World Atlas

Sarravel

Shape

sphere

Powers

Name: The Sunthrone Accord

Description: A fragile alliance of Highcrown Vale's noble fleets that nominally governs trade-routes and salvage rights across Sarravel, held together by shared fear of the Wraithreach captains and the ruins beneath the Meridian.

Name: The Freecaptain Confederation

Description: An unruly brotherhood of pirate-lords based in the Wraithreach Shoals who answer to no crown, bound instead by a code of shared charts and shared enemies, quietly controlling more real trade than any kingdom admits.

Name: The Bell-Wardens of Mournhaven

Description: A scattered priesthood who maintain the shrine-bells warding coastlines from the Ashen Tide, wielding influence far beyond their numbers because everyone, pious or not, fears what happens when the bells stop.

Name: The River-Queens' Compact

Description: The matriarchal rulers of the Verdant Reach, who control the single navigable delta linking the ocean to the interior and use that chokehold as leverage over every coastal power that needs jungle goods.

Name: The Ashen Current

Description: Not a nation but a force: the deep, cold ocean current believed to carry the restless dead and salvaged malice of the Drowned Empire, subtly steering weather, migration, and fate across all eight regions.

Themes

heroic
seafaring

History

Long before living memory, the Drowned Empire of Ys-Cathel spanned sky and sea, its sky-fleets and throne-spire said to have tamed the Deep Mother's breath itself. In a single terrible night now called the Drowning, the empire's capital and half its fleet sank beneath a tide that should not have existed, scattering survivors to found the coastal kingdoms and island holds that became today's eight regions. The centuries since have been an age of rebuilding and heroism: free captains charted the Wraithreach's murderous reefs, river-queens tamed the Verdant delta, exiles turned volcanic wastes into the Cindered Strand, and Highcrown Vale's fleet-nobles rose from the wreckage to claim a fragile crown. Yet the ruins of Ys-Cathel, breaching the waves at the Sunken Meridian, remain both the world's greatest temptation and its clearest warning: everything raised from the deep has, eventually, gone back under.

Regions

Hook: The Sunthrone fleet-council is fracturing over who has the right to claim salvage from the Drowned Empire's outer reefs.

Name: Highcrown Vale

Seed: A ring of volcanic islands crowned by terraced palace-cities, Highcrown Vale is Sarravel's political heart, where rival admiral-nobles jockey for the Sunthrone through regattas, marriages, and quiet piracy.

Type: capital archipelago and royal seat

Index: 1

Codex Entity Id: 111

Hook: A newly surfaced wreck is rumored to hold a captain's log naming the exact bearing to Ys-Cathel's sunken heart.

Name: The Wraithreach Shoals

Seed: A thousand-mile tangle of reefs, sandbars, and fog-banks where three generations of free captains have built a lawless confederation that lives and dies by knowing water no chart agrees on.

Type: treacherous reef-maze and pirate haven

Index: 2

Codex Entity Id: 116

Hook: The bell-shrines that ward off the Ashen Tide have started ringing without wind, and pilgrims are vanishing from the beaches.

Name: Mournhaven Coast

Seed: A long temperate coastline lined with mourning-bell shrines built after the Drowning, where fisherfolk-priests tend the dead of the sea and whisper that the empire's ghosts still walk at low tide.

Type: grief-shrined mainland shoreline

Index: 3

Codex Entity Id: 114

Hook: The river-queens have closed the upstream trade locks, strangling every coastal port that depends on jungle timber and spice.

Name: The Verdant Reach

Seed: A humid, myth-choked interior of river deltas and canopy cities ruled by matriarchal river-queens, connected to the sea by a single treacherous delta that every coastal power desperately needs kept open.

Type: inland jungle kingdom and river-empire

Index: 4

Codex Entity Id: 118

Hook: A drift-iceberg has calved away from the northern shelf carrying an intact, frozen fragment of the old empire's sky-fleet.

Name: Frostmantle Isles

Seed: A scattering of ice-locked islands whose whalers and rune-smiths trade in narwhal ivory and salvaged empire-metal, said to still hear old Ys-Cathel's bells ringing beneath the pack ice.

Type: glacial northern island chain

Index: 5

Codex Entity Id: 117

Hook: Ash-storms have unearthed a buried temple predating even the Drowned Empire, and the exiles who found it refuse to say what they saw inside.

Name: The Cindered Strand

Seed: A chain of restless volcanic islands settled by criminals, heretics, and second sons with nothing to lose, now a lawless frontier boomtown fueled by sulfur-glass trade and desperate second chances.

Type: volcanic frontier and exile colony

Index: 6

Codex Entity Id: 115

Hook: A rogue windwarden has planted a heretical flag directly above Ys-Cathel's throne-spire, daring any nation to stop her salvage claim.

Name: The Sunken Meridian

Seed: The open-water grave of the old empire's capital, marked by broken spires breaching the waves at low tide, patrolled by treaty-bound navies and haunted by things that were never meant to surface.

Type: open-ocean ruin-field and forbidden zone

Index: 7

Codex Entity Id: 112

Hook: A returning explorer-ship's entire crew has gone silent and gray-eyed, refusing to say what lies past the last charted current.

Name: The Farthest Reaches

Seed: The uncharted rim where the trade-winds fray and compasses lie, home to rumored floating islands, reversed tides, and the last sailors brave or foolish enough to try to map the world's true edge.

Type: unmapped edge-of-world frontier

Index: 8

Codex Entity Id: 113

Tagline

Where the tides remember empires the maps forgot.

Overview

Sarravel is a single ocean-wrapped world where every kingdom, cult, and coastline owes its shape to the sea. A thousand years ago the Drowned Empire of Ys-Cathel ruled the deeps and skies alike until its capital sank beneath a single cataclysmic tide; ever since, its ruins have seeded the seafloor with drowned wonders and dangers. Now free captains, exile-princes, windwardens, and monster-hunters chase the trade-winds between eight great regions, each bound to the others by sail-routes older than any living kingdom. Heroism here is measured in leagues sailed, storms survived, and the willingness to dive where the old empire fell.

Conflicts

A three-way salvage race for the Sunken Meridian's ruins between the Sunthrone Accord, the Freecaptain Confederation, and a secretive Frostmantle rune-smith guild, each convinced the others will unbalance the Deep Mother if they win first.
The River-Queens' Compact has closed the Verdant Reach's upstream locks in a trade dispute, starving three coastal regions of timber and spice and pushing Highcrown Vale toward an ultimatum that could mean war.
Mournhaven's mourning-bells have begun ringing untriggered, and Bell-Wardens are divided on whether this heralds the Ashen Tide's return or a hoax staged by a heretical sect seeking to seize shrine authority.
The Cindered Strand's exile colonies have unearthed something pre-dating even Ys-Cathel, and word is spreading that certain Strand elders now answer to it rather than to any council or crown.

Cosmology

Sarravel's single ocean is held to breathe: tides rise and fall not from moons but from the slow inhalation of a world-spirit called the Deep Mother, whose moods are read in current, storm, and the songs of drowned things. The old empire of Ys-Cathel believed it had bound her breath to its throne-spire, and its sinking is remembered as the moment she exhaled in anger. Sailors still pour libations at the rail before crossing open water, and every region's faith, however different, agrees on one thing: the sea allows passage, it does not grant it.

Plot Hooks

A Highcrown noble offers the party a privateer's charter to beat a rival house to a Meridian wreck-site rumored to hold the last intact piece of Ys-Cathel's throne-spire.
The Freecaptain Confederation quietly recruits outsiders — deniable, expendable, useful — to steal back a stolen chart that reveals a safe passage through the Wraithreach Shoals.
A Bell-Warden elder begs the party to investigate why the mourning-bells ring on windless nights before the sect declares it heresy and burns the evidence.
A River-Queen's estranged daughter seeks passage downriver to broker peace with the coastal powers before her mother's locks trigger a war neither side can afford.
Survivors of a Farthest Reaches expedition, gray-eyed and nearly silent, need protection from a Sunthrone inquisitor who wants to know exactly what they saw — and whether it followed them back.