Return to No man's Sea

Beautiful but dangerous

Teleportation circle

## Overview

The plane of water is boundless ocean with specks of civilization in between. Any idiot can get there- just dive deep enough- but not getting lost and actually coming back is another matter entirely.

Great bubbles of air sometimes accumulate with islands and jungles and pirates and generations go by without them ever realising how insignificant their world is. They circumnavigate their bubble and they think they’ve mapped the entirety of the plane of water with their globes. Poor insignificant fools.

The plane of water is so many things and more: the Sea of Worlds, the Isle of Dread, the floating outposts built on wood and coral, towns inside the bellies of whales or sea monsters, the Sea of Ice, the Darkened Depths, the Silt Flats, the sunken planets, the nomad clans, and, of course, the City of Glass. The City of Glass is the "Sigil of the elements", the greatest city in all the inner planes, wealthier than any Prime Material country and far more populated than the City of Brass!

## Survival

### Basics

In many respects, the plane of water is the safest of all. Thirst isn’t a problem if you stay away from the salty areas. Light shines from all directions as if you were just below the surface of a lake on a sunny day in the Prime Material. No gravity except a slight tug towards anything bigger than a ship if you’re really close. You can carry your food around: any wooden barrel with decent buoyancy weighs nothing and you can tie it to a rope. What’ll kill you is the overwhelming vastness of it. I had a friend who was swept off the deck of the ship by a freak current. Once he’d gone about 60 feet from us, we couldn’t see him anymore and there was no chance of finding him. He probably floated for days before starving. If he found a coral reef or a seaweed ball, he’d have enough raw fish to live for months or years. Until scurvy or slavers got him really. If he was lucky, he was swallowed by a kraken before he knew what killed him. The lack of fire is a problem though. Cooking, metal-working, keeping warm, reading, smoking, signalling, branding,… all of that is so difficult, you just wouldn’t believe. It’s why everyone converges around the air pockets I suppose.

### Breathing

Oh, breathing? Obviously you can’t breathe, you dolt! It’s water! What did you think? Most are happy enough staying in the City of Glass or in some prosperous bubble in the Sea of Worlds. We travellers need to get *Water Breathing* somewhere. Not from the party wizard because it’s got a verbal component and I’d like to see her cast with her mouth full of water. Not from the Glass Nixies either: they can undo their spell any time they want so there’s a better than even chance they’ll keep you as a slave, dependent on them for your every breath. No. We’ll have to buy you *rings of water breathing*. If you can’t afford that, you’ll have to settle for *decanters of endless air* to make a bubble around your ship.

### Hazards, combat and weather

It’s not all smooth sailing and calm seas. Doldrums are dangerous but so are currents if you don’t know them. Some currents plunge you down to the Darkened Depths, others trap ships in century-long loops. That’s how you get Flying Dutchmen, ships maintained by the undead skeletons of the crew. Then there’s salt patches, ooze patches, steam and whirlpools. Places that boil you alive and others that freeze you to death. Always be on the look out for red tide or it’ll blind you and melt you. Finally, there’s the sea monsters. You can feel their pull long before you see them: aboleth, kraken, giant squid, leviathans, giant darkmantles, dragon turtles, dragons, giants, and -if rumour is to be believed- gods themselves and a tarrasque.

Don’t expect to be able to fight any of those or even the average sahuagin: ranged weapons fail, melee attacks become slow and ponderous and magic words must be pronounced differently underwater. Tridents, nets, sharks and other swimmers on the other hand become deadly. You’ve been warned.

## Localizations

There are countless people there: merfolk, countless kuo-toa, merrow serving their dark overlords, aquatic myconids, nixies, ruling Marid, sea-centaurs, savage suahagin, aquatic elves and all the humanoid races really. There’s even the odd beholder, flumph, colonising mindflayers, hags and harpies.

Actually, it’s better if I talk about each location in turn instead of speaking in general terms. You’re going to have to search everywhere anyway so you might as well know.

### City of Glass

The City of Glass is a great metropolis enclosed within a sphere of *hardened water*, a nigh unbreakable barrier that protects the city. Half is underwater, half is filled with air, depending on the districts. This inter-dimensional trading hub is filled with merchant ships and portals to every other plane. That’s where we’ll start our journey. Each race and each great merchant family have a “House”; every five years, each House elects their leader to sit on the ruling Council. It is highly cosmopolitan with every kind of air breather and water breather from halflings to giants, fae to merfolk.

### Sea of Worlds

The great bubbles of air your “maps” come from. There’s too many to list them all and they’re far too varied to say much. Imagine a giant bubble of air the size of a planet with bits of rock and earth trapped on the edges by the surface tension, always half in and half out, with an air-breathing civilization living on one side of the "island", trading with a water-breathing one under their feet. They're littered with unexplored islands, coves, plains, beaches and jungles. Many become wealthy because air lets you have forges and agricultural land. Metal and timber are so rare in the Plane of Water that they'll trade for pearls and gold. Of course, fire, soil and metal attract wealth but wealth attracts pirates and some bubble-worlds are nothing more than raiding bases and hideouts.

### Isle of Dread

We’re not travelling to the Isle of Dread. Out of the question. I’ve shipwrecked there enough times to do me a lifetime. It’s one of the largest bubble-worlds out there, a continent crawling with dinosaurs, undead, strange natives, warring kingdoms and the odd lunatic trying to find the City of Gold. I came back from the Valley of Diamonds myself, but I repeat. It. Is. Not. Worth. It. Not unless you’re in desperate need of riches or have a desire to meet an exciting end.

### Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls

“The Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls is the greatest of Marid communities and the seat of the Coral Throne. From this court emanates the wise rulership of the Great Padishah of the Marid, the Keeper of the Empire, the Pearl of the Sea, the Parent of the Waves, the Maharaja of the Oceans, Emir of All Currents, and so forth.” Which is to say, it’s a dangerous nest of backstabbing courtiers with a lot of wealth and magical power but no capacity to enforce their claim to ownership of the plane beyond their walls. Even other Marid only pay lip service to the Padishah’s edicts.

### Floating outposts & sunken cities

Remember what I said about any large body pulling smaller things to it? A patch of coral or seaweed can snowball into a great reef or deep jungle with shoals of fish living in them. Some folks let ships or specially-constructed wooden structures grow into floating castles; sunken cities or rocky “planets” become moving metropolises, messy amalgamations that house millions within their towered homes or interior caves. Obviously, it’s mostly merfolk and water-breathers but all the large ones have water-tight centres filled with air for guests, books or artisans. In this manner, most of the plane’s inhabitants are nomads of a kind.

### Travel

So now that you know what to expect, we need to organise how you’re getting there. Obviously, the easiest way to would be to sail a ship over a trench or whirlpool, tie yourselves to the deck and then sink the ship. The problem being that even if you come out the other side alive, you could end up anywhere. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up in the plane of Surf, Steam, Alcohol or even the Silver Sea. If you’re not, you’ll be trapped in the Plane of Salt, in the Ice Sea or in the Darkened Depths of the Plane of Water. Most likely, you’ll be adrift in the middle of nowhere and utterly lost. Worse, you won’t have any way back.

Which is why we’ll travel to some port cities I know and ask to use a portal to the City of Glass. If you’re desperate, we can use the passage below Umberlee’s temple in Waterdeep.

The City of Glass is a bit out of our way but travel around the plane itself isn’t difficult if you’ve got money. Any sufficiently large ship can be given its own bubble of air which stays with it and we can buy a few hippocampi. Otherwise, we’ll join a caravan, reach a nomad city, or rent transport. Worst comes to worst, we’ll hitch a ride with some merchants and hope not to be sold as cargo or attacked by pirates.

## Politics and religion

Politics? Fah, nothing you shouldn’t get very far away from. Obviously there are covert wars between factions to control the Council of the Glass City and the throne of Padishah but nothing worth knowing about. Vipers the lot of them. I suppose the Marid are still bitter about losing the Glass City but they’re not stupid enough to try and take it back now that they have a fleet and an empire. Besides, the plane is too big to fight over, everyone does their own thing and it’s live and let live. Let me break it down for you:

* The Glass City and all surrounding areas and trade routes are controlled by the Council. It’s challenged only by pirate raids on the outskirts of their small empire and on distant protectorates.
* Everywhere the Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls goes, briefly becomes a part of their “Empire” and Marid will seek it out to pay homage to the Padishah. It’s just easier to pay tribute and wait for them to leave. Doesn’t stop the merchant families from pushing back and trying to make their life difficult.
* The Sea of Worlds is mostly controlled by human settlers or pirates but few of them are able to leave their bubbles, leaving them open to raids from sea-breathing peoples like merfolk and merrow.
* The High Seas are controlled by merfolk but their outposts and nomad cities are regularly attacked by the merrow, their sworn enemies.
* Similarly, sea elves control great islands of seaweed and flock of hippocampi but the sahuagin have sworn to drive them from their leafy homes.
* The Darkened Depths are none of your concern. The aboleth live there, worshipped by kuo-tua and pestered by cultists and the occasional mind-flayer incursion.

As for religion… half the races have their own deity but the cult of Umberlee is predominant. Everybody lives at the mercy of the sea. Praise be to the Queen of the Depths and Wavemother.

### Journal

I was never one for writing things down, I prefer telling my stories in person. Sorry to disappoint. One of my companions made sketches at the time, let me see if I can find them… aha!

(PENDING PERMISSION FOR IMAGES)

I could go on, but I can see I'm boring you

## Mysteries

### NPCs

* **Bruno Montgomery**. This grizzled old captain sails his Artic Tern from port to port, looking for something. He says he has three tasks he must complete before he dies and that one involves a “great treasure”.

* **The Avenger.** Nobody knows whether this is the name of a giant construct or of a new kind of ship. It looks like a giant ray mantis and has an electric tail but it is clearly mechanical in nature and has attacked a number ships.
* **Mādhava of Sangamagrāma** and **The Marvellous Merchiston** are two wizard-mathematicians, currently in hiding. Every major power has placed a bounty for their capture without specifying why; rumour has it they have a powerful spell tome known as “The Log Book”.
* **Jade Ibn Jalal of House Drake** is the current Leader of Council in the City of Glass. She suspects other merchant Houses (the giants and kuo-toa in particular) of capturing and selling fellow citizens into slavery. She’s technically the City’s ruler and empowered to investigate this but in practice, she dares not move against such powerful factions openly. The guardian of the law and Chief Justice is looking towards more unsavoury methods…
* **Sk’Beshaba Chesk**, the “Drowning Traveller”, is a githyanki spy with urgent news. The Illithid have captured an aboleth and intend to feed it to an elder brain. Regardless of who subsumes who, this freak joining will spell disaster. She is unsure whether she should try to stop this unnatural fusion herself or follow orders and warn her people.

### Enviromental hazards

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## DM's Toolkit

### Inspiring works

* The Vortex of Madness module describes the politics of the City of Glass;
* The Isle of Dread is an early edition location, a murderous sandbox. Ixalan artwork is good inspiration material as they are surprisingly similar; (edit: more ixalan artwork at the card seller and on artstation)
* *One Piece* is a series that revolves around seas and sailing, making Water 7, Fishman Island, Calm Belt (or even *the entire setting*) easily fit within the plane of water.
* The City of Glass is medieval Venice writ large
* Sinbad the Sailor; the narrator of this guide
* *Pirates of the Caribbean* fits nicely into the Sea of Worlds, as does any pirate or Caribbean story;
* *1492: The Year Our World Began* by Felipe Fernández-Armesto gives a nice sense of what the world felt like when it was largely unknown.

### Useful homebrew

* Codex of the Waves supplement and Fathom Horror Warlock by Walrock Homebrew
* Rogue Archetype: The Corsair by Walrock.
* The Keeper of Depths from Genuine’s Warlock Compendium and Ocean Domain from their Cleric Compendium
* Ocean Heritage Sorcerer v2 by /u/Rain-Junkie
* Aquatic Subclasses by /u/paganGoldfish (untested)
* Finally, most fortress mechanics can be re-skinned for large ships or the features of a caravel.