Dispatches from the briny depths

• The Sea of Mists frustrates even the most dedicated of cartographers. Some islands and atolls sink and rise again. Others drift, sometimes miles in a day, to the annoyance of traders, pirates, and fishermen alike.
• Hy-Brasil, an island of turquoise forests and shimmering palaces of red and gold, appears once a century. For the few hours it exists on our plane it becomes a beacon for the desperate and the wretched, who swarm its shores before the island again recedes into the mist. Nobody who has set foot upon its shores has ever returned.
• Piracy is endemic. The most feared raiders are the Doon-Var-For, shadowy forms who appear only on moonless nights. They steal only people, showing no interest in objects or livestock.
• Beyond the edge of the mist, days from any safe harbour, lie the impossibly remote islands of Drer and Montenay. Cut off from the learned doctors of the Kirk, their religious practices have drifted so far from orthodoxy that more than one mainland bishop has called for a crusade against the inhabitants of the dreary, windswept archipelago.
• The Mormaers of Kaithweir claim stewardship over many of the lands of the mist, occasionally sending a tribune to remind the indifferent islanders of that fact.
• The hanging monastery of Inis Dia, suspended in iron from atop a puffin-infested sea stack, has gone silent. It’s abbot, a tonsured and mutilated pretender to a distant throne, has been seen screaming profanities into the howling wind. All ships attempting approach have been driven back by hails of allows fired from the narrow windows of the cloister. More disturbingly, the seabirds themselves seem determined to keep Inis Dia isolated from the rest of the world. The crew of one fishing skiff who drifted too close to the monastery were found adrift, their eyes pecked out by gannets.
• The souls of the dead gather nightly upon the rocky shores of Carraigfuar. They do not take kindly to being disturbed.