job (and the prior lesson clearly didn't take.). Freed the slaves though so that's cool! There was going to be a plot about finding a safe haven for the slaves but they weren't interested.

The marid (who escaped) has reported back to the Tempest Court in Evershale and now the party is being hounded by the River King, a powerful being made up of a demi-god's spirit bound into an elemental body with wish magic whose sole purpose is to hunt down those who eff with Evershale.

The party is headed the The Deadyards, a massive graveyard of sunken ships that locals have told them were pulled through a rift to the material plane. Once they get there they'll find it the base of a powerful pirate army. The pirate king will let them use the rift in exchange for retrieving an intact Brine Drake egg from the realm of the Brackish Emperor for him (brine drakes are notoriously hard to tame unless raised domesticated from birth). Granted, the party might just sneak through or try to fight through instead.


There were a bunch of adventure possibilities that didn't pan out, as is always the case with a sandboxy game: The Cloud Forest, home to a hyperintelligent giant jellyfish that would have granted psionic abilities if they managed to defeat it in a battle of wits (or something like that); Evershale, the city ruled by Marids that, if they hadn't pissed it off, would have resulted in an interesting diplomatic adventure with the marids as the party maneuvered to a: find out which of the city's many portals lead back to the material and b: gain access to that portal; The Salvage Tide 'where all things come from and all things go' (this is a red herring, no rift here just ocean giants fishing for salvage. Weird, weird salvage); Lure and Mapielek, two cities (one on the back of a giant anglerfish, the other carved into a glacier) where the could make contacts who would encourage them to say eff the material plane, join us in raiding marid shipping lanes swashbuckling buccaneer style!; The kraken's lair which DEFINITELY has a rift to the material. Just have to get past the kraken to go through it; Phantom's Ebb, a deep trench full of shadowy undead that the party doesn't really have a reason to go near, but if they had gone to Lure the fish would've swam right down in there and ohhh boy what fun the city'd have!

[Vogie]

You could have a place on the Water plane that is kind of junk-from-other-planes, a hybrid of the actual Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the Planet Sakaar from the MCU or House's asteroid from The Doctor's Wife. That way there's a place where a bunch of random civilizations, creatures, items, et cetera can show up without having to explain it all.

Have some sort of underwater city that has giant air bubbles, not terribly unlike the Gungan cities from the Phantom Menace... just without Gungans.

You could have time pass a differently while in that plane, as a nod to the water world from Interstellar