Endless Blue - Week 09 - 3D Combat

Physics

Danger From All Sides

Despite the tranquil vista of oceans of the Endless Blue setting, Elqua is a very dangerous place to simply live.  Without solid boundaries to prevent the encroachment of other creatures, every cubic inch of the seas can hide a quick death in the jaws of a predator or by the passive defenses of prey.  To eat or be eaten is the basic law of nature, and on Elqua it is as true as anywhere.  Eventually, inevitably, sooner or later everything has to fight for its life.

The depth that combat takes place uses the table-top as an anchor point, just as if you were playing a game in any other setting.  However, being surrounded in other games only means having eight opponents ringed around you.  In the Endless Blue campaign setting, where a character’s buoyancy keeps him floating at a controllable depth in the water, becoming surrounded means twenty-six opponents boxing a victim in from all directions – eight around, nine above, and nine below.  With that many possible combatants, keeping track of three dimensional position on a two dimensional plane becomes problematic.

To address this, each model will need a special die.  At first glace it would appear to be a twenty-sided die, closer inspection of the faces reveals two sequences of 0-9 in two colors.  In the case of the examples here, the two colors are light blue and dark blue.  Each face signifies how many “cubes” (the 3D equivalent to D20’s “squares”) above or below the table-top the creature floats.  The lighter blue numbers represent altitudes higher than the models on the table-top, and darker blue means lower depths.  Each cube roughly equals 5 cubic feet of space.  This means a die set to 2 is approximately 10 feet above the table top, and 5 means twenty-five feet below the table-top.  When a creature moves, simply add (for ascending upward) or subtract (for sinking downward) the number of cubes moved from the die.  Becoming parallel with other creatures on the table-top is considered 0 (of either color).

So this:

...becomes this:

Remember that ascending any number of cubes greater than the creature's Constitution score results in a check for the pull.  Should a creature risk letting its natural buoyancy pull it upward in combat, attackers are allowed an attack of opportunity.  If an attacker is located directly above a victim, the victim cannot use its natural buoyancy to pull it out of combat.

Obviously, when a creature has moved more than forty-five feet (9 cubes) away from the table top in either direction, the die can no longer track their distance from the table-top.  Use the same methods as if the creature had passed off the edge of the table-top.  Opponents at these distances rarely matter in immediate combat due to the severely truncated ranges that weapons and spells can travel in the medium of water.

Not all creatures fit easily into a single cube.  For a rough estimate, creatures Small or Medium will normally take up one cube.  Creatures of Tiny, Diminutive, and Fine sizes take up less than a single cube, and multiples of these creatures can occupy the same cube.  Since creatures these sizes have no reach, they must enter the cube a victim occupies to attack, and there qualify as a participant of a flank in any direction.

Large and larger creatures will take up cubes dependant on their orientation.  For example, a piscean of Huge size will occupy a number of vertical cubes, where as a Gargantuan serpent will fill a number of horizontal cubes.  Keep in mind that some creatures, such as the above serpent, may very likely be able to twist up or below, and even bend back on themselves, filling cubes on both vertical and horizontal axes.  In these cases, multiple dice (for each cube of the creature’s length) are used to determine where each segment of the creature is located, their order determined by die color or size.  This is called a creature's orientation, and in an essentially gravity-less environment such as underwater "up" is just an arbitrary direction.

Flanking Bigger Creatures

Flanking rules are still the same as in D20, but now can be inflicted in three dimensions.  The character and the ally must still be directly opposite each other with at least one cube of the victim between them.  There may be multiple cubes of the victim between them, but the line of cubes must be in a straight line from the creature to the ally.  If you can draw an imaginary line between the center of the cube the creature to the center of the ally, and that line crosses the line between the center of the first cube and the center of the last cube any of the cubes the victim occupies, the flank is legal.

The blue line overlaid on the serpent is the line from the center of the first cube it occupies to the center of the last cube it is in.  The direct line between an attacker and an ally must cross this axis to qualify as a flank.

Red lines are invalid flanks; green lines are valid.  In the above example:

Ceph 1 flanks the serpent with Ceph 3 and 4.
Ceph 2 flanks the serpent with Ceph 3 but not Ceph 4.
Ceph 3 flanks the serpent with Ceph 1 and 2.
Ceph 4 flanks the serpent with Ceph 1 but not Ceph 2.
None of the Ceph flank with the Mer.

Note: A sufficiently long creature that occupies enough cubes to wrap around a victim (5 or more) can flank with itself if it possess a natural weapon(s) on both ends (a bite attack and a tail slam, for example).  In these cases, the intervening sections (cubes 2 through 4) qualify as an ally for any other attacker.

There are creatures on the face of Elqua whose size dwarfs even the most Gargantuan of creatures that ruled over other worlds.  These Immense and Tremendous creatures are simply too large to be flanked by any creatures, even others of their own kind.  To foolishly attack one of these beasts is as effective as striking the ground or swinging at a mountain.  They are like forces of nature, and natives of the Endless Blue setting pray they never cross paths with these legendary threats.

Endless Blue - Week 08 - Buoyancy

Physics

Buoyancy

Every child knows things either sink or float, but day-to-day existence in the oceans of Elqua requires a character to be able to maintain his level in the water.  Bedding down on ocean floor is of little use if when you sleep during the night you wake up to find you’ve risen to the surface as you slumbered.  Just as a hot-air balloon can maintain its altitude in the atmosphere, aquatic creatures can do much the same under water.

A body normally displaces water, and that water presses inward trying to refill that space. That produces an upward pressure that pushes a body to the surface and makes it float.  This is buoyancy.  Increasing a body’s buoyancy results in it rising to the surface, just as decreasing it causes the same body to sink.  The further down in the depths of the ocean you go, the greater the forces push a less dense body upward, so the greater effort needs to be spent to overcome buoyancy.  A body’s floating point is the depth at which it’s no longer floats upward or sinks downward due to autonomic processes in the body.  In the Endless Blue setting, this point is usually categorized by whatever zone of water constitutes the creature native habitat – the Shore, the Shoals, or the Shelf.

A creature’s buoyancy does not prevent it from rising higher or diving deeper, just that it takes active effort swimming to overcome the natural inclination to return to their neutral floating point.  It is a move-equivalent action to maintain attitude at a water level different than the character’s buoyancy point.

Below the Waves
Buoyancy is achieved in Pisceans with a several redundant systems.  As a rule of thumb, the primary means is how aquatic life forms evolved their morphology to posses a lesser density than the water surround them, thus producing an intrinsic higher buoyancy to aid their locomotion and survival under water.  As a result, a dead piscean will automatically rise to the surface unless it is weighted down (several burial customs involve wrapping a corpse in their belongings or even rocks and seaweed to cause it to sink down).  Conversely, terrestrial and avian life have a lower buoyancy, and so will sink toward the ocean floor when killed – though they rarely reach significant depths before predators and scavengers devour the sinking meal.
The second process is via an organ called the swim bladder, which functions by diffusing or infusing gasses from oils and lipids in the expandable sac.  Because these infused oils are not compressible from ocean pressure, the swim bladder helps regulate the buoyancy by exuding more gases (which are compressible) to sink and reabsorb them to return to their neutral buoyancy point.  Creatures able to adjust their own swim bladders consciously may do so once per round for free as part of a move action instead of at the normal cost of their movement. This can only be accomplished when the creature is either unencumbered or lightly encumbered.
The final method is by the pelvic fins located at the socket-like notch called the acetabulum on each side of the pelvic bone, like the hips of terrestrial creature.  These webbed fins act like the wings of a bird, inducing dynamic lift.  Flexing of the spines changes the shape of the fins, allowing the creature to travel deeper.

Not all creatures are built for all depths.  While the Ceph can survive at any level, many creatures from the Shore would be crushed instantly in the dark trenches of the Shelf, just as a jellyfish native to the Shelf that has lived all it’s existence under the extreme pressures of the on the ocean floor would rupture outward from its internal fluids pressing outward and die were it marooned along the Shore.
A creature can voluntarily release its buoyancy to neutral, essentially becoming weightless.  This results in immediate movement as physics and gravity try to push the individual to the surface.  These creatures move their full movement (they cannot move less) directly upward until they readjust their buoyancy (by either a move action or for free as part of one) and cease their ascent.  They may then move normally.

The danger with this movement is a condition called “the pull”, or decompression sickness.  Early Elquans believed the pull to be a curse by the evil aberrations above the waves to claim more souls.  Usually the victim would die and the body’s natural buoyancy would cause it to rise to the surface (where it would become fodder for predators0 instead of sinking all the fathoms towards union with the gods.  Myth aside, every body is under pressure in the depths of Elqua’s oceans, and as a result of this pressure certain gasses are harmlessly dissolved and dispersed throughout their body’s fluids.  As an individual rises, the pressure eases and the dispersed elements coagulate back into gases.  Rising too quickly results in the gasses forming more quickly than the body’s normal means of eliminating them.

The Pull

Individuals can always rise a number of feet per round equal to their Constitution score without a risk of incurring the pull.  Moving greater than that requires a Fortitude save each round of moving so to avoid becoming incapacitated and helpless.  The DC for this is a base save of 15 for the first round, with and cumulative penalty of +2 for every successive round spent rising via positive buoyancy.  If a creature moves more than its Fortitude score in feet, it takes an additional penalty of +2 when moving its full rate, or a +5 if performing more than a single move action.

Rise up to Fortitude score in feet                           No penalty
Move over Fortitude in a single move                    +2
Move over Fortitude in a full round action             +5
Each round rising beyond Fortitude score             +2 cumulative

Failing such a Fortitude save results in immediate spasms and wracking pain.  The victim of the pull becomes disabled and begins taking 1 point of temporary Constitution damage per round he continues to rise.  Should the creature’s buoyancy become neutral and he stops rising, the Constitution damage stops accruing.  The Constitution damage can be restored at a rate of 1 point per day spent at a lower depth, and the victim is allowed a new Fortitude save each of those days at a flat DC 15 to remove the disabled status.

Above the Surface

For native creatures, survival above the life-giving waves of Elqua is not unlike survival underwater for air-breathers.  An aquatic creature essentially holds their breath on the surface to avoid asphyxiation.  The muscles of the gill-slits press the flap down and seal the organ so gravity cannot cause the water to spill out, preventing speech but keeping water already in the lungs around the oxygen-extracting gills.
A creature can hold their breath for a number of rounds equal to twice their Constitution score.  After that period expires, the creature must make a Constitution check (DC 10) to subsume their semi-autonomic breathing reflex, with a cumulative +1 each subsequent round.  Failure is a little more torturous for an aquatic than a terrestrial, resulting instead with the creature passing out, becoming helpless, and automatically taking 1 point of permanent ability score damage to all abilities (Constitution, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) each round until they are submerged under water again.  Should any one of those abilities reach 0 before re-submergence happens, the creature dies.

Endless Blue - Week 07 - Shore, Shoals, and Shelf

Oceanography

Topographical zones

Despite its submergence beneath fathoms of water, Elqua is little different from any other world.  It has mountains and valleys, rolling hills and wide plains, shallow basins and expansive mesas.  The main difference between the more familiar world and the world of endless blue is that Elqua’s ocean level is far higher than most.  The tallest peaks of mountains in a normal realm appear as island archipelagos here, and what would be sea level for a more familiar world becomes a kind of underwater balcony before the drop into the darkness of the ocean floor.

Understanding the logistics of Elqua requires the acceptance that the oceans are comprised of three levels, layers that cut across the depths of the world’s water: the Shore, the Shoals, and the Shelf.

The first layer is known as the Shore, and it is composed of the sea floor that directly touches land at the water’s edge and extends approximately 200 feet from the surface.  Usually defined as “lit water”, the visible spectrum of light fully illuminates this layer along the coast of what little land breaks the waves.  Wildlife of vivid and varied color thrive as the Sun warms these waters thoroughly, allowing more traditional ecosystems to continue and flourish, and as such surface predators use these coastal areas as hunting grounds.  This area includes the waterline gained and lost by the complex tides of Elqua.

Next come the Shoals, or “dark water”.  This far down – to about 650’ – ambient light has begun to be absorbed by the expanse of water above.  Cooler colors begin to look muted and muddy, and the warmer colors are little more than black.  Shades and hues become washed out and indistinguishable.  With less light, the water is cooler here, and requires a modicum of protection to withstand the temperature.  The land begins to slant downward more aggressively, and can extend outward this way for miles and miles in all directions.  The sea floor here would be the equivalent of the plains on a dryer world, ie, large swaths of relatively flat land for as far as the eye can see.  The majority of life on Elqua inhabits this zone.

Finally is the Shelf.  Light has all but been swallowed up, and normal vision is useless.  Darkness is the norm here, and due to the complications of maintaining life at these depths, the few races that live here are the more varied and extreme.  Insulated from the heat of the sun, significant adaptation must be made to avoid hypothermia.  Here the continental plates take a sharper slope downward, forming the trenches and basins of the deepest oceans.

The races of the Endless Blue setting are scattered across these striped regions.  Some, like the Kouton, are tied closely to the Shore due to biological need.  Others, such as the Orcans, populate the Shelf almost exclusively.  Then there are the Ceph, whom are found everywhere, in a manner reinforcing the ancient bigotry that they are essentially vermin that have worked their way into every hidden nook and cranny of decent Elquan life.

Travel

Even a basic grasp of geography would tell you the shortest route between two points is a straight line.  While this is difficult to accomplish above water due to the curvature of solid land, it is much easier to achieve under the waves.

The seafloor is much like a valley, but on a vastly larger scale.  The tips of the hills would be the Shore, the slope of the hills the Shoals, and the valley bottom itself the Shelf.  Short of some kind of magic, to travel from hilltop-to-hilltop on dry land requires a traveler to climb down one embankment, hike across the valley bottom, and then scale up the opposite slope.  But underwater, the inherent tendency for matter to float (called buoyancy) allows travelers to simply swim straight across from hilltop-to-hilltop, avoiding the valley altogether.

However, there are dangers to this.  Foremost among them is “water blindness”.  Due to the light-absorbing properties of water and the particulate matter suspended therein, vision is often limited.  While in the Shores land is almost always visible, floating above the center of the hypothetical valley may put hilltops beyond visual range. With no point of reference, it is quite easy to become disoriented and lose one’s way.  Even rising to the surface is of little help in mid-ocean, where the endless horizon of rising and falling waves is rarely broken by a glimpse of land.

The next danger is the vulnerability.  With solid earth firmly beneath your feet, it is generally a safe assumption that nothing will burst up out of the ground and swallow an unwary traveler.  However, when afloat in the water, danger can approach in not just the hemisphere above, but from below as well.  With 360^o cube degrees of potential danger, it makes crossing “open waters” a risky endeavor.

The risk of cross-currents adds to the difficulty of travel.  While a body of water may appear as a languid pool, the flow of water layers can work against passage, dragging the helpless victim at immense speeds into danger.  These currents can be as weak as a trickle, or as strong as raging river rapids.  And when submerged in total water, visually discerning these tidal forces is nearly impossible as they are for all intents invisible to simple sight.  The development of infravision – seeing into the infrared spectrum normally given off by heat – has allowed some creatures to deal with this ever-present and quickly changing threat.

Finally, there is the effect environmental space has on the size that lifeforms can theoretically achieve.  With more space, creatures that normally would be expected to grow to a moderate size – like say a squid – can grow to a colossal scale.  With the volume of the oceans on Elqua, there is no gauging to what extremes a creature might reach.  Larger predators that may move faster, swim deeper, and consume huge groups of Pisceans like they were microscopic plankton.  Even animals thought as harmless due to their normal diminutive size become hazardous threats when their scale is multiplied by a magnitude or two.

In general, it is safer to skirt along the seabed when traveling.  It provides protection in the form of shelter and opportunities to hide that are simply impossible floating in the middle of the deep blue.  On the other hand, there are some risks in traveling along the ocean floor.  Traveling too deep runs the risk of dangers from ocean pressure – the weight of all that water overhead pressing down on a creature.  The deeper one sinks, the greater the weight pressing down on their body.  If they are not designed to resist these heightened pressures, the creature will literally be crushed from the forces.

Life beneath the waves of Elqua is difficult, but manageable.  It takes a different mindset to view what would normally be a boundary for a landwalker as the opportunity it is to a waterdiver.  The sharp, straight borders of our world are replaced with the gradual phasing of darkness, pressure, and cold.  But despite all this, societies flourish under the seas of the Endless Blue.

Endless Blue - Week 06 - Map of the Known World

Oceanography

There is a plethora of intelligence beneath the waves of Elqua, and like any peoples, they group together with their neighbors and form communities.  Communities in the Endless Blue setting are defined by the body of water that holds the society, or “homesea”.  While they may seem to consist of a single species, immigration over the centuries has not left a single one without some level of intermixing.

On this water world, the nations formed due to geological formations and historical conflict, and thus are now clustered around a central area in the Eastern hemisphere.  With little knowledge of beyond its claustrophobic borders, this known world is broken down into three concentric divisions.

The Core

The Core is defined as the ruins of the Kraken Empire and the Crèche of Civilization.  Once populated, the area is now considered cursed and blessed (respectively), and much of the politics of the aquatic nations revolve around either coveting or despising the Core.
The main geographical feature of the Core is the Maw of the Kraken, the actual homesea of the once mighty Kraken Empire.  The borderseas around this area once belonged to other nations but was usurped during the Kraken Occupation.  Now, even long after the fall of the invaders, the area around the Maw is avoided at all costs.
The Crèche is treated as holy waters, and nearly every race wishes to claim it as their own.  It’ sea-beds are the richest in agricultural and mineralogical resources that, due to the contention between the races, remains nearly pristine from the era of the Icht Dominion.

The Periphery

The Periphery is comprised of the four civilized nations, which are clustered around the Core: the Cetacean Oceans, the Chelon Seas, the Lumulus Basin, and the Mer Currents.  These nations have relatively favorable conditions for harvesting crops and raising livestock, and as a result are the more affluent nations.

The Hinterseas

The Hinterseas are the area loosely made up of the nations of the primitive races: the Kouton Bay, the Locanth Gulf, the Sahaguin Lagoons, and the Yaun-Teel Bights.  They surround the Periphery, effectively corralling the civilized races inward towards the Core or each other’s territories.  At the more climatic extremes, these nations have poor natural resources to sustain their peoples, and thus results in unavoidable poaching on the wealthier nations’ borders.

Bodies of Water
While nations maintain "no mer's seas" along their borders, this does not keep the natural encroachment of plants and animals across these imaginary lines.  With the primitive races that still maintain a nomadic lifestyle, following the herds on their instinctive migrations sometimes brings them into territorial conflicts with the indigenous denizens.

Cetacean Oceans
To the north and west of the Kraken’s Maw, the Cetacean Oceans are a deep double-impact crater that is claimed to include the deepest point on all of Elqua.  It is an expansive, fathomless place well suited for the Orcan race.  The phytoplankton (the lowest link of the food chain for the entire world) in this area is plentiful and varied, enabling the Orcan peoples to turn inward into the craters in their quest for new feeding grounds.  It is perhaps the best balanced area, with sufficient Shore, Shoal, and Shelf areas to keep the nation nearly autonomous and independent of imports from the other nations.

Chelon Sea
The Chelon Sea is nearly completely comprised of Shoals, a rolling sea-bed of rich silt and vital sediments.  Its gentle, dependable currents keep the sea temperate even at its most northern places.  Flora and fauna of the Chelon Sea is perhaps the most varied, if not the most beautiful, in all the world of Elqua.  It is referred to by its people as nature’s utopia, where the inhabitants live in harmony with the surroundings.  Here, amid the placid beauty, lies the Abyss, a sheer vertical drop in a vast plains area of the Shoals zone that stretches for miles.

Kouton Bay
To the north and west of the Cetacean Ocean, the Kouton Bay arcs around the Orcan homesea from the Locanth Gulf to the Yaun-Teel Bights.  It’s deep, cold currents are rife with wildlife.  The Bay of Kouton is the spawning waters for many of the main fish species that make up the diet of the civilized and primitive races alike.

Locanth Gulf
The Gulf of Locanth is the central populated area of the Locanth Gulf, and reaches northward to the Kouton Bay and southward to the Lumulus Basin.  The most westward of the aquatic nations, it is here that the plant ricelqua was discovered, where it grows more prevalent than seaweed.

Lumulus Basin
The deep, concave basin populated by the Lumulus is riddled with thermal vents that become more and more frequent the further south traveled towards a particularly volcanic portion of the Spine of the World.  With such little Shore and Shoal zones, agricultural imports are vitally important to support the Lumulite population.  It is the only civilized nation that has an outer border not blocked by one of the primitive races, butting out between the Bay of Kouton and the Gulf of Locanth.

Mer Currents
Perhaps the most densely populated waters on Elqua, the various Currents of Mer are loosely banded together as a single nation.  Bordering on the Crèche of Civilization, the Mer Currents benefit from species migration out of the untouched holy sea, and has allowed its tribes (each a “current” in the nation’s name) to explode with unparalleled success.

Sahaguin Lagoons
Located between the Crèche of Civilization and the southern ice cap, the Sahaguin Lagoons border on the ruins of the Kraken Empire and the Mer Currents.  It follows the Shade of the Sargasso Ring – the area wrapping around the globe of Elqua where the planet’s green rings cast an emerald twilight – quite closely.  It is comprised of a string of lagoons and other Shoal-level areas randomly dotted along the islands in that area.  At its south-most point it is suddenly truncated by the frozen barricade that is the southern polar ice-cap.

Yaun-Teel Bights
The Yaun-Teel Bights neighbor the Chelon Sea and the Mer Currents to the north, and dip down towards the Sahaguin Lagoons to the east.  Essentially barren due to the misuse at the hands of its own inhabitants, the Yaun-Teel resort to heavy raiding of the Chelon and Mer territories to sustain themselves.

What lies beyond the known world is a mystery.  Until now, there has been plenty of room for the races of Elqua to grow and develop.  A few – the brave, the ostracized, the insane – have traveled the seas beyond, but only tales and supposition remain as to what final fate awaited them.

Endless Blue - Week 05 - Elqua

Oceanography

Deceptively tranquil, the wide blue swaths of Elqua’s oceans belie a complex geographical system beneath the surface of the Endless Blue setting's water world.

This holomographic view (Mollweide projection) shows the scattered links of island chains on Elqua and areas of the Shore around them in cyan, a rough approximation of the Shoals in light blue, and the Shelf in deep dark blue. The intelligent races of the Endless Blue setting straddle these zones in a precarious attempt to not encroach on other’s territory, but still need their own room to grow. This tangled web-work of sub-aquatic sandbars and islands make the division of living space somewhat hazardous and quite complex.

The major geographical feature that can be seen is known as the Spine of the World, a series of mountain tops peaking out of the seas, forming several island archipelagos in an almost complete circle around the globe. Despite the continental drift of the eight major tectonic plates (and four minor), these chains of tiny islands are still roughly synchronous with the world’s planetary ring, fating these areas to an ever-present semi-green dusk known as the Sargasso Ring. This shadow does move slowly with the passage of time, but a clearly identifiable range has been determined by the natives, who live accordingly.

The arctic and Antarctic circles are defined by the 30° longitude (or represented with the sigil λ) from each pole. These mark the circle around Elqua where the sun begins to stay above or below the horizon for a full 24 hours. The southern circle is dominated by a massive polar icecap. A humongous permafrost monolith that nearly fills the Antarctic Circle, it is a solid slab of ice from surface to ocean floor, and acts like a barrier along the borders of the southern nations, preventing migration in that direction. Its northern parallel lacks a similar sheet of ice, but does have one of the world’s largest land masses nearly at the magnetic pole – an islet with an tapering peninsula pointing eerily, almost accusingly, toward the north pole…

At about 9° λ each are Elqua’s breath-taking aurorea, made much the more spectacular due to the high levels of noble gases in Elqua’s atmosphere that fluoresce greatly as the ionized oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere give off light, and can easily be seen from beneath the shallow waters of the Shore. The wavy, cascading undulation of the aurorae have been likened to gossamer seas overhead, and have been dubbed The Tides Above and The Currents in the Sky for the north and south poles, respectively. It is one of the few phenomena from above the waves that possess anything close to a positive association, in the face of the hellish damnation that Elquan religions have reinforced in the populace.

The tropics of Cetacean and Kraken lie at approximately 64° λ. The Tropic of Cetacean is the line of longitude that circles the globe at the northernmost point where the sun is still directly overhead at noon, usually on the summer solstice. Conversely, the Tropic of Kraken is the southernmost point on the winter solstice. The area between these two circles is the tropics, and serves as the best place for horticultural harvesting. Both longitudes are named after the nations that are bisected by the lines of longitude.

The Prime Meridian is defined as the line of latitude (signified with a symbol φ) that runs over the deepest known point on Elqua, in the Cetacean Ocean. It was chosen arbitrarily (some would say disparagingly) by the Chelon, whom are credited with the creation of the geographic coordinate system. Modern cartographers argue that the point in question is hardly the deepest point on the ocean floor, giving the Abyss in the Chelon’s own sea as just one example. Despite this, Chelonian oceanographers remain steadfast in their reason and shut-mouthed in the face of contrary evidence, and the Orcan resolutely refuse to allow any outsider that far into their borders.  Along with the 180th latitude, the prime meridian forms the boundary between the western and eastern hemisphere.

Continents
Unlike our world, where the ocean’s edge helps form the shape of continents, Elqua’s tectonic plates are more eroded from constant ocean currents. To complicate this, sometime in the world’s past the planet was bombarded by meteoric activity, as evidenced by the plentiful number of crater basins forming the deepest depths of the world. Most likely the planet was impacted by multiple comets of massive size, fracturing in the unique atmosphere and filling the planet with its immense oceans with water. As a consequence, the national borders of Elqua’s countries are defined more loosely than those of our own. “No Mer’s Waters” exist between nations, serving as both buffer zones between expanding populaces and also as a kind of national park, where wildlife has ample opportunity to refresh its numbers from the predations of homo Pisceans.

Crèche of Civilization

One specific crater is of special significance to the denizens of Elqua. It is called the Crèche of Civilization, so named as the intelligent races trace back their history to this relatively shallow but wide basin as the birth place of Piscean life. It is here it is believed that the now-extinct Icth originally rose to prominence, and most every race calls it their mother sea.

Maw of the Kraken

A ring of islands formed by a crater that once delineated the Kraken homewaters, the Maw looks like the distended, wide-open jaws of a gargantuan megalodon breaking the surface to feed. While most of the occupied seas were reclaimed when the Kraken Empire fell, the waters inside the Maw are still avoided at all costs as it is believed that much of the Kraken’s foul magics still permeate the ruins.

Migrating Islands

One of the strangest geological formations on Elqua is the rare, solitary floating islets. While most islands are either formed by volcanic eruption or tectonic pressure pushing the seabed to the surface, there are a handful of large islands that are not anchored into the sea floor. Like icebergs made of rock and dirt instead of ice and snow, these islands float slowly on the waves of the myriad seas independent of tectonic plates and continental drift. Just like icebergs, the larger volume of these floating landmasses bobs beneath the surface, just as clustered with wildlife as any reef or shoreline.

Endless Blue - Week 04 - Cooking without Fire

Biology

      Most animals of the world can eat their meals raw, be it chewing up plant matter or gulping down other animals in parts or in whole. Humans are different, however. While we can eat many things raw – such as salads and sushi – we actually thrive better on cooked foods – like potatoes or roasts. Cooked meat is easier for the body to process the vital proteins and vitamins necessary in the large dietary intake required for development of the brain. But in a world where water surrounds you everywhere, you cannot light a match and set the campfire necessary to cook a pot of stew or roast a coney. Further, our smaller jaws, mix of teeth, and narrow larynges make swallowing things whole difficult at best and dangerous at worst. And even if such harder foods could be swallowed, our dedicated digestive system is ill prepared to efficiently break these hardy products down into usable bits we can easily assimilate.

      Where as we cultivated fire, the civilizations of Elqua instead developed a method of food preparation based more directly on chemistry than as a result of physics. Cooking produces an irreversible change in food with the intention of making it both easier to digest and more palatable to the consumer. Raw meat changes from red to brown when baked, and the transparent whites of an egg turn opaque after it is cooked. It was discovered that foods immersed in citric acids become denatured in much the same manner as normal cooking – essentially becoming pickled in a cooking process independent of heat. This way the foods are sterilized from bacterial infection and also preserved for storage (an essential need for civilization to flourish) just as their temperature-processed parallels become with normal cooking. With high-calorie food transformed into a state that is easier to masticate, we spend less calories chewing cooked food rather than raw. Spending less energy collecting energy means more can be spent else were, giving us a surplus of caloric energy to devote to cultural growth.

      One of the drawbacks of chemical cooking is one of time – it takes hours for a meal to finish “cooking” before it reaches its most edible state. In our own world, cuisine such as ceviche is prepared via citric fruits like lime, but require significant lengths of time for the food to marinate – from a little as four hours to as long as overnight – to allow the chemical process the opportunity to permeate the meal. As a result, mealtime has become an event that must be planned around to such a degree that it is intimately ingrained into society. So much so, that cooking has become the basis of time measurement in zones of Elqua’s ocean depths where light cannot penetrate.

      Another drawback to cooking is again the medium in which it is prepared. Water currents are constantly moving, be they gentle trickles or dangerous torrents. Biting into a plant or animal breaks the outer skin and allows its inner fluids to escape, bleeding into the surrounding water that is dragged along with the flow. The very act of eating leaves traces of food in the currents that can be carried for long distance and still be picked up by predators and prey with tracescent. With an animal’s attention piqued, it will not be long before the individuals that just recently fed may themselves become a meal for something else.

      In terms of the D20 rules set, Alchemy replaces Craft (cooking) as the skill to denature food. Advances in alchemy led to the development of consumable catalysts that aid and speed up this process, called kelaguen, and is a vital portion of the culinist character class’ abilities.

Acari

      One of the rare contributions to modern society by the undeveloped races (the northern Locanth and Kouto), the acari is an aquatic vine that produces a grayish fruit with a translucent, rubbery skin and gelatinous insides. While the melon fruit possesses a poor, gruel-like taste, the plant’s benefit stems from an innate ability to absorb nutrients that will affect the pulp of the fruit. It’s this ability that makes the acari fruit indispensable to culinists. Through alchemical and agricultural means, nutrients can be mixed into the fruit pulp, providing a storage medium for later consumption.

      A mer trader is given credit for its discovery, but the truth is he procured it by trading with the primitive races, which had used it for millennia as a luxury indulgence. It flourishes best in the shore due to the unfiltered sunlight, but can also grow (albeit, with tougher consistency fruit) around sources of heat such as the thermal vents of the Lumulus Basin.

Ricelqua

     The food staple of the world, ricelqua is a hardy, short plant that produces a grain full of vital nutrients. However, the plant can only grow in shore areas, where sunlight can shine down almost directly on the broad, lily-like leaves that float just beneath the surface of the water. With its root system deeply entrenched in the shallows’ soil, it’s supple stalk uncoils upward and spreads it’s broad leaves just below breaking the surface. The crop will sway in a mesmerizing pattern as the gentle action of the tides sweep the plants back and forth.

     Ricelqua requires little in the way of active cultivation other than protection of incursive fauna until harvest time a scant three to four months after planting or ratooning. This makes ricelqua farming a dangerous endeavor, as predation by surface abominations becomes a significant threat. So shallow are the waters in a ricelqua field that there is barely enough room for a mer to swim, with is belly along the fertile loam and his back skimming the water’s edge, that they are vulnerable to any passing land-based predator that turns it’s attention to the paddy.

     Refinement of ricelqua produces a mash with alcoholic properties. It can be chewed raw for a slight inebriation (though this is considered extremely crude in many elitist circles), or further refined and used as a base ingredient for various intoxicating acari-based concoctions. Subsequent aging of these alcoholic fruit can bring out exotic flavors, but storage and protection of these luxuries is the province of the affluent.

Endless Blue - Week 03 - The Piscean Form

Biology

Unlike the world we know, life on Elqua mostly remained in the oceans. This results in a few common traits that are universal to all creatures, player and non-player characters alike. These “genetic constants” are just that – traits that evolved into the species from the first single cells that populated the planet’s waters.

Water breathing is the primary genetic constant. Never emerging from the palpable fullness of the seas into the intangible emptiness of air above the waves means the organs that extract oxygen from the atmosphere and infuse it into our bloodstream never developed. The lack of true air-breathing will result in some slight re-definitions of the various animal phyla and orders. Amphibians, for instance, are mainly defined as life forms with a water-breathing larval state and an air-breathing adult state. With the genetic constant of water-breathing only, amphibians may be relegated to a sub-class of reptile whose main differentiating aspect is the lack of scaly skin. The extent of these changes is perhaps better addressed at another day.

Not having evolved lungs means native life kept the pre-existing method of aquatic organs known as gills. Gills are an anatomical structure of microscopic filters that extract oxygen from the water and excrete carbon dioxide out of the body. Of the sea creatures we know, most vertebrates (biological organisms that posses a spine) have their gills located either side the larynx, with the “gill slits” exposed to the environment. To breathe, the organism opens its mouth and swallows an amount of water, which is then squeezed out through the gills by the muscles in the throat instead of the peristaltic push downward into the stomach as with the eating process. This is what the well-known gaped, gulping action of the mouth is that we associated most vividly with fish.

This would be simple enough to translate into the biology of an aquatic humanoid. Instead of respiration being dependent on a diaphragm in the torso, it would rely on thicker neck muscles. The problem, though, comes from volume. Compare the size of the chest cavity that houses the lungs to the small surface area of the neck. The lung has a network of divergent structures called bronchioles that terminate in alveoli. These work just as the filaments in a gill do, but with immensely more volume. If a humanoid was dependent on such smaller gills for respiration, they would constantly be gulping water to keep up with their cellular need for oxygen.

A further drawback to this form comes from a more artistic perspective. This form of respiration would make small things we recognize in our own behavior that convey great amount of emotion quite difficult, such as simply sighing. Strangulation would also prove nearly impossible, as the grip of the would-be attacker would need to press down and shut all the gills on either side of the neck, instead of simply shutting the wind pipe. Choking an opponent is such a primal, visceral image that it would be a great shame to lose that narrative tool, so some kind of change had to be made.

To resolve this, humanoids of Elqua will instead have “embedded gills”, a form of lung/gill hybrid. The bronchioles will connect to the gill fibers in lung-like organs that are controlled by the diaphragm. This wall of muscle will contract, forcing the water through gill exits located on either side of the rib cage. These groups of three gill exits will be lined under the bottom three ribs, with the muscle flap anchored to those ribs allowing the slits to be closed in cases where the individual will attempt to hold his breath. With this arrangement, putting pressure around the neck will still block the intake of water and result in strangulation, and the slow exhalation from the chest still achieves the non-verbal sigh.

With this second pair of bodily orifices, the need for a nose is greatly diminished. Thematically, the structure we know of as a “nose” will not exist in the evolution of Elquan life. This will not diminish the sense of smell’s role in the setting. Our sense of smell is strongly linked to our sense of taste, and it greatly enhances our experience when eating. Anyone with a strong cold or the flu can attest that food tastes much blander with their sinuses are clogged and preventing the odor receptors from interacting with the scents wafting in the air.

Scent and taste are intertwined for many denizens of our oceans. Sharks are notorious for their ability to detect the faintest trace of blood in the currents from far away. Elquan life will smell things much the same way, expressed by abilities like tracking by tasting trace elements in the sea currents.

What now comes into question is the ability to communicate through sound. Speech is an invaluable tool for the evolution of civilization, and without the ability to convey even basic need or emotion most animals would be helpless. Roars to frighten off encroaching challengers, whinnies to panic other herd animals, mating calls to facilitate reproduction are all facts of life dependent on the ability to not only produce sound, but to also hear it. This is where the lung/gill hybrid will help, by acting as a resonance chamber.

Much like the hollow body of a guitar, sound enters a resonance chamber and bounces off the internal structures, amplifying the intensity (volume) of the sound. With a stronger intensity, sound waves can be propagated through the water’s natural quality to impede motion. Humans do much the same thing when singing “from the diaphragm” – their chest cavity acts like a resonance chamber, aiding in the projection of sound. Despite the fact that the air is being pushed out the mouth (or out the rib cage in the case of Elquan natives), the sound is still intensified by the reverberation back into the body. The vocal chords of humanoid Elquan life will remain in the larynx, but speech will posses a slight triphonic aspect – much like a surround system’s left, right, and center speakers -- as sound will escape not just the mouth but the gill slits on either side as well. Some intelligent species, such as the Orcans, will be able to take advantage of this to a great degree, giving them echolocative abilities and a unique mode of speech.

With this in mind, the image of aquatic humanoids begins to solidify perceptually. The removal of the nose serves as a visual distinction in the look of the Endless Blue setting that will hopefully add a level of alien-ness without losing the sense of empathy from the players. The position of the gills gives a reason to realistically leave the sides of the body relatively bare, playing well into the artistic interpretation that aquatic life would tend towards being scantily clad. Still identifiably human but sufficiently distanced by biological evolution, life on Elqua begins to take on a shape that will allow players to explore this new blue world.

Endless Blue - Week 02 - Bigger Blue Marble

Cosmology

The world of Elqua is a world of endless cerulean, truly a big blue marble in space. Nearly all ocean, its surface is almost utterly swallowed up with a single massive, liquid, living ecosphere in the form of a vast ocean that wraps around the planet. Placid and pristine tides belie the deep currents below, a blossoming flowering of flowing fluid, surging across the world like the pulse of a living being.

Elqua (the native language for “water”) orbits at about .92 AU around a G3 class star. A cooler yellow star than our own, it is the planet’s larger size that allows it to absorb more of its sun’s radiant energy. While the high albedo of such a large body of water would usually reflect most of the sunlight away, the high levels of carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere maintain a balance that keeps the ball of liquid from freezing over.

The circumference around the world’s equator is roughly 53,229 km, with a 8482.8 km radius of the geothermally-active molten core. This results in a surface area of 904,249, 587.8 sq. km, of which 95% is covered in the life-giving liquid. That comes to about 1/3rd the amount of solid surface above the waves that Earth posses.

While life has flourished in those 45,212,479.4 sq. km. of dirt and rock, it is the 1.82 billion cu. km. of ocean volume that serves as home to intelligent life. With so little contiguous land except for the plethora of archipelagoes, the opportunity for primordial creatures to crawl up out of the murky aquatic depths and onto the dry, open land rarely mattered. Instead, life flourished under the waves and mostly remained there. Creatures great and small grew and diversified, migrating to fill the empty world, dispersing across the currents and finding homes in every niche of the sparkling, virgin waters

With all extra accumulation of water above, pressure at the sea floor would outstrip anything known on Earth if not for Elqua’s lesser gravity. The water world’s mass is 1.7445 of our own planet’s, or almost 6x1024 kg. With more water and less iron contributing to the planet’s density, Elqua has a density of about 4.1 grams/cm³, resulting in a gravimetric pull just 19% shy of Earth’s own. This has helped life to reach further down into the abyssal trenches of the planet, as well as allowed for much larger organisms to develop.

Despite the preponderance of a single ecosphere, Elqua’s axis is tilted by 25°, therefore resulting in a variance in temperature and season when coupled with its orbit around the sun. The tilt of Elqua is just a degree and a half greater than that of Earth, which produces a slightly more extreme winter and summer, but a year is shorter. Cloud cover is rare during the months the hemisphere is closest to the sun, and the climate is for the most part calm due to the significantly low amount of surface land interfering with air currents. During the summer, most all cloud cover dissipates until only a few wisps are left (though the Maelstrom continues to rage on strongly, but with little visible fanfare).

This world has three satellites orbiting its peaceful surface in the form of moons, and a planetary ring. The moons are known as Oberus, Ymaris, and Urowes, genderless siblings in the seas that are the sky. Because of the innate fear nearly all life on Elqua has of the surface, very little research has been done on the triptych of satellites. Scholars of the Godless, be they brave or simply unperturbed by the legends of damnation above the planet’s waves, have begun to examine the complex clockwork of lunar orbits. The average denizen knows at best a passing reference to the moons in the narrative of mythology, while the current standard of cosmological knowledge knows little more than their waxing and waning cycles.

Ymaris is a close approximation of our moon, Luna, except for its brownish-yellow rust coloring. It has an orbit of about 20 days, a diameter of 3,443 km, and a density of 3.125 g/cm³. It has a slow, chaotic rotation due to its occasional passing through Oberus’ closer, strong gravitational field, which imparts a minor spin that fades as Ymaris circles around Elqua to meet its larger sister again.

Oberus’ orbit is further out and much slower, thus it will remain in the Elqua sky for nearly two and a half days before vanishing for the same length of time. It takes nearly 108 days for this pale moon to complete its cycle from new to full and back again. It has a diameter almost 1/3rd larger than Ymaris’ and a density of 3.586 g/ cm³. Most likely Oberus was an inner planet of the system that knocked from its stellar orbit by some type of large-mass collision and was caught in the gravity pull of Elqua. Oberus is tidally locked, meaning it does not spin, and one hemisphere always faces Elqua.

Conversely, dark Urowes rotates around the planet so quickly – and in the opposite direction that Elqua rotates (a “retrograde” orbit) -- that it will rise and fall twice in a single day, harkening the dawn and heralding the dusk. This means Urowes will be in the sky for 7 hours of the night and 7 hours of the day, with the other hours spent going around Elqua for it to rise again. Urowes is a little over 2,200 km away from the surface of Elqua, literally defining its Roche Limit (the closest a natural satellite can orbit a planet without falling back in on it due to the effects of gravity).

With its orbit so close that it practically skips along Elqua’s “event horizon”, it is this powerful velocity that prevents the tiny satellite from being drawn in by the water world’s greater gravity. To exist so close to the planet, the density of this satellite must be five or ten times that of Oberus, yet it is nearly one-tenth the size of its largest sibling. Urowes’ diameter is about half that of Ymaris, and faces Elqua on it’s wobbling axis. This makes the pivot of Urowes appear to spiral in place as its pole revolves in a whirling pattern.

Urowes is the inner guide satellite for Elqua’s planetary ring, and Ymaris is the outer guide. It is the rotation of these two “shepherd moons” that keeps the debris rings of Elqua constant. Any materials that would fly off into space or be pulled down into Elqua’s gravity are instead intercepted by the two moons. The pockmarked surface of the two satellites attests to the frequency and violence of these impacts.

Urowes is too small to block out the visual disk of the system’s sun, meaning it cannot cause a solar eclipse. However, its transit across the sun is noticeable as a black sphere skirting a quickly curved path across the yellow disk. The other two siblings are capable of eclipses – even concurrently, an event that produces a spectacular double “diamond ring” effect.

The planetary ring around Elqua is euphemistically referred to as “the Sargasso in the Sky”, and mythology equates it to the same entangling mass of seaweed that endangers those foolish-yet-inquisitive individuals to peek out of the enveloping embrace of the ocean and gaze at the ring’s hazy green tint over the constellations.

Endless Blue – Week 01 – The World of Endless Blue

Expansive oceans forming an endless horizon, Elqua is a swath of pristine blue waters. Seas teaming with varied life ranging from the microscopic to beyond gargantuan, races of intelligent life both clinging to archaic ways and embracing new concepts, and island archipelagos sparsely dotting the world, Endless Blue will be a distinctly different world with boundless potential.

The purpose of the Endless Blue campaign setting is to provide a truly aquatic-themed world for players and game masters to explore. While most ocean-themed supplements are more a conglomeration of sailing ship rules spruced up with water-breathing analogs of surface races and a little pirate slang thrown in for atmosphere, Endless Blue intends to present a true "underwater world" designed from the bottom-up.

To accomplish this, there will need to be a few intrinsic rules that will help define the mood and direction of the setting:

1. No Air-Breathing
All life in the currents of Elqua is solely water-breathing creatures, especially intelligent life. On this world, intelligent life sprang up beneath the expansive waves. It grew and evolved without breaking to the surface due to nearly borderless seas and bountiful ocean resources. Crossing the boundary from the water onto land is fundamentally the quickest way to violate the integrity of the Endless Blue setting. This means that even if a creature is mammalian based (such as the Mer) they will lack the ability to extract oxygen from air. Though this may cause some anachronisms further along in development, it is perhaps the primary, most fervent law.

2. Life Is Not Always the Same
As a fan of speculative evolution and role-playing games, I hope to marry the two together into a relatively seamless whole that balances the species we already know with new ideas that will give Elqua a significant feeling of an alien ecosystem. There are volumes of folklore pertaining to the denizens of our own world, and it would be a shame to waste that communal knowledge and symbology. But that doesn’t preclude the addition of new creatures and new associations. The intent is to develop animals and plant unique to the setting that, through text, come to be identified on their own merits.

3. Genre Neutral
The majority of information on Elqua and the Endless Blue setting will be done in a genre neutral way, eschewing commitment to any one rules-set. Some things will be presented in fantasy game terms (such as classes) and others in science fiction terms (satellite orbits and planetary ring), but overall no text should be too heavily enmeshed in rules text that its basic information cannot be extracted to other game systems or genres. This may result in sections of information that will be useless in a fantasy game or inapplicable in a science fiction game, but overall should provide a more rounded, more vibrant setting.

4. Magic Exists, But Is Not Prevalent
While most of the setting presented will try to be genre neutral, there will need to be some concessions in order to effectively integrate the use of magic with a scientific world. The power of magic will be lessened, limited to a more direct, personal interaction instead of the wide swaths of destruction that has become expected from practitioners of the mystic arts. Sea monsters of epic capacity will roam the oceans, but sylvan spirits like nereid or fae will not exist. As a result, the Endless Blue setting will have a low magic yet high fantasy feel.

5. No Need For Fire
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the formation of civilization, fire does not "exist" on Elqua. Instead, other methods will need to be used in order to achieve the equivalent end result that normally would be achieved with fire. Manipulation of heat and chemical reactions will be the tools of progress for underwater races, and will affect countless aspects of daily life such as shelter, construction, and even cooking. But even those methods pose unique challenges when the surroundings are completely submerged.

6. Single Races are Multi-Cultural
A distinct attempt will be made to present races as more than a stereotypical caricature. Ethnicities are an imperative for all races in a setting where diversity in flora and fauna is as extensive if not more so than on our own world. Just as species of fish have become numerous and varied, so should the intelligent races. Most will have at least two ethnicities if not more, and culturally they will have complex political and religious histories. Even the “human-equivalent” Mer will have multiple ethnicities, with visible differences that make them distinct.

7. Combat
In nature, the predator vs. prey dynamic is constantly in effect. As civilized as any race may be, invariably there will come a time when one individual will need to fight, be it for protection, survival, or simply to feed. Beyond tooth and claw, weapons will be the next most common tool used for this result. However, due to the properties of water, soldiers swinging swords and warhammers is difficult and hampers the effectiveness of the weapons. Thus, combat will be limited to weapons that can be thrust with relative ease in the various vectors around, above, and below the individual.

8. The Rule of 8
More thematic than anything else, there will be a cultural emphasis on the number “8”, from the eight notes in musical notation, through the spectrum of visible light under the waves, to the eight vertices in a mathematical cube of three dimensional space. The Fibonacci curve of a nautilus, the radial symmetry of octagrams, the number of bits in a byte, the cardinal and intermediate directions of a compass, even the Kraken/Ceph themselves, all will have strange connections to this numinous value.

These inviolable laws have many repercussions that will be addressed more closely in subsequent posts. Over the next year I intend to regularly publish material pertaining to the world of Elqua and the Endless Blue setting. My vision of this water world has some concrete concepts, some nebulous ideas, and some gaping holes that will be explored in enough detail to entertain but not give away all the secrets. Hopefully future submissions will bring my ideas together into a fully realized world that intrigues and challenges the imagination.

William James Cuffe

Endless Blue – Sneak Peek