Topic: Scenario Idea: 'Below Deck, Many Things'
(An adventure I've been unable to finish writing due to other commitments. May be of use to others here)
England, 1613
The PCs are contacted by a lawyer representing “men of prominence and discretion”. Recently one of their chief agents, the smuggler William Vogel, fell into disfavour. Always a strange man, Vogel had lately been possessed of a mania borne of desperation. More worryingly, his last delivery contained items other than arranged, from fraudulent to outright baffling. Pepper instead of gun powder. Ostrich eggs instead of rosaries. An unsolvable oriental puzzle box where nothing was asked.
Following the delivery Vogel disappeared for precisely one lunar month. Now his ship, the Plutonian, has been spotted off shore at Yarmouth, adrift. The lawyer’s masters have managed to delay an expedition of excise men for now; there will be consequences for them should certain discoveries be made. What they urgently need are agents without connection, rootless and deniable, to ransack the ship, destroying all papers and items of religious value.
The Plutonian is a ship of infinite shores. Across the spheres versions of itself slowly come into being, meld with each other and are destroyed. In dreams shipwrights and captains conceive her. Over decades all ships that bear the name slowly connect to the ur-vessel.
The Plutonian is bigger on the inside. Below decks is a labyrinth of cabins, corridors and galleys. Some areas are waterlogged, others rotten. Some rooms are pristine, evidence of inhabitants taking their absence only moments before.
The Plutonian has many exits, passageways and stairs leading above to other versions of itself, desolate ships under strange stars skirting unknown shores.
The Plutonian abhors sapient replication. It is the nature of the refelected spheres that events transpire in a similar fashion. Thus multiple versions of thinking creatures find their way below decks simultaneously. The ship imprisons them within its twisting wooden bowels until but one worldly representative (or group of representatives) remains.
(The rest is up to you)