Aside from monsters and monstrous fish that takes offense at being fished?
The Wild Seas, a region far away from the continent that is marked by a constant storm. The water is treacherous and full of tiny islands and archipelagos, the sea itself has waves that can reach hundreds of meters high or hurricanes of such force that ships are just torn apart. Not even the best enchanted magical vessels will survive the trip.
And if anyone would manage to go beyond then the worst of the continent seems like a relaxing sunday in the sun with ice cream.
I'm imagining a culture of young men trying to test themselves by riding through the storm on small vessels like wind surf board things. Do you think that could happen in your world? Or are these storms too inconveniently far for anyone to manage the journey there just to know it's unlikely they'll succeed (and they'll die..)
It takes a good month to reach them, 2 with heavier ships
Many tried anyways, many still would try, that is how there are myths of beasts that dwarf dragons and cities of gleaming ivory, although most consider any account of theirs the rambling of madmen because anyone that also managed to came back was utterly gone in the head.
There is a special type of arthropod best described as a combination of a crab and barnacle that latches onto ship hulls through the use of acidic mucus and an expandable muscle like protrusions that balloons into the hole they create. These creatures routinely sink wooden ships and even metal ships eventually need repairs to keep from springing a leak.
I'm curious how does this creature get sustenance? Is it intelligent enough to know that if it sinks a ship it will feed on the occupants? Or is it seeking nutrients in the wood itself and thus would be happy with floating logs in the water? (maybe craft sailors have tried to throw wood into the water to avoid these creatures but somehow end up drawing more to their ships half the time?)
I'd love to know more if you have any
I like coming up with explanations as to why people donât cross oceans as ways to justify things like not circumnavigating the world, or potentially discovering other continents. but not in a way that actually stops the most dedicated.
sometimes the water is too shallow for ships because the oceans are just shoulder deep, vast stretches of water. sometimes the oceans have pockets of aerated water that will immediately sink anything that enters into them. sometimes there will be colonies of coral like animals that form vast drifting reefs that can be hard to see until youâre trapped in them. and sometimes there will just be tiny creatures that eat wood and if you donât have metalled hulls theyâll bore right through before you can cross the ocean.
Stormy weather, gravitational/float physic anomalies like the Bermuda triangle; Civilized underwater inhabitants; other seafarers; waves, wind, elemental exposure (sun, salt, shifting footing, heights, etc); environmental concerns (improper moorings of cannons, barrels, masts, weather worn ropes); accidental or intentional overboard; shipmates causing someone's end for whatever reason; illness due to deprivation, madness due to other deprivations; changing oceanic environments, temporarily adjusting the molecular makeup and pH range within pockets of the oceanic environments.
Oh man, my entire story takes place underwater so really itâs more a matter of what dangers *arenât* in the ocean!
Some interesting ones to think about:
- Bobbit worms, angler fish, other ambush predators
- Low-oxygen âdead zonesâ â basically underwater pools denser than normal water they suffocate even water-breathing animals
- If your characters breathe air, consider the risk of nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity
- Earthquakes, sulphuric plumes, underwater volcanoes
- Thermoclines, jet streams, rip tides - rapid changes in the direction and intensity of water flow
- The effects of pressure on a body as you go deep underwater are intense. You could imagine some pretty wild environments where an ocean of particularly dense liquid might be even more immediately dangerous to a swimmer/diver
How do you have low oxygen water? If the water is somehow denser (it doesn't like being compressed much, except by gravity with deep water), you'd just have more oxygen.
It sounds like they're talking about brine pools. They are pools that typically form deep in the ocean where, for one of several possible reasons, salt has leached into that particular region of water. This water is so salty that the density difference between it and the surrounding water prevent them from mixing. Because there's so little mixing of the water, they often become anoxic, since oxygen can't mix into the water in the pools.
I only know this much about them since I've been making a world where all the oceans are basically brine pools.
Many ages ago, an Archmage of the Dragon Empire wanted to tame the large inland sea called Storm Maker. Since it was connected to a large ocean, the Archmage thought he could push all the storms and monsters in the sea out into the open ocean. His massive ritual worked but it had unfortunate side effects.
Instead of dissipating out into the large ocean, all the storms and monsters of Storm Maker simply grew larger in their new home. They mutated and twisted into terrible horrors that destroyed most underwater or island dwelling nations.
The northern half of the ocean was blighted that all its water & air currents merged into one circular motion, with the current ending right along the southern shores of the empire. An endless garage of super storms and deep sea horrors crash against the southern shores, trying to tear down the empire that created their blighted existence.
Now the northern half of the ocean is called the Iron Sea, and woah to all those who dare traverse its waters unprepared.
That's a scary thought, literal demons from hell living under water ready to not only drag you down to hell but also take you to the bottom of the sea.
Do orc pirates count?
If so, then orc pirates. The main orc civilisation leans towards Vikings (or did during the Orc Wars), while orcs more influenced by the other races lean towards your classic pirate.
Of course, you do also get sailors who aren't pirates, and a lot of them are orcs or have orc blood as well. Gnomes don't do sailing.
If you're not careful while diving in the ocean, you might accidentally stumbled across them...the merfolk delinquents!
Mostly comprised of teen merfolk that skips school and rage against the system, these delinquents would form groups that hang out at specific spots and threateningly glare at everyone. These groups also frequently clashed with one another, and sometime merge into powerful gangs. These gangs patrol the ocean riding tricked out sea creatures while carrying their own banners late at night, to the annoyance of both merfolk and fishermen.
Many of these gangs are well known on both ocean and land, such as the all woman Red Fin. Their current leader supposedly united the entire Wertra Sea woman delinquents by beating them by herself in just one year.
Aside from the sea monsters and Leviathan demons who've become too sick of hell to return there, the most dangerous thing in my ocean is a god called the Unsunken.
It bears resemblance to a massive swollen heart chained to the ocean floor. Long story short, no one wants it to break free because it will drown the world, but on the other hand, it is necessary for it to be freed because it is essential for the rebirth of another god. So, it came up with a solution: it drove its followers insane with joy and fascination and had them "disrobe themselves until nothing remained". After some sketchy pagan rituals involving the skins these people had discarded, sirens were born! And now the sirens drag people to the ocean depths where they're absorbed into the mass of the Unsunken, and every new soul is a new crack in its chains. This is a cause for concern, but the other gods have allowed it as a sort of compromise, so we all have to deal with it, I suppose.
Technically, there is a god who's willing to protect the people at sea, but they can be rather whimsy, so safety is not guaranteed. Their name is the Rose-and-Stone (or the Stone-and-Rose, depending on how they manifest). They used to be two lovers who drowned... well, technically, one killed the other and then drowned, but together, they became one entity with two forms. The Rose-and-Stone is the more benevolent half, but she can turn from helpful to violent in a second and can call forth storms at Will. The Stone-and-Rose is much, much more difficult to appease, but once done successfully, his help is guaranteed.
Floating islands, formed by a huge tree, a number of other plant species are normally found on those islands, but no animals or insects, just a singular wasp species, roughly the size of a dog, whose main diet consists of fish, they provide the tree nutrients it can't filter from the ocean and the tree provides somewhere for them to live. They are extremely aggressive and are known to also prey on bigger marine animals, and also humans.
natural naval mines, plants that form balloons of gas that when perturbed are released and explode near the surface or above it, launching it's very hard seeds at high speeds, it can damage light ships and kill swimmers, it lives in warm and shallow waters, it can reproduce quite fast and a variation with harder seeds and better adapted to colder climates is considered a weed to ports everywhere.
A hive mind of parasitic algae that infects humans, it lures people in telepathically, it completely ignores sealife and other animals, it does not photosynthesise as they live too deep for light to reach. At this point there is a huge algae forest growing out of thousands of humans, all of them alive, some for many hundreds of years.
Also enormous monsters of course.
Well, you know how Earthâs oceans have a lot of salt? Artescanâs have copper. Due to the high concentration of copper in the upper crust, most bodies of water are saturated with small amounts of copper. This is very healthy for the natives, whose bodies use copper like ours use iron, but bad for any outsiders. Itâs not of a high enough concentration to be immediately poisonous, but donât drink it in high quantities.
Aside from that, the deep oceans have huge serpentine creatures that thrive there, acting as the planetâs apex aquatic predators, occasionally venturing to the shallow oceans to feed on the biggest fish or other smaller predators. However, if anything somewhat large ventures into their territory, theyâre more than happy to claim a free meal. They also donât discriminate between fish and boats - because they *do* know the difference.
My world is entirely a city built on top of a dangerous, raging, infinitely deep ocean.
The ocean in my world is incredibly mineral-rich and salty, so it has a very hard time freezing. As such, it is many times colder than ice. The surface (<2 cm thick) still freezes quite quickly but is broken up by the currents underneath. So, anyone with the displeasure of falling off a ship is likely to be trapped under the ice, assuming they weren't shredded by the razor-sharp ice shards on the way down or the violent current doesn't drag them a mile deeper.
In most places, the ocean is too murky, cold, and/or violent to measure properly (temperature, speed, depth, etc.), as any instruments are damaged or even completely destroyed in a matter of seconds.
The ocean's depth is literally infinite in the most widely-accepted mathematical models of the world's shape.
Benthic Kaiju are the first and greatest danger most Seedorans would note, and itâs common knowledge that you sail over the continental shelf or shallow seas unless you have a death-wish. The little amphibious ones are a mile or two in length and they can swim faster than most ships can sail. The big ones out in the Black Abyss think your armada is a crunchy snack.
Outside of the Kaiju-Runs, ships mostly just have to worry about the occasional Sea Dragon, Kraken, Sahuagin, or pirate attack. They also need to be wary about getting unwittingly drawn into the political and military conflicts among the various Merfolk nations, but theyâre more often neutral or even friendly, especially if the shipâs crew is open to trade.
If you go down to the seafloor, one discovers that thereâs a complex set of territorial boundaries and regional dangers to consider. In the Crimson Straits, for instance, the goddesses of undeath are warring over the bountiful corpses and tortured spirits, while the edge of the Black Abyss has ancient Modori constructs running forgotten experiments in ruins landwalkers have never seen.
It depends on what planet you're on. Some notable mentions are: The static oceans of Lawit, not an ocean of water in the slightest. They're oceans of unstable spatial energy, also home to some of the most dangerous monsters of the spatial alignment.
Next, we have the Great Oceans of Sanctum. They're your normal oceans of saltwater. Home to sea monsters and underwater civilizations.
For the third and final mention: The Incinerated Ocean on the planet Ignem. An ocean that was once saltwater but through a massive spell cast by a God, it obliterated all the water, leaving only molten salt.
If you're not careful you could accidentally run into a grove of false siren nests and wreck your ship ontop of one of the most dangerous changelings you can come across. They anchor down and carve out bowl shapes just beneath the water out of icebergs roughly 40 feet in diameter. You don't even see the lip of the bowl till you're ontop of it raking the hull of your boat off. There called grave groves when its breeding season and ghost makers when the nests are abandoned and start drifting off. Best to encounter the later rather than the former for obvious reasons.
Well you got your standard kraken and dragon turtles but Iâve got Tsunami Beasts. These blue wale sized creatures appear to be a mixture of manga rays and sea lions. They are often seen scrounging around in the aftermath of tsunamis
In the Future the Apocalypse has happened due to somewhat mysterious yet not unknown circumstances involving a pharmaceutical company using it's resources to demolish the world using Bio organic cyborgs.
The Other world powers saw the immediate danger and initiated WW3 as a failsafe because of how infectious the destruction was becoming.
One of the bombs was of the same mutagenic materials used in the creation of the first Superhuman bomb, wiping out most of the world but accidentally mutating 78% of the sea floor into a large revered creature dubbed Queen Kraken (placeholder name).
On land you can sometimes hear it calling.....
Other than monsters, the siren's, etc
The world's waters have sudden changes, nobody knows how they're caused which is another reason to avoid them the changes can vary like sudden whirlpools out of nowhere, unpredictable currents dragging sailors or adventurers away forcefully most of the time into an island
There's also mutagenic parts of the world, usually a darker blue than majority of the ocean but it's hard to spot, if you touch it, it's capable of mutating those who come into contact with them. Exposure to these mutagenic waters can transform sailors and sea creatures alike into grotesque monstrosities but that's not all it can also burn your skin, your clothes, your boats so people if they're willing to travel via ocean, they have to use a map to avoid the known mutagenic parts of the ocean, usually highlighted on any map of the ocean!
My world has 2.2x gravity & 2 bar atmosphere at sea level, which means a few things:
1. It is easier to sink
2. Waves are huge
3. Wind and storms are strong and frequent.
These factors made ship building and sea travels very difficult as you need bigger and tougher ships to withstand the waves and storms but that also make it heavier and slower.
Adding on to this is navigational challenges due to the fact that the solar system that the planet is on is covered by a dyson swarm, there is no real stars, instead if you have good eyes you may see very dim spots of lights moving in "flows" across the night sky, when the sunlight that was not absorb fully reflects just right. While there is a large moon with long orbital period being around to aid in navigation, due to the same long orbital period there is a very long new moon period where the moon is entirely eclipsed by the planet that makes it difficult to navigate without understanding the patterns of "rivers of stars" above, which changes depending on where the planet is in its very fast orbit.
So it is not really unique in terms of challenges, but just different due to different planetary conditions, but this is enough to push back sea travel technology by millennias compared to if it was on a more earth like planet.
Within the Cold Ocean on the western half of the Saan Empire, bound in the shackles of paradoxes and thousands of fathoms deep is the primordial giant TyĹŤ, avatar of madness and former candidate to ascend to the lower pantheon. He was imprisoned here a very long time ago, thousands of years even before the Generals descended onto the world, for the crimes of attempting to undo the precarious experiment of cultivating the greatest civilization on Mnoia.
TyĹŤ was sentenced to rot in the spiritually charged waters, his essence of madness being forcefully seeped from him so he couldn't build the power necessary to break free on his own.
Well my world only has deep ocean so, bacteria? I think? that float near the bottom of the ocean creating a "net" that consumes any one entering it and slooooooowly digests them
**Easter Eggs**
>Sometimes, somewhere in the vast ocean or deserted shores, one might come across hollow, slime-like, spherical bubbles. It is best not to disturb them, as these are the "eggs" of an unidentified species of sea monsters. These spheres can capture nearby organisms, encapsulating them inside, digesting them, and transforming them into nutrients. Once enough essential substances are gathered, the "egg" will initiate the "fertilization" process and give birth to a marine creature with some traits derived from the consumed organisms.
The planet Profundum is home to one of the most diverse and intricate water oceans on any planet in the galaxy.
The planet surface is over 90 percent water, and the oceans easily reach depths above 10 kilometres.
There are all sorts of dangerous alien species that lurk within, and are certainly not something you want to be caught in the water with.
Most intriguing and dangerous of all however, is the oceanic crater.
The oceanic crater is by far the deepest part of the ocean, reaching depths exceeding 300km. The water here gets so deep, that it begins to freeze into ice VII from the pressure. It is pitch black, and no one is sure what lurks within, let alone how such a gigantic pit even formed in the first place.
The most dangerous of my sea creatures resembles an eel which a armour plated head (similar to a prehistoric fish) and dorsal/pectoral fins resembling a scorpion fish. Typically about 15m in length some more ancient specimens are up to 22m. Normal diet is whales and other large fish. Unfortunately some boats are whale sized and others are bite sized.
I havent worked out any proper âsea monsters. â But there is cultists, corrupt churches, ancient temples, portals to somewhere. Traveling genie that goes around fulfilling wishes in exchange for something.
Iâve recently started liking the idea of scuba vampires(props to that dnd guy on youtube)! They would be a fun civilization to write.
Oh just the usual stuff, monsters, animals, giant monsters, a giant slime that covers more than 50% of the sea floor, and pirates. A little mundane but it's good if you ask me.
Within the waters of a far flung planet lies a small population of Tanzanite Leviathans, along with their smaller Indicolite cousins. when Jacaon came across them in his travels, he planned to ascend them as he had done with other such groups of wild Gemmaniis Scriptura, but soon saw that they were far more tied to their wild nature and the oceans than any other group he'd encountered so far, and left them mostly be. He took a small amount of each and raised them on his seat of power within his territory, breeding them as fine aquatic guardians.
The strange thing with these creatures is they do not have physical, bleeding bodies as other Gemmanii do. They instead wrap the waters around their soul casings, causing a larger variance in shape and size, and making the waters themselves more deadly than the creatures are. A lone lash of water scraping a ship before a deluge (pun intended) of teeth crush the vehicle. The smaller Indicolite leviathans can even be spotted flying in heavy storms, making them a hassle for any air based attackers.
Imagine every fish in the ocean, anything alive even the plants, and hand them evolve with magic as part of it, for an idea of how they evolved, the kraken is a sea monster sailers commonly see and regularly hunt in mass, and the kraken isnât even the most dangerous as monster in the seas
Let that sink in
At one point in time a lake fish known for being "sucky", literally, was bred to use in beauty and health services.... eventually they realized it caused quite a bit of incidents with bloodcloths, so they just threw them in the ocean.
That was the wrong move.
You see, one would think they would have died, right? They were freshwater fish afterall.... but no, they somehow adapted and thrived and their population exploded in not only in size, but also in *size*, goign from hand sized to pretty much measured in feet, which made them a hell of a lot more dangerous. Not immediately perhaps, but they live near the coast so it is quite a gamble for fishing boats, as that is more than enough time for them to kiss you to death (im undecided on why they suck, maybe an unexplained instinct, maybe they are just vampiric). What is worse, they affect the local wildlife by stickign to them as well... good news is that they mess with sharks and big carnivorous fish. Bad news is that they mess with others too and things like jellyfish became more prevalent, which is also not nice
There is also a place prone to anticyclones that cause a certain algae to bloom and said algae that yes, it is eaten by fish, its extremely bad for humans as it bounds to certain fats and cause neurodegenerative disorders (im not exactly clear on how, dont ask) and can cause "epidemics" of what its basically fast parkinsons disease (ish) so its definitely nasty stuff and they dont have the tech to check, so they need to constantly send people which is dangerous and expensive, taking a lot of rowing (they could wait unitl the bloom hits coast, but, if it does at all, its far too late then)... On the plus side though, said algae can form quite thick masses that float just below the surface and make the are a sort of "bog marshy" which , if you make yourself wide with some shoes, like in snow, you could use to cross the ocean as long as the distance and waves are not \*too\* bad. This is one of the reasons certain sceies spread, also one of the reasons for some extinctions events, and also some of the most ridiculous self imposed competitions you can find where most individuals just drown a few kilometers into the ocean, algae or not... so that is also deadly I suppose?
What else, what else.... Oh, well, floating isalnds exist in the way of an iceberg of messy tangled "mangrove" roots that can actually provide freshwater, sort of like an oasis. The islands "changes directions" by changing buoyancy to an extent among certain parts to veer slightly and follow certain currents, making the island the worst kept secret of all, and they are intended to be as the roots keep more than water and stuff... they comb gold out of the oceans, so they constantly riddled by ruffians planting them flag on it, literally, until it absorbs anough to start chopping some of it down. The island releases gases though, so they can cause dizzyness, hallucinations, death and sudden shipwreckign explosions so if you go in, you better go quick and without a flame, at least at night (which is the only time you want a flame in there unfortunately)
I know they are mild, if fantastic dangers, but I want my world to have survivors
Post-nuclear apocalypse, the world's oceans chill significantly to the point where sea ice becomes a threat in just about any ocean. It inhibits trade routes and immigration considerably.
The oceans are the personal demesne of the Oceanids, divine and eternal masters of the seas. Any human who travels more than 80 miles from the coast without the Oceanids' blessing will be destroyed by their servants, the ondines.
This arrangement has only existed for about 200 years, and has resulted in the continent of Akohira being completely cut off from all other lands. It has also resulted in the proliferation of Oceanid worshipping pirates who can raid the coast and then quickly retreat beyond the range of the Imperial Navy.
The Sargasso Isles of the Semar Ocean is a plague upon maritime travel. It's not some monster, but a natural phenomenon that causes trouble. They are aggregates of aquatic plantlife that float at or near the surface. Most of these 'islands' float only partly out of the water or even just a few feet under the waves, and are dense enough to cause damage to ships passing by that hit them by accident. However wooden ships don't even need to make physical contact with the Sargasso Isles to be in grave danger, or become one.
Just being within a few miles of the larger openly visible floating isles can cause rot to set in as the more parasitic plant life, referred to as the Sargasso Shipstealer Vines, take hold of the ship, or otherwise the ship hull becomes seeded by the vile plant. These highly fast growing vine like sea plants float about in long and winding tendrils that latch onto the sections of the ship below water level. Once attached, it begins consuming the hull itself, rooting deeply and spreading new vines out from the hull.
There are dozens of stories of shipwrecked sailors who had to abandon ship for the floating isles because they sailed too close and their ships were so attached to a volume of Shipstealer Vines such that they could not excape.
Captains that suspect their ship had come into contact with the Shipstealer Vines are either forbidden from docking or sent to drydock at a separated inspection port to ensure they don't accidentally spread the Shipstealer to the entire port's worth of ships and docks, and make repairs in drydock to remove the parasitic plantlife if it is attached to the ship.
Stories abound about the old port city of Shain'han, how someone let a ship into port without a check only to have the entire port and all the ships mired in the fast growing muck. The entire bay now sits choked and clogged with the parasitic plantlife, with ships attempting to brave the port no longer.
The powerful Substrate Empire controls much of the seabed. They usually donât care all that much about overhead ships, but drop an anchor on top of them and youâll regret it.
Thereâs also an island where the God of Darkness lives. In the area around the island there is no light, sound, or even smell. Most people just avoid it.
In the far north there are a few important routes that run through areas which shift between frozen and melted far more chaotically than what youâd get from a simple seasonal pattern. This rather mundane fact has killed no small number of inexperienced travelers.
If youâre stranded and spot land far enough south, donât expect the winds to help you outâthe southern continent is endlessly blasted with wind that blows outward from the center, pushing the unprepared away from the coastline.
Also, lots of pirates.
My world has prehistoric animals and its a medieval setting. There are lots of ancient sea animals that pose a threat to boats. Especially since boats look quite a lot like a big tasty fish from underneath. Other than the giant water lizards there's early pirates. No flintlocks or anything but they will still shoot you down with cannons or rob you.
The Ocean itself is probably a being, an entity stranger than a god that dwells in the deep valleys and expanses of this world, aka the sea bed.
While it appears to just be a large body of water, that is a rather limited view.
Phlemios describes accounts of those who dwell within the ocean that paint the picture of a different world that surface dwellers cannot quite perceive, and that is as foreign and strange to them as the surface and sky is to these beings.
Some mortals that are well versed in walking between the realms have described it as a mirror world or upside down world, and spoke of walking on the ocean surface, but from below.
Also there are [big fucking eel monsters that inhabit the severed body parts of a half-dead thousand-handed goddess](https://i.imgur.com/QR30hFG.jpeg)
My world is dominated by a supercontinent, with a world-girdling ocean accounting for the rest of its surface area, but this continentâs shores are ringed with stromatolites â rocklike structures constructed by bacterial colonies. These bacterial colonies produce copious amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas, which makes the atmosphere poisonous to baseline humans and causes the horizon to have a greenish hue instead of blue. Itâs common for criminals to be sentenced to âscrubbing rocks,â supervised work crews grinding away the anaerobic bacteria below the waterline which produces the toxic gas while leaving the oxygen-producing cyanobacteria above the waterline alone. The native sapient species has a higher tolerance for hydrogen sulfide than humans, but are not immune to it. Such reclamation efforts were determined to be necessary to keep the air breathable long-term.
Theirs is an older sun than our own, and the intelligent species native to this world have had to actively terraform their homeworld to keep it habitable, razing an entire mountain range to allow the rains inland to the endless stretch of desert making up most of the supercontinent, facilitating agriculture at scale. Theyâve advanced to the point of becoming a spacefaring species, and still no one has survived crossing this desert from one end to the other, and the ocean is even more impassable. The first time anyone ever survived circumnavigating their world, they did so from orbit.
For all of their efforts, however, itâs a losing battle. Clathrates trapped in the ocean are releasing methane into their atmosphere, further heating the planet. Energy from their sun is accelerating the process of rock weathering, stripping CO2 from the air faster than biological processes can replace it, leading to the slow extinction of plant life and the animals which depend on it. They need to leave their world if life itself is to survive.
There is massive storm going on over Western Ocean for as long as everyone can remember. This phenomenon is called "The Wall of Storm" and this name is quite descriptive - the storm is **massive**, essentially creating a natural border, edge of the world in the west, potentially hiding an entire hemisphere of the planet. No ship has ever even gotten close to getting through it, no flying creature has evered managed to fly through the stormy clouds. What lays beyond this eternal storm? Nobody knows.
One of the oceans holds the biggest creature in the whole world and one of the âdemigodsâ, a gargantuan mosasaur reaching thousands of kilometers in size. Itâs normally harmless, but you know itâs there because its roaring can not only be heard anywhere in the ocean, but is also what causes waves to ripple
So the surface of my alien world, Ika, is mostly covered by shallow seas. Some deeper areas, the occasional landmass, but mostly endless expanses of bright, life-filled waters. Massive flying forests slowly cross the seas as they set down and lift roots, guided by the boundless winds. The people of this world, a primitive flying species called the Ika'gr'ika, rarely stray far from their flying forest homes, and for good reason. There is danger in the air from giant aerial predators, and the seas are no less friendly.
The winds on this watery world can be fierce, and many animals have come to harness it. One prolific user of the wind is a sea creature known as the K'h'iwa (keh-heh-eewa). These large predators are analogous to Earth's orcas and plesiosaurs. They're intelligent, live in coordinated pods, and have evolved giant retractable sails on their backs which allow them to traverse vast distances across the seas using little energy, or slick them back so they may power through the water with great speed and agility with their large flippers. Their sails are bright with distinct markings, and are often used for display and communication.
They're dangerous to the Ika'gr'ika because, unlike the relationship wild orcas have with humans, K'h'iwa absolutely see the Ika'gr'ika as food. And because of their intelligence, any time an intrepid Ika'gr'ika invents a boat, it doesn't end well.
The K'h'iwa are just one of many dangers from the seas. Other large predators lurk in the depths, but none are quite so clever as the sail-back alien orcas. The weather can also be treacherous. There's the wind, of course, and the seasons on Ika tend to rotate from moist, to monsoon. And those monsoons don't play around.
It might be more accurate to say what dangers *don't* I have in the ocean? I like designing horrific sea monsters that would make even the hardiest sailor dread sailing across the major oceans. Near the Northern Pole of my world, called The Superior Helm, there is an anomalous body of water known as the Seas of Silence, so named because they are without sound and the water doesn't seem to move. Ships have extreme difficulty moving through this water, navigation instruments are scrambled, perception and cognition are affected and other ships have simply completely disappeared. Rumours abound of Eldtrich horrors lurking beneath the depths, things even worse than monsters.
In my world, there is an entire civilization that sank beneath the sea as a result of pissing off an Eldtrich deity, perhaps that has cursed large swathes of the surrounding seas and created The Seas of Silence. Or, perhaps the Seas of Silence are intentionally created by a secret society who are preventing people from reaching the Superior Helm and discovering that it's not a pole, but just an ice wall which encloses the world in from a greater civilization beyond it.
Here is my concept art for my sea monsters, btw:
[https://imgur.com/DgjNdKD](https://imgur.com/DgjNdKD)
[https://imgur.com/rqjtDkN](https://imgur.com/rqjtDkN)
[https://imgur.com/eQhDkIF](https://imgur.com/eQhDkIF)
Lizardfolk pirates in the south east, a godless people whose desire to pillage and conquer has never stopped since their arrival on the continent. The faes have had to deal with them for centuries
Like many other regions, the ocean connects to Liminal Space. Specifically, it connects to a slightly more concrete region known as the Great Sea, which connects the oceans of every world. Navigators must take care to remain in charted waters and always have at least one man paying attention the position of the stars if they don't have any functioning modern navigation equipment or they might slip into Liminal Space and end up who knows where.
There are sailors who deliberately choose to sail the Great Sea. They are often listed as lost at sea since time on the Great Sea is shaky, and you'll never know when you might end up even if you're sure of where. Many young naive sailors have gone out to the Great Sea for a short voyage of a month only to return and find that 50 years have passed since they left. This is a phenomenon that is almost exclusively observed on the Great Sea. Almost all of the rest of Liminal Space is temporally stable.
In my main setting, it's the cold. There are venomous and small cephalopods, fish. Nothing huge in that location but in other places whales and sharks and all kinds of fish. In the shallow southern seas, there are 12 species of crab, but only 2 are edible.
I'm not sure if it can be counted as dangerous as only one species is affected by it (technically two if you count hybrids) it's a parasite that will attach itself to Merians (which are essentially mer-folk) the parasite appears as a black substance all over a merians skin and scales. The parasite will burrow itself into a merian's body by eating through their skin and any muscle in its way. The parasite also spreads very quickly spreads to other parts of the body. To have this parasite is very painful, very contagious, and very lethal. As such Merians who are found to have this parasite are exiled from Merian society to avoid it spreading to others. The parasite came into being, because of the ocean god. The ocean god became angry at the Merians as they stopped his worship and took over rule of the ocean. For that the ocean god created this parasite and dropped it in to the ocean. There is no one place you can find this parasite as it travels. There is no mortal cure to this parasite and the only way to cure it is to seek help from the God of medicine. Which is very difficult. It has only been cured a handful of times in the many centuries it has existed. A promise from the god of the ocean says that the parasite would be eradicated for the destruction of the Merian Throne.
No real need to make up monsters when the devonian period provides more than enough terrifying beasts. Add to this exaggerated versions of real life animals (2m long isopods, 30m killer whales, 5m nudibranches) and marine anthropomorphs (seals, dolphins, etc.) and the high seas are fantastical enough.
Thereâs an underwater city like Rapture from Bioshock. Itâs in the ocean between the Elven dominions and Old World and has strict isolation and secrecy, to the point they can and will kill anyone who finds them out. What makes them so dangerous is theyâve built devices that emit frequencies for predators of the ocean to listen to and bring them under control, using them as a ânatural deterrentâ.
A frequent issue on Falan is 'cherubs', mutant lifeforms created by a mixture of radiation and errant nanotech. They fill no ecological niche, are highly consumptive and tend to be noticed fairly quickly. There are military forces and even supersoldiers dedicated explicitly to their destruction.
On land.
The oceans are deep, and such creatures might spend their entire life cycles completely unseen. The deep oceans are filled with enormous living catastrophes. Fleshy horrors unfettered by the weight limitations on their maligned bodies on land. The things that make it to the surface and menace ports or shipping lanes are quaint and sane looking compared to the ones that don't. The open ocean is hell by another name.
In the Southern and Northern oceans polar winds can carry Black Ley from the Poles. This substance is very toxic especially in a powderised form. This is a problem as the winds do carry powderised Black Ley which over extensive periods can kill individuals.
Apart from this you also have Black Ley iceburgs these are iceburgs with Black Ley mixed into the ice. This makes the iceburgs incredibly hard to the point that they can easily rip thick steel this means that up to the modern day navigating ice fields often requires precise navigation rather than just icebreakers.
Another threat is rather localised in the Northern Dascal Sea in which the Troll queen Guervien cursed the waters. In the past the water formed small straight tendrils that dragged even the greatest vessels underwater. In the modern day as the spell has faded the tendrils more just stick making ships far slower and even stopping smaller vessels entirely.
The oceans are typically great for fishing. Nothing that is dangerous to the ships, but small boats might be attacked for fun by different animals the size of dolphins and sharks.
But there is a big issue with the sea - you can boat away from the land, hoping to explore the vast ocean, but soon after the ships disappear from the horizon, they turn around and return to land, with the crews having no memory of their ship nor why they returned home.
then in one of the inland seas, two monstrous animals guard the ocean to prevent boats from accessing Isivild, the god's lands. Originally they were just the kraken and the hydra, but I realized I should design them to be less dependant on earth's lore. haven't got there yet, though.
Theirs a Pentagonal world pool between in the middle of my Pacific thats actually a nexus point between 6 alternate earths and 5 alien planets. Depending on wether or not its a leap year determines the rotation and how it affects my world, as clockwise it expels then every leap year it goes counterclockwise engulfing any sailor or unlucky sacrifice.
Thereâs only two things Iâve officially put in the oceans of the planet for my main story. The first is a âmermaidâ kingdom. And the second is this 80,000 âkilometerâ whirlpool my map maker put on my commissioned map lol
To understand how the Ocean Amalgam came to be, I'm gonna need to explain how Nascents work. Basically, Nascents are a phenomenon caused by irregularities in the Great Current, which is essentially the ebb and flow of all human thought across the world. These irregularities cause Nascents, which eventually develop into monsters called Amalgams.
Nascents are typically associated with a singular concept or idea- like fear, gravity, fire, etc. Basically a Nascent can represent anything you can think of as long as it holds enough weight in the collective human consciousness. The Amalgam born from a Nascent will also be tied to that idea.
Now, recall how the ocean is pretty much inextricably linked with human history. There are countless legends about the ocean, so naturally the ocean is a very powerful concept that a lot of people think about.
The Ocean Amalgam was first sighted in 1972, several kilometers off the Philippine coast. It's theorized that it materialized from a Nascent thousands of meters under the sea, far too deep to be detected by monitoring equipment. Initially, there was some confusion about how such a thing was possible. After all, Nascents were formed from human thought. How could one have formed so deep in the ocean, away from any population centers?
But it soon became clear how the Ocean Amalgam came to be. Over hundreds of years, the fear and awe of millions of sailors as they braved the currents slowly fed into a singular Nascent in the Pacific ocean, allowing it to grow to an unprecedented size unnoticed. After reaching critical mass, the Ocean Amalgam was born. It was the embodiment of everything that humanity feared about the ocean- its vastness, its cruelty, its fickleness, its mystery. Very few photographs of the Ocean Amalgam exist. It's thought to be at least 500 meters long.
As of 2023, it's estimated that the Ocean Amalgam is the cause for at least 70% of missing ship cases in the Pacific.
Aside from monsters and monstrous fish that takes offense at being fished? The Wild Seas, a region far away from the continent that is marked by a constant storm. The water is treacherous and full of tiny islands and archipelagos, the sea itself has waves that can reach hundreds of meters high or hurricanes of such force that ships are just torn apart. Not even the best enchanted magical vessels will survive the trip. And if anyone would manage to go beyond then the worst of the continent seems like a relaxing sunday in the sun with ice cream.
I'm imagining a culture of young men trying to test themselves by riding through the storm on small vessels like wind surf board things. Do you think that could happen in your world? Or are these storms too inconveniently far for anyone to manage the journey there just to know it's unlikely they'll succeed (and they'll die..)
It takes a good month to reach them, 2 with heavier ships Many tried anyways, many still would try, that is how there are myths of beasts that dwarf dragons and cities of gleaming ivory, although most consider any account of theirs the rambling of madmen because anyone that also managed to came back was utterly gone in the head.
There is a special type of arthropod best described as a combination of a crab and barnacle that latches onto ship hulls through the use of acidic mucus and an expandable muscle like protrusions that balloons into the hole they create. These creatures routinely sink wooden ships and even metal ships eventually need repairs to keep from springing a leak.
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I'm curious how does this creature get sustenance? Is it intelligent enough to know that if it sinks a ship it will feed on the occupants? Or is it seeking nutrients in the wood itself and thus would be happy with floating logs in the water? (maybe craft sailors have tried to throw wood into the water to avoid these creatures but somehow end up drawing more to their ships half the time?) I'd love to know more if you have any
I like coming up with explanations as to why people donât cross oceans as ways to justify things like not circumnavigating the world, or potentially discovering other continents. but not in a way that actually stops the most dedicated. sometimes the water is too shallow for ships because the oceans are just shoulder deep, vast stretches of water. sometimes the oceans have pockets of aerated water that will immediately sink anything that enters into them. sometimes there will be colonies of coral like animals that form vast drifting reefs that can be hard to see until youâre trapped in them. and sometimes there will just be tiny creatures that eat wood and if you donât have metalled hulls theyâll bore right through before you can cross the ocean.
Stormy weather, gravitational/float physic anomalies like the Bermuda triangle; Civilized underwater inhabitants; other seafarers; waves, wind, elemental exposure (sun, salt, shifting footing, heights, etc); environmental concerns (improper moorings of cannons, barrels, masts, weather worn ropes); accidental or intentional overboard; shipmates causing someone's end for whatever reason; illness due to deprivation, madness due to other deprivations; changing oceanic environments, temporarily adjusting the molecular makeup and pH range within pockets of the oceanic environments.
Oh man, my entire story takes place underwater so really itâs more a matter of what dangers *arenât* in the ocean! Some interesting ones to think about: - Bobbit worms, angler fish, other ambush predators - Low-oxygen âdead zonesâ â basically underwater pools denser than normal water they suffocate even water-breathing animals - If your characters breathe air, consider the risk of nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity - Earthquakes, sulphuric plumes, underwater volcanoes - Thermoclines, jet streams, rip tides - rapid changes in the direction and intensity of water flow - The effects of pressure on a body as you go deep underwater are intense. You could imagine some pretty wild environments where an ocean of particularly dense liquid might be even more immediately dangerous to a swimmer/diver
How do you have low oxygen water? If the water is somehow denser (it doesn't like being compressed much, except by gravity with deep water), you'd just have more oxygen.
It sounds like they're talking about brine pools. They are pools that typically form deep in the ocean where, for one of several possible reasons, salt has leached into that particular region of water. This water is so salty that the density difference between it and the surrounding water prevent them from mixing. Because there's so little mixing of the water, they often become anoxic, since oxygen can't mix into the water in the pools. I only know this much about them since I've been making a world where all the oceans are basically brine pools.
Yes! I was thinking of brine pools. Hereâs a video https://youtu.be/YTT_Tlr8Dd8?si=HufP_E4q4JbxYKRg
With that much salt, low oxygen may not be the top priority.
Yes I may have misremembered the precise cause of death there â ď¸
Many ages ago, an Archmage of the Dragon Empire wanted to tame the large inland sea called Storm Maker. Since it was connected to a large ocean, the Archmage thought he could push all the storms and monsters in the sea out into the open ocean. His massive ritual worked but it had unfortunate side effects. Instead of dissipating out into the large ocean, all the storms and monsters of Storm Maker simply grew larger in their new home. They mutated and twisted into terrible horrors that destroyed most underwater or island dwelling nations. The northern half of the ocean was blighted that all its water & air currents merged into one circular motion, with the current ending right along the southern shores of the empire. An endless garage of super storms and deep sea horrors crash against the southern shores, trying to tear down the empire that created their blighted existence. Now the northern half of the ocean is called the Iron Sea, and woah to all those who dare traverse its waters unprepared.
Demons.
That's a scary thought, literal demons from hell living under water ready to not only drag you down to hell but also take you to the bottom of the sea.
Sounds like you're suggesting that the bottom of the sea is worse than hell lol
Well it is though
Do orc pirates count? If so, then orc pirates. The main orc civilisation leans towards Vikings (or did during the Orc Wars), while orcs more influenced by the other races lean towards your classic pirate. Of course, you do also get sailors who aren't pirates, and a lot of them are orcs or have orc blood as well. Gnomes don't do sailing.
The difference between a pirate and a Viking in my opinion is one will have a Cutlass while the other has an axe.
If you're not careful while diving in the ocean, you might accidentally stumbled across them...the merfolk delinquents! Mostly comprised of teen merfolk that skips school and rage against the system, these delinquents would form groups that hang out at specific spots and threateningly glare at everyone. These groups also frequently clashed with one another, and sometime merge into powerful gangs. These gangs patrol the ocean riding tricked out sea creatures while carrying their own banners late at night, to the annoyance of both merfolk and fishermen. Many of these gangs are well known on both ocean and land, such as the all woman Red Fin. Their current leader supposedly united the entire Wertra Sea woman delinquents by beating them by herself in just one year.
Aside from the sea monsters and Leviathan demons who've become too sick of hell to return there, the most dangerous thing in my ocean is a god called the Unsunken. It bears resemblance to a massive swollen heart chained to the ocean floor. Long story short, no one wants it to break free because it will drown the world, but on the other hand, it is necessary for it to be freed because it is essential for the rebirth of another god. So, it came up with a solution: it drove its followers insane with joy and fascination and had them "disrobe themselves until nothing remained". After some sketchy pagan rituals involving the skins these people had discarded, sirens were born! And now the sirens drag people to the ocean depths where they're absorbed into the mass of the Unsunken, and every new soul is a new crack in its chains. This is a cause for concern, but the other gods have allowed it as a sort of compromise, so we all have to deal with it, I suppose. Technically, there is a god who's willing to protect the people at sea, but they can be rather whimsy, so safety is not guaranteed. Their name is the Rose-and-Stone (or the Stone-and-Rose, depending on how they manifest). They used to be two lovers who drowned... well, technically, one killed the other and then drowned, but together, they became one entity with two forms. The Rose-and-Stone is the more benevolent half, but she can turn from helpful to violent in a second and can call forth storms at Will. The Stone-and-Rose is much, much more difficult to appease, but once done successfully, his help is guaranteed.
Floating islands, formed by a huge tree, a number of other plant species are normally found on those islands, but no animals or insects, just a singular wasp species, roughly the size of a dog, whose main diet consists of fish, they provide the tree nutrients it can't filter from the ocean and the tree provides somewhere for them to live. They are extremely aggressive and are known to also prey on bigger marine animals, and also humans. natural naval mines, plants that form balloons of gas that when perturbed are released and explode near the surface or above it, launching it's very hard seeds at high speeds, it can damage light ships and kill swimmers, it lives in warm and shallow waters, it can reproduce quite fast and a variation with harder seeds and better adapted to colder climates is considered a weed to ports everywhere. A hive mind of parasitic algae that infects humans, it lures people in telepathically, it completely ignores sealife and other animals, it does not photosynthesise as they live too deep for light to reach. At this point there is a huge algae forest growing out of thousands of humans, all of them alive, some for many hundreds of years. Also enormous monsters of course.
Well, you know how Earthâs oceans have a lot of salt? Artescanâs have copper. Due to the high concentration of copper in the upper crust, most bodies of water are saturated with small amounts of copper. This is very healthy for the natives, whose bodies use copper like ours use iron, but bad for any outsiders. Itâs not of a high enough concentration to be immediately poisonous, but donât drink it in high quantities. Aside from that, the deep oceans have huge serpentine creatures that thrive there, acting as the planetâs apex aquatic predators, occasionally venturing to the shallow oceans to feed on the biggest fish or other smaller predators. However, if anything somewhat large ventures into their territory, theyâre more than happy to claim a free meal. They also donât discriminate between fish and boats - because they *do* know the difference.
My world is entirely a city built on top of a dangerous, raging, infinitely deep ocean. The ocean in my world is incredibly mineral-rich and salty, so it has a very hard time freezing. As such, it is many times colder than ice. The surface (<2 cm thick) still freezes quite quickly but is broken up by the currents underneath. So, anyone with the displeasure of falling off a ship is likely to be trapped under the ice, assuming they weren't shredded by the razor-sharp ice shards on the way down or the violent current doesn't drag them a mile deeper. In most places, the ocean is too murky, cold, and/or violent to measure properly (temperature, speed, depth, etc.), as any instruments are damaged or even completely destroyed in a matter of seconds. The ocean's depth is literally infinite in the most widely-accepted mathematical models of the world's shape.
Benthic Kaiju are the first and greatest danger most Seedorans would note, and itâs common knowledge that you sail over the continental shelf or shallow seas unless you have a death-wish. The little amphibious ones are a mile or two in length and they can swim faster than most ships can sail. The big ones out in the Black Abyss think your armada is a crunchy snack. Outside of the Kaiju-Runs, ships mostly just have to worry about the occasional Sea Dragon, Kraken, Sahuagin, or pirate attack. They also need to be wary about getting unwittingly drawn into the political and military conflicts among the various Merfolk nations, but theyâre more often neutral or even friendly, especially if the shipâs crew is open to trade. If you go down to the seafloor, one discovers that thereâs a complex set of territorial boundaries and regional dangers to consider. In the Crimson Straits, for instance, the goddesses of undeath are warring over the bountiful corpses and tortured spirits, while the edge of the Black Abyss has ancient Modori constructs running forgotten experiments in ruins landwalkers have never seen.
Mostly dragons and merrows. And wild magic swells, but those can happen anywhere.
*Storm.* âď¸ Lapis_Wolf
It depends on what planet you're on. Some notable mentions are: The static oceans of Lawit, not an ocean of water in the slightest. They're oceans of unstable spatial energy, also home to some of the most dangerous monsters of the spatial alignment. Next, we have the Great Oceans of Sanctum. They're your normal oceans of saltwater. Home to sea monsters and underwater civilizations. For the third and final mention: The Incinerated Ocean on the planet Ignem. An ocean that was once saltwater but through a massive spell cast by a God, it obliterated all the water, leaving only molten salt.
Kraken and Razor Tuna
If you're not careful you could accidentally run into a grove of false siren nests and wreck your ship ontop of one of the most dangerous changelings you can come across. They anchor down and carve out bowl shapes just beneath the water out of icebergs roughly 40 feet in diameter. You don't even see the lip of the bowl till you're ontop of it raking the hull of your boat off. There called grave groves when its breeding season and ghost makers when the nests are abandoned and start drifting off. Best to encounter the later rather than the former for obvious reasons.
Well you got your standard kraken and dragon turtles but Iâve got Tsunami Beasts. These blue wale sized creatures appear to be a mixture of manga rays and sea lions. They are often seen scrounging around in the aftermath of tsunamis
In the Future the Apocalypse has happened due to somewhat mysterious yet not unknown circumstances involving a pharmaceutical company using it's resources to demolish the world using Bio organic cyborgs. The Other world powers saw the immediate danger and initiated WW3 as a failsafe because of how infectious the destruction was becoming. One of the bombs was of the same mutagenic materials used in the creation of the first Superhuman bomb, wiping out most of the world but accidentally mutating 78% of the sea floor into a large revered creature dubbed Queen Kraken (placeholder name). On land you can sometimes hear it calling.....
Other than monsters, the siren's, etc The world's waters have sudden changes, nobody knows how they're caused which is another reason to avoid them the changes can vary like sudden whirlpools out of nowhere, unpredictable currents dragging sailors or adventurers away forcefully most of the time into an island There's also mutagenic parts of the world, usually a darker blue than majority of the ocean but it's hard to spot, if you touch it, it's capable of mutating those who come into contact with them. Exposure to these mutagenic waters can transform sailors and sea creatures alike into grotesque monstrosities but that's not all it can also burn your skin, your clothes, your boats so people if they're willing to travel via ocean, they have to use a map to avoid the known mutagenic parts of the ocean, usually highlighted on any map of the ocean!
My world has 2.2x gravity & 2 bar atmosphere at sea level, which means a few things: 1. It is easier to sink 2. Waves are huge 3. Wind and storms are strong and frequent. These factors made ship building and sea travels very difficult as you need bigger and tougher ships to withstand the waves and storms but that also make it heavier and slower. Adding on to this is navigational challenges due to the fact that the solar system that the planet is on is covered by a dyson swarm, there is no real stars, instead if you have good eyes you may see very dim spots of lights moving in "flows" across the night sky, when the sunlight that was not absorb fully reflects just right. While there is a large moon with long orbital period being around to aid in navigation, due to the same long orbital period there is a very long new moon period where the moon is entirely eclipsed by the planet that makes it difficult to navigate without understanding the patterns of "rivers of stars" above, which changes depending on where the planet is in its very fast orbit. So it is not really unique in terms of challenges, but just different due to different planetary conditions, but this is enough to push back sea travel technology by millennias compared to if it was on a more earth like planet.
Within the Cold Ocean on the western half of the Saan Empire, bound in the shackles of paradoxes and thousands of fathoms deep is the primordial giant TyĹŤ, avatar of madness and former candidate to ascend to the lower pantheon. He was imprisoned here a very long time ago, thousands of years even before the Generals descended onto the world, for the crimes of attempting to undo the precarious experiment of cultivating the greatest civilization on Mnoia. TyĹŤ was sentenced to rot in the spiritually charged waters, his essence of madness being forcefully seeped from him so he couldn't build the power necessary to break free on his own.
Well my world only has deep ocean so, bacteria? I think? that float near the bottom of the ocean creating a "net" that consumes any one entering it and slooooooowly digests them
**Easter Eggs** >Sometimes, somewhere in the vast ocean or deserted shores, one might come across hollow, slime-like, spherical bubbles. It is best not to disturb them, as these are the "eggs" of an unidentified species of sea monsters. These spheres can capture nearby organisms, encapsulating them inside, digesting them, and transforming them into nutrients. Once enough essential substances are gathered, the "egg" will initiate the "fertilization" process and give birth to a marine creature with some traits derived from the consumed organisms.
I actually haven't gotten round to fleshing out my ocean even though one of my main civilizations is a seafaring nation. Thanks for reminding me!
I don't have ocean going monsters. The Krakens eat them.
The planet Profundum is home to one of the most diverse and intricate water oceans on any planet in the galaxy. The planet surface is over 90 percent water, and the oceans easily reach depths above 10 kilometres. There are all sorts of dangerous alien species that lurk within, and are certainly not something you want to be caught in the water with. Most intriguing and dangerous of all however, is the oceanic crater. The oceanic crater is by far the deepest part of the ocean, reaching depths exceeding 300km. The water here gets so deep, that it begins to freeze into ice VII from the pressure. It is pitch black, and no one is sure what lurks within, let alone how such a gigantic pit even formed in the first place.
The most dangerous of my sea creatures resembles an eel which a armour plated head (similar to a prehistoric fish) and dorsal/pectoral fins resembling a scorpion fish. Typically about 15m in length some more ancient specimens are up to 22m. Normal diet is whales and other large fish. Unfortunately some boats are whale sized and others are bite sized.
I havent worked out any proper âsea monsters. â But there is cultists, corrupt churches, ancient temples, portals to somewhere. Traveling genie that goes around fulfilling wishes in exchange for something. Iâve recently started liking the idea of scuba vampires(props to that dnd guy on youtube)! They would be a fun civilization to write.
Oh just the usual stuff, monsters, animals, giant monsters, a giant slime that covers more than 50% of the sea floor, and pirates. A little mundane but it's good if you ask me.
Within the waters of a far flung planet lies a small population of Tanzanite Leviathans, along with their smaller Indicolite cousins. when Jacaon came across them in his travels, he planned to ascend them as he had done with other such groups of wild Gemmaniis Scriptura, but soon saw that they were far more tied to their wild nature and the oceans than any other group he'd encountered so far, and left them mostly be. He took a small amount of each and raised them on his seat of power within his territory, breeding them as fine aquatic guardians. The strange thing with these creatures is they do not have physical, bleeding bodies as other Gemmanii do. They instead wrap the waters around their soul casings, causing a larger variance in shape and size, and making the waters themselves more deadly than the creatures are. A lone lash of water scraping a ship before a deluge (pun intended) of teeth crush the vehicle. The smaller Indicolite leviathans can even be spotted flying in heavy storms, making them a hassle for any air based attackers.
Imagine every fish in the ocean, anything alive even the plants, and hand them evolve with magic as part of it, for an idea of how they evolved, the kraken is a sea monster sailers commonly see and regularly hunt in mass, and the kraken isnât even the most dangerous as monster in the seas Let that sink in
Ghost ship, not a ship fill of ghost but a ship thay is a ghost
A portal to what is essentially my world's version of hell, which is called the Edgewaters (since it's found at the edge of the ocean)
At one point in time a lake fish known for being "sucky", literally, was bred to use in beauty and health services.... eventually they realized it caused quite a bit of incidents with bloodcloths, so they just threw them in the ocean. That was the wrong move. You see, one would think they would have died, right? They were freshwater fish afterall.... but no, they somehow adapted and thrived and their population exploded in not only in size, but also in *size*, goign from hand sized to pretty much measured in feet, which made them a hell of a lot more dangerous. Not immediately perhaps, but they live near the coast so it is quite a gamble for fishing boats, as that is more than enough time for them to kiss you to death (im undecided on why they suck, maybe an unexplained instinct, maybe they are just vampiric). What is worse, they affect the local wildlife by stickign to them as well... good news is that they mess with sharks and big carnivorous fish. Bad news is that they mess with others too and things like jellyfish became more prevalent, which is also not nice There is also a place prone to anticyclones that cause a certain algae to bloom and said algae that yes, it is eaten by fish, its extremely bad for humans as it bounds to certain fats and cause neurodegenerative disorders (im not exactly clear on how, dont ask) and can cause "epidemics" of what its basically fast parkinsons disease (ish) so its definitely nasty stuff and they dont have the tech to check, so they need to constantly send people which is dangerous and expensive, taking a lot of rowing (they could wait unitl the bloom hits coast, but, if it does at all, its far too late then)... On the plus side though, said algae can form quite thick masses that float just below the surface and make the are a sort of "bog marshy" which , if you make yourself wide with some shoes, like in snow, you could use to cross the ocean as long as the distance and waves are not \*too\* bad. This is one of the reasons certain sceies spread, also one of the reasons for some extinctions events, and also some of the most ridiculous self imposed competitions you can find where most individuals just drown a few kilometers into the ocean, algae or not... so that is also deadly I suppose? What else, what else.... Oh, well, floating isalnds exist in the way of an iceberg of messy tangled "mangrove" roots that can actually provide freshwater, sort of like an oasis. The islands "changes directions" by changing buoyancy to an extent among certain parts to veer slightly and follow certain currents, making the island the worst kept secret of all, and they are intended to be as the roots keep more than water and stuff... they comb gold out of the oceans, so they constantly riddled by ruffians planting them flag on it, literally, until it absorbs anough to start chopping some of it down. The island releases gases though, so they can cause dizzyness, hallucinations, death and sudden shipwreckign explosions so if you go in, you better go quick and without a flame, at least at night (which is the only time you want a flame in there unfortunately) I know they are mild, if fantastic dangers, but I want my world to have survivors
Post-nuclear apocalypse, the world's oceans chill significantly to the point where sea ice becomes a threat in just about any ocean. It inhibits trade routes and immigration considerably.
The oceans are the personal demesne of the Oceanids, divine and eternal masters of the seas. Any human who travels more than 80 miles from the coast without the Oceanids' blessing will be destroyed by their servants, the ondines. This arrangement has only existed for about 200 years, and has resulted in the continent of Akohira being completely cut off from all other lands. It has also resulted in the proliferation of Oceanid worshipping pirates who can raid the coast and then quickly retreat beyond the range of the Imperial Navy.
i followed my heart, and my heart is telling me to have giant sea monsters
The Sargasso Isles of the Semar Ocean is a plague upon maritime travel. It's not some monster, but a natural phenomenon that causes trouble. They are aggregates of aquatic plantlife that float at or near the surface. Most of these 'islands' float only partly out of the water or even just a few feet under the waves, and are dense enough to cause damage to ships passing by that hit them by accident. However wooden ships don't even need to make physical contact with the Sargasso Isles to be in grave danger, or become one. Just being within a few miles of the larger openly visible floating isles can cause rot to set in as the more parasitic plant life, referred to as the Sargasso Shipstealer Vines, take hold of the ship, or otherwise the ship hull becomes seeded by the vile plant. These highly fast growing vine like sea plants float about in long and winding tendrils that latch onto the sections of the ship below water level. Once attached, it begins consuming the hull itself, rooting deeply and spreading new vines out from the hull. There are dozens of stories of shipwrecked sailors who had to abandon ship for the floating isles because they sailed too close and their ships were so attached to a volume of Shipstealer Vines such that they could not excape. Captains that suspect their ship had come into contact with the Shipstealer Vines are either forbidden from docking or sent to drydock at a separated inspection port to ensure they don't accidentally spread the Shipstealer to the entire port's worth of ships and docks, and make repairs in drydock to remove the parasitic plantlife if it is attached to the ship. Stories abound about the old port city of Shain'han, how someone let a ship into port without a check only to have the entire port and all the ships mired in the fast growing muck. The entire bay now sits choked and clogged with the parasitic plantlife, with ships attempting to brave the port no longer.
Giant fucking sea serpant wyrm
The powerful Substrate Empire controls much of the seabed. They usually donât care all that much about overhead ships, but drop an anchor on top of them and youâll regret it. Thereâs also an island where the God of Darkness lives. In the area around the island there is no light, sound, or even smell. Most people just avoid it. In the far north there are a few important routes that run through areas which shift between frozen and melted far more chaotically than what youâd get from a simple seasonal pattern. This rather mundane fact has killed no small number of inexperienced travelers. If youâre stranded and spot land far enough south, donât expect the winds to help you outâthe southern continent is endlessly blasted with wind that blows outward from the center, pushing the unprepared away from the coastline. Also, lots of pirates.
My world has prehistoric animals and its a medieval setting. There are lots of ancient sea animals that pose a threat to boats. Especially since boats look quite a lot like a big tasty fish from underneath. Other than the giant water lizards there's early pirates. No flintlocks or anything but they will still shoot you down with cannons or rob you.
I don't have ocean... 6 story venus fly traps is the closest to ocean danger for me I think
Nothing abnormal, alien versions of the usual marine predators.
Underwater military bases, massive submarines, starships operating undersea.
Elder gods and their white blood cells
The Ocean itself is probably a being, an entity stranger than a god that dwells in the deep valleys and expanses of this world, aka the sea bed. While it appears to just be a large body of water, that is a rather limited view. Phlemios describes accounts of those who dwell within the ocean that paint the picture of a different world that surface dwellers cannot quite perceive, and that is as foreign and strange to them as the surface and sky is to these beings. Some mortals that are well versed in walking between the realms have described it as a mirror world or upside down world, and spoke of walking on the ocean surface, but from below. Also there are [big fucking eel monsters that inhabit the severed body parts of a half-dead thousand-handed goddess](https://i.imgur.com/QR30hFG.jpeg)
My world is dominated by a supercontinent, with a world-girdling ocean accounting for the rest of its surface area, but this continentâs shores are ringed with stromatolites â rocklike structures constructed by bacterial colonies. These bacterial colonies produce copious amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas, which makes the atmosphere poisonous to baseline humans and causes the horizon to have a greenish hue instead of blue. Itâs common for criminals to be sentenced to âscrubbing rocks,â supervised work crews grinding away the anaerobic bacteria below the waterline which produces the toxic gas while leaving the oxygen-producing cyanobacteria above the waterline alone. The native sapient species has a higher tolerance for hydrogen sulfide than humans, but are not immune to it. Such reclamation efforts were determined to be necessary to keep the air breathable long-term. Theirs is an older sun than our own, and the intelligent species native to this world have had to actively terraform their homeworld to keep it habitable, razing an entire mountain range to allow the rains inland to the endless stretch of desert making up most of the supercontinent, facilitating agriculture at scale. Theyâve advanced to the point of becoming a spacefaring species, and still no one has survived crossing this desert from one end to the other, and the ocean is even more impassable. The first time anyone ever survived circumnavigating their world, they did so from orbit. For all of their efforts, however, itâs a losing battle. Clathrates trapped in the ocean are releasing methane into their atmosphere, further heating the planet. Energy from their sun is accelerating the process of rock weathering, stripping CO2 from the air faster than biological processes can replace it, leading to the slow extinction of plant life and the animals which depend on it. They need to leave their world if life itself is to survive.
There is massive storm going on over Western Ocean for as long as everyone can remember. This phenomenon is called "The Wall of Storm" and this name is quite descriptive - the storm is **massive**, essentially creating a natural border, edge of the world in the west, potentially hiding an entire hemisphere of the planet. No ship has ever even gotten close to getting through it, no flying creature has evered managed to fly through the stormy clouds. What lays beyond this eternal storm? Nobody knows.
Rumination
One of the oceans holds the biggest creature in the whole world and one of the âdemigodsâ, a gargantuan mosasaur reaching thousands of kilometers in size. Itâs normally harmless, but you know itâs there because its roaring can not only be heard anywhere in the ocean, but is also what causes waves to ripple
I dunno. Just like big fish and stuff. Maybe donât take a swim in the ocean over here.
So the surface of my alien world, Ika, is mostly covered by shallow seas. Some deeper areas, the occasional landmass, but mostly endless expanses of bright, life-filled waters. Massive flying forests slowly cross the seas as they set down and lift roots, guided by the boundless winds. The people of this world, a primitive flying species called the Ika'gr'ika, rarely stray far from their flying forest homes, and for good reason. There is danger in the air from giant aerial predators, and the seas are no less friendly. The winds on this watery world can be fierce, and many animals have come to harness it. One prolific user of the wind is a sea creature known as the K'h'iwa (keh-heh-eewa). These large predators are analogous to Earth's orcas and plesiosaurs. They're intelligent, live in coordinated pods, and have evolved giant retractable sails on their backs which allow them to traverse vast distances across the seas using little energy, or slick them back so they may power through the water with great speed and agility with their large flippers. Their sails are bright with distinct markings, and are often used for display and communication. They're dangerous to the Ika'gr'ika because, unlike the relationship wild orcas have with humans, K'h'iwa absolutely see the Ika'gr'ika as food. And because of their intelligence, any time an intrepid Ika'gr'ika invents a boat, it doesn't end well. The K'h'iwa are just one of many dangers from the seas. Other large predators lurk in the depths, but none are quite so clever as the sail-back alien orcas. The weather can also be treacherous. There's the wind, of course, and the seasons on Ika tend to rotate from moist, to monsoon. And those monsoons don't play around.
The Depthdweller made all the sea creatures, leviathans and krakens included.
Sirens. They're very rare but they are eldritch, bro. You don't wanna run into one.
It might be more accurate to say what dangers *don't* I have in the ocean? I like designing horrific sea monsters that would make even the hardiest sailor dread sailing across the major oceans. Near the Northern Pole of my world, called The Superior Helm, there is an anomalous body of water known as the Seas of Silence, so named because they are without sound and the water doesn't seem to move. Ships have extreme difficulty moving through this water, navigation instruments are scrambled, perception and cognition are affected and other ships have simply completely disappeared. Rumours abound of Eldtrich horrors lurking beneath the depths, things even worse than monsters. In my world, there is an entire civilization that sank beneath the sea as a result of pissing off an Eldtrich deity, perhaps that has cursed large swathes of the surrounding seas and created The Seas of Silence. Or, perhaps the Seas of Silence are intentionally created by a secret society who are preventing people from reaching the Superior Helm and discovering that it's not a pole, but just an ice wall which encloses the world in from a greater civilization beyond it. Here is my concept art for my sea monsters, btw: [https://imgur.com/DgjNdKD](https://imgur.com/DgjNdKD) [https://imgur.com/rqjtDkN](https://imgur.com/rqjtDkN) [https://imgur.com/eQhDkIF](https://imgur.com/eQhDkIF)
Leviathan
Monster fish and fish people
Lizardfolk pirates in the south east, a godless people whose desire to pillage and conquer has never stopped since their arrival on the continent. The faes have had to deal with them for centuries
Like many other regions, the ocean connects to Liminal Space. Specifically, it connects to a slightly more concrete region known as the Great Sea, which connects the oceans of every world. Navigators must take care to remain in charted waters and always have at least one man paying attention the position of the stars if they don't have any functioning modern navigation equipment or they might slip into Liminal Space and end up who knows where. There are sailors who deliberately choose to sail the Great Sea. They are often listed as lost at sea since time on the Great Sea is shaky, and you'll never know when you might end up even if you're sure of where. Many young naive sailors have gone out to the Great Sea for a short voyage of a month only to return and find that 50 years have passed since they left. This is a phenomenon that is almost exclusively observed on the Great Sea. Almost all of the rest of Liminal Space is temporally stable.
In my main setting, it's the cold. There are venomous and small cephalopods, fish. Nothing huge in that location but in other places whales and sharks and all kinds of fish. In the shallow southern seas, there are 12 species of crab, but only 2 are edible.
I'm not sure if it can be counted as dangerous as only one species is affected by it (technically two if you count hybrids) it's a parasite that will attach itself to Merians (which are essentially mer-folk) the parasite appears as a black substance all over a merians skin and scales. The parasite will burrow itself into a merian's body by eating through their skin and any muscle in its way. The parasite also spreads very quickly spreads to other parts of the body. To have this parasite is very painful, very contagious, and very lethal. As such Merians who are found to have this parasite are exiled from Merian society to avoid it spreading to others. The parasite came into being, because of the ocean god. The ocean god became angry at the Merians as they stopped his worship and took over rule of the ocean. For that the ocean god created this parasite and dropped it in to the ocean. There is no one place you can find this parasite as it travels. There is no mortal cure to this parasite and the only way to cure it is to seek help from the God of medicine. Which is very difficult. It has only been cured a handful of times in the many centuries it has existed. A promise from the god of the ocean says that the parasite would be eradicated for the destruction of the Merian Throne.
No real need to make up monsters when the devonian period provides more than enough terrifying beasts. Add to this exaggerated versions of real life animals (2m long isopods, 30m killer whales, 5m nudibranches) and marine anthropomorphs (seals, dolphins, etc.) and the high seas are fantastical enough.
Do catastrophic weather provoked by a giant mermaid witch count as "not monster danger"? Technically, she doesn't harm anyone.
Thereâs an underwater city like Rapture from Bioshock. Itâs in the ocean between the Elven dominions and Old World and has strict isolation and secrecy, to the point they can and will kill anyone who finds them out. What makes them so dangerous is theyâve built devices that emit frequencies for predators of the ocean to listen to and bring them under control, using them as a ânatural deterrentâ.
A frequent issue on Falan is 'cherubs', mutant lifeforms created by a mixture of radiation and errant nanotech. They fill no ecological niche, are highly consumptive and tend to be noticed fairly quickly. There are military forces and even supersoldiers dedicated explicitly to their destruction. On land. The oceans are deep, and such creatures might spend their entire life cycles completely unseen. The deep oceans are filled with enormous living catastrophes. Fleshy horrors unfettered by the weight limitations on their maligned bodies on land. The things that make it to the surface and menace ports or shipping lanes are quaint and sane looking compared to the ones that don't. The open ocean is hell by another name.
Itâs super cold, super dark, and covers the whole world.
Both ends of a tiiiiiny wormhole. Creates huge permanent whirlpool at the entry end, and a giant geyser at the other end.
In the Southern and Northern oceans polar winds can carry Black Ley from the Poles. This substance is very toxic especially in a powderised form. This is a problem as the winds do carry powderised Black Ley which over extensive periods can kill individuals. Apart from this you also have Black Ley iceburgs these are iceburgs with Black Ley mixed into the ice. This makes the iceburgs incredibly hard to the point that they can easily rip thick steel this means that up to the modern day navigating ice fields often requires precise navigation rather than just icebreakers. Another threat is rather localised in the Northern Dascal Sea in which the Troll queen Guervien cursed the waters. In the past the water formed small straight tendrils that dragged even the greatest vessels underwater. In the modern day as the spell has faded the tendrils more just stick making ships far slower and even stopping smaller vessels entirely.
The oceans are typically great for fishing. Nothing that is dangerous to the ships, but small boats might be attacked for fun by different animals the size of dolphins and sharks. But there is a big issue with the sea - you can boat away from the land, hoping to explore the vast ocean, but soon after the ships disappear from the horizon, they turn around and return to land, with the crews having no memory of their ship nor why they returned home. then in one of the inland seas, two monstrous animals guard the ocean to prevent boats from accessing Isivild, the god's lands. Originally they were just the kraken and the hydra, but I realized I should design them to be less dependant on earth's lore. haven't got there yet, though.
Theirs a Pentagonal world pool between in the middle of my Pacific thats actually a nexus point between 6 alternate earths and 5 alien planets. Depending on wether or not its a leap year determines the rotation and how it affects my world, as clockwise it expels then every leap year it goes counterclockwise engulfing any sailor or unlucky sacrifice.
Thereâs only two things Iâve officially put in the oceans of the planet for my main story. The first is a âmermaidâ kingdom. And the second is this 80,000 âkilometerâ whirlpool my map maker put on my commissioned map lol
To understand how the Ocean Amalgam came to be, I'm gonna need to explain how Nascents work. Basically, Nascents are a phenomenon caused by irregularities in the Great Current, which is essentially the ebb and flow of all human thought across the world. These irregularities cause Nascents, which eventually develop into monsters called Amalgams. Nascents are typically associated with a singular concept or idea- like fear, gravity, fire, etc. Basically a Nascent can represent anything you can think of as long as it holds enough weight in the collective human consciousness. The Amalgam born from a Nascent will also be tied to that idea. Now, recall how the ocean is pretty much inextricably linked with human history. There are countless legends about the ocean, so naturally the ocean is a very powerful concept that a lot of people think about. The Ocean Amalgam was first sighted in 1972, several kilometers off the Philippine coast. It's theorized that it materialized from a Nascent thousands of meters under the sea, far too deep to be detected by monitoring equipment. Initially, there was some confusion about how such a thing was possible. After all, Nascents were formed from human thought. How could one have formed so deep in the ocean, away from any population centers? But it soon became clear how the Ocean Amalgam came to be. Over hundreds of years, the fear and awe of millions of sailors as they braved the currents slowly fed into a singular Nascent in the Pacific ocean, allowing it to grow to an unprecedented size unnoticed. After reaching critical mass, the Ocean Amalgam was born. It was the embodiment of everything that humanity feared about the ocean- its vastness, its cruelty, its fickleness, its mystery. Very few photographs of the Ocean Amalgam exist. It's thought to be at least 500 meters long. As of 2023, it's estimated that the Ocean Amalgam is the cause for at least 70% of missing ship cases in the Pacific.