Rivers with Personality

Rivers have names, mouths, and banks, which makes them pretty much 99% human. Here are three examples of rivers with human personalities.

a river, for reference (by Amir Zand)

Easybrook is a stream of no great repute. It runs once around the waterwheel of an old man’s mill, through a secret village of halflings, and is eventually absorbed into the rushing Wyrmtail River. Easybrook can whisper into her big brother Wyrmtail’s ear, convincing him to slow his current for those in need. She’s not the only being who will help you cross the rapids, but she is definitely the most agreeable. She collects a tidy sum, which she plans to spend hiring a wizard-engineer to divert water upstream and transform her into a more destructive force than her brother. If you find her treasure trove, she’ll try to drown you. If you threaten her, she’ll alert the halflings. They’ll defend her with their lives, unaware of her secret ambitions.

The Misra is a stream trickling through a dry riverbed. It claims to have once known the location of every gold piece lost in its banks, but its memory of these treasures is sealed away in an underground aquifer that it hasn’t the strength to reach. If you restore its flow (destroy an abandoned dwarven dam, cause an avalanche, open the lich king’s aqueducts) and return to the Misra with proof, the river will gladly shower you in coins. It will, of course, keep its most valuable treasure for itself — the one it discovered as the waters carved the riverbed for the first time in centuries — but a clever party can surely find a way to access it.

This is Haku. He is a river.

Montegrum is a fledgling trade city built on the banks of two great rivers, the Tressent and the Krahm. These bodies of water, colloquially known as “the twins”, meet only once, in the center of the city, before splitting unnaturally to go their separate ways. The twins possess an odd property that prevents their waters from mixing; a drop of ink in the Tressent will never flow into the Krahm, and vice versa. You can tell them apart by temperature: the Tressent is hot and the Krahm is cold. The townsfolk postulate that the twins have been in a minor dispute for several centuries, which is why they refuse to mingle. To take advantage of this phenomenon, merchants guilds in Montegrum employ “river politicians” — gangs who perform favors for the rivers in exchange for swifter trade ships.

1d6	Montegrum River Politics (is this is what D&D blogs do?)
1	The river wants you to dump a few tons of garbage in its twin’s waters. Watch out for rival river politicians.
2	The river wants you to halt construction of a dam upstream. Could be humans, could be dire beavers.
3	The river wants you to start a conversation with the other river, then pull a nasty practical joke on it. It suggests defecation. It doesn’t mention what happened to the last person who did this.
4	The river wants you to destroy a bridge for offending its decorating sense. Its a rickety wooden thing that connects two local gang hideouts. They run Blue Lotus shipments over it, so its heavily guarded.
5	The river wants you to drown a fisherman or two, to send a message.
6	The river wants you to remove an old anchor from its bed. The thing is cursed, and also sixty feet underwater, and also the river is not very clean.

Monica Antonie Meineche

Talking with rivers is pretty easy. First, locate an auspicious feature of the river, such as a peculiar eddy or school of iridescent fish clustered near a pier. This is where the river’s attention is most likely to be located (1-in-6 chance of success, 4-in-6 if you are particularly familiar with rivers/fae/augury).

Next, provide an offering to gain its interest. Offerings that are foreign to their waters are generally well received, such as igneous stone crafts or a pinch of desert spice. They also appreciate irony, and will accept drowned land animals as a kind of backwards fishing. If all else fails, rivers like gold as much as any intelligent being.

Now ask your question. Are you looking for something that was lost? Do you want to know a sailor’s secrets? Deliver your question, in written form if possible, and wait. The river might create a nymph-like form to converse with you. It might chuck a note right back. It might communicate in swirls and eddies (in which case, you’ll probably need a local river politician to decipher). It might simply whisper in your ear. Regardless, it wants something in exchange, and you probably won’t be able to threaten it; swords and shields do very little against a localized tsunami.