Oceans

Every island sits in an ocean, and an ocean is a square of sea you can sail to by its number. It holds settled shores and empty ones, and in most waters a few bare rocks nobody lives on that are worth more than they look. Learn what an ocean is, what stands in it, and what the water itself is telling you, and the chart stops being a picture and becomes a plan.

Chart & Navigation

Moving around the chart and reading the rings.

Taking Oceans

Putting an ocean to a vote and flying your flag over it.

Resources

The four ores that come only from the rocks.

The Lumen Rupture

What a storm over an ocean means.

Reading a bearing

Everything on the chart has a bearing of three numbers, Ocean:Region:Slot, with colons between them and nothing else. The first two name the sea: together they are the ocean, the square the chart shows when you pull back from an island, and the square an alliance can claim. The third is the berth inside it, the exact island or rock. Write a bearing the way the chart does; other punctuation may sit around it in a sentence, but the bearing itself keeps the colon form, so a friend can enter it and arrive.

What stands in an ocean

Most of what is drawn in an ocean is an island: your own, a rival's, one held by the Black Tide, or an empty shore waiting for a charter. The coloured rings that tell them apart are on Chart & Navigation. Not everything is an island, though. Bare rock breaks the surface in most waters, named on the chart, and nobody lives there: nothing to spy on, nothing to settle, nothing to trade with. What a rock carries is ore.

Rocks and their seams

Each rock carries one of the four ores, Ember Ore, Aegis Stone, Veilglass, Sunstone, and the coloured seam painted across its face says which: ember red, steel blue, pale violet or amber. That colour is a promise you can plan a voyage on, because the ores exist nowhere else and each one casts one kind of doctrine shot. Seams are not all the same size. The chart tells you which kind a rock carries when you look at it; how much is left in it is nobody's business until your ships tie up.

A seam puts its measure back every 12 hours on a plain-speed world, and a world running at five times speed refills it five times as often. The clock is the rock's own: it ticks whether anyone has touched the seam or not, and nibbling at a rock never delays its refill. A rock worked recently simply has less to give until the next window.

Prospecting

Send small merchant ships with the Prospect order and they work the seam until their holds are full or the rock is bare, then sail home with the ore. Bring enough hulls and one voyage carries off everything the seam holds. Small hulls only: a large ship draws too much water to lie against the stone. The run leaves a report, and the ore lands in the storehouse like any other material.

Ships are the fence, not the cloth. A rock with a rival alliance's ships standing on it turns your merchants away empty when they arrive. A flag with nobody underneath it does not: you may work that seam, and the holders will hear that you did. Prospecting needs no alliance: a Governor sailing alone may work any rock nobody is standing on, and is turned away only from a guarded one.

Master Quill: Harbour read

Look at a rock before you send to it, not after. The order tells you whose flag flies and whether anyone is standing under it. A convoy turned away has spent a day at sea for nothing, and the holders now know your colours.

The flag and the garrison

An alliance can plant its flag on a rock by sending ships to hold it. Only small warships can lie against the stone, only foot soldiers can stand there, and every ship that ties up spends a length of Fine Rope, so a garrison of any size is something an alliance builds together rather than one Governor's afternoon. A rock holds only so much: its garrison is capped at 2,000 defence. The strongest hulls stand first, then foot soldiers fill what is left; the rest sail straight home with their rope unspent, and the order tells you which before you send.

The flag is the garrison. Claiming always leaves ships standing; call the last of them home and the flag comes down with them. A flag with nobody under it can be taken by any rival who simply garrisons over it, with no fight, and a Governor who leaves the alliance takes their ships with them, and the flag if nobody else stands there.

Taking a rock by force

A guarded rock is taken in two waves. First, raid it: the fight is an ordinary battle against the ships and soldiers standing there. Wiping the garrison out brings their flag down; a garrison that survives keeps it. A raid does no more than that. No flag goes up, nobody stays behind, every surviving ship sails home, and there is nothing on bare stone to plunder.

Then claim it, with small warships and their rope, like any empty rock. Until a Claim lands, the rock is open to every alliance, the one you just beat included, so the second wave should not be far behind the first. The rock's ledger records the alliance that brought the flag down and never the Governor who sailed.

Two one-day alliance quests turn this into a contest: one counts rival flags brought down in battle, the other counts new rocks claimed.

Friendship is no shield out here. A friend's island can never be attacked, but a friend's ships standing on a rock can be raided like anyone's, and they turn your merchants away like anyone's.

The rock's ledger

Every rock keeps a ledger, open to anyone who selects it, and it reads as a timeline: whose flag has flown and for how long, who tore one down, who reinforced a garrison, whose fleet was turned away and who worked the seam. It is named by alliance. The one Governor it names is the one who planted the flag, since a Claim is an open act; the Governor behind a raid or a mining run is never named, only the colours they sailed under.

A flag on a rock and the ocean's claim

A rock flag reaches further than the rock. Any rival flag on a rock in an ocean, guarded or not, blocks that ocean from being claimed, and a rival flag raised on a rock while a vote is running cancels the vote. Holding the rocks is therefore the quiet way to keep an ocean out of another alliance's hands, and the first thing to clear before you put one to a vote. Rocks themselves pay no toll in claimed waters. The claim itself is on Taking Oceans.

Master Quill: Diplomatic read

An ocean vote lost to a rival flag on a rock is not lost to the voters. Clear the rock, by garrison or by force, and call the vote again. Or talk to the alliance whose flag it is; a flag comes down for less than a fleet costs.

Reading the water

The sea can change. When an ocean turns dark and heavy, with whitecaps, driving rain and lightning, something is standing in it, and there are two things it can be. One of the Risen, a creature let through by a Lumen Rupture, storms the water it stands in, and that storm clears when it moves on or dies, unless a second creature still stands in the same water. A creature's storm is a tell and nothing more: it slows no ship, turns no fleet, and changes nothing about a voyage through it. The other is a Black Tide warband, and its storm is not harmless, as the next paragraph says. You see the weather when you are looking at that ocean; the wide chart does not yet mark it.

The same storm also stands over every ocean where a Black Tide warband holds an island, for as long as one is there. That storm is not only a tell. It lays Rough Seas on every Governor's island in the ocean: fleets sailing from those islands sail slower, and a caught plunder crew loses more ships. Fleets sailing in from outside, and the islands' defences, are untouched. The storm lifts the moment the last warband in that ocean falls.

Nothing can stand off in that sea. A patrol over an island there is called home when the storm sets and cannot be raised again until it lifts. No garrison can sail to a rock in that ocean, and the garrisons already on its rocks sail home a few ships every hour, about half of what stands each day. A rock's flag comes down with its last ship, as it does whenever a garrison leaves. Every ship comes home: the storm takes nothing.

Not every rain is a tell. Once every two hours or so a shower rolls across the whole archipelago at once: pale grey cloud, light rain and slightly darker water, and never lightning. It falls on every ocean together, passes in about ten minutes, and means nothing at all. Nothing is standing in it and nothing sails slower for it. A real storm is the one that stays put while the rest of the sea clears, and wherever a creature or a warband stands, its storm shows over the shower. A Governor still taking their first lessons sees fair weather throughout, storms and showers alike, until the lessons are done.

Reference

Common questions