Ocean

Dolphins are social predators that hunt shallow seas and rivers in large family groups called pods. Sailors are fond of dolphins and frequently tell tales of dolphins saving drowning fishermen or killing sharks with blows from their powerful snouts.

Most common in warm or temperate waters, the death’s head jellyfish is an aggressive predator. The creature derives its name from the pattern on its 4-foot-wide bell and from the poison it delivers with its tentacles. Those unfortunate enough to be subjected to this toxin develop rigor of the facial muscles that results in a wide-eyed grimace if left untreated.

The octopus is a cunning animal capable of using complex tactics to get food.

Squids are aggressive predators that fear little and are more than willing to attack prey larger than themselves.

This shark is named for its stocky shape, flat snout, and aggressively territorial behavior. Its natural environment brings it close to humanoid prey, and it has been known to attack fishers, swimmers, rafts, and canoes. Though it prefers salt water, it can tolerate fresh water, and can leap over obstacles like low rapids. These qualities make it a terrifying aquatic predator that can travel dozens of miles up rivers in search of prey, striking in secluded swimming holes and placid lakes. A bull shark is over 7 feet long and weighs roughly 250 pounds. Female bull sharks are slightly larger than males.

The giant tube worm resides entirely within its constructed, armored tube. It extends its stinging tendrils out into the water to search for prey.

A strange sort of sea creature that appears to be an oversized cephalopod, an incutilis hides a significant intelligence behind its unassuming appearance. Though most incutilises live their entire lives within the deepest trenches of the darkest seas, some venture to the border between water and land, taking terrible control over land-dwelling flesh with an alien disregard for sentient life. Because of their aquatic physiologies, their ability to cross this border and travel on land is limited. These aberrations overcome this hurdle with a lethal solution, slaying land dwellers and commandeering their flesh to bear the incutilis on shore. Although incutilises can live as bottom feeders, they prefer not to scavenge. Their favorite foods seem to be larger sea creatures—sharks, whales, and sentient ocean dwellers—and they make no distinction between the living and the dead. Incutilises exhibit strong self-preservation compulsions, going out of their way to avoid dangerous predators. When one is on land and its zombie puppet is destroyed, it attempts to flee to the nearest body of water. An incutilis weighs about 25 pounds (30 with its shell) and measures 4 feet from the tips of its longest tentacles to the top of its shell.

The shark is a relentless eating machine, a creature evolved over the course of eons to do one job perfectly—hunting. Sharks have achieved a special place in the lore of most seafaring races, who view them as devils, monsters, and the wrath of the gods. The shark presented here is a 10-foot-long, 300-pound blue shark.

These aquatic outsiders resemble merfolk, except where a merman has a single fish tail, a triton has two scaly, finned legs. They are the watchers of the sea, often using dolphins or other aquatic creatures as mounts, and maintaining a vigil against the evil races below the waves. Originally hailing from the Plane of Water, long ago the triton race migrated to the oceans of the Material Plane, and they are now fully adapted to life there. Their split legs allow them to hobble about slowly on land, but they rarely do so, preferring their natural environment and the greater mobility their forms afford there. Tritons make their homes on the sea floor, growing coral reefs and sculpting stones into gentle arcs to create living spaces that are beautiful and natural-looking. Many of these sites lie near great thermal vents, providing not only heat but also rich minerals and nutrients for the fish and other creatures tritons eat. Tritons can breathe air or water, but prefer water. While their cities are designed for water-breathers, they usually feature one or two airtight buildings set aside to hold air for landwalking visitors. Triton settlements can be found anywhere from arctic to tropical waters, but most are in temperate locations. They generally avoid the deepest reaches of the ocean, for it is here that creatures like aboleths and krakens rule—creatures that the tritons have long waged war against. Tritons maintain relationships with other good undersea creatures, but mostly keep to themselves. They aid others in fights against their enemies (primarily krakens and aboleths, but also lesser evils like sahuagin or skum). They typically form strong squadrons of aquatic cavalry trained in coordinated attacks when they go to war. Tritons tend to distrust outsiders, and usually avoid land-dwellers. They sometimes provide aid to air-breathers, even though they often see them as trespassers under the sea; when they do help landwalkers, their price for this is high. Nevertheless, when they witness a landwalker do battle against and vanquish a great evil such as an aboleth, they are quick to cast aside their prejudices and accept the great hero into their societies with open and welcoming arms. Tritons have silvery skin, hued in tones of aqua blue and kelp green. Older tritons often have barnacles, corals, and seashells crusting the back, chest, and shoulders, worn almost like jewelry as a mark of status among their kind. They have white, blue, or green hair. Tritons’ eyes shine blue like sunlight upon a clear sea. A typical triton stands 6 feet in height and weighs 180 pounds. While most exceptional tritons advance by taking class levels (typically as druids, oracles, or rangers), a rare few tritons advance by increasing in size. These Large tritons are great heroes among their kind and have 8 racial Hit Dice or more.

Rulers of deep ocean trenches, ceratioidi share several unusual traits with the aquatic predators of the ceratiidae family, also known as angler fish. From their strange, spired cities beneath the waves, ceratioidi cast their nets of influence far and wide. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the ceratioidi is that each individual is in fact two entities—a powerful, imposing female, and a rat-sized parasitic male who spends most of his life attached to his mate’s neck. A female without a mate loses her dual mind ability, while a male unattached to a female retains his intelligence but otherwise has the same statistics as an electric eel (without the electricity special ability or electricity resistance).

Much like common merfolk, deep merfolk have humanoid upper bodies and fish-like tails, but they are adapted for survival within the depths of the ocean. Their skin is both dark and transparent to help them blend with the sunless ocean depths. They sometimes adorn themselves with bioluminescent dye to create glowing spots on the skin along their tails, which they use both as a form of silent communication and to lure in prey when they hunt.  Deep merfolk build villages along the sides of the deepest ocean trenches, where they hunt sea creatures and gather crustaceans from the ocean floor. They are capable hunters, and small hunting groups of deep merfolk have been known to take down sharks or other large creatures stalking the depths. When hunting, deep merfolk prefer to ambush their prey, often luring targets in with bioluminescence. They rely on their camouflage to hide within the crevices and cold sand until their traps can be sprung.  Like their cousins, deep merfolk are highly protective of their tribes and homes and go to great lengths to keep strangers away. Spellcasters among their tribes often use illusions to hide deep merfolk dwellings, while rangers and hunters set up traps, ambushes, and false trails that lead interlopers into distant and dangerous areas of the deep ocean. If such misdirection and illusion fail, deep merfolk don’t hesitate to launch proactive attacks against intruders—at a fair distance away from their homes if possible.  While their appearance has led to legends of ties to dark powers and sinister agendas, most deep merfolk are simple folk with little interest in the world above the waves. A few secretive tribes worship the demon lord Dagon, but they view him as a dark protector they must appease, not a deity to emulate or for whom they feel any affection.

Giant seahorses are bear-sized versions of the common, harmless seahorse. Naturally docile and skittish, seahorses are easily trained to be mounts but are difficult to train for combat. They provide a smoother but slower ride than sharks or hippocampi. A giant seahorse is considered a quadruped for the purpose of carrying capacity. A light load for a giant seahorse is up to 500 pounds, a medium load is 1,000 pounds, and a heavy load is 1,600 pounds. It can drag 8,000 pounds.

The shark is a relentless eating machine, a creature evolved over the course of eons to do one job perfectly—hunting. Sharks have achieved a special place in the lore of most seafaring races, who view them as devils, monsters, and the wrath of the gods.

A comozant wyrd appears to be 3 feet of buzzing, heatless blue or green plasma. Creatures near it find their hair standing on end and their bodies crawling with harmless but unnerving sparks. Those who have “conversed” with a comozant using illuminating flames say it uses pure emotion and image as concept and word—a mixture of knowledge and ignorance.

The great white shark is one of the largest predatory fish in the ocean, and preys on seals, small whales, seabirds, dolphins, and turtles. Its strength and speed even allow it to leap out of the water to reach prey on land, rafts, or boats. Though fierce and ruthless, great white sharks are often careful when they encounter a new type of prey. They make many biting passes to evaluate the threat their quarry poses. An adult great white shark is 20 feet long and weighs 5,000 pounds.

These specially bred offshoots of the giant seahorse are used by aquatic creatures as guard animals. Vicious and territorial, they prefer larger prey and have been known to eat giant crabs and careless handlers. Killer seahorses are too unruly for use as mounts and only accept riders or baggage if magically controlled. Killer seahorses have been known to crush other creatures into a bloody pulp just before giving birth, ensuring a good meal for their newborns (called “fry”). A killer seahorse fry is the size of a human hand and is an aggressive swarm feeder, like a piranha. A light load for a killer seahorse is up to 2,500 pounds, a medium load is 4,900 pounds, and a heavy load is 7,400 pounds. A killer seahorse can drag 36,800 pounds.

A dunkleosteus is a massive fish with a bony head, armor plating, and a beak-like maw capable of creating a vortex that siphons in its prey. Despite growing to over 30 feet in length and weighing 8,000 pounds, dunkleosteuses are agile swimmers. These voracious predators think nothing of swimming into estuaries where the brine of the sea extends, lying in wait under piers or in the shallows along shorelines, patiently watching for a chance to lunge up and snap their jaws around unsuspecting prey that has come to the water’s edge to fish or swim.

Unlike its smaller cousins, the giant jellyfish is an active predator that seeks out prey. Capable of slithering through narrow cracks, a giant jellyfish is a horrifying beast to encounter lurking in the hold of a flooded or sunken ship. Other species of these vermin exist, as summarized on the following table—these variants often have different types of poison or other abilities like translucency or constriction.

The hookfang is primarily an ambush predator; it swims quickly, but only in brief bursts. When hunting, it covers most of its body under the sands of the ocean floor and remains perfectly still until potential prey swims nearby. When it lunges, its bite is so quick and powerful that its hook-teeth can cut targeted creatures in half. A smaller (but still sizable) variant of the hookfang is the vampire worm, which drains blood from its victims.

Aquatic kin of nymphs and dryads, oceanids are fey bound to the sea. They can live in lakes, rivers, or oceans, but truly thrive only in salt water. The mood of an oceanid can change with little warning—they are quick to love and even quicker to anger. An oceanid can be quite helpful toward mortals and their vessels— particularly if the mortals indulge her extreme vanity. Though silver-tongued people skilled at flattery might earn her help, they might also be lured away to join the oceanid under the sea until she grows bored with them. When an oceanid is in the water, the lower half of her body transforms into a pillar of water, allowing her to swim at incredible speed. When she leaves the water, this water pillar transforms into humanoid legs. However, most oceanids consider walking a chore, and avoid it when possible.

The giant octopus is a true monster capable of catching and eating sharks, humans, or anything else it can grab with its tentacles.

The true nightmare of the sea is the dire shark or megalodon, a shark that represents the pinnacle of this species’ evolution. Horrifying in its immense size and ruinous appetite, the megalodon is certainly the beast behind many legends of enormous fish who swallow ships whole. A megalodon is 60 feet long and weighs 100,000 pounds.

The giant squid is a legendary beast capable of feeding on humans with ease. Hunger has been known to drive these normally deepdwelling creatures up to the ocean surface where anything they encounter is potential prey. A giant squid is 45 feet long and weighs 1,500 pounds.

A sargassum fiend is a free-floating mass of intelligent seaweed capable of luring its victims to their deaths via a powerful hallucinogenic pheromone. Once the sargassum fiend lures prey within striking distance, it grabs the entranced creature and attempts to crush it to death. Experienced sailors tell tales of entire crews jumping overboard to swim out to a murderous field of the sea plants. The strange pheromone produced by a sargassum fiend can be harvested from the numerous bulbs that grow within the fiend’s body, but these bulbs rot quickly once harvested. A fresh bulb lasts for 1 hour before becoming useless; until that point it can be crushed as a standard action to produce a mirage effect as detailed above. A single sargassum fiend generally has 1d6 bulbs of musk when slain—harvesting one requires a DC 29 Survival check. To date, no alchemical or magical process has successfully preserved this musk. Sargassum fiends usually reach sizes up to 10 feet in diameter before splitting, their means of asexual reproduction. Mutations have been known to exist, however, and sea-faring scholars have recorded individual sargassum fiends reaching masses of truly enormous size, up to Colossal. Such enormous sargassum fiends can be created by advancing their Hit Dice by a minimum of 5 HD per size increase step.

Siyokoys are eel-like aquatic creatures often mistaken for merfolk by sailors. On closer inspection, however, siyokoys’ appearance might make one question the vision of said sailors, for apart from their humanoid arms, siyokoys are very much creatures of the sea. Two primary species of siyokoys exist, although both are essentially identical as far as game statistics are concerned. The most commonly encountered siyokoys are those that dwell amid the caves and crags of coral reefs in relatively shallow oceanic waters. These siyokoys tend to have colorful patterns on their flesh to mimic the riot of hues the typical coral reef displays. Reef-dwelling siyokoys are fond of decorating their lairs with particularly strange or colorful specimens of coral, especially when such marine growths encrust sunken treasures. A siyokoy variant that is encountered less frequently dwells in the deeper abysses of the ocean, far below the limits of the sun’s ability to light. These siyokoys are darker colored, and they tend to be darker in personality as well. Whereas those dwelling in the bright, sunlit environs of a coral reef might be capricious or playful, those who dwell in the dark, vast deeps of the sea are often morbid, morose, and even sadistic. Most evil siyokoys dwell in such lightless, forgotten reaches of the world’s oceans. Regardless of where they dwell, siyokoys adore shipwrecks and long-forgotten ruins claimed by the oceans. Exploring these relics and recovering strange and wondrous treasures is what most siyokoys live for, and a siyokoy’s lair is often decorated with the results of these scavenging expeditions to sunken ships and flooded cities. Strangely, siyokoys avoid making their lairs amid such ruins, mostly out of a strange superstition the creatures share about these areas—it is not lucky, say siyokoys, to sleep in a place where air breathing creatures have drowned. A siyokoy is 7 feet long and weighs 200 pounds.

Whales are frequently hunted for their meat and the valuable oil in their blubber. Baleen whales have no teeth and attack with a tail slap; toothed whales like sperm whales instead attack with a bite.

A primordial ambush predator often found in the depths where sunlight is too dim to support much plant life, the cameroceras is a grave danger to anyone who dares explore the ocean. A cameroceras can survive up to 1 mile beneath the surface, for its shell is strong enough to resist the water’s pressure at such depths, though it cannot survive for long at greater depths. At times, hunger drives these beasts to higher, brighter waters. When a cameroceras enwraps prey in its tentacles, it can pull the helpless creature into its shell while sinking to the sea floor to feed at its leisure.  The average cameroceras is 25 feet long, the majority of which is its long shell. Because much of a cameroceras’s shell is hollow, most specimens weigh only around 2,000 pounds. In addition to its grabbing tentacles, a cameroceras has four specialized tentacles that grant it a keen sense of smell.

Despite their saurian name, basilosauruses are in fact oceanic mammals, and at 60 feet in length are highly formidable beasts of the sea. In appearance, they resemble greatly elongated whales, but with long, toothed jaws resembling an alligator’s. Inexperienced observers often confuse a basilosaurus with a sea serpent or water orm— and in all fairness, in the aftermath of a basilosaurus attack on an unsuspecting ship, such distinctions are largely academic anyway. A basilosaurus relies as much on vision as echolocation to find prey, but sometimes mistakes smaller ships for food. Basilosauruses have few natural predators; only supernatural monsters like krakens, thalassic behemoths, and the largest of sea serpents can truly threaten a fully grown one.

Despite their size, blue whales are docile unless threatened. They eat millions of tiny invertebrates known as krill, which they suck through their baleen in massive gulps. These enormous mammals can be found in oceans and seas. An adult blue whale is 100 feet long and weighs 200 tons.

Infused with the power of waves and storms, sea dragons or jiaolungs, as they are known in many lands are draconic protectors of oceans and their creatures. Possessing tempestuous natures, sea dragons wander widely, sometimes claiming thousands of miles of ocean and coastlines as their protectorates.

Tales of immense sea serpents have colored the accounts of seagoing folk since the first ship sailed beyond sight of land. Yet proof of these immense and elusive creatures is remarkably difficult to come by, for not only is the ocean vast and the true sea serpent rare, but these creatures are quite adept at both avoiding capture and destroying ships bent on such a daunting task. Due to the sea serpent’s hermitic nature, many sailors take to ascribing the sighting of such a beast to an omen, although whether the sighting portends peril or providence depends as much upon the ship’s morale as it does anything else—the sea serpent itself has little interest in prophecy, and only its hunger determines how dangerous its proximity to a curious ship can be. Although sea serpents are little more than animals, they possess about them an air of mysticism that even old salts and cynics are forced to admit quickens the heart and buoys (or sinks) the spirit. Reports of sea serpent sightings are just as likely to encourage travel as they are to cause panic among seafarers, as explorers and adventurers f lock to the site in hopes of sighting such a legendary creature. Typical sea serpents are 60 feet in length and weigh 4,500 pounds, but their upward size limit is unknown. Certainly, the sea is a vast and mysterious place more than capable of supporting whales and other such leviathans, and tales of sea serpents that exceed lengths of 300 feet or more are not unheard of. You can generate statistics for a sea serpent of such tremendous size by applying the advanced simple template or the giant simple template to the statistics presented here. Alternatively, you can advance this sea serpent to Colossal size, increasing its Hit Dice to 25 and its CR to 18.

Masters of the oceans, the enigmatic cetuses are mighty but slow-witted dragons who demand tribute of any who would dare enter their domain. A cetus’s length and weight are immense, their dizzying coils proving almost impossible to count. Sailors have long told tales of these great creatures, noting that they are almost unstoppable unless they can be turned to stone and left to sink into the ocean depths.  Cetuses prefer to fight their enemies on or under the water, but can leap unexpectedly high to attack foes who dare to take to the air.

Sailors tell many tales of the creatures of the deep, from the terrible kraken to the beautiful mermaid. Yet few are stranger or more feared than the dread charybdis, for it exists to capture ships, crack them open like nuts, and feast on the doomed sailors within. So legendary are these violent attacks that many sailors have come to view the charybdis not as a species of aberrant life, but as the vengeful personification of an angry sea god. In truth, the charybdis is not the sending of an angry deity, but in fact little more than a monstrous predator capable of churning even the calmest of seas into a whirling maelstrom. The charybdis uses this vortex ability not only to capture prey like sharks or small whales, but also to entrap ships on the ocean surface above. The monster’s claws are particularly well suited to puncturing the hulls of ships, and most charybdises have learned that a single large merchant vessel contains enough sailors to make a perfectly sized meal. Often, a charybdis settles in along a well-known shipping route near the shoreline or amid an archipelago of islands where ships are forced along relatively narrow lanes between rocky isles—such locations allow the charybdis to lie in wait and increases the chance of its prey being unable to circumvent its vortex. A charybdis is 60 feet long and weighs 26,000 pounds.

Atuikakuras are typically content to dwell placidly at the bottom of deep bays or oceans. They are easily startled by large objects and creatures, and enjoy entwining themselves around driftwood and other solid objects and resting there beneath the waterline, which can lead to rare attacks on ships or other surface dwellers.

Deep walkers are among the largest creatures bred by the aboleths. A deepwalker weighs around 10 tons, and when reared up to its full height, it’s 35 feet tall.  Deep walkers prefer to feed on blood, especially that of intelligent creatures. While they can at times be encountered alone in the ocean wilds, they are most common in realms controlled by aboleths, where they serve as guardians for these mysterious underwater enclaves or as devastating amphibious assault forces against coastal targets. Those few that have managed to escape direct aboleth control remain vile and cruel sadists, and they often rule over their own petty kingdoms of lesser creatures that they can torment and consume.

Legendary in size and temper, great white whales are far more aggressive than their smaller kin.

Ocean giants embody the great extremes of the sea. Their skin colors vary from deep blue to pale green, and their eyes and hair range from foamy white to coral pink. They decorate themselves with the treasures of the sea, wearing shell jewelry or scrimshaw, and clothing woven from underwater plants, or even salvaged sails. Each ocean giant carries a hand crafted musical horn made from a conch shell, an object of cultural significance representing its family history and travels on the vast sea. Many ocean giants view themselves as guardians of the sea, its creatures, and those who travel the waves, safeguarding their charges from remarkable coral towers. Others, however, claim domains measuring thousands of leagues, enslaving the beasts and aquatic races within and shattering any ship that dares trespass near their citadels of urchins and bones. Adult ocean giants stand approximately 22 feet tall and weigh about 15,000 pounds. Most live to be about 500 years old.

The dreaded isonade is a silent killer. Many a sailor has spotted a dark shape in the waters below, only to turn around in time to see his mate being dragged overboard, impaled on a spiny tail. A ship’s captain who plans to sail through an isonade’s waters often takes on extra crew, knowing that at least a few crew members might simply disappear over the side before they reach port. Though few alive have ever seen the monster’s full body, a great many sailors have caught a glimpse of its hooked carapace as it drags a skewered sailor down to the inky depths.  Mercifully, isonades spend much of their existence in hibernation. When an isonade is preparing to hibernate, the population in its area of the ocean drops drastically while the beast consumes huge quantities of food. Though an isonade will eat just about anything that bleeds, it favors massive beasts to minimize time spent hunting—such as giant squid or whales—though it will resort to eating hundreds of fish once larger prey grow scarce. It’s also intelligent enough to know that a seafaring vessel contains a large quantity of warm and screaming snacks all isolated in one convenient place. An isonade can hibernate for hundreds of years, waking only when its vast store of food has been exhausted or when startled by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption.  Because of this long hibernation, rumors of isonades are often exaggerated and relegated to myth, making their exact territories hard to predict when they awaken once again. The isonade’s eating cycle provides indicators of its return. An abundance of fish in a region can signal a hungry isonade’s territory, as sudden explosions in the fish population sometimes occur when these beasts begin devouring the region’s larger predators. An isonade shakes off its torpor by eating the large, slow animals in the depths, but inevitably circles upward as its appetite grows.  An isonade can live for over 10,000 years, and can grow to over 70 feet in length. An adult isonade weighs approximately 300,000 pounds.

The ocean knows few terrors as unnatural and horrific as the sea bonze. This undead goliath dwells near established shipping lanes or offshore from coastal settlements, where it lurks just beneath the surface of the water until it can strike unsuspecting boats in the dead of night. Sailors often advise launching ocean voyages only during the day on the assumption that doing so might protect them from the sea bonze’s attention, but such tactics make little difference to the creature itself, which will trail a particular ship until after dusk, sometimes for hundreds of miles, only to lurch out of the water and lay waste to an entire ship. Sea bonzes are formed from the combined despair and horror of death at sea, such as when a ship sinks and its entire crew drowns. No single restless soul empowers a sea bonze—it combines the anger and doom of all who die in such close proximity. Reawakened as mammoth shipwreckers, these angry spirits have no memory of their past lives, and seek to inflict the doom they suffered on others who ply the seas. Their hatred does not make them mindless, however, and more than one lucky crew member has talked her entire ship’s way out of total annihilation. Sea bonzes have an unusual respect for those with wit and guile, and will sometimes consider sparing those they deem worthy of their esteem. Those who try to defend themselves with brawn and weapons, however, receive no mercy from the enormous monsters. A sea bonze’s flesh is black and leathery like that of a squid, and appears at first glance to be made out of the black waters of the ocean itself. The entire creature is featureless and smooth, making its empty visage all the more horrifying.

Sometimes, a whale that dies after days of anger and pain arises as an undead monstrosity known as a bakekujira. A bakekujira weighs about 50 tons, and measures from 50 to 60 feet long.

Planktas are stony creatures formed from the shattered remnants of ancient island civilizations devastated and inundated by natural or magical cataclysms, and given life by unleashed magical energies and the anguished spirits of those lost in the tragedies that formed the planktas.  These massive, rocky aberrations dwell in the seas. They burn with hatred for the ships and cities of empires that still stand, and seek to ruin such foes in the hope of creating more planktas, though this bizarre attempt at reproduction rarely succeeds.  Some planktas are nomadic, wandering in search of prey, but others lurk in busy sea-lanes or narrow straits to shatter and sink ships attempting to pass.

The largest of all known jellyfish, whaler jellyfish are able to rapidly paralyze and kill prey as large as whales—hence their name. This deep blue creature’s pale bell can sometimes be mistaken for a bank of fog when viewed from afar as it drifts on the surface of the sea, lying in wait patiently for its next meal.

Predators of the oceans, the hulking undead monstrosities known as bone ships leave devastation in their bloody wakes. Formed from the collective consciousnesses of dead sailors bound within the bleached bones of giant aquatic creatures, bone ships hunt the seas without mercy, destroying ships and slaying the living wherever they are encountered. Bone ships stalk their prey with tenacious intelligence and single-minded purpose. They often trail their quarry for days, relishing the terror their sudden   appearance on the horizon causes, and have even been known to continue the chase on land, the many bones of their hulls pulling them over the ground. Bone ships do not care for plunder, seeking only to add more victims to their unholy crews.  The creation of a bone ship can occur in many different ways. Some bone ships arise as servants of evil gods, pawns to their vile wills. Certain powerful necromantic rituals can also create bone ships. Such rituals typically require those performing them to sacrifice dozens of humanoid creatures and trap the victims’ souls. Other bone ships result from ships being destroyed in horrific and catastrophic events. The souls of the sailors who died in such a disaster, unable to find peace, slowly form a bone ship on the ocean’s bottom before rising to the surface to take vengeance on the living. No matter how they’re created, bone ships retain jumbled memories of the previous lives of the souls bound to them—though all bone ships attack any creatures they encounter, each ship’s unique origin and collection of souls burns a particular objective into its very nature. A bone ship created by an evil god might target ships bearing the flags of an opposing faith or enemy of that god, while a bone ship created in a ritual is ingrained with a specific purpose that forces it to enact its creator’s will. Certain bone ships viciously target ships from one or more nations, either those from the dead sailors’ former nation if they seek revenge, or those from a rival nation the sailors hated in life.  Over time, legends and stories about a bone ship’s capacity for destruction arise. A bone ship never takes a name for itself, but living sailors may ascribe it an epithet based on its origin, purpose, unique characteristics, or notable attacks. Though all bone ships possess the same abilities, a particular bone ship can be identified by its hunting area and appearance. Bone ships eventually display certain unique features such as glowing barnacles that cover its hull, a masthead featuring the skull of a particular sea creature, the bones of a unique and rare sea monster, or an unusual configuration of the musculature holding together its hull. Many of these changes are the result of a bone ship scavenging remains off the ocean floor to repair itself.  No living crew—or even other undead creatures—have ever been seen sailing in a bone ship. These undead ships operate independently, and don’t form alliances even with others of their kind. Merely attempting to communicate with a bone ship is dangerous, as even such means as telepathy produce only the howling voices of the suffering, ghostly crew, spreading their insanity to those foolish enough to contact them.  Though a bone ship is a single creature, the numerous souls it contains create a hive mind. A bone ship can reshape certain aspects of its hull by using its knotted muscle to move the bones within it. This transformative ability allows a bone ship to quickly sprout cannons from its hull that can attack in any direction, and each ship keeps a collection of bones and debris within its own body to use as ammunition. It can also tap into the unholy energy giving it unlife to fire a devastating beam of negative energy at its enemies, and those who close with a bone ship find that even its hull has the ability to drain away life force.

The legendary kraken is one of the greatest of sailors’ fears, for here is a creature the size of a whale, one that can strike from the unseen depths below, can command the winds and weather that a ship needs to move, and possesses the cruel intellect of the world’s most creative and spiteful criminals. Some believe krakens to be a punishment of the gods, while others hold them to be the true lords of the deep, with the air-breathing races naught but their cattle. A kraken measures nearly 100 feet in length and weighs 4,000 pounds.

An enormous monstrosity that makes its home in the darkest depths of the ocean’s trenches, the deep sea serpent is as elusive as it is terrifying, the nightmare of sailors making their ways over the vast and seemingly bottomless waters. A deep sea serpent is rarely seen unless it wishes to be seen, and the beast usually has its own mysterious reasons for occasionally coming to the surface. At other times, those reasons are gruesomely obvious—the deep sea serpent rises to the surface to crush ships and devour sailors who tumble from the freshly shattered hulls. It is thought that in incredibly remote parts of the underwater world, even more powerful deep sea serpents exist, beasts with supernatural luminous lures that can be used to blind foes, or with the ability to create overwhelming blasts of electricity that stun or even outright slay prey with a single stroke. Yet perhaps the most unnerving are the rumors of deep sea serpents that possess a remarkable intelligence. Such creatures, if they even exist, are rarely if ever seen near the surface—both their naturally elusive natures and the remote reality of their habitats mean that ensuring the veracity of these claims requires truly extraordinary efforts. A typical deep sea serpent measures 50 feet long and weighs 35,000 pounds.