Highseas Wiki

This is to be a complete copy of the rules of the High Seas campaign setting.

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Introduction
Before the Inundation, the world was like any world: populated by the usual array of races, with the usual conflicts and the usual alliances. Then, 600 years ago, the god Quasxthe brought the Inundation. Over the course of 50 years, the land slowly sunk beneath the waves, leaving nothing but ocean.

The elves grew floating forest-cities from mangrove swamps, bringing as many natural specimens with them as they could. The gnomes and dwarves combined their expertise to build a fleet of submarines. The drow picked up and moved their entire civilization to the Deathly Plane of Shadow. Most other civilized races settled for old-fashioned ships, or one or two naturally-occurring floating islands. Many uncivilized races died out.

Humans settled the floating island of Shell. The gnomes and dwarves gradually interbred, giving rise to the race now known as engineers. On pirate ships, every race interbred, giving rise to a great many mongrelfolk. The pirate king Gus Dreadworm retired, mooring his fleet together; mongrelfolk settled on these ships, and moored more to them, creating the floating mass that would come to be known as the Disreputable City.

After 500 years, a group of adventurers (their names are known: Cofniben the Wizard, Morgram Crow the Swashbucker, Arossi the Cleric (since sainted), Sir Bucket the Bold (since coronated), and Saito the Scout) managed to partially reverse the Inundation (an event known as the Subsidence), before being stopped by the fiendish Baron Terek Rogan. A number of small continents rose above the waves, and were quickly reclaimed by the survivors.

Baron Rogan was lavishly rewarded by Quasxthe for stopping the adventurers. His family was dispossessed and Terek declared the Eighth Count Rogan, ruler of the Disreputable City, and he was given a notorious pirate captain for his bride. Quasxthe also steered the Disreputable City to a newly-formed landmass, as the actions of the adventurers had inadvertently caused it to start sinking. Terek Rogan then declared himself King of this new continent, which he called Gus, after Gus Dreadworm. He founded a new city at the mouth of a river, which he called New Disreputable City. The inhabitants found this too much of a mouthful, and referred to it instead as NDC, which was almost immediately corrupted to Endeesy.

20 years later, a party of adventurers (Eleanor the Crusader, Scarecrow the Dragonborn, Doldor Wildheart the Druid, Namia Daydreamer Nagalupine the Goliath, Shian the Sparrow, Cladius the Engineer, and Aeyssa the Nymph) completed the Subsidence. Over the course of the next 30 years, the planes returned to their natural order and the ocean receded from the land.

Aeyssa the Nymph invested her goodwill to lead massive diplomatic efforts to rehome seafolk displaced by the Subsidence into the deeper unaffected realms, arrange alliances and political marriages (some to herself, some between others), and gradually accumulated enough prestige that nobody argued when, on the First of Melts of the fifty-first year after the beginning of the Subsidence, she crowned herself Unity and declared a new Age: Epocha Unitatis, the Age of Unity.