Perils of the Seas
Leviathans’ and Krakens’ Breeding Grounds
Leviathans and Krakens are two families of gargantuan sea animals, the former a group of cetacean-like beasts, the latter of tentacled creatures. Some species are prized catch, with a fleet of “whaling ships” [“leviathaning ships”?] on the hunt during spring and summer. Other species are a menace: the Armored Leviathan is impenetrable to most harpoons, while the clawed Kraken actively hunts ships to eat.
The Divination school of magic and druidic traditions linked to the sea are prominent in the regions engaged in this kind of whaling: wizards and druids are among the crew members with the job of spotting these terrible monsters in advance.
Smoke Monsoon
A sliver of Elemental Smoke is hovering far off the western coast of the Dwarven Federation, causing a unique weather pattern. Once a year, the smoke reaches the shores, engulfing them in a dark cloud. After weeks, a dark and dense rain will follow. When the rain dries it will leave behind a fine powder that can be easily turned into gunpowder (and it’s the main source in the world).
While the towns on the shore deal with this oddity with specialized structures and institutions, ships may not survive the hazard. The smoke is hot and suffocating, the rain will make everything oily yet sticky, and the powder left behind is very flammable.
The Elemental Sliver is a small, permanent hurricane, and near there the smoke’s temperature is so hot that a gust of wind has the destructive power of a pyroclastic flow.
Coincidences’ Strait
The coincidence strait is one of the world’s scientific enigmas. A sliver of an outer plane ended here, but it’s unclear which. It could be either the plane of Order, Chaos, Balance, or a mix of those.
Sailing there, you will be bound to observe some strange coincidence: you could cross paths with an old friend on another ship; it could turn out you have some previously undisclosed commonalities with your crewmates; things, names, and symbols of your past could reappear in aleatory events, like your hand of cards having spelling the digits of your birthday.
Many wizards set shop in lighthouse-towers, trying to find the solution to this reality-warping riddle. These towers have a fast turnover since these scholars never stay in the strait for long: after a while, it could be a week or a year, every one of them will be drawn out of the area by some incredible and somewhat ironic twist of fate.
Sunken Ruins of the Dragons’ Continent.
The dragons disappeared during the Cosmic War. They were torn by fratricidal conflict and the Angels destroyed their continent to avoid their involvement in the War. Only a few islands remain.
Merchant ships do their best to avoid the area, as many vessels disappeared sailing there. Some brave or foolish explorers choose the ruins as their destination, hoping to uncover the legendary riches of the dragons. Sacred texts say the Demiurge tasked the dragons to be the world’s historians, so they gathered an exemplar of everything in their massive vaults.
The people who returned from the Dragon Islands are either disappointed or staunchly silent about what they saw, and their finds are generally underwhelming or baffling. Surely, those who didn’t make it back found something much more interesting… maybe even too much.
Menagerie Islands’ Mutations.
In the Menagerie Islands, it is like the Collapse never ended as mutagenic energies continuously reshape flora and fauna. The piece of heavens hosted somewhere on the main island sustains an impossibly ever-changing ecosystem, with species emerging and going extinct in just a few decades.
One startling effect is that the magic makes it possible for giant creatures to live and thrive in an otherwise too-small environment. Giant lizards, giants insects, and enormous plant-animal hybrids are spotted from time to time, and the continental towns facing the islands fear the coming of a “gargantuans’ decade” as the macro-fauna seems to develop in waves of ten years. Luckily the creature affected by this extreme gigantism can’t survive for much time far from their islands, but they can still attack the settlement in a blind animalistic rage.
Ships don’t have this advantage, the sea surrounding the islands supports these mutations and so a vessel can meet some of these animals, some will be just so big that the water of high seas will just not reach their neck, and others will be native marine species.
Beasts’ Rebel Crew
The northern part of the Erebos Principality is seen as an occupied land by the habitant of the Beasts’ Nations.
The legitimacy of this claim is an eternally open question and, after 40 years, many Beast Folk have accepted the situation.
But not all. The Redeemers are an underground liberation movement aiming to annex back the territories lost in the III Axam War, and the Rebel Crews are the seabound branch of this movement. Through piracy, they aim to weaken and demoralize the Holy Infernal Empire forces and grab riches that will fund the Redeemers’ activities everywhere.
The Rebels’ Crews prefer attacking Infernal cargos and Elvish one as a second choice (“those collaborationists!”), but at the end of the day, they will concoct an ideological reason to assault any vessel they want.
Halfling Chaos Pirates
The Whirlpool surrounding the Chaoscipelago makes the environment unpredictable, with crazy weather patterns, strange creatures washed up on shore, and a general “warping aura” that makes everything look paradoxical.
Most Halflings simply adapt to the situation, while others snap: to cope with the continual disorientation, they accept chaos as a blessing, even if it’s incomprehensible.
The halfling pirates desire only to spread mayhem and upheaval around the world.
They have no clear motive and don’t follow any intelligible scheme in their actions, ignoring obvious targets in favor of riskier or humbler prey.
These pirates follow an aleatory moral where the difference between mercy and violence is the roll of the dice.
Their specialty is kidnapping, and they are famous for the bizarre ransoms they ask (“to free the ambassador, four blindfolded old ladies named Iris will deliver us twenty-three wedding dresses made of silver”).
Confederacy Corsairs
The Confederacy is the center of the world’s piracy.
The myriad of tiny islands offers innumerable hiding spots for the seas’ raiders.
The local economy rests, in part, on the illicit earnings of the pirate captains, and many towns have risen to meet those crews’ needs. The various communities and towns on the island are loosely organized but have some institutions. One of which is the Corsairs, an authorized fleet that works as a counter-counterpiracy force, fighting the Infernal and Angelic efforts to bring law to the sea. They also act as a task force for strategic missions: even if they are de facto state agents, their “pirate ways” will give the rest of the Confederacy plausible deniability.
The Infernal noble skull on the Corsairs’ flag is a throwback to the time when the Confederacy was briefly united by the outcast infernal noble, Typhonio of House Belfagor, in the VII century. The fleet of Typhonio won time and time against the Infernal Forces, becoming a symbol of fearsome nautical prowess.
Merfolk Sea-Bandit
As highway bandits that will jump on the street and rob chariots and travelers, the Merfolk bandits ambush nautical routes for a quick profit.
But the fish people prefer stealth to violence. The bandits wait patiently to meet a vessel at strategic points and then infiltrate it, climbing the hull with specialized knives.
They sneak into the cargo hold via the windows and empty it onto the sea, where accomplices wait to retrieve the goods.
Merfolks have fishtails instead of legs, and that puts them at a disadvantage during fights, for this reason, they will avoid direct conflict on decks but will not hesitate to attack if in open waters.
More unscrupulous merfolks opt to sink ships altogether: they do it by sabotaging the helm and making the ship crash, or through well places breaches into the hull.
Sobekian Cult Raiders
The crocodile people’s hate for other civilizations burns with an all-consuming fervor. Even a humble fisherman fishing near a coast will become a bloodthirsty zealot the moment they see a “sinner” (as to say another humanoid). You may be lucky and have your heart carved out on the spot, or you could be taken prisoner and sacrificed by a Blood Shaman. They have very creative rites, ranging from slow bleeding, by which they create Blood Rubies, to grotesque transformation, that turns the victim into living and screaming fetishes.
Sobekinans actively seek “sinners” to sacrifice and they send out to intercept merchants and explorers. They don’t flag any flag but gnomes sailors will mark know “hunting grounds” with the “stabbing heat” symbol. The crocodile folk seems not to mind.
Sharkmen tribes
Sharkmen don’t consider other people real people: for them, humanoids are just smart animals, which means smart food.
The Sharkmen will evaluate if you are worth the hassle, from a caloric intake point of view, and decide whether to hunt you or not.
Believe the Dwarves that tried it for centuries: sharkmen can not be negotiated with, you can just fight back, hoping to become a too bothersome meal.
They spend most of their life underwater, near rocks or reefs, but the more they meet surface people, the more they appreciate their tools, like weapons or fire.
Western/Eastern Abyssal Tritons
Most Tritons live an amphibian life, half underwater and half on the surface, taking the best of both worlds. Others choose to never set foot on dryland, making the bottom of the ocean their home.
Throughout history, waves of tritons’ communities have left for the abysses, never to return. The reasons were varied (displacement due to war or famine, religious schisms, fear of pestilence), but all of those who went away shared the desire to not be disturbed.
Abyssal Tritons are a rare sight but sparse trades occur with their “shallow water” cousins, to get goods that can not be crafted underwater like glass, ceramics, and metal (weapons most of all). In return they sell what they think is valuable to the surface people: sometimes they are mistaken and offer rubbish as treasure, but sometimes they bring unseen oddities from the deep seas or long-lost riches from shipwrecks and sea battles.
Year after year, the Abyssal tritons become more and more different from their relatives, as their language becomes ever more unintelligible, their looks paler and withered, and their culture becomes more obscure and alien.
Abyssal tritons avoid outsiders, but they will fiercely defend their eremitic lifestyle. They are reluctant to share information, even trivial ones and they won’t explain their customs and quirks (why do they greet each other by covering their eyes with their palms? /why are they afraid of stairs going down?). Many suspect some esoteric religion has taken hold among them, but they would never say.
There are two main areas where Abyssal Tritons reside, but it’s speculated that they are, in fact, one continuous country. Or maybe two warring nations, it’s hard to say.
Black Star Papacy
The Anti-popeìs Evengelizer Hordes of zombies will sometimes use the icing of the Northen Seraphim Sea to reach land to spread the Black Gospel (known to the world as the unlife).
Icebreaker ships looking for seals and other fur animals occasionally meet processions of undead mumbling blasphemous hymns while walking on the frozen sea.
In the past, a couple of Vampire Cardinals have led surprise attacks on the southern coast, making their zombie army march on the sea floor. Luckily, it has been more than a century since the last “sea horde”, but there are still some “devotees” that end up beached on the south-eastern coasts.