Alas for the Awful Tides [ EDIT ]

The Pariah’s Tides are a sea beyond the seven, a vast sunless ocean home to outcasts and rejects, the lost and forgotten. The story is almost always the same. A freak storm suddenly descends upon a ship, and after much whirling and howling, it is cast out, whole or in pieces, into ink-black waters under foreign stars. Just about anyone can find themselves subject to a crossing from reality into the nonsensical Tides, but they seem to primarily target those with few ties to the rest of the world. Some manage to find their way back out, bringing wondrous, unbelievable (and they are very rarely believed) stories of the land on the other side of the storm, but the vast majority live the rest of their lives among the myriad isles of the Pariah’s Tides.

But let’s cut the waxing and wane poetic for a second. What, precisely, are the Pariah’s Tides? Now, I certainly can’t give you the full answer, but I can tell you the general phenomena experienced by its inhabitants, and allow you to draw your own conclusions. Perhaps the first thing a newcomer to the Tides notices is the darkness. The Pariah’s Tides lack a Sun, and they have for a long time. Reason dictates that this can’t have always been the case, because while a missing Sun is understandable, an altogether absent one is entirely preposterous. This line of reasoning is only aided by the common phrase "since the Sun set in the North," indicating a time long past, which can be heard echoed across the Tides, whatever it may mean.

Instead of a Sun, the Pariah’s have two natural sources of light, if you can call them natural. The Moon lives in the South, emitting a dim, cold light that flickers and gutters like a candle in a breeze, going out every day (or night, which is which is a matter of some debate) until it starts back up twelve hours later. The Stars hang in the sky, and burn constantly, but proximity is a large factor in how much light they provide. After all, the Stars of the Pariah's Tides are much closer than those of the rest of the world. Where the Stars and the Moon cannot provide light, mankind must pick up the slack. This is typically achieved through the burning of whale oil, one of the Tides' most valuable resources, though obtaining it from the screaming, squamous denizens of the deep that bear little resemblance to actual whales is an entire ordeal itself.

Enough about that. The second thing that one would likely notice is that almost everything makes noticeably less sense than it ought to. Not no sense, mind you. In fact, some amount of sense can still be located within most occurrences on the Pariah's Tides, it's just better at hiding than it is in the rational world. What exactly does this mean? It means that, if things work out just right, you can meet your Aunt Myrtle for tea at noon, attend yesterday's meeting of the Tremontaine Intriguing if Slightly Abnormal Baubles Enthusiasts Club, receive tomorrow's mail, and still have time left to wake up in the morning. Time, space, common logic, it's all a bit fuzzy. Each city is like a maze of constantly changing streets, navigable only by those with a level head and a powerful gut feeling, and the same goes for the sea itself. Places just don't stay in place. Luckily, methods of subverting this unique problem have been developed, although there is always some amount of chance involved when traversing the Tides, or (god forbid) planning next week's luncheon for the Tremontaine Society for the Perusal of Texts of Eldritch Import.

The "Hub" location of the Tides, in which the majority of its stories take place, or at the very least begin, is the isle of Tremontaine. It is one of the many United Isles of America, a group of islands that entered the Pariah's Tides anywhere between forty and sixty years ago, following the failed American Colonial Rebellion of 1775-1783, and the subsequent swallowing of many of the colonies' major cities in massive storms that deposited them in the Pariah's Tides. A major port city, even before the great storm of 1783, it is a hub of tidal trade and seafaring activity, rivaled only by the UIS' capital isle, Gotham. This is where your journey will begin, and hopefully you'll at least manage to get out of it before your journey ends.