Mork-Tober 2025 – Maw

“It was naught but an enormous gaping maw, slowly spinning, a rushing whirlpool of water being sucked into that yawning orifice, plunging past rings of jagged teeth and down into the unimaginable guts below.”

For Pirate-Borg, “Maw” seemed the perfect opportunity to bring in Charybidis, the classic sea hazard / monster mentioned in The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Jason and the Argonauts. Modern scholars point to it as more a poetic description of the treacherous waters at the Straits of Messina, but in a TTRPG why not lean hard into a wandering whirlpool chasing after the carnage left by a ship battle.

As a sea hazard, it’s a SHIP AGILITY test with a difficulty that gets higher as the Maw draws closer (18 at 1 hex from the Maw and -2 per hex beyond), failure reducing the ship’s speed similar to trying to sail against the wind. As more a force of nature than a creature, if you choose to give it HP then it ought to be between 100 to 200 so less than THE LEVITHAN but similar to THE KRAKEN. In size it ought to be represented by something big enough to swallow multiple ships so 3 hexes in width as a minimum. Unpredictable movement, moving as follows:

• 1 – 4 Move that many hexes towards the nearest ship
• 5 Move 1 hex in a random direction
• 6 No movement

For those bold enough to risk getting close enough, there awaits rewards of many a ship’s treasure caught in it’s jagged teeth, like any other wrecked ship.

#morktober2025 #MÖRKTOBER

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Cover Image from The Odyssey (1997)