The Formless Sea

this + ALOT of mud

At a distance one could mistake the Formless Sea as a vast plain of savanna with copses of strange trees, but the smell gives it away.  The air here reeks like stale beer, mildew, and a low tide on a hot humid night.  The 'water' in here is more like a thick brown organic soup than an open ocean.  This soup is a churning, undulating mass, a slurry sea of a semisolid sandy sludge.  It gurgles and bubbles in places making sounds more fitting to a digestive problem than to a geographic feature.  Most is thin enough to sail through however in some places hardened masses have solidified and formed temporary islands.  Temporary is the key word here, and with a few exceptions these islands rarely last more than a few months until they break apart and fall back into the mass.

In addition to the clods of earth that pass as islands in this sea large mats of fungus and mold grow on the muck.  In fact, no flora outside of fungus and mold seem to grow in this sea.  Thick yellow clouds of fungal spores lay thick and lazy just above the mucky surface of this sea.  These clouds sometimes settle and great agglomerations of mushrooms and strange molds spawn where they fall.  These islands, known as spore falls, are more of a green spongy mass than terra firma.  Fungus and mold grows and knots upon one another until little islands form that covered is strange vegetation that reek of wild fermentation.  The valleys and divots in these islands make for narrow waterways and quaggy paths choked with green and purple fungal blooms.  When pressed the ground yields slightly and excretes a thin orange liquid that looks like clay rich river water.

These spore falls are thick with ‘vegetation.’  Great bulbous gardens of mushrooms that bear strange fruits common only to this sea spring up in the spore falls.  As do thick ropy stands of mycelium that bob in sync with the winds and the tides.  Parasitic mosses hang from large nets from tree-like mushrooms that sloop like drunks.  Many these blooms are poisonous, but a few are edible and some have valuable medicinal and alchemical effects.

some get you high, some kill you, some get you high THEN kill you

Some of the mushrooms grow tall and strong, their stalks becoming hard as oaks.  If they are left to grow unmolested these mushrooms will keep growing indefinitely.  These mushrooms can grow vast, hundreds of meters tall and some with caps of over a kilometer in diameter.  These are known as Ubershrooms they are by the largest objects in this sea.

There is a suppressing amount of animal life in this Sea.  Insects are common here and can grow to massive proportions, Sludge Striders being a prime example.  Oozes too are common, and run the gamut from simple amoebic like creatures, to globs with an animal like intelligence, to a few that are even sentient and can speak.  There are even two types of fungus people, the savage Fungaloids and the more intelligent and docile Mycondids.  Imported from other seas, hogs have exploded in population growing fat and feral.  The most dangerous inhabitants of this sea however are the vile inbred goblins.

Life in this sea is not easy and most people would consider living here a punishment.  Only a small number of hardy human settlements exist on the Ubershrooms as well as a few hermits and isolated communities that live out in the swamps.  Food from outside this sea rots extremely fast once exposed to the air.  It’s rare for one to be able to finish more than a few mouthfuls of imported food before creeping mold fuzzes it over.  Open bottles of wine will turn to vinegar in a matter of hours.  Even the hardy staples of sailors are not immune, hard tack and fatback soon turn to moist slop.  The air here is way too thick with fungal spores to be comfortable.  Great green-yellow gales can whip up, blanketing whole areas like a foux blizzard.  Even the muddy water of the sea is awful; it manages to be both sticky and slick at the same time and great globs of it gets everywhere; in your boots, in your clothes, in your hair, in your eyes, and in your very soul.

There are however, very good reasons to reside in this sea.  The material that the Ubershrooms are made out of is similar to a hardwood, but is very light in comparison to those harvested from trees.  If treated properly this shroomwood is an excellent building material.  Many of the mushrooms and molds here are edible and as export some worth their literal weight in gold.  Legends abound of foragers that have located truffles the size of kegs, truffles that allow them to retire to pleasure palaces in faraway seas.  Many of the mushrooms can be fermented into powerful liquor or into a more subtle wine.  While having its one rather ‘unique’ taste this mushroom wine is nearly immune to spoiling and is great for long voyages, even if it tastes like whiskey and gravy got into and fight and whiskey lost.