The world
Nobody lives at the surface any more. Humans live in sealed domes on the shelf, fishmen in reef cities, and everyone works the sea below. Deeper water is darker, colder, under more pressure, and stranger.
The ocean is one seamless world laid out in depth bands. Each band opens up across several regions, so there's more than one way forward. Every boundary is a problem to solve: fading light, then pressure and cold, then total darkness and toxic vents.
The alpha covers the first band: the sunlit shallows, the Rimlands, the kelp forest, Glow Hollow and the town of Saltreach. The deeper bands are planned, not built.
Playable species
You choose a species when you make a character, then shape how they look: body, height, build, skin or sea colouring. Looks never change your stats, so nobody regrets a choice. The two species share one story and can always group up. What changes is how you get deeper.
Humans survive on tech. Rebreathers, glowlamps, wetsuits and a dive kit that grows with you. Your power lives in what you craft, upgrade and trade, so gear can be swapped and sold. Every upgrade needs something from the deep, and that has a price.
Fishmen adapt. Glowsight for the dark, deeper gills, pressure bladders for the crush below. Adaptations are permanent, and the deepest ones make the bright shallows uncomfortable. Natural sea colourings: reef, kelp, deepwater, sandbar or dusk.
| The problem | Human tech | Fishman adaptation |
|---|---|---|
| Fading light | Dive lamps, rebreathers | Low-light eyes |
| Pressure and cold | Pressure suits, heaters | Pressure bladders, insulation |
| Darkness and toxic vents | Sonar, sealed hull suits | Echolocation, toxin resistance |
| Crushing depth | Exosuits | Deep metamorphosis |
Only the first step of this is in the alpha. The rest is the plan.
The blight
Something is seeping up from below. Reefs bleach, fish die off, and the air and water systems in human domes fail. The ancients, a silent people whose dark stone ruins are threaded with teal light, have started to wake at the same time. Everyone blames them.
Dyrhald, the fallen colony, was the first to go. Its name is an old word meaning the held door.
Life in the shallows
Grazers and darters in the open water, crabs and slugs on the rocks, eels and lurkers waiting in the dark. Some are food, some are crafting stock, and some are hunting you. Every one you meet goes in your Bestiary.
Slow, spiny, and a source of puffer spines.
Shy reef life among the kelp stalks.
Hauls its striped shell over the rocks, beside bright nudibranchs.
Raw crab for the pot, chitin for armour.
Also out there: Silverfin Grazers, Gilded Darters, Glowfins, Glow Jellies, Lantern Slugs, Cleaner Shrimp, Spine Crabs, Gloom Eels, Murk Eels, Sand Lurkers, Night Lurkers, Rimland Prowlers, Brine Crawlers and Canyon Hunters. And a few named rares with their own lairs: Old Gnasher, Ironclaw, Hollowshell, the Bloatmother and the Pale Widow.
Home
Every diver has a Den: a private home under the sea, reached through a door in town. It's where you craft and where your stuff lives.
