Deep sea

Time of the Ancient Mariner

>>68511456
Play with Floridians.

big whale

>>68511456
Tell them they got - 50% to result of whatever dice they throw while in water.

>>68511456
There's a webcomic, Unsounded, where the metaphysical layer of reality that allows people to do magic is also the afterlife, to which all souls return upon death. But this layer only extends to the edges of the main continent the story takes place on. What this means is sailors who stray too far from the shore aren't just risking their lives, should they be lost at sea, but their very souls. At least, as far as everyone on the mainland is concerned. Nobody knows what happens to sea-dragged sailors and sunken vessels.

If I were running Unsounded as a D&D campaign, I'd say drowning kills you instantly (no saves) with no possible chance of resurrection, and if you're a magic-user you can't cast underwater in the ocean. That would put some fear of the sea into the players.

I'm not telling you to do that, this is just an example. Think of how you can make the sea spooky in-universe, and how you can reflect that mechanically. Good players will play along with whatever atmosphere you wanna spin but even not-so-great players will understand that 1.) they have to venture into the sea to earn their keep, but 2.) the sea itself is an ever-present danger that must be routinely planned around and overcome, even before whatever lurks below.

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>>68511456
plastic feeding deep sea mutant monsters

>>68511456
we know very little of the sea actually. Just consider that rogue waves went from being considered a mariner myth to being accepted as pretty regular occurrences in less than 100 years

>>68511899
>plastic monsters made of drink packaging lugging around dead dolphins

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Is it that time again?

>>68512825
I do believe so Anon. Time for another episode of /tg/ visits the horrors of the deep.

Someone turn on the Deep Sea Biologist Anon signal.

Read a bunch of lovecraft, become a bit racist, and keep talking about how the sea is full of bad things that we hate and that they'll come kill us. Basically make your players racist at the sea.

>>68511456
>ocean is seen as pathetic
bruh

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>>68511456
Use things like pollution to amplify the horror. Something can be a pathetic victim and still be creepy or unpleasant.
A steady diet of plastic is going to do terrible things for someones health. Weird deformities, half blind in their natural habitat etc. You could even go all 'man is the real monster!' and have their spookiness be entirely the result of outside contamination.

Or you could do what a normal person would do and just set it 150+ years in the past.

>>68511694
Not only that, but the magic dimension (khert) also thins out the higher above the ground you go, making airplane-level height impossible and limiting the height of buildings built with magical assistance. Conversely, the khert also thickens as you delve deep underground, making magic easier but weird and risky.

Although, if was going to run an Unsouned game, it would stick to the established continent. The dynamics between Cresce and Alderode are just too damn good not to use. Ashley does fantastic worldbuilding.

>>68511456

Play on a boat. At night. No land in sight.

>>68511456
Make spooky shit real. The most ghostly you should get is divine, Rime of the Ancient Mariner style. If you fall into the ocean, you got creatures that will kill you in the darkness of the sea. There are flesh eating bacteriae that will creep onto the ship if you eat perishable food. If you look in the water, you can see the horrifying glowing eyes and sharp teeth on the monsters below.

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>>68512825
>>68512911
Fine, if you insist. It's a bit ahead of scheduele, but if people want. Incidentally, I'm not sure what I should think of somebody actually saving the picture I made. I know I had some reason I stuck Gulper Eel-chan's goofy mug in the bottom corner, but I'll be damned if I remember what it is (i also made a version without it).

Not sure if I can help much, though. All I can say is read a lot of book about the ocean, and try to replicate the tone. Not that I could do it myself, despite extensive reading. I've been wanting to write an nautical horror story for the Lovecraft historical society's magazine, but I just can't describe the ocean well enough.
For what's it worth, emphacise the isolation. There's nothign quite like being in the open ocean with nothing but water around you as far as eye can see and no sight of land or another ship for weeks to bring home how small you are and how big the world is. And being caught in a storm on the ocean is downright terrifying. Nothign quite like being acutely aware that the only thing between you and certain death by drowning is a thin layer of wood/metal/fiberglass, and that if you happen to be in the wrong place and a mountain-sized wave collapses on top of your little boat and shatters it into a million pieces there's nothing you can do to stop it, to make you realize your own mortality.

Course, you try getting that across while you're standing on dry land player pretend. Don't ask me how to do it, I just draw dumb mermaids and shitpost about deep sea fish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Indianapolis_(CA-35)

>>68513668
>For what's it worth, emphacise the isolation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceanic_pole_of_inaccessibility
The spot in the ocean farthest from land on Earth. Basically dead water, thanks to the Pacific gyre, and it's a spacecraft cemetery. If you're alone on a boat at Point Nemo, and the International Space Station flies overhead, those are the closest human beings to you.

>>68513668
>There's nothing quite like being in the open ocean with nothing but water around you as far as eye can see and no sight of land or another ship for weeks
It is also super comfy.

>And being caught in a storm on the ocean is downright terrifying. Nothing quite like being acutely aware that the only thing between you and certain death by drowning is a thin layer of wood/metal/fiberglass, and that if you happen to be in the wrong place and a mountain-sized wave collapses on top of your little boat and shatters it into a million pieces there's nothing you can do to stop it, to make you realize your own mortality.
A nice explanation of "you can't bullshit nature". Also a reason ocean sailing will break you because when you get back you won't be able to stand people's petty bullshit.

>>68511456
>Bathybius
A now disproved theory that down in the abyssal plane there was an ocean spanning organism that dwelled in the dark and fed on ocean snow and other dead matter that sank into the depths. I've used it in a game before, it was intelligent but profoundly alien to what we understand as life, before the game it was unaware that anything existed above it. After the party made contact it became curious for lack of a better term, now they call it the Reacher In The Depths.
>Body horror
The sea is full of parasites. Go nuts with The Thing levels of creepy crawlies crawling out of other things.
>Isolation
Speaking of The Thing, and as Deep Sea Anon said, stress the isolation of being at or under the sea. No one is coming to save you. You are in a small pocket of your world surrounded by a world that's hostile to your very being. If that small pocket breaks, the alien world will start to seep in, and unless dry land is in reach you have nowhere to go. This goes double for being under water.
>Alien forms
All life on land follows a couple of basic templates. Seen one vertebrate, seen most of them. Not so down in the depths. Look up some of the wierd stuff deep sea rovers have spotted. Its bizarre.

>>68513771
That's awesome and chilling at the same time. Oh the things I want to do to my group by taking them out there in game....

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>>68514109
>All life on land follows a couple of basic templates. Seen one vertebrate, seen most of them. Not so down in the depths. Look up some of the wierd stuff deep sea rovers have spotted. Its bizarre.
True. Let's look at one of my favorite animals, the gulper eel. Some ichtyologists are seriously debating whether it can really be considered a bony fish. It has no ribs, no swim bladder (that's common with deep sea fish, though), a simpler structure of muscles than other fish, and unique molecular biology. It's skull is composed of a tiny neurocranium and ridiculouly thin and long jawbones. It has really oddly shaped kidneys that are pretty much just a long thin tube (and may play a role in maintaining its boyancy in the absence of a swim bladder). There's a bulb on the end of its tail that glows pink.
It really is little more than a huge mouth and stomach, plus the bare minimum of parts needed to keep it functioning. It feels less like a real animal and more like some abstraction of a deep sea fish, with anything not part of the core aspects of a deep sea fish removed.

>>68511456
>ocean is full of plastic, to the point there are floating islands of plastic debris
>this is somehow not terrifying
You never saw those blobs of trash in your own eyes, right?

>>68511456
The ocean is only more terrifying because of the plastic, not less. And of course it would want revenge.

>>68511456
Those fish that swim up your peehole.

Is constantly having an ambient sound of waves (or underwater sounds, if underwater) playing a good idea?

>>68514656
Don't want to disappoint you or anything, but those live in the Amazones. And they need fresh water, preferably muddy one.

>>68514601
It's mostly microscopic bits of plastic, as larger pieces break down from exposure to sunlight and salt water. Problem is, those tiny pieces don't go anywhere, until I suppose they eventually sink and get buried in the seafloor sediment along with everythign else that falls down there and doesn't get eaten by something, but who knows how long that'll take? Tiny pieces of plastic float pretty well.

>>68511456
A sea of plastic.

>>68511456
Just remind them what death by drowning feels like

>>68511456
It's just a lot of cum, and massive sperm are its apex predators

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>>68511456
With mermaids.

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>>68515484
Deep mermaids that trap men in air bubbles deep beneath the sea for use as breeding material and food sources.

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>>68515498
Or abandoned military projects that still haunt the depths, not aware the war that required them has ended.

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Since I'm here, I might as well post more weird deep sea things.
I'm not sure if the gulper eel or the black swallower is a better posterchild for the deep sea being underwater vore hell. One's pretty much nothing but a floating mouth and stomach, while the other is (in)famous for being able to swallow huge prey. A lot lot of deep sea fish can swallow things their own size or bigger, but few can match the black swallower, which can swallow fish over twice its size and ten times its weight (the record being a snake mackrel four times the swallower's length, although that seems to have been too big and ruptured the fish's stomach).
Most samples of black swallowers that have been collected have been ones that had swallowed prey so big that they couldn't digest it before it started rotting, and the gasses created by decomposition lifted the fish to the surface.
There's probably an aesop there. I should draw it.

Post ghost ship stories pls

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>>68515528
Wooden sailing ships, heavy seas, no antibiotics or refrigeration.

>>68515114
Passing around Seychelles (for a varied definition of "around" - it was closer to them than the Maldives) I've seen a floating island of bottles, roughtly in size of an ore carrier. I wish they were microscopic. I really do.

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>>68515624
Pirates.

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>>68515624
>Wooden sailing ships, heavy seas, no antibiotics or refrigeration
I fail to see the horror of it

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>>68515638
Special forces trying to bring about the end of the world.

>The water elementals now wear armor and weapons made out of trash
>One of them has a flail that's basically a garbage bag full of rusty needles
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

have you ever conisdered that the darkness at the bottom of the ocean might be perfect place for a Grue?

Other things to mess with:

>Exotic weather patterns: St. Elmo's fire was a pretty consistent mystery to early mariners if I recall correctly, and birthed some degree of superstition, fear of the supernatural.

>'Play': Ever seen an Orca, or dolphins play with their food? Take that, and open the door to something bigger having the same tendency.

>Geology: The Bermuda Triangle is theorized to have claimed so many due to eruptions of methane deposits on the sea floor of sufficient magnitude to severely compromise the lifting/buoyancy granting characteristics of the water and atmosphere above them. This can cause ships to sink in a placid Sea, engines to stall/misfire and aircraft to experience sudden, unexplained, undetectable descent when flying through the columns of gas.

>Physics: Water, or any sufficiently fluid like cargo is a cold hearted bitch. Once you're out at sea, if complications arise from improperly stowed, tampered with, or unknowingly volatile cargo, you can find yourself in dire straits.

>>68515355
that's why I always bring the old rag and water tank

>>68515591
I can't say I really know many. I mean, everybody knows the story of Mary Celeste, who was found floating intact but with no sign of the crew, who apparently abandoned her in a hurry (there were still plates of food left on tables, and other signs of people just dropping whatever they were doing). Most likely explanation is that the crew thought there was a fire and retreated to the lifeboat which was connected to the ship with a rope, only for the rope to snap off, leaving the ship sailing off without a crew, the the lifeboat lost to the sea, never to be seen again.

Real life "ghost ships", i.e. abandoned ships floating around with no crew, aren't even all thet unusual. There was one in Canada that regularly appeared every spring due to repeatedly getting stuck in ice every winter and being released once the ice melted. Eventually the damage from rust and ice pressing on the hull caused it to sink. I also find it pretty intresting that one of the boats from the Essex apparently made an U-turn after its crew had died from exposure and came to shore on an island practically next to the island the survivors had earlier stopped on. What are the odds?

>>68515629
I mean, yeah, you obviously have larger pieces of trash too, and due to sea currrents they tend to congregate (same happens with floating seaweed and pumice after underwater volcanic eruption), but the myth that the pacific garbage patch is literally a floating island made out of trash is just that.

>>68513690
Black eyes like dolls eyes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slosh_dynamics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll-on/roll-off

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster

Stowage is a bitch. Fire becomes your worst nightmare when surrounded by water.

There is just so much that can go wrong at sea, and so few hands to help you out of a tight spot.

Also, you don't even need an ocean to get scary, the Great Lakes prove that even an inland sea is a cold merciless bitch. See the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I'm bringing all these technical disasters up just to illustrate how a human slipping up can doorman entire ship. Throw in an external malevolence, and There is no shortage of things to put your party on edge.

A good submarine movie is usually a good horror movie by accident. The lack of windows, the isolation of being in a cold metal tube, the knowledge of the tons upon tons of pressure all around you, every creak and groan of the metal as you change depth, transient sonar and hydrophone contacts that you can never identify, the paranoia of stalking vs being stalked, knowing one mishap could end it all, sea tales and myths, and constant threat of one mistake can end it all
>tldr submarine spooky

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>>68516128
>A good submarine movie is usually a good horror movie by accident.

>>68511456
Plastic golems march out of the sea to avenge themselves upon humanity.

>>68515997
That kind of reminds me of something that happened pretty close where I used to live. There was a barge carrying iron ore to to a steel mill, when during bad weather the barge got knocked by a wave a little too much to one side. All the ore (which obviously wasn't secured as we're talking about a barge with one big hold, and cargo composed of tons of little chunks of metal) rolled to one side, tipping the barge further, and before anybody could do anything, the thing flipped over, filled with water, and dragged the ship pulling it to the bottom. Two people survived. One got lucky and was pushed clear out of the boat by water rushing in, and thus avoided getting trapped or sucked down with it, while another was an old engineer who knew to be prepared for such a thing and always kept his lifevest nearby and escape route at hand.
My dad used to work pretty close to the site of the accident (you could see the steel mill from the docks; it's literally on the other side of a bay), and while I'm not sure if he saw the accident, he did see the recovery. My uncle was one of the divers recovering the bodies. They couldn't get them all out as some were stuck under the ship, now resting upside down in the bottom. Most had seemingly died almost instantly. They found the corpse of one poor bastard locked in the shower cubicle where he had been taking a shower right when the ship capsized, and had to break the door with an axe to get him out. And this was right next to the coatline, in a region I'd describe as pretty pleasant with none too bad weather, aside from the average autumn storms that seem to show up everywhere next to the sea on the northern hemisphere.

>>68511637
I think a game that consists of a party of Florida Man is too intense for anyone.

>>68516224
>You come to a town
>I go to the nearest swamp
>...ok. You go to the swamp. The sawgrass slashes at your legs and-
>I'm gonna roll Search to find an alligator
>I'm gonna help him
>I'll help him too
>*sigh* You find an alliga-
>I roll to grapple
>I'll help
>Me too
>Ok, fuck, you grapple the alligator and-
>I take it back to the village.
>Is there a Waffle House in the village?
>Waffle House doesn't exist in this setting
>Ok well what fast food do they have
>There's a tavern in-
>I'm gonna rob the tavern with the alligator

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>>68516164
>tfw finished it for the second time
>The ending

>>68515801
[dread-filled flashbacks intensify]

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>>68515484

Have them be the ones choked by plastic

Play XCOM: Terror From The Deep in the dark while listening to creepy whale sounds.

>Also Cthulhu

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>>68515557
Have you visited the Nechronica thread? I found something you might like there.

>>68511456
Set it after the end. The ocean has adapted to the plastic. What did not kill it only made it stronger. The waters are high now, higher than they have ever been. She does not hate you, dry-children. She understands the pain your separation from Her has caused you. She knows you did not mean to hurt Her. She will make you whole again. Come home, dry-children. One way or another, you will all come home.

>>68511456
Have it take their stuff. Players hate hate hate losing loot of any kind.

>>68516570
Boner, why?

Actually, an interesting scenario might be to just have some extremely poisonous jellyfish hidden in a plastic bag sea dump, just to keep everyone on their toes (since one player will probably roll high enough on one check or another to see AT LEAST 1 jellyfish)

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>>68516570
Yup, that's definitely a gulper/pelican eel girl. Head shape seems more like pelican, but the teeth and maybe placement of dorsal fin are more like gulper.

I'd like to see somebody actually recreate the saccopharyngiformed head/jaw structure properly on a mermaid, though. I've seen multiple gulper mermaids but none of them get it right. And that definitely includes me (i just gave up and gave my gulper eel mermaid a head like from that Hidamari Wideface anime).

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>>68516961
As a not-marine-biologist, I have trouble imagining the proper head structure, so I’d say I’m interested, too.

>>68516695
Imagine the deepthroat bruh

>>68516380
that's pretty metal

>>68513134
Because of the Implication.

>>68515638
I actually love that movie...

remind them that the ocean is very large and it hates them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQUXbkAdZhg
then point out if they go too deep or too far out no one can help them, play up the combination of unstoppable power and complete isolation.
Also, death pressure, submarine destruction and diving accidents.

The deep oceans scare the fuck out of me honestly.

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>>68517232
For some reaosn it's really hard to find high resolution images of a saccopharyngid skull online. Infact, I couldn't find one, but happened to have a pdf with pictures of eel skulls (as you do), and ripped the picture from there. This a pelican eel, in particular.
Basically, the neurocranium (the part of the skull that contains the brain and is connected to the spine) is tiny, with ridiculously long and thin jawbones that stretch backwards from the skull. It's pretty hard to correlate it with a more traditional skull we've all seen, as the proportions are just so warped. The best analogy I can think of is a snake skull, which also has think jaw bones that are separate from the neurocranium to a degree (letting snakes swallow prey bigger than their head), but exagerrated to a ridiculous degree.

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>>68517599
Here's another picture with the muscle and cartilage drawn in to get a better idea of the shape on the live animal, although most of the lower jaw is missing.

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>>68513101

>>68511456

Make the sea inexplicable and terrifying.

There is a pretty good fantasy series about conmen in a low-magic setting called the Gentlemen Bastards Sequence, often known instead as The Lies of Locke Lamora.

The second book in particular deals with a region called the Sea of Brass, and while the metaphysical nature of the region isn't actually relevant to the plot, the Sea of Brass is downright spooky.

Imagine travelling over a patch of deep black water, and you look over the side and the water is suddenly so clear that you can see with perfect clarity a city full of buildings, in perfect repair not as ruins, on the sea floor below. And then, and your ship keeps moving forward, the sea darkens again and you lose sight of it.

A bay with glowing colorful pinpoints of light at the bottom, like pastel stars in the ocean, that look really pretty from above the waves but if you look down at them while underwater there is such a visceral sense of malice to them that experience sailors have *drowned* because they were in such a panic to get out of the water that they forgot how to swim. Just flailing and bawling in the water like terrified children.

An island where, as you pass by, everyone experiences the same hallucination of someone calling out their name from the shore and begging for help. No one who ever goes to the island returns, and the shore is lined with the wrecks of ships that landed there and never left.

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And here's a picture of the anatomy of a gulper eel. I drew this on top of a picture on a scientific paper, as the original artwork was pretty terrible (nice to know even actual scientists can also suck at drawing). Note the really long and thin kidney, large ovaries (gulper and pelican eels, as well as eels in general, produce eggs only once in their life and then die), and very large stomach (one thing that separates gulper and pelican eels; the latter has a smaller, non-stretchy stomach, while the former can swallow fish larger than itself).

>>68517599
>>68517668
Pretty much the opposite of the human skull with its huge braincase, then. I imagine it would be very difficult to draw a creature with such a jaw as girl-like…

>>68517820
reminds me of sunless sea

>>68511660
brutal but effective and immersionpilled

>>68513668

Dumb mermaids and deep sea fish are cool and appreciated! Lillends are also acceptable.

>>68511637
This, really. Play with people who know the sea not faggots from LA and Seattle who think they know because they see a bit of coastline from their loft.

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I life in spain's atlantic coast, and i love to swim and snorkelling. you can see, at best, 5 or 6 meters horizontally, and a bit less in deep. most days, if the beach is very exposed to wind, you cant see more than 1 meter.
This is scaring as hell, because even if you just know that there are not monsters (real or imaginary), once you start swimming a bit out of the shore, your mind starts to pop up images of sharks and monsters appearing just in front of you out of the blue. If i am snorkeling, most times i dont see my hands, and if you are swimming, you see the seas surface but you cant see a thing under it. It could be a lot of things under it, close to you, huge things, and you wouldnt notice... Until its too late.
Thats the kind of fear you must play with. Same thing if you are in a boat, the players must realize that there is only a thin and fragile wooden surface under their feets, and then, a lot of height, they are really high above oceans floor, and all that space is dark... And full of things (for real). So just play with those fears, the dark, the emptines...but the real fact that the sea is full of things, you cant see until to late.
Anyway, i always wanted to make a small horror campaign in an ongoing fantasy game. The pcs find the only open tavern in a misty night in a coastal town, and some old sailors start to tell sea horror stories. The players play the characters in those stories, more short encounters with a lot of background, than full adventures. They still get a bit xp from this tales, and if nobody survive the tale and they ask the teller how can he know what happened, he smiles, they look at the door after hearing some weird sound from the harbour, and when they look back at the teller, he has disapeared and the other guys look scared as hell (roll for sanity). I wanted to use a horror sea tales anthology book i readed by the time, i cant recall the title now

>>68514788
If they are swimming up my peehole that's about as fresh as it gets, anon.

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>>68515835
the idea of boarding a ship on the middle of the ocean and it's just full of skeletons is a spoopy one.

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>>68511456
How nautical we talking? 1 being a coastal fisherman 10 being a saturation diver

>>68517671
Shark with legs feels like baby’s first underwater terror.

>>68511456
Have their characters roll a spook check and if they fail, which they will, tell them their characters are super spooked. This will make them scared

http://www.scp-wiki.net/tower-b

>>68511456
The second sky

>>68516365
I don't know what it is, but despite having completed that game thrice now, I'm still shitting my pants when it's dark and I'm not in a prawn suit. Early exploration is basically going to a location, building a small base with a scanner room and using the scanner or remote cameras to locate what I need, then quickly retrieving it before retreating back to safety. The moment I get the prawn suit I'm punching leviathans in the face and not giving a fuck.

>>68521482
Honestly, I think tech-divers have less to fear from the sea than just plain old fuck-ups. (Which probably shows how little I really know)

For them, I'd think it'd be almost possible to become as close to comfortable with the sea as a human can get. You basically have all the knowledge you need to safely conduct yourself. You have your equipment, and an at depth base of operations.

The terror for me would be in putting my entire existence in the surface crew's hands. Hostile environments I can deal with. Having faith on others to keep my pre-reqs for life satisfied? Not so much.

One fuck up with atmospheric pressure or gas composition, one loss of position or communications, one missed shipment of supplies...

Like, I could grow to dig the details of life at depth a la The Abyss. It's making the transition back up, or dealing with a SNAFU in the supply chain that would keep me awake.

When you've been down so long, even the trip back up is lethal done wrong.

>>68522081
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOBf-jQUWGo

>>68522382
>I think tech-divers have less to fear from the sea than just plain old fuck-ups.
To a degree. I worked as support crew for a saturation dive team and the sea really is a wild card in this business. I've been on jobs where squid were attracted to the dive team's lights and swarmed the crew. We had an emergency where a rogue wave hit the ship and damaged the dive bell badly enough that there was a real chance we wouldnt be able to recover the divers. I've been on more than one job where a silt cloud came out of nowhere and visibility on the bottom dropped to zero. Mechanically everything can go flawlessly and people with be in jeopardy because old man ocean said fuck you.

>>68517380
That sounds really dark though.

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>>68512825
I've heard many terrifying things my days and thought of many horrible versions of hell.

Underwater Double Hell is by far the scariest thing I've ever heard.

>>68523033
Keep an eye on the board for the next time Deep Sea Anon runs a thread. This was just a preview.

>>68522728
>Silt cloud brown out
>Fucking squid thumping into you at high speed out of nowhere like a pissed off murder of crows
>Pecking at dials, fucking with regulators/hoses.
>Possibly grabbing a giant tentacle and confusing it for a line in all the confusion.
>Heading toward your buddy's dive lights
>Oh-Shit-not-a-dive-ligh

Ah. There it is. Figured I just wasn't imagining hard enough. Thanks Anon. Deep sea terror restored.

>>68517873
To give an idea of how it would be drawn the jaw would extend down the body to the hip area. Unless the jaw was hinged right at the tip to allow the creature to look straight ahead it would be locked looking straight up. Itd be like something from The Thing, it could pass for human at range then turn and "shoot" its maw at you from a surprising distance.

>>68511456
Imagine pulling a sea strainer on a ship and finding a massive wad of hair. Man sized. But it’s entirely hair. So you trash it, only to fine that it’s now missing from the trash room and left a trail behind

>>68523067
My pleasure. I'm about to pass out of network if the thread is still up in the morning I'll green text the incidents or make a new thread if theres interest in my tales from the deep.

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>>68511456
I major in marine environmental science, scuba, and also am getting my third mates license. I’m just saying this because I like to dab on people. Also I say this to let OP know that I’ve thought about nautical horror a lot when I’m in the Atlantic. You could do a story about how ocean acidification is lowering the pH level, making it more habitable to aquatic nightmares. Or maybe a setting in the great dead reef, where things come out to prey upon you at night? What about increasing sea levels drowning cities, leaving half sunken wastelands to explore? You don’t even have to do these in modern times, shake it up and do some real swords and sorcery shit.
>>68513771
>>68517820
Based

>>68517232
That girl is cruising for a bruising, putting her head there.

>>68523153
Hell yes!

>>68516274
Good Lord it ended way better than what I feared

>>68523153
Would be interested, would be spooked.

>>68515498
No do what real anglers do. Latch onto males until the male fuses with the skin and their organs dissolve save the gonads feeding her sperm whenever she has eggs that need fertilizing.

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>>68524524
I'm not kidding. If you want mermaid anglers, expect her to be clingy. So cling that your skin melts and your body fuses to hers

>>68524524
>>68524557
Except it's the males that latch onto the females, they do that to themselves.

>>68524557
Angler fish and mermaids live in different levels of the sea. Anglers live in the mesopelagic and bathypelagic zone, mermaids live where the rest of the sea life lives, the photic zone. Mermaids reproduce like other photic zone fish.

>>68516365
>An even scarier, anthropomorphic Ghost Leviathan
I did NOT fucking need this!

...But yea, Subnautica is a good place to start. Plus most undersea documentaries.

>>68523114
The connection point of the jawbones to the skull is pretty flexible (they can go from being flush to the body to pointing almost 90 degrees to the side, and I think they have pretty wide range of motion along the vertical axis as well), so she she could probably tilt her head forward quite a bit, even if not quite to the same position a human head normally sits in.

>>68525093
But what about deep sea mermaids?

>>68515591
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan
There's a recent game about it.

>>68526132
There are none.

>>68523067
"I can't use my eyes" really is the beginning and the end of all horror when you're a visual species huh

>>68511456
Plastic monster men

>>68511456
>crtl+f
>only two mentions of sharks
Sharks are legit the scariest thing that exists in real life. The only way evolution has changed them is to make them more efficient killers. Their natural cammo is flawless, looking down into darker water the top of the shark is darker, looking up towards the light, the shark is lighter. A movie made about a shark was so terrifying, it motivated people to hunt them to near extinction. To even encounter one, you have to enter an environment you are completely unsuited for, but it is perfect in. Despite the size they can reach, their approach is always perfectly silent. A shark that isn't even interested in biting anything ever can still swallow you whole by accident. Sharks are so pants-shittingly scary, one time they even killed Sam Jackson.

>>68527837
Until you boop their snoots and they become docile puppies.

>>68511456
That's not really how I or most people I am aware of think of the ocean. Then again, living in a nation consisting of 400 islands and a peninsula, with a long ass naval history probably has something to do with it. Also having landmarks and summer houses in the process of being swallowed by the sea probably helps. Hell, the plastic and polution angle only makes things worse because if anything is gonna kill us, it's gonna be fucking with the ocean.

>>68511694
>>68513121
>Shilling a shitty webcomic
I hope you fall and break your neck.

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>>68527837

>>68511456
Have mermaids that actually drown people. Make them sexy, yes, but have that sexiness be the bait they use to lure victims.

>>68511456
Eldritch abomination made of waste and garbage fused together.

I am planning a vampire pirates campaign in Seas of Vodari and this thread is a huge help. Thanks anons.

>>68526132
>>68524557
>>68524524
>>68524693
If anglermaids have the same relationship with males as anglerfish females, wouldn't that mean that they'd have to be rather large? If they're compatible with landwalkers, you could have basically giant anglermaids swimming around with up to multiple sets of vestigial limbs from human males arbsorbed into them.

>>68528727
http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-879

Polychaete worms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=refnOdW49rw

>>68511456
GASHUNK

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>>68527837

>>68528395
>Referencing something as relevant inspiration is now shilling on /tg/, the board where everything is inspiration
Yeah, nah.

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>>68527837

The video game SOMA, although more focused on the scifi aspects of horror, actually did deep sea horror very well along with it, and it was amazing.
The Curie and the abyss in particular are highlights. The monsters are also good inspiration, as most of them are ocean themed.

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>>68521621
That's not a shark with legs, it's legs carrying a dead shark.

>>68528727
Or maybe the males are just tiny. They pretty much only exist to mate once and then die, so they wouldn't need to have anything more than sharp senses to find the female, and the ability to mate with her.

That's how a lot of deep sea fish work, actually. The females can often live for a long time, but adult males commonly have degenerated or nonfunctional feed apparati and devote all their energy to finding a female, then dying after mating. Many others are hermaphroditic.
The extreme form of sexual paratism only occurs on a few anglerfish genera (which IIRC doesn't actually include the Melanocetus genus, which is pretty much the "standard" deep sea anglerfish), but is so bizarre that it's disproportionately well known.

>>68528727
>If anglermaids have the same relationship with males as anglerfish females, wouldn't that mean that they'd have to be rather large?

Isn't that basically black latinos? Giant fat women, scrawny men?

>>68528431
>Outta my way nerd

>>68516200
>and thus avoided getting trapped or sucked down with it

I think that’s the part that spooks me most honestly.
It’s one thing for escape to a lifeboat to be hard, but another entirely for the dead sinking ship to drag you along with it.
That shots fucking horrifying.

is drowning the worst way to die? i think it must be up there.

>>68527837
Funnily enough I had a dream about sharks just last night. I was scaling a brick wall that dropped into the ocean and I could see great while sharks poking their heads out of the water and hear them gnash their jaws together.

>>68528431
>>68528971
>>68529023
Nope, not clicking.

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Have a sunken city. Sunken cities are usually good for spooky times, regardless of what type they are. You could really ramp up the atmosphere just by having the players rolling for encounters that are rigged to be nothing/ ordinary harmless sea life in narrow hallways and enclosed spaces and, without warning, have rooms that could have actual hazards in them.

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>>68531101
Don't worry, anon. You just need to give them defensive cuddles.

>>68531101
>>68531228
Pretty sure sharks just leave divers alone because they have no idea what to do with a thing that spews bubbles instead of blood.

>>68531256
Most predators avoid any unknown factors, as they can't afford to get injured or waste energy attackign something they can't eat. That's why often when a shark attacks a person it's because it mistook them for a seal, or it's not actually attacking but just curious and tries to investigate, but being a shark its only method of interacting with things is biting.

>>68523227
Go small scale Pacific Rim, with underwater gates opening to biotch invaders. Gates have existed for a long time, but rising ocean temperatures are allowing them to reopen.

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>>68511456
As someone from Florida, I would just like to say I am terrified of the water

Do you know what it's like minding your own business fishing in a river and to see a bullshark breach the water? Like what the fuck? I had always heard about bullsharks in freshwater but didn't see one till like 3-4 years ago? Fuck the water dude, humans are like the very bottom of the food chain next to shrimp

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>>68531657
Wait, hang on. I was just prevented from posting a shark webm because it was over 3 MB, so how did I just upload this?

>>68530646
From what I've heard it's actually pretty peacefull. The actual asphyxiation, that is. Not the minute long fight against your breath reflex.

>>68516638
The horrors from the sea don't kill, except accidentally. They come to land, take as many people as they can, alive, and disappear below the sea again.
We can only hope they drown.

>>68531174
That game any fun?

>>68527695
Not really. The brain is an adaptable organ. Horror starts where you run into too much change too fast for it to keep up with. Visually impaired people and the like work just fine given the right tools.

Come into a situation you do not have the tools for however...

>>68531742

Prob PDF files can be bigger than a webm.

>>68517820
>you look over the side and the water is suddenly so clear that you can see with perfect clarity a city full of buildings, in perfect repair not as ruins, on the sea floor below.

Fuck you emet-selch you won't bamboozle me again.

start simple, and improvise based on the players.
the ocean is pissed now is basically where id start. then if the players stay on land, the sea may have shoreline abominations that raid and consume more and more of the shoreline, using something to collapse that area into the sea.

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>Isolation
>Confined spaces
>Literal Crushing pressure
>Limited recourses
>Madness
>Freezing Cold
>Predators we have no defence for
>Parasites
>Moonpool intrusions

Read 6000 or watch Sphere or something.

>>68515678
>Oh god, they rebuilt the Bismark with peices of the Titanic!

>>68532948
>and it's piloted by twin clones of hitler!

>>68517472
Have you seen Director's Cut? If not, strongly recommend doing so

>>68531844
One of the best point & click adventure games ever made, definitely in top 20, if not top 10.
Fun as fuck, especially since it has an unique feature of going through it either as Brawl, Brains or Teamwork, so you solve the puzzles differently in each take or have different locations entirely

>>68515835
I specified Indian Ocean. And it was ore-carrier big. Because I was on one and we had similar size. Obviously, it was just surface level, but anyone being in this business (or just hobby sailor) will tell you you can never be sure what's beneth the surface of such debris. Most likely it wasn't even trash, but someone lost a contained and they were simply floating around.

>>68521621
Gyo, one of Junji Ito's works is fucking weird.
The basic plot is that all of a sudden these weird parasitic/robotic legs carrying rotting fish start pouring out of the ocean and murdering people. They turn out to be powered by the gases emitted by rotting flesh.
And then it turns out that they were built by ghosts or something. As usual Ito can't finish a story to save his life. It's probably the most unintentionally hilarious of his works, followed closely by Hellstar Remina.

>>68532407
Sphere is good, but I like The Abyss better.
You guys excited for that new one? Underwater?

>>68533363
>Most likely it wasn't even trash, but someone lost a contained and they were simply floating around.
Yeah, that happens surprisingly often, sometimes with odd results. Like, there's a beach in France that had plastic Garfield telephones washing up on shore for years. Turns out a container ship lost a cargo container full of those in a storm and a lot of them got swept by the currents into a coastal cave. Every high tide the cave would be submerged and when the water retreated during low tide it would pull some of the Garfield phones with it and wash them up on the nearby beach.

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>>68511456
Man from Florida here. First order of fearing the sea, fuck the beach.

>Just walking on the beach
>Jellyfish bigger than my torso beached right behind a log I just jumped over.
>Feel horrible pain and begin to contemplate pissing on myself when the dad of a family of Floridians barbecuing nearby says, "Oh hey, sorry about that. I would have warned you if I'd seen you."
>"I'll forgive you if I can have some of that bbq sauce
>Thank God its vinegar based which actually helps with stings
>Meet his cute daughter. We date for a while.

Also, if you step in a jellyfish you will also get stung in your back and neck somehow because God made the sea to hate you. I've said a lot of shit. My point is jellyfish landmine traps. Also needles buried in the sand because of meth heads.

>>68533456
Ghosts? they were an experiment by Unit 731 that sunk in a sub and over the years the sub ruster open and they latched onto fish, its a book about japan denying its warcrimes.

Where the fuck did you get ghosts out of that?

>>68533587
Because it says the weapon the ship was carrying was some sort of gas, not weird spider robots. And definitely not that many of them.
Although it has been years since I read it. Maybe I missed something there.

>>68527837
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KH5QBZdvf0

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>>68511456
In total darkness of the ocean there exists terrors that respond angry to any expedition to their realm.

>>68533486
The scary part with containers is the fact they tend to be like submarines. Not an issue when you are on board of something bigger, but absolutely terrifying when you're sailing. Hitting one will rip your hull open and you won't be even able to see it until you are already sinking.
And it also happens on regular basis around high traffic areas and anywhere where the current could drag the container within a week - that's about how long they float just RIGHT beneth the surface

>>68515557
>Adventurers vs Balloon Bois
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT_EMKl2A3Y

>>68534073
>is it engorged or is it... like that?

lmao

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>>68531844
>>68533324
The atmosphere and the music are top tier, too. Especially in Atlantis.

>>68513771
>If you're alone on a boat at Point Nemo, and the International Space Station flies overhead, those are the closest human beings to you.
I mean... if you're out in the ocean and not on/near a shipping route, chances are that if the ISS passes over you, people aboard are the ones closest to you. ISS isn't that far away.

>>68511456
You need to go *double underwater*!

Deep sea brine lakes; who knows what could be lurking in there?! - https://youtu.be/ZwuVpNYrKPY

>>68511456
Have you considered adapting the setting of Fallen London? I've always thought it would make a great rpg.

>>68535401
You fool! That's levels of saltiness no man was meant to know! You've doomed us all!

>>68535671
Come on lad, people have been to evo before.

>>68533518
I also have a jelly fish sting, its not nearly that bad, but it is across my chest. Fuck the beach, i have no clue why people love going there so much, it looks nice sure, but its terrible to be there.

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>>68522236
Below Zero adds a whole new layer of nope.

>>68536283
Own it, but haven't gotten much into it since release. Been waiting for it to finish. Upgrading my PC wouldn't hurt either.

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>>68535764
>Hang out with your bros
>Shoot the shit
>Ogle women
>Hot sand and cool water
>Light a bonfire as it starts to get dark to dry off and get buzzed on the last of ice cold beer
>Head to wherever your staying with a girl leaning against you.

Going to the beach in the summer is a necessity.

>>68536283
That on one side... Sandworm on the other...

Jolly well fucked I'd say.

>>68535459
honestly i'm surprised the makers of that game haven't done that themselves yet.

>>68521265
Free ship.

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Fuck the ocean, I mean fuck any open body of water that's not a pool really

The water is fucking terrifying, all of it. I can't fathom how human beings willingly get into water knowing full well there are predators god knows where cause visibility is extremely poor and god should you have to defend yourself your as about as able to as a crawfish can defend itself from a southerners buffet

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What if the ocean was suddenly just... not there?

>>68513668
Anon, I want you to know I'm glad you're still around. I dont have the balls to push my fetish ocs on /tg/ so I commend your tenacity and good taste.

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>>68537816

>>68538053
this shows gravity concentration, not water/land level anon.

>>68537433
It's been suggested on the forums and last I saw the devs have said they have no plans to do anything like that. Something about cost and opportunity cost etc etc. A real shame if you ask me.

>>68538194
gives an idea anyway

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>>68537816

>>68537816
dramatic landscape and interesting debris to explore, as long as you can explain where the explorers get their water from

>>68517820
Fuck I had forgotten about those books thanks.

>>68511456
>ocean is seen as pathetic victim full of plastic nowadays
Are your all players landlocked or something? The ocean's fucking horrifying. And the plastic might just make it even more fucking terrifying.

>>68538455
>explorers get their water from
Well they weren't getting it from the ocean anyways.

>>68523358
>>68524473
Diver anon here I've got bad news and good news. Bad news is in going to have to rain check the deep sea stories the job got extended and I'll be at sea for a lot longer than first planned. Good news is I'll have a week to write up stories so I'll have a thread's worth of material when I get back on the beach. Expect a deep sea story thread early October sometime.

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>>68525189
>Subnautica is a good place to start
But not it's spinoff. That game is perfect example of how to gut the atmosphere of a game that relies almost completely on it.
>huge emphasis on complete isolation, the data longs and emotionless robo voice as the only thing approximating social interaction. Only actual interaction with another sapient being in the game is between you and a fucking spooky psychic leviathan near the end
>Below Zero is filled with the 'banter' between two annoying characters and an alien in your head like fucking Cortana, complete 180 from the previous game
God damn, I love Subnautica so much, but it's like the devs had no fucking clue why it did so well in the first place

>>68540553
I was just fucking looking for that.

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>>68540618

>>68540356
>Only actual interaction with another sapient being in the game is between you and a fucking spooky psychic leviathan near the end
I don't play subnautica, but I kinda want to hear more about this, or at least know what it's called so I can look it up

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>>68511456
you

>>68516638
^ you see this this shit right here, this is fucking terrifying on an extential level. This is what gave me chills when playing the cove in darkest dungeon. The game didn't scare me, but the idea that there's some palegic force seeking to drag man back to the oceanic depths from which all life sprang scares the shit out of everyone who I confront with it in game.

>>68538194
The 2 are related.

>>68540131
Safe sailing!

>>68511456
Watch Arjuna, apply themes accordingly.

>>68540553
Jesus what's that from

>>68531681
My experience living near a lake - People who live near the water fear and respect it. People who've only visited think it's just a splashy play ground.

>>68532407
I was kicking around a tiny group game played in a pseudo-gothic nuclear submarine in a near-apocalypse setting.
The big hook was about a cloning conspiracy replacing the sailors with creations that were all a little bit off compared to the originals.
Could have gotten pretty spooky with it, maybe I'll brush it off and complete it.

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>>68540356
Could be they didn't actually intend to make a scary game, or at least not AS scary as it turned out. Or they heard all the people who said "I'd love to play this, but it's just 2spooky4me" and decided to alleviate it somewhat.

OR they're just trying to do something different for their sequel. Testing the formula, seeing what works or not. It's why I never play games while they're still in Early Access.

>>68537816
Instant Biosphere Collapse. Dust storms on the martian scale. The North and South no longer has the heated water currents to keep it warm and becomes ice-cold in the winter, while the equatorial areas become even more arid than the Sahara.

Worst of all, your sand castles wouldn't have a moat.

>>68540131
>Marks calendar.

Fair winds and following seas, Anon. Don't forget to bring a towel!

>>68540806
What's that? A movie? An anime? I'm seeing a lot of things named Arjuna but none of them sound like ocean horror.

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>>68516224
>>68516274
>>68524309
Florida Man...

>>68515498
> Bioluminescent eyes
> Bio
> Luminescent
> Eyes
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH

Unspeakably annoying.

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>>68540720
Subnautica has a wiki out there so you can just check that.
The thing Anon is talking about is the Sea Emperor leviathan

>>68540851
Haven't played it but looks like Diluvion, a submarine themed space sim-ish game. You know, go around and trade, do missions etc.

>>68511456
Tabletop RPGs are incapable of inducing true fear in an emotionally stable adult. At most you can evoke phobic unease , aversion, and wariness from bad experiences.

>>68537969
The deep sea mermaids exist because of /tg/, and I primarily draw them because /tg/ seems to like them and heavily rely on anons for ideas. Which is also why I haven't drawn anything lately, as I usually get inspiration to draw things based on threads like these; this week I'm sadly very busy, between my work, the geological society's meeting, and having to be a pallbearer in my uncle's funeral. I don't like to think that I'm pushing anything, but answering a demand.

I also don't like to think of them as fetish ocs but, well, I'm aware what most of the people who follow me want to see, and I'm also actually pretty uncreative so I tend to repeat variations of the same basic joke.

>>68538053
Interestingly, the areas of low gravity anomaly (at least I'm assuming that's what the red is) are primarily connected to old precambrian cratons and shields. Not really surprising, as those rocks are relatively light. But I'm not sure why there's such a huge low-gravity anomaly off the east coast of Africa, when you don't see something like that under the other oceans.

>>68540131
That's nice. I usually try to make the annual Horrible Deep Sea Thread in October (around Halloween), so we can combine it. I haven't really been able to dredge up too much new stuff for it anyway (it's pretty hard to find info on deep sea life since we don't really know very much about it and most new research that does comes out is behind a paywall).

>>68514770
Yes. Be aware that ambient ocean sounds may help to induce sleep in some players.

>>68540922
As someone who has lived his entire life within walking distance of the sea - nah.

>>68528431
Yep. that's the fucking terrifying thing about water in a nutshell. I'm a hella strong swimmer and been swimming in the ocean my whole life, and people who even just do shit like go for a dip in the water off their boats a few miles out freak me the fuck out. What's out there? You don't know. The same shitty vertigo I feel from heights, it's out there in the bluewater, except there's something to eat me on the way falling down to the bottom.

>>68535764
Honestly, after a while you kind of get used to being stung and it stops being a thing. Or as much of a thing. Same thing with mosquito bites, seeing a harmless shark swimming near you, or worrying about alligators (as opposed to crocs, whatever Australia did to Jesus they need to fucking apologize)

>>68511456
>You enter the machine
>It starts to descend
>Darkness overtakes you faster than you thought it would
>You're not sure why there's a window
>Hours pass
>You hear nothing except the occasional groan the machine makes under the massive pressure
>You fall asleep
>When you awaken, you notice light coming from the window
>There are stars in the distance
>You keep descending

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>>68544444
>Stars in the distance
>The Ocean is the Sky
>The Sky and the Cosmos are One

>>68511456
It's an alien sea on a distant planet.

>>68515484
Aren't angler fish males parasitic swimming testicles?

>>68511456
https://youtu.be/KWoNvFrhPAQ

>>68545045
Only Ceratiidae.

>>68545029
Descend until you Ascend.

>>68545118
Apotheosis through katabasis.

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>>68515624

Be sure to read a description of what Skurvy is, what it does to you, and how it feels. <3

>>68515498
That's hot, Anon. That's really hot.

>>68516303

I watched Das Boot the first time at the age of like, 10. It fucked me up entirely. for weeks.

Like, I still remember.

>>68516638
so basically a campaign influenced by every water focused song Dethklok made then?

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>>68511456
Show them that even the waves can't save them from awkward social situations.

>>68545445
Honestly, I've always thought Murmaider 2 would make a kickass campaign villain.

>>68545161
>Apotheosis through katabasis

Baller name for a D&D campaign to be honest.

>>68544309
>The same shitty vertigo I feel from heights, it's out there in the bluewater
And the worst thing is, once you're underwater it's reversed. It's nice and comfy here but you're gonna have to cross that hostile mirror shine above you.

>>68543673
Scihub, my man, or just email the author for a copy of their work. It does in fact work.

Don't let them stop the Signal. Someone has to spread the Word.

On a related note for those of you looking for a more scifi angle on the theme, Jupiter's moon Europa is covered in an ice sheet up to 30km thick which floats over a sea up to 100km deep. Dispite being one quarter the size of earth Europa has almost 3 times the volume of liquid water on its surface.

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I've often thought about an underwater horror vidya with instant deaths, namely from things like a man-sized bobbit worm. Just imagining swimming along and you enter some weeds or other dangly things, not noticing that some of them are long, thin stalk-like tendrils, and then suddenly and instantly you are grabbed, pulled onto the sea floor, and then given one last look at your screaming doomed character as the ground swells from the worm rising slightly before it pulls you under completely; you're just gone as the screen fades to black... gives me chills every time.

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>>68547942

>>68540720
Sea Mom is best mom.

Fun fact, the same VA also did the voice of the Hivemind in Dawn of War 2.

>>68540944
The devs did want to make you feel isolated. Originally the map was suppose to be like in the crater of a volcano, surrounded by steep cliffs, but the idea of just seeing endless water in all directions was more appealing. That's also why you can't see the two land masses until you get closer to them, while the Aurora is constantly visible as your one reference point.

They could have made it like in Soma, where you only interacted another person at fixed points. Like Alan only spoke to you when you activated an alien machine that allowed him to speak. But I guess they wanted to try something different and I can't fault them for that.

>>68547942
Eeh. I like the bobbit worm idea, but here's the dirty little secret about horror games: You don't actually want the player to die very often. You want the THREAT of death to hang over them, of course, but if you make it too cheap and frequent it's only break the spell and cause frustration.

What you could do, however, is make it something similiar to the tentacle encounters in the first Dead Space.

>>68547672
I was gonna go for some planet with a really deep ocean but I am not entirely sure what to put in there after a while. Seems even with "just" the depth found on earth you get almost everything. Not like light will get any further down on a 100km deep ocean than ours. And I suspect there is nor much beyond crushed corpses to be found on that ocean floor either as far as exploration is concerned. So I am a bit stuck

>>68542941
Either you fucked up as a GM or had a misfortune of always meeting weak-ass GMs

>>68521023
Here´s a (you) for effort, Jorge.

>>68548336
I'm no dev, but in my mind it was more about teaching players to look out for said tendrils/spot the body/jaws of the worm sticking out near the sand and learning how to avoid them, and if it wasn't a randomly-generated environment, learning where the worms spawn.

Maybe I'm just personally more forgiving of instant-death things as a learning tool, I dunno.

>>68515807
Fun fact the Bermuda triangle doesn't have a high rate of ship disappearance and is averaged with most other major shipping lanes. You want "O shit where did that boat just go?!" Look to the great lakes. Boats just blink out all the fucking time on the great lakes.

>>68522382
>I think tech-divers have less to fear from the sea than just plain old fuck-ups.
>>68522728
Yeah nah what ^ this guy said. Doing most things on the ocean you're working under "best case scenarios" these can and often do get fucked out of nowhere.

>>68527837
Sharks aren't that bad. I got slammed into some coral on a dive and split my hand wide open. There were large reef sharks about 4-5 foot on average. I was more than a little worried, but they didn't give a single fuck. Hell I had one bump right into me.

>>68544309
Counterpoint, free dive down in clear water.
Point you feet up and watch as the sky comes rushing up towards your feet.

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>>68540720
After you find the alien bases you start hearing weird messages telling you to go deeper. You don't know who they are at first because all you get is a vague outline of a face and a voice saying it wants to help you.
Parallel to this, the game teaches you that nothing good ever comes from interacting with a leviathan, and they just keep getting bigger as you go deeper until you have to sneak past leviathans so big that they actually prey on the leviathans that were trying to eat you back at the surface.
You get past those and into the primary containment facility, and by this point you never want to see a leviathan again, but the only place you can go is a giant aquarium which brings you face to face with the biggest leviathan in the entire game - and then it starts talking in the same voice you heard earlier. Turns out your new friend is a 600 foot space kraken.

Rolled 7 (1d20)

>>68553335
Roll to seduce

>>68541142
He works too well as a Florida Man.

>>68553672
Do not lewd the Sea Mom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo53JsM6R6Y

>>68515807
>>68550284
nice try aliens, your triangle death portal won't get me yet.

>>68550284
Oh anon, that's just because you've been lied to. The disappearance rate around the bermuda triangle isn't low because there was never anything there.

It's because the bermuda triangle is moving.

>>68550284
Great Lakes as in Michigan or some other place? That sounds like a factoid equivalent of “more people die of bees than shark attacks”. I mean, if both places are relatively safe, it doesn’t sound too scary.

>>68545248
I’m not advocating teenagers to just pump and dump their girlfriends, but I feel at that level of protectiveness, you might as well arrange marriage with someone you know.

>>68556053
Just marry her yourself. Problem solved.

>>68556081
Which Hebrew prophet banged his two daughters? Point is you’ve gone biblical anon.

>>68553335
>>68553672
I've seen porn of that thing.

>>68556115
Lot didn't bang his daughters, his daughters got him drunk and raped him after they saw everyone get Old Testament'd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot%27s_daughters

>>68556697
Women are incapable of rape. Rape is penis plus power.

>>68556855
So what you're saying is that if a man rapes a woman with more power than him its not really rape

>>68557218
No, because men as a whole hold more institutional power. It's just logic.

My one complaint with Subnautica was that the leviathans got less scary as the game went on.

Reapers? Fucking terrifying, all the way through. Hearing them was always terrible, and any trip to the Aurora was always nailbiting.

Ghosts? Scary, but not nearly as bad. The fact that they were generally avoidable didn't help them at all.

Sea Dragons? Almost comical. They barely focus you as long as you don't hang out close to them, they generally just throw some rocks at you, and even when they rarely do directly attack, they either miss or you can dodge since you see it coming a mile away. It doesn't help that they're so obviously visible, and thus, easily avoidable.

>>68557661
Dragons are all fun and games until one sneaks up behind you and grabs you in their jaws.

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Just remember /tg/

There's always a bigger fish

A horror/spooky fiction podcast /tg/ turned me on to called the Magnus Archives has a couple of really good water based episodes.
The Magnus Archives is based around 14 "aspects" of fear each with its own motivations and methods. These include things like The Buried, fear of tight spaces and being buried alive, and The Slaughter, fear of senseless, destructive violence. The aspect most associated with the Ocean is The Vast, fear of wide open spaces and something so much larger than you.

The best one is about a deep diver, who goes to recover something from a wreck, which is situated near a drop off. Looking over the edge she is confronted by "something dark moving against backdrop of black." "I kept trying to find the edge of it, but couldn't, it was so much bigger than anything should be, anything /could/ be, and yet it was there, just over the edge."

>>68540553
Too bad the game is pretty shitty.

>>68559754
Are there any transcripts? Audio stuff never really interested me.

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The Wake is a pretty good comic about undersea terror. Brief summary: Bunch of scientists are tasked with investigating a creature found at a secret deep sea research station. Shit goes wrong. It also shifts to a futuristic setting with some interesting themes. Honestly a very good set of examples for deep sea spooks.

>>68560055
Is it?

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Bamp.

Related to the topic, this week marks the 25th anniversary of the sinking of Estonia, probably the biggest maritime disaster on the Baltic sea in recent history, and a great example of the fact that there's little you can do when the ocean tells you to go fuck yourself.
Now, the Estonia was heading from Tallinn to Stockholm, during a pretty typical autumn storm. Nothing had seemed particularly unusual about the weather for time of the year, the the Baltic is basically a bathtub compared to something like the North Atlantic. But the wind picked up and the sea got rougher, to the point that a lot of the passengers started getting seriously seasick. And then a massive wave crashed against the bow of Estonia, breaking the locks holding the bow visor (the part that can be lifted up to let cars drive directly into the hold) in place. Another wave then tore it off entirely, and water started rushing in. less than an hour later, she had gone down, taking 800 people with her.

And I reiterate, this was on the Baltic, which is really little more than a big pool of brackish water, barely more than 200 meters deep and unable to even hold a candle to a proper ocean. And yet it's still perfectly capable of fucking you up if you have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

>>68563154
Weather in general is no joke.

>>68511456
> Most of the ocean is still unresearched
> Ocean is seen as pathetic victim full of plastic nowadays. VICTIMS SOMETIMES TAKE REVENGE
> Sharks
> Whales
> Octopi
> Poisonous fish
> Other poisonous and dangerous sea creatures
> Sea cryptids: Sea serpent, leviathan, merfolks, Kraken, dinosaurs
> Bermudan triangle and other mysterious "anomalous" zones
> "Flying Dutchman" and its modern counterparts

>>68563499
>modern counterparts
There are?

>>68563899
Sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan

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See is an unknown and unpredictable thing, that's why it should be feared and that's what you need to implement in the game. Treat it sort of as a hexcrawl megadungeon. Make it a hexmap starting at the shore, have the first couple of hex rows from shore mapped, the rest nobody fucking knows, maybe you can get some shitty maps from mad sailors but generally there is no map of the area, not even the GM has it, you're going to generate it as you play.

Make a big random encounter table and split your sea into zones. Every time they go a zone deeper, you add one dice to the random encounter table roll, this way the players can feel the increasing danger even from the dice. Of course the table should be sorted from least to most dangerous encounters.

You do standard table stuff with some regular resource drains like storms, lack of wind, fog, pirates or anything really. At higher numbers start adding wandering monsters with really high rolls yielding some old god encounter. Have some island encounters sprinkled through the table and an island table with high rolls leading to more dangerous islands(again, more dice the deeper they are), there could be weird tribes, cults hidden away in deep sea, stranded communities of settlers that degenerated over hundreds of years, dungeons of all kinds that you can prepare beforehand. This way even you don't know what they are going to encounter and if you do your rolls in front of the players or even let them roll they will feel the unpredictability and danger increasing.

Make sure to incorporate getting lost mechanics on the hex map. This way your players won't be able to reliably map the thing. You just make sure that you know where they are and keep the correct version hidden from them.

>>68545029
Ah, Kos.
Or some say Kosm...

>>68536655
Only if you're a fucking boomer.
>bros
>posting on /tg/
>beer
>ugh
>girl
>nasty

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>>68545118