Wavecrawl region: the Maelstrom Islands

Here's a completely new region for a piratecrawl campaign I'm preparing. Map and lots of details about all the islands and settlements. Put it on your world map or lift it as the setting for a short campaignlet or one-shot. Comments are very welcome!


The Maelstrom Islands lie around a titanic ocean whirlpool and are home to all manner of horrible secrets. My place to dump weird lovecraftiana into an innocent piratecrawl. In my own campaign, I'll place the Maelstrom on the route between the Mehabara and Yoon-Suin and the Spice Islands (being written). One last horrible stop on the way to untold riches.

USE THIS

I've made an overview for this entire region (pdf); find the same info below. Get all my map handouts via Google Drive. Available under CC by-nc-sa/4.0 (use, attribute, don't monetize w/o permission).

The Maelstrom Islands, possibly the worst piece of real estate on the entire planet.

INTRODUCTION

A raging whirlpool dozens of miles across. Islands of fearful settlers and sleeping ruin. No-one was living here before the Old World countries planted their flags, although there are ruins. Life is cruel near the Maelstrom. The inmates of Dreadhold would confirm it if they ever got out of the prison on the edge of the whirlpool.

If the Maelstrom Islands weren't the gateway to the Spice Islands and Yoon-Suin, no-one in their right mind would have settled them. Some say that no-one in their right mind ever has. Take on supplies and cast off quick as you can before this desolate place sucks you in.

The Maelstrom Islands are just one region to explore in a wide-ranging roleplaying campaign of sea travel and piracy. At sea you can be free from the Old World powers. Life still touches the unexplainable here. The New World is wide open and strange.

THEMES

An iron grip on the spice trade.
All trade with the far east has to pass the Maelstrom. The Ranstead League famously traded property in Chult for control over these islands, but settling the Maelstrom is a steep price to pay for the lock on spices.

Desolate shores and lashing rain,
You will be cold, and wet, and miserable. So does the Lord test his flock, say the islanders. Their life is both simple and difficult. Basic amenities only. Farming, fishing, herding, weaving. Always praying for forgiveness from their fathers's sins or blissfully repeating them.

Old World settlements on the island shores...
Tight-lipped villages of strict morals. Clannish. Mistrustful of outsiders and of the few decadent towns in their midst. The islanders could not worship freely in the decadent Old World. Out here, they found the freedom to lock themselves in a faith like a straightjacket.

..sleeping horror in the interior.
The Lord tests us all of our days, say the islanders. Even so, they know the lure of their home. Be it Kerguelen's whispers, the fishing bounty of Meerdorf, the obsessive search for the wreck of the Fortune, the impossible buildings on Carcosa, or the nightmare honey out of Quellport - the Maelstrom is a place to explore and a place to lose yourself.

The Maelstrom and Dreadhold. 50 miles across, give or take. Don't get this close.

THE MAELSTROM

Image: the Whirlpool Galaxy, W. Parsons.

The heart of the Maelstrom is two miles across, filled with spray. Rainbows when rare sunlight gets past the storm overhead. All ships inside the ring of the Maelstrom Islands feel the inward pull of the whirlpool. A quick dip along the outer edge can speed up a trip, but most captains stay well clear for fear of being sucked in.

No-one knows why ocean currents race  here from hundreds of miles away, how deep the whirlpool is or where it leads.

Maelstrom rumours (d10)

1. eats a year of your life for every mile you sail towards its heart.
2. slows when certain stars align.
3. has a voice. Learn its language and you can ask it a favor.
4. is where the Devil fell to Earth.
5. the sea devils have an island full of treasure for those who know the way.
6. those who ride the Maelstrom down and out can command the very sea.
7. will one day spit out all it ever ate.
8. will spare your life in return for your one true love.
9. is the baleful eye of God on his world.
10. sends those it eats to faraway places.

What's at the heart of the Maelstrom? (d10)

1. a direct road to Hell.
2. a chained thing of endless hunger.
3. a city cursed for its endless curiosity.
4. the Sea King, raging for the return of his daughter.
5. a tunnel down to a vast sunless sea.
6. Prometheus, bound and tortured for  bringing mankind the secret of fire.
7. the kingdom of Death himself.
8. a paradise of eternal life and wealth.
9. dry land with a thousand shipwrecks.
10. a secret Old World fortress.

Navigating the Maelstrom

1 turn = 15 minutes; 1 square = 1 mile
*: Include the ships manoeuvre bonus/penalty.Outside the islands, water flows inward in strong, steady currents. This only affects travel to other places on the world map.
The outer reach of the Maelstrom (outside its drawing on the map) moves counterclockwise around the maw.

• Radius: 50 to 25 miles.
• Ships move 2 squares with the flow at the end of their turn. The helmsman can roll Navigation >20* to avoid the ship moving inward 2 squares.
• Swimmers move 2 squares with the flaws and inward 2 squares.

The grasp of the Maelstrom, inside its drawing on the map, surges around the maw in great swells. The sound is deafening and the sea tilts inward.

• Radius: 25 to 12 miles.
• Flotsam slams a ship or swimmer for d6 damage every half hour. Con 15 for half.
• Ships must roll Sailing >20* or cut their speed in half (round down).
• All ships and swimmers move 4 squares with the flow and 3 squares inward at the end of their turn.
• Swimmers have to roll Swimming >20 or go under for 2d4 rounds. Grab a barrel!

The maw of the Maelstrom, inside the orbit of Dreadhold, steepens down into a funnel.

• Radius: 12 to 2 miles.
• Ships roll to keep their speed as in the grasp.
• Move 6 squares with the flow and 4 inward.
• Flotsam: d6 per 15 minutes. Con 20 for half.
• Swimmers go under unless they have something to hold on to.

The heart of the Maelstrom is filled with salt spray and the stench of rot. Lightning marks moving shapes deep below.

• Radius: 2 to 0 miles.

Inspired by the cruel look of the turkish prison from Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest

DREADHOLD PRISON

Dreadhold: Eberron's Inescapable Island Prison, detailed in Dragon 344

A fortress of black stone where the Old World powers send their worst criminals to rot for years, for life or longer. Impossible to reach and harder to leave.

There is no vegetation on this rocky island. The only  road leads from the docks to the prison, looking out over the Maelstrom. The roar is deafening. Cliffs range from 40-60 feet high and end in sharp rocks except at the one inlet near the docks. Prison staff from Kerguelen and Graben works three month shifts locked in with the inmates.

Warden Saxon Gundirk is a heartless Ranstead noble. He cares not about guilt or due process; he just imprisons those that the Old World countries send him. Only known agents of an imprisoning government can order an early release.

The original Dreadhold is warded up to the gills against flying ships and teleportation, with endless layers of runes to hem in its prisoners. In a low-to-no magic setting, Dreadhold makes do with stone doors, complex locks, heavy chains and hobbles. No single guard carries all the keys to the many corridors and ward rooms. Engineer Cassius Vreyman is a Weather Witch specialising in devious curse-traps.

Dreadhold keeps 418 prisoners in progressively stricter wards - two to a cell, in a single cell, in 24/7 solitary, in chains, in a deep hole, blinded and mute. The gold ward offers luxury for noble prisoners. Rumours of a ward where dangerous prisoners are turned to stone are almost certainly a fancy tale. So are tales of prisoners that have been incarcerated before the island was even discovered.

Shark's Teeth Reef
Shields Henderson island from the worst pull of the Maelstrom. Tall tales about Knammen Island fishers meeting beautiful mermaids here and coming home lovesick with strange jewelry.

Coffin Nails Reef
Prisoners who die in their cell are tossed into the sea here. There are stories about an underseas tunnel to Dreadhold.

Kerguelen. Perhaps the closest to a classic buried horror story that you'll get.

KERGUELEN

Trail of Cthulhu - The Black Drop

In The Black Drop, Kerguelen is an island group in the Antarctic under French rule. The adventure has the colony closing up, just when a party of Nazi investigators show up to suicide pact a waking Lovecraft horror back to sleep.

Adaptation: recast the French as Valois and the Nazi anti-doomsday cult as the advance team for Kerguelen's new Ranstead masters. Lose the 30 year timer on the big nasty. It's asleep but can be woken by determined action.

Extremely cold, even for the Maelstrom Islands: mountains are covered by snow year-round, the sun seems to sit lower in the sky than on the other islands and plants grow extremely slowly on Kerguelen.

A failing Valois colony has been handed over to Ranstead explorers. The 137 Port Couvreux colonists are miserable and poor, which makes their black gem jewelry even more remarkable. The Ranstead advance team landed in Betsy Cove to explore the ancient quarries where these jewels were found. What no-one will write in a report is that the stones sing softly at night or that the quarry is flanked by immense towers of unknown architecture. A pitch black tunnel leads into the mountain.

Graben Island, Knammen and Nebelstein. For all your evil necromancer and dubious fish folk related needs.

GRABEN ISLAND

Maps: Lyakhovsky Islands. Ship of Horror is a Ravenloft adventure with a cool boat haunting. Players are pretty much expected to exterminate everything but the townsfolk. The module is more novel than game aid. The basic idea is nice. Throw out all the plotted encounters. Recast the land owners as Ranstead settlers. The Graben family is not undead, but they are into dark stuff.

Port Graben (1700) services any trading ship, but non-Ranstead ships pay a hefty extra fee. Currently the largest port in the region. Simple Ranstead villages of fishers, farmers and herders. Reformed Liturgists, withdrawn. Many wool spinners.

A recurring sickness is picking off the settlers. Ezekiel Graben, head of the local landholder family, is collecting the bodies of the dead to contain the disease. The family is in rudely good health. They secretly drug victims, dig up the sleeping "dead" and ship them to Nebelstein for their grandfather's studies.

Captain Garvyn of the Vliegenthart, afraid of catching the non-existing plague, dumped some of the bodies overboard. Now the crew is cursed. They cannot leave the ship, wreck it or even die it until the bodies are returned. Old Jacob, little Charlotte looking for her doll, and her mother Madelyne want to be buried on Graben.

Nebelstein Island 
None of the ice magic. Nebelstein's master isn't a level 20 lich, but a mad scientist.

Manfred Graben is a recluse chemist investigating the boundaries of life. The Ranstead League didn't think the ancient mausoleum on Nebelstein was worth exploring. Manfred is convinced that the ruins hold the secret of eternal life. He invested his family fortune to become land owner of the area.

Manfred is homing in on a potion that stops aging for ten years. He shares a diluted version with his family on Graben. Each potion takes a living person to create. Early experiments produced zombies. Manfred has learned much from the unquiet ghosts, like how to recover from Quellport's Blue Stone radiation.

Knammen Island

Not detailed in Ship of Horror, but in the Nocturnal Sea Gazetteer. Basically the Shadow over Innsmouth in Ravenloft.

Needs very little work to run. Innsmouth, sorry, Meerdorf, was a faltering Ranstead fishing town before one of the fishermen caught a weird statue of a half man, half fish in his nets. (Would it have killed the writers to give a name? Fine, it's the Marsh family in Innsmouth, so Herr Sumpf it is.)

The Sea Strange statue was put in Meerdorf church to worship. Soon after, Deep One knock-offs crawled out of the sea with a deal: mingle your line with ours and your holds will overflow with fish and gold. Said and done: children have been born since with...a skin condition, is what we're going with here. Definitely not gills.

Run this as a withdrawn town, mistrustful of outsiders, with people wearing heavy clothes. They keep their mutated offspring out of sight when travelers show up. All they want is to keep hauling in fish and wearing deep sea jewelry to church.

In other words, an excellent quiet place to lay low and avoid the law. Of course enterprising pirates might become very interested in rumours of sea gold.

Wasn't sure about this place when I plonked it on the artboard, but quite happy with how it came together. Mash-up of alternate realities and a buried Thing Man Was Not Meant to know.

HENDERSON ISLAND

Map: Pitcairn, of the mutiny on the Bounty. I realised I knew nothing about this mutiny and decided to turn that into the rule of the land. Henderson is contaminated with alternate histories. There are many variants of the mutineers and the wreck around.

Henderson is famously where the Wexlish ship Fortune was wrecked after a vicious mutiny against its captain Bligh. The mutineers founded Adamstown. Wexland annexed them three years ago. Factor Squires discovered doubles of the mutineers, and it seems everyone has a different story about the fate of the ship, what it was carrying and even its name.

Paul's Pool
HEX 0609 Blowhole Caverns. A good dungeon delve against vile inhuman beasts - and the tide, when it inevitably rushes in.

Beautiful tidal pool with wild beasts - barnacle and crab men, giant starfish. They come from Yoon-Suin or even from an alternate reality. Barnacle men shamans use actual magic, which would be devilish hard to learn for soft shelled humans.

Bottle Beach
Sunless Sea, the Dead Letter Office. Mad. Glorious.

A beach where message upon message in a bottle washes up. Faber, a Ranstead clerk, collects them in his driftwood hut. He's building a sorting engine to find where the letters should go. He will pay for you to deliver some.

Faber guards the hatch to his basement. Stairs, turning down and down and down until the light is gone. Shelves everywhere for more letters and parcels. Language shifts, alphabets never seen before, paper becomes parchment, then wax tablet, bone, clay. More letters. They never end. They must be delivered.

Wrecks of the Fortune
The wreck of the Fortune has been found thrice already. Each salvage ran into puzzling anomalies of the ship's layout and encountered unknown sea beasts.

The wreck of the… (d10)

1. Fortune
2. Destiny
3. Benevolenc
4. Salvation
5. Legacy
6. Benediction
7. Chance
8. Favor
9. Recompense
10. Bounty

Mutiny, because… (d10)

1. Cruel captain
2. Endless bad luck
3. Mermaid charm
4. Religious spat
5. Going pirate
6. Lost at sea
7. Cannibalism
8. Infighting
9. Superstition
10. Want to settle

What doomed the ship (d10)

1. Hurricane
2. Food ran out
3. Rotting curse
4. Kraken
5. Pirate attack
6. Haunting
7. Hallucinations
8. Disease
9. Fire
10. Crew sank it

The ship's cargo (d10)

1. Vast riches
2. Murmuring statue
3. Slaves with witch
4. Magical beast
5. Lovecraftian beast
6. Alien ship
7. Secret weapon
8. Opium and worse
9. Spices
10. Breadfruit

Snake reef
Check every bit of water for snakes. Even if you just checked it; even if the barrel has been closed ever since you left port. The reef's brightly coloured snakes get everywhere. Reef snakes turn fresh water into salt and good men into corpses. Become bigger the deeper you go. Sailors say the entire reef is one, sleeping. When the Maelstrom slows, you can see structures down there like those on Kerguelen.

My very simplified variation of Micaholism's United Tribes of Carcosa map. Added in some Bretonnish myth and Hyperion Cantos for fun. Well, as much fun as being hunted by a time-shifting razor golem can be.

ISLE DE CARCOSA

Based on Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow and this gorgeous map by Micaholism. Lovecraftian horror, but asleep like on Kerguelen. You can wake it, of course. Have added the city of Ker Ys (found via Chambers), a Bretonnish myth about a sunken city, and added a second city with the same name scheme on dry land.

Carcosa is filled with the remains of previous occupants. Many things simply become known to visitors, like the Candela Mountains being named for their dancing lights or the names of Ythill and Kêr Ys.

Kêr Bras
Valois settlement controlled by Baptiste Gralon, the nominal governor of the entire island. In practice most of it is still unexplored. Kêr Bras, or "the High City" in Gralon's native Brezhon, outfits many expeditions into the interior. Growing appreciation for the fine arts. Tarracon composer Benvento Chieti Bordighera is working on the reputedly unplayable Massa di Requiem per Shuggay. The exiled Valois violin maker Erich Zahn is working on a masterpiece out of bone. No-one wants to know where he gets his material.

Kêr Ys
The "Low City" of Kêr Ys lies beneath the waves of Chambers Bay. All know without asking that Kêr Ys was punished for its arts and sins, and that its princess opened the tidal gates to the sea. There are plenty of fish in the bay, but no fisherman dares to brave the songs of drowned Kêr Ys. During the new moon, you can hear the city's bells ringing. Silver glitters in the depths.

Free City of Alabasque
A town more than a city, but the grandiose name stuck. Home of the Leaden Brothers, anarchist gunsmiths who settled here to live in the name of the gun. Create strange and powerful firearms and find disturbing bullet caches in the hills. Assign spiritual value to guns and those who wear them. Everyone is armed. Any dispute is settled with a shooting contest or an outright duel.

Ythill
Known to all without anyone telling. An abandoned metropolis on lake Hali where a mirage fills the sky with two suns. Domes, villa's, towers, piazzas, colonnades. Famous for its arts, balls, masquerades, literature and music. Famously devastated by a play about the King in Yellow, who came into reality to sweep the people of Ythill into nightmare.

No-one alive has ever visited Ythill, seen it from less than a day away, spoken to one who has been there or read about its history. It is, and is known. Most Carcosans try very hard not to think about it, or about the fads of literature and poetry that are following each other ever faster in Kêr Bras.

The Time Monuments
Names from Micaholism's map of Carcosa, idea from the Hyperion Cantos.

The monuments are carved with an unknown script that can be read anyway. That is how we know their names: Ciethal the Priestess, the Navel Stone, La Torre Amarilla, Olimatte's Tomb. They are vast works of stone. Edgeless, unmarked by time, empty but waiting. You can enter some, but their insides can shift or close up. A giant statue made of razors sometimes appears to observe or slaughter visitors.

Are these buildings without doors or windows the tombs for ancient dead or memorials markers for a forgotten war? No-one knows. Historian Sol Weintraub wants to pilgrimage here and find out.

Four monuments have been discovered. A fifth is known (but how?) to exist. They are rumoured to plumb time itself. Far in the past, or future, things were locked in. They were to travel towards a now not far away. The right procedure should seal them shut. Or crack them wide open.

 

So...for this last island I actually took the text that goes with one of Dyson's maps. I then used a completely different island for the image because I liked the slant of this one better. The Red Honey from Sunless Sea came to me when finishing up the Henderson map with its own link to that game.

QUELLPORT AND SEVEN BEE ISLAND

Area: Dyson Logos' map of the same name. Geography: Heard and Mcdonald islands.

The Ranstead colony Quellport could be a perfectly normal resupply point for ships on the spice run. Mayor Stijn Gellink works his men to the bone to make that dream a reality. Work on a dry dock should see Quellport become the port of choice in the Maelstrom Islands over Graben. Alas, the vile and unnatural has a strong grip here. Gellink will pay well to have Quellport's vices squashed.

Red Honey and the Rose Garden
Red Honey: Sunless Sea.Produced and shipped from Quellport and extremely popular amongst jaded nobles and merchants. Red Honey is highly addictive. Users delve into ultra-realistic dreams, fears and pleasures, living an entire life inside an hour.

The Sweet Sisters are the only ones who can produce it, and they protect the secret recipe for Red Honey with your life. The group is led by Sister Zaira, an ex-slave from Chult, and the popular poet Isery. Below Quellport, they oversee the Rose Garden, where lamplighter bees drink the dreams from screaming prisoners' brains and make a nectar redder than blood.

North Cove
Mundane, on the surface. Herders, fishermen. North Cove is the home of exiled notables who wish to overthrow the Burgherparlement of the great merchant houses of Ranstead.

Lawyer Hugo Grotius and parliamentary clerk Gilles van Ledenberg are co-conspirators of the executed Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. They want to return the Burgherparlement to the hands of the people of Ranstead. Lacking the oratory gifts of Van Oldenbarnevelt, they are interested in any and all word of his descendents, lost speeches - or of ways to bring the old man back from the grave.

Sheep's Cay
Sheep's Cay treats with a giant in the hills named Zalt, who can see the future. He shades his prophecies to sow discord, but brings enough fortune to his petitioners that they keep coming back.

The Blue Stone
A 400 yard cube of deep translucent blue stone in the bay off Quellport. Ships have wrecked themselves, those who climb and explore its sigil-covered sides take ill within weeks, but still the Society of the Blue bribes captains out of Quellport to ferry them to the stone.

The lamplighter beehives
Name & inspiration: from Sunless Sea. Scaled down from the 20m bees in the Quellport write-up to make them less physically intimidating and hopefully all the scarier. Effect of being stung: False Machine's Atomic Bees.

On the northern Seven Bee peninsula, seven enormous beehives are home to luminescent bees the size of your thumb. Their honey twists the body. They can zip through ordinary matter in short bursts and are relaxed like bumblebees - until threatened.

To be stung by a lamplighter bee is to implode in a heartbeat. The feeling is beyond agony, golden essence streaming out of you like the blaze of a falling star. Every seven years, the seven hives swarm to the Blue Stone for reasons unknown. They might be linked to the Flying Gods of the City of Barzon in Chult.