Over three quarters of the surface of N’plork is ocean, the vast majority of it uncharted. Only a handful of islands smaller than those constituting the Paradiddle chain will appear on any widely accepted map, although some regional versions are better populated. The shipping lanes are, of course, heavily traveled, but they constitute only a tiny fraction of the overall marine topography.
Sentient societies with so much ocean surface available will inevitably produce groups who live most of or even their entire lives at sea. A number of such peoples exist on N’plork, most notably the Moreani, Kiash-Lemna, and Oopoornu. The latter two make their livings exclusively as fishers, while the Moreani specialize in transporting goods traditional shippers might find problematic for political, safety, or legal reasons.
Since the Moreani are orcs—wholly disenfranchised from the rest of N’plork’s races—they are also insulated from political considerations arising from national affiliations. Moreani are the remnants of the population of ancient Morianella, a robust seafaring society with heavy involvement in maritime transport of goods. Generations of this expertise, combined with lack of bureaucratic oversight, lends them unique credentials for moving loads no one else will touch. In response to this sort of demand they have designed and built a variety of specialty vessels to handle just about any kind of cargo imaginable.
While the digital electronics of N’plork are quite sophisticated, in most other areas of technology they are rather primitive. The aircraft industry, for example, is embryonic and relies on gliders or lighter-than-air modalities at present. No powered fixed-wing or rotary-wing vehicles have been developed. Nor are there are any submarines to speak of, although a few fairly crude bathyscaphes exist. Consequently, while the surface of N’plork’s oceans has been explored to a small extent, the subsurface map is effectively a blank slate.
The continents of N’plork are subject to tectonic movement, but scholars are only minimally aware of that process. Sea floor spreading, submarine ranges, trenches, and rifts are at best merely guessed-at. The mechanisms of volcanoes and offshore quakes are understood but dimly. The practical result of this is that the topography of the vast ocean floor is a mystery. The depth of relatively shallow coastal shelves near the larger ports has been ascertained by sounding, but the deep ocean might as well be an alien planet. No one has any idea how far down it goes.
Fishing is naturally a major occupation for coastal N’plorkians. Large commercial fisheries are unknown, however. Most all fishers ply their trade in single vessels or in small fleets of no more than three or four ships. The majority of what is known about N’plork’s marine life is based on specimens recovered and observations taken by fishers. The total number of species discovered by fishers is quite difficult to estimate, since very few global data collection efforts have been undertaken for logistical reasons.
N’plork is inclined 21° to its rotational axis. While this is slightly less than Earth’s tilt, it does mean that N’plork experiences similar seasons. The combination of uneven heating, dramatic undersea geography, and the fairly rapid rotation of N’plork generates planet-wide circular oceanic currents, or gyres, that reverse direction twice a year due to complex upwelling, facilitating commerce among continents separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean. Cross-ocean shipping lanes follow these currents almost exclusively, with the result that huge areas of the ocean’s surface have never seen a single vessel.
Not surprisingly, the seafaring peoples of N’plork have a rich legacy of myths, legends, and folklore concerning myriads of exotic sea creatures, large and small. These range from swarms of tiny bioluminescent ‘wriggling ghosts’ to enormous armored marine horror lizards called ‘strakerippers’ with multiple rows of teeth half a meter in length. Tales abound of ships wrecked and sailors devoured by these and other monsters of the deep, but little substantive proof of these occurrences exists.
N’plork has no need of fantastic sea monsters to explain lost mariners, though. The weather encountered on the vast briny can be unforgivably violent. Hundred-meter swells and winds topping 150 knots are all too common in some areas at certain times of year. Needless to say, only very specially-designed vessels have any chance of surviving an encounter with one of these maelstroms. The Kiash-Lemna, in fact, are the only sailors who can reliably navigate a storm of this magnitude. They originated on a chain of tiny atolls in the southern Noorprid about two thousand kilometers west of the Paradiddle Islands. This area is subject to some of the most energetic meteorological phenomena on the planet; as a consequence the Kiash-Lemna developed ships they refer to as makkarrs that could handle these storms as a matter of survival.
Makkarrs are made from hollowed-out logs of giant tallarbors hauled all the way from the forests of extreme southeastern Tantatku. The ends are rounded and plugged with a waterproof pitch. Portholes located at various points around the circumference are fitted with membranes that allow gases to pass across them but not water; this permits the crew to breathe without risking flooding. Perhaps the most ingenious aspects of the vessels are the stabilizing pontoons, or spont-gells. These are cylinders that protrude from the hull all along the waterline. Spont-gells are sufficiently flexible that intense wave action causes them to bend in toward the hull rather than break off, but they retain a ‘memory’ of their default configuration and return to it when the waves allow. The upshot of this is that the ship is extraordinarily stable in all seas, no matter how rough. The shape allows the hull to punch through the waves rather than ride them, so tossing is minimized. The walls of the tallarbors are extremely tough and resilient, so hull failures are very, very rare. When the storm has passed, the upper hatches are opened and fishing platforms fold out from the inside. The sails are also stored inside the hull, mounted on flexible masts that stiffen when extended. Since no one else is willing to venture into seas where storms of this magnitude can spring forth with little warning, the Kiash-Lemna have those rich fisher grounds all to themselves.
In a world of wet, those who adapt, thrive.