THE OCEAN'S EMBRACE

It was meant to be an quick jaunt.

Less than 2 days of sea swell lay between you and the inheritance that was yours by right and labor. Then, as night fell, a squall rose up and pummeled the ship like a mouse in Her paws. Something…deep came to break the ship. It scattered the crew to drown in dark waters. You were seized by a writhing, barnacled limb and shoved past wiry baleen. Nestled, for a time, in a diaphanous bladder—you felt the dive, the pressure, and the scraping as your gelatinous prison slipped through a crack in the sea floor. Then a jut of volcanic stone cracked too-hard against your head. Then darkness. Then here.

Welcome to Glimmer’s Rim.

An island at the bottom of the sea, where She is broken into a second horizon with stale air and alien stars above; a twice-sized sun sinking into the eventide.

Kind of like this but for real.

No one finds themselves idly upon these shores. This is the Ocean’s heart, and She guards it jealously. If She has brought something here, it was greatly coveted and greedily snatched. The sand is strewn through with sea-smooth gems. Towering stone faces rise unevenly from the dunes, staring out at a world that has forgotten to worship them. In the distance, the roots of the World Banyan knot into a tangled jungle devoid of all greenery. Who knows what forgotten treasures lie therein?

Even the people here are a pathetic sort of trove. A shadowbox of ceramic misfits, plucked from a world that didn’t want them and deposited here. Living Debris of the World Above.

LAY OF THE LAND

TO THE EAST, THE BAY—Even these relatively calm waters chop with violent promise against the angry razor teeth of the reef. These are the bars of Her cage and they hunger for shiptimber. Beyond, the Undersea stretches out to a horizon where a sun sits unmoving, always peeking over the distant wave sand bathing the isle in a multi-hued twilight.

The open ocean is an even more perilous prospect here than in the World Above. Beasts yet trawl these waters that can recall when no living thing had left the ocean’s embrace to walk upon the land.

TO THE SOUTH, THE DUNES—A shining, technicolor crescent of beach. lapped by the wine-dark waters of the bay. Each scoop of sand holds coin and gem, painted china, chiseled marbled, hammered bronze. statues poke scatter-shod in basalt mazes and pastel swirls of coral creep up the beach to breath salt air.

Most castaways consign themselves to the beach. It’s not safe, per se, but its a known quantity. The jungle is not.

TO THE WEST, THE TANGLE— The gnarled tail of a massive tree reaches out its seed-encrusted roots like twisting, bony fingers up into the eternal dusk. The pitiless thicket knots its branches ever tighter unto its center; where a core of bent bark spits loose a mountainous alien limb of fossil stone. The crook of an arm? A bent knee? Perhaps it is high conceit to presume a form familiar to that of a man.

In the shadow of this monolith savage creatures have grown clever and queer from a handful of lifetimes spent on the Rim. Time’s grasp on this place is…ephemeral. Like the sun on the horizon, it seems to sit still. The balance of immortality, of course, swings on whether its spent in heaven or in hell.

TO THE NORTH, THE SWAMP—Where roots soak black in stagnant silt, their rotten husks adorned in purple flowers. The twilight of the rest of the isle falls to full dusk here. No oranges and pinks, but a deep navy blue. A feral queen holds reign here and her dreams leak from these still waters all across the shining isle, granting beasts and birds the tongues of men.

Deep within the bayou, where bluffs begin to rise out of the mire before plunging down into the open sea, a light flashes through the vines. Its colour is indescribable, but it can be seen from a great distance away on the beach.

THE HEART OF THE SEA

The body of the Salt Mother lies beneath the Rim. She shed it long ago. She is the sea, now.

Still, even She must be allowed some sentiment. A bed for Her bones, interred in all the little gifts of drowned men and cracked earth. A scintillant grave for whatever She used to be.

There is a contingent of those trapped on the Rim that have discovered and begun to worship the corpse of the Salt Mother. They sacrifice living flesh to Her fossilized remains in hope that they might revivify Her corporeal form. That they might bring her back here. For some reason, they think that She will be happy about this. Thankful.

They are deeply wrong.

Glimmer’s Rim is an idea I had a couple of years ago when my players decided to up and hop on a ship, sailing off to fuck-who-knows and I was dreaming of a way I might make more time for myself to write an actual location out of the two sentence description I had given them to grab their attentions. “Well”, I said to myself, “Why don’t I just waylay them somewhere cool enough that they forget about where they were going for a couple of weeks? It’ll be so useful because the work I put in now will be handy anytime this happens in a future campaign!” So…two years later and I’m doing it. The players in that campaign have already fucked off to that place I didn’t know about and come back. That campaign is over. I don’t even play with most of those guys anymore.

BUT

It’s a good idea, and I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with a weird island where the sea keeps all her treasures, so I’m gonna try and put it together. More posts incoming, likely ~50% of what I post here.

I hope you get something useful out of it.

TL

ART

Broken Galleon by Robert Allen Burns

The Rim Dunes by Robert Allen Burns

The Poleman’s Discovery by Robert Allen Burns

I don’t have a source for the Hollow Earth thing but its easy to find.

WRITTEN TO THE TUNE OF

Caspian—Dust & Disquiet

Radiohead—Amnesiac

Sinoia Caves—Beyond the Black Rainbow

Disasterpeace—Hyper Light Drifter