TenKeep

  An acolyte Orderic, traveled from Brinewell to Hallownaughtling to press the priestess Erren for help with giant bees. In a solo game, Orderic aided a dying fisherman, named his lost friend's grave, then found the priestess.  *** Orderic's time with the dying fisherman was a scene straight from George Crabbe's poem, Peter Grimes (1811). The fisher 'spoke at times / as one alluding to his fears and crimes.' Orderic took-in the dying man's rhymes: Twas one hot noon, all silent, and serene, No living being had I lately seen;                                              ….I fix’d my eyes On the midstream and saw the spirits rise, I saw my father on the water stand, And hold a thin pale boy in either hand; And there they glided ghastly on the top Of the salt flood, and never touch’d a drop: I would have struck them, but they knew th’intent, And s...

A cleric near OneKeep - Orderic - mentioned the last words of a fading sailor - about the Wreck of the Marshall . Originally reported in The Ghosts of Saltmarsh , the sailor warned that two ghosts haunted the sunken Marshall . With his last breath, the sailor said, 'All's there, but ask b'for takin', yur gotsa askum first..."  Orderic's story got me thinking about secrets of the watery deep . *** Likely you've heard the sailor Ishmael's account of ' the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind .'  In Herman Melville's Moby Dick , chapter 59, Ishmael reports a 'transparent blue morning at sea' and its revelation of the giant squid. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No...

Far west of TenKeep, long breezes blow on the Mistral Sea - you'll feel a calling from landward ways! Here are three songs or tales I heard - about giant sea monsters, mermaids, and the monster's summer break. *** The Sea Lizard First, a tale adapted from the Hawaiian Legend of the Mo'o . Out from Onekeep, it's said a giant sea lizard prowled the seacoast - near what's now called Squama - and slaughtered intruders.  From across the Mistral Sea, a vengeful warrior came, murdered the sea lizard, and heaved the pieces of its head across the bay.  All these years later, the lizard's body juts out into the surf, and the pieces of its head - now dry and heavy stone, form islands spanning North.  Some say the lizard had a golden eye. *** Mermaids [from a mural - Windward Oahu] Much can be said for Mistral sun and breezes. Mermen and mermaids sometimes swim-in. Few see them, and fewer still forget. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair...