The storm breaks an hour before dawn. By the time the party comes down the coast road, the beach below is littered with split timber and tarred rope, and a carved figurehead lies face-down in the surf, rocking with each wave. Everyone at the table will want to search every plank. Give them a little of that. Then make each find come with a catch they have to decide about quickly, before the beach turns into a second dungeon you never meant to run.
Why a wreck works better as a scene than a sidequest
Treat the wreck as one morning. You don't need a hull map. You don't need three sessions of crawling through flooded holds.
Each entry on the table below has a hook, a complication and an ignore consequence. The hook should take ten seconds to describe and be worth looking at. The complication only shows up if someone investigates. The ignore consequence is what happens when the party keeps walking, and it should cost them later, not now.
Spend the most care on that last column. Without it, the find is set dressing, and if you drop the complication instead, you've just handed out treasure. What you want is a small bet that the players can take or turn down.
With a little extra prep, run the storm omens table the session before. Scatter two or three omens along the road (gulls flying inland, a fisherman dragging his boat well above the tideline), end the night as the storm hits, and open the next session on the wreckage. The party will feel clever for having noticed the signs, and they earned it.
The twenty things the tide brings in
Roll a d20, or choose a row that hooks into something already running in your campaign. Every row is short enough to read straight off the page.
| d20 | Hook | If investigated | If ignored |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A split crate spills oilcloth-wrapped ledgers, pages still legible. | Dates and a cove sketch give away a smuggling ring's drop schedule. | A rival salvager pockets them, and the ring learns someone saw. |
| 2 | A sailor tangled in rigging coughs up seawater and whispers, "It sang the ship down." | She swears a voice steered the helmsman onto the rocks, and says she can still hear it. | She staggers inland alone and turns up again two sessions later. |
| 3 | A swarm of crabs picks at a drowned officer whose fist clutches a wax-sealed letter. | Prying the fingers open sends crabs scuttling over your boots. The seal belongs to the harbor magistrate. | Someone else delivers the letter, and the magistrate owes them instead. |
| 4 | An iron-banded chest with a keyhole shaped like no key anyone has seen. | No pick, crowbar or spell opens it. It is faintly warm to the touch. | By evening it's gone, with drag marks leading into the dunes. |
| 5 | At low tide, a ship's bell rings somewhere under the waves. | Someone caught in an air pocket in the hull is ringing it, and the tide is coming back in. | The ringing stops. The local fishermen have a new ghost story. |
| 6 | Wine barrels stamped with a merchant guild's brand. | A guild factor shows up and pays well to have every barrel staved in. He won't say why. | The wine appears in a tavern, and the guild blames whoever was on the beach. |
| 7 | A child's shoe, wet but never worn, and no body anywhere. | The manifest lists no children aboard. | A notice in the next town asks after a missing child nobody admits existed. |
| 8 | A long neck breaks the surface past the breakers: a plesiosaurus snapping at floating sailcloth. | The best cargo is bobbing right where it hunts. | It follows the debris down the coast and finds the party on their next crossing. |
| 9 | An archelon noses crates apart, after shellfish clinging to the planks. | It has cracked open the most valuable crate and won't move without a fight or a bribe of food. | By noon that cargo is strewn along three miles of shore. |
| 10 | The figurehead, a woman whose painted eyes have been scratched out. | It's hollow, with a rolled chart wedged inside. | A street preacher hauls it to town and calls it a sign. |
| 11 | An empty cage, its door bent outward. | Claw marks on the inside, tracks heading for the treeline. | Livestock start disappearing from the next village. |
| 12 | A soaked ship's cat on a spar, wearing a collar with a small brass key. | The key carries a moneylender's mark from the next town. | A child adopts the cat, and the key ends up with people who know what it opens. |
| 13 | The captain's log, last page torn out. | The page is folded inside a dead sailor's boot: a passenger paid the captain to change course. | The shipping house rules the loss "an act of the sea" and closes the file. |
| 14 | Dozens of identical festival masks bobbing in the shallows. | Each has the same sigil burned inside the brow. | Masked figures turn up at the next town's feast day. |
| 15 | A coffin, roped shut, floating upright. | The occupant didn't drown. They were dead before the voyage began. | The next tide brings the coffin back, open and empty. |
| 16 | A rowboat already beached, three salvagers working the debris. | They wave a writ claiming the wreck. The writ is forged. | Later they sell the party's missed finds back to them at triple price. |
| 17 | Bottles with rolled messages, all in one hand. | Each is a plea for help, dated three days before the storm. | Townsfolk find them and start asking who knew. |
| 18 | A lifeboat, oars neatly shipped, provisions untouched, nobody aboard. | Footprints climb the cliff path to a cave where the first mate hides with the payroll. | A stranger starts spending freely in the next town. |
| 19 | Bolts of purple silk tangled in kelp. | The dye is reserved by law for nobility, and owning it is a crime. | A tailor in town comes into a sudden fortune, then a sudden arrest. |
| 20 | A sealed lead tube stamped with an unknown crest. | Whoever carries it begins hearing the singing from entry 2. | It washes up in the next harbor, and the singing arrives with it. |
Entry 4 can turn into a slow mimic reveal if you want, and the mimic encounter ideas explain how to make that more than a cheap jump scare. We'd still leave it a real chest most of the time. A box nobody can open yet gives the players something to wonder about for weeks. Entry 7 is the best mystery seed here by a wide margin. To grow it into an arc, the mystery guide shows how to lay clues players can actually follow.
How each complication escalates if players dig in
If the twist ends at the reveal, curious players hit a wall. Build each find so it gets worse in stages, and let the players choose how far down they go.
The first stage is a skill check or a few lines of roleplay that bring the complication to the surface. If they keep pulling, something new shows up: a rival salvager, the guild factor, the rising water. Push past that and the find links to someone the party already cares about.
Take the smuggler ledger. A cautious party flips through it, sees names they don't know, and stuffs it in a pack. It sits there doing nothing until you want it to. A nosy party sits on a rock and lines up the dates. They realize the drop point is a cove they rode past yesterday. One more push and a name jumps off the page: Maren Holt, the innkeeper who gave them a free room two sessions ago. Now the ledger has a face, and it's someone they like.
The locked chest climbs the same way, just slower. At first it won't open, and it's warm. Plenty of parties will stop there and drag it along, and that's fine. If they camp beside it or try to force it, it shifts an inch while nobody is looking. Keep pressing and the keyhole turns out to match the brass key on the cat's collar from entry 12, and the moneylender whose mark is stamped on that key wants it back badly.
Both outcomes come from the same chest. The players' curiosity decides which one they get, and you don't have to.
What happens if the party just keeps walking
The ignore column is there so you can let the party skip the beach without feeling your prep was wasted. Whatever they walk past still shows up later.
There are four ways that tends to happen. Pick whichever suits the find.
The rumor reaches town before they do, and it's wrong in a useful way. By the time they walk into the taproom, the wreck is all anyone talks about: "Heard a band of armed strangers was on that beach at dawn. Picking corpses, they say."
Someone else takes what they left. It comes back as leverage: the ledger in a blackmailer's hands, the silk on a noble's back, the payroll hiring a mercenary company.
The beast moves. The plesiosaurus or archelon trails the debris into water the party has to cross later, and now your random encounter has a backstory.
The survivor comes back different. Leave the sailor from entry 2 on the sand and she turns desperate. Say she reappears two sessions later as a lookout for the smugglers, because they were the only people who fed her. She remembers who walked past. Write her line now so it's ready: "You saw me in the water. You kept going."
Pacing it so the detour doesn't eat the session
Hold yourself to one roll on the table and one complication check, then move the travel along. A party that wants a second find pays for it, usually in time against a clock.
Make the clock part of the world, not a count of rounds. The tide turns in a few hours and will pull the cargo back out. A sail on the horizon keeps getting bigger. Smoke rises from the next village, where survivors may have gone. Say the clock out loud early, so the pressure feels fair and not sprung on them.
You also don't need to grid the sand or track every minute. The rules give you room:
The GM can summarize this travel without calculating exact distances or travel times, or the GM might have you use the travel pace rules below.
SRD 5.2.1, "Travel"
Apply that to the search too. Narrate it in broad strokes, zoom in on the find you rolled, then pull back. "You spend most of an hour turning over timbers. Rope, broken crockery, a drowned hen. Then the rogue's crowbar hits iron."
If the beach threatens to swallow your main plot, the guide on what to do when players derail the plot has ways to fold side threads back in. And if the real-world clock runs out before the tide does, just stop. End on the survivor grabbing someone's wrist, or the bell ringing again under the waves. The cliffhanger guide covers when to make that cut.
Running it at the table
Prep for this fits on one card:
- Roll on the table before the session, or pick a row tied to a live thread.
- Decide what triggers the complication: which check, which question, or which action brings it out.
- Choose the clock and announce it in the first minute of the scene.
- Write the "if ignored" result on an index card so you can drop it in two sessions later without digging through notes.
Beach scenes sprawl. Suppose you end up with three side conversations and a half-finished scuffle with salvagers. LorePanic can turn that session's Discord log into a clean recap, so nobody has to argue about who grabbed the ledger and who stayed with the chest.
When you describe the beach, mention the find you rolled plus one detail you have no plan for, like a set of bare footprints leading into the water. If the players follow the footprints, roll for them on the spot. If nobody bites, leave the footprints alone and get the party moving up the coast road.