Ghost Islands, Part 2

The Obelisk of Wonders
A white obelisk with veins of gold towers over this small jungle coated island. This obelisks float about two meters above the ground in a small clearing in the jungle. The clearing appears to have once been part of a large building, perhaps a temple, as it is covered in large while tiles with strange writing carved into it. The obelisk has a faint glow to it at all times and serves often as a beacon and navigational aid for nearby ships. Periodically a beam of golden light shoots up to the heavens. A small village has formed on this island run by a small cult that worships the obelisk. The jungle is thick with fruit and the village has a clean and plentiful spring along with a decent boarding house. While friendly they are odd and keep referring to the obelisk as ‘her’ and speaking of ‘her upcoming arrival.’

Fields of Keld
At a distance this cold island looks as if it is covered in trees. As one gets closer they see the trees for what they really are, large carved totem poles. Thousands of totems dot this island and each marks the site of an ancient barrow mound. A few brave grave robbers had plundered some of the barrows. The grave robbers have reported vast treasure hordes guarder by elaborate mechanical traps and hordes of undead warriors. They have also reported that at night ghost roam the island looking for bodies to possess.

Excavation
This island is dominated by a vast ancient quarry. A gentile ramp leads down from tier to tier to the basin below. The rock that makes up each tier is radically different from the last, and after the sixth layer begins to exhibit strange features unnatural to normal geology. After the twelfth first layer, strange text is carved into the stones. After the eighteenth layer, strange fossils of bizarre sea creatures appear embedded in the stones. At the very bottom of the quarry, a single round metal hatch with a valve. Glowing red runes are inscribed on the metal and it is cold to the touch even during the hottest summers. No one has opened the hatch and anyone who has spent time near it hears distant whispers and is overcome with an overwhelming sense of dread.

Dry Corals
All around the Gray Sea are small settlements made on bunches of giant coral that jut from the sea often supplemented with structures made from salvaged shipwrecks. At night the coral that makes up the majority of these settlements glows with a faint bioluminescence. These settlements are populated almost exclusively by Koa-Toa and are quite friendly to visitors and ships. While these settlements have little in the way of accommodations they Koa-Toa do sell fish and freshwater, as well as totems and fetishes carved from the coral. Much like coral in the wild strange and dangerous creatures often lurk in the coral below the water line and many of the corals are poisonous. The Koa-Toa are used to these creatures and immune to their poisons and often fail to mention their presence to outsiders. Unfortunately many of these settlements are vulnerable and fall under attack for pirates and sahuagin.

Saltland
Considers an island by most Saltland is technically a very large pile of salt. A village made of large salt blocks sits near the shore. The village consists of houses, an inn, shops, storehouses, and even a temple. Only two of the buildings remain occupied, the inn and the store. The shop sell large blocks of salt, salted candies, and various salt cures. While the villages take coinage, fresh vegetables and clean water prized more than gold.

Kender Isles
This small chain of forested atolls and small islands is covered in ruins of a long forgotten, or soon to be created, empire and populated by a small degenerate race known as the Kender. The trees here are rich with fruits and the lagoons are thick with schools of fish. The tribal inhabitants of these isles look much like the Halflings common to the Blue Sea and there is even speculation that they are descended from a common ancestry. The Kender welcome travelers to their land often by traveling into The Gray Sea to invite expecting ships to their islands in their dugout canoes. By day the Kender are quite kind hearted. They lack any sort of concept of property, so they let guests take what they can from their islands (they also try to take whatever they can from their ships). However come nightfall the Kender descend into madness becoming violent and vicious cannibals. The Kender do not eat their victims right away rather capturing them, they instead consume them in a ritualistic fashion on the ruins that dot their islands to the profane gods.

Steel Eater Island
This island is covered in rusted and broken machines. Large corroded cogs and pipes stick out of the island and the surrounding waters. Vines and small shrubs cover many of the deteriorating parts on the island and everywhere there is a faint high pitched hum and the scent of copper and ozone on the wind. Small shimmering pools of a prismatic corrosive substance cover the island like pox marks. Most avoid the island as the mechanical degradation that affects the objects on this island is caused by the corrosive saliva from numerous packs of a small hairless six legged creatures with long snouts known as Steel Eaters. Steel Eaters eat the metal rich slurry that their corrosive saliva produces. More interesting their droppings are made of the more corrosive resistance metals, particularly silver, gold, and platinum. There have been more than a few brave sailors who have defied their captain’s orders and braved the pools of acid and jagged metal pieces of the dead machines for as much Steel Eater scat as they could carry. Rumor has it that the Steel Eaters are not natural to this island and that the eco-terrorist group The Tangelroots breed them here as part of a weapons project.

The Zeniths
The Zeniths are unique in that they are not true islands, nor are they an individual set of islands. Zeniths can appear as a singular instance, or more commonly as a cluster. The Zeniths are large hexagonal stone pillars that seem to grow out of the oceans floor then collapse over a short period of time. One day just the top of the Zenith will poke out of the waves, then a few months later it may tower more than a 100 meters above the waters, then a few months after may have collapsed back into the sea. Few Zeniths last for more than a year, but there are exceptions. These pillars also bring up whatever is on the ocean floor from where they sprout. While this is mostly sand, ooze, and rock, there have been instance of old shipwrecks, massive skeletons, ancient temples, and coral structures (with residents) being uplifted from the depths.

Brass Onion Island
Brass Onion Island was once a gleaming beautiful metropolis, its name long lost to time, filled with painted towers and covered walkways of shades of blue and green topped with brass domes but is now drowned under meters of ash. The people who inhabited this city made great inventions that used power harvested from the geologic power of the earth. In their hubris the people of this city drew too much eventually causing the cataclysm that engulfed their island. Now just the onion shaped brass domes of the city’s tallest towers jut from above the ashes, giving the island its name. A few brave treasure hunters have set up camps on this island using the few exposed towers to dig down to the lower levels of the city. Tails of both treasure and terror in equal measure have come from below the ash; stories of gardens with tress that bear gems, of restless dead that still burn from the inside, of mechanical menageries filled with flocks of clockwork animals, of an armored shark like creatures that hunts the ashes using sound.

Origami Isles
When approaching the Origami Isles the first thing one might notice is the abundance of loose papers floating in the sea. Strange currents seem to draw all the papers that fall into The Gray Sea towards this island. The second thing that one would notice is that all of the plant and animal life on this island is made from folder paper. This island in inhabited by a small society of origami Paper-Folk. The Paper-Folk are a friendly lot and are always looking to trade. While the Paper-Folk do not eat food like other creatures they consume paper and ink. The Paper-Folk and the origami creatures that inhabit this island ‘hatch’ from large balls of crumpled paper. Even stranger any paper brought to this island, and isn’t consumed by the Paper-Folk, has a chance to become one of these paper eggs. They only have one real resources for trade, but it is one that is extremely vital to inter sea trading, Sending Cranes – letters that when folder shift into birds and fly to any address written on them at an incredible rate of speed.

Last Rites
When old gods die, their shrines and the last of their followers make their way to the island of Last Rites. Here all of the vestments and altars of gods no longer worshiped are laid to rest in the sandy byways trapped in the perpetual twilight. Carved totem poles, metal icons, painted statues, and etched obelisks jut from the dunes like a petrified forest to dead gods. Little grows on this anti-sacred island save for dune grass. The last of the clergy from these dead gods makes up the population of Last Rites. This island is somber and quiet, save for the Market of Atonement, a marketplace that specializes in the fetishes and charms of obscure religions. Also on the island, The Books of Midnight, a library built into a perpetually sinking spiral staircase, that catalogs the collected holy books of all of the religions of the Gray and Known Seas.

The Eye of Al-Dren
The Eye of Al-Dren, names for the navigator who first discovered this island, is in a perpetual night. Nothing grows on this rocky island, save for small patches of faint bioluminescent blue mushrooms. At the center of this island is a complex consisting of a large stone observatory and a few out buildings all carved from a single block of red sandstone. The out buildings are stuffed to the brim with racks of star charts, cosmological texts, drawings of astral bodies, and various constellations. The telescope at the center of the facility is an overly complex chamber of whirling gears and leavers and aligning the machine required the inputs of hundreds of variables across various stations. This said, the telescope itself does not move when activated, but the sky around it does. This telescope is able to view the skies not only of any of the Known Seas, but also numerous other skies as well.

Tarchipelago
Great gobs of a tar float in the waters near the shore of this cluster of small sandy islands covered in vast bubbling tar pits. The pitch from these pits is known as being the best caulk and waterproofing agent across The Gray and the Known Seas. Ships of all stripes and all makes stop here for repairs and touchups and a small village of shipbuilders, known as The Stop, has sprouted up to serve this industry. The Stop will take on any job, and serve any ship, regardless of how unscrupulous or amoral the task or crew may be. However, cutthroats and sea dogs are not the most hazardous things on these islands. The great tar pits have a tendency to disgorge not only large animated oozes of the sticky noxious substance, but of vile agglomerations of tar and the bones from dozens of skeletons.

Bullet Bottom
Nodules of metal are common around the floor of this atoll. Most are knobby, roughly the size of a hens egg, and made of iron, lead, or rarely phosphate. Very rarely nodules of other metals, like gold, platinum, and even the god metals like mithril and adamantium have been found. The nodules must be harvested by hand or else risk disturbing the large schools of electric eels that live in this area. A number of small weapons shops and workshops have formed on the nearby atoll. Most are dedicated to rounding out the nodules to make bullets and bolt heads, but a few manufacture weapons themselves.

Al-Barshed
This island has but a single ruin on it, an ancient collapsed watchtower made of red sandstone. There is no plant or animal life on the island, save for some scrub grasses and the occasional washed up shell. Hundreds of names and dates have been carved into the ruined stone by passes by. This is a popular stop for ships; the island is relatively safe and the anchorage nearby is good. Few dare stay more than a night however, the longer one stays on the island the more of an overwhelming sense of pessimistic melancholy seems to affect their mood.

Hospital Island
This forested island was known to cartographers but uninhabited for centuries, until the Barnacle Pox hit the Known Seas and became a pandemic. A hospital was quickly erected here for the sufferers, providing a place where they could undergo the painful and bloody process of scraping themselves cured. The pox, while it has come and gone, seems to have had a lasting effect on the island. Great colonies of barnacles, formed from the discarded scrapings from the pox sufferers, can be found all over the island. If hurting for sustenance the barnacles can be boiled into a soup, but run the risk of getting infected. The brick hospital has been left to go fallow, now collapsed in many sections but still have cashes of medical supplies for those brave enough to navigate the dilapidated ruins and colonies of barnacles.

Merchants Court
This island appears to be plucked right out of the Shattered Isles and deposed in the mists of the Gray Sea. A huge brick great house, now just a burnt shell, was built in the style of the great manor houses popular over a century ago. This manor at one point was ravaged by a fire destroying most of its wings. Now the only intact buildings are the rickety stables and a small temple, its altar long removed. A fountain near the center of the island supplies fresh water and close inspection of the overgrown gardens will yield wild versions of some of the crops cultivated here years ago. Rumor has it that the ruins hide the vault of the patron of the manor and are still guarded by his ghost.

Ashen Shores
An island, more of a flat hill, juts out of the water. Its beaches are hard-packed ashes and broken pumice and chunks of obsidian. Buried just inches from the soil is thousands upon thousands of skeletons. Each skeleton is still alive, as much as a skeleton can be alive. Each is swimming, up from some unknown depth, trying to break the black surface. They rarely make it. When they do make it the scramble desperately trying to pack the ash and stones on their boney frame like a child packing a sand castle. These ash packed will try desperately to leave the island but if they touch water they fall apart. They cannot speak, they have nothing of value, and will try to stowaway if possible. Rumor has it that if kept away from the island for extend times they will eventually grow a pale skin that allows them to blend in with regular humans.