The Forgotten Tide

As recorded in waterlogged journals found drifting at the edge of the Void’s Wake, their pages somehow still legible despite the salt and time

“We are not pirates. We are the consequence of overlooking small things with sharp teeth.” —Attributed to the Black Bitch of Void’s Wake

The Truth of the Tide

Every merchant captain knows the signs: fog where no fog should be, the taste of copper in the wind, the way good halfling crew members suddenly find urgent business below deck. The Forgotten Tide is coming. Not with magic or divine mandate, but with something far more dangerous—the accumulated knowledge of those whom the world forgot to fear.

They sail from nowhere, strike with laughter, and vanish into waters that shouldn’t be navigable. They are the Forgotten Tide, and they have turned being overlooked into the deadliest weapon on the seas.

Origin: The Woman Who Shouldn’t Exist

She has no true name—or rather, she has so many that none stick. The Black Bitch of Void’s Wake was born to scandal: a drow exile who fled the Underdark pregnant with a halfling’s child after a merchant raid went wrong. The halfling trader had made her laugh—something forbidden in drow society. When her pregnancy showed, she ran to the surface rather than face execution.

The child was born in a smuggler’s cove during a storm, small and dark-skinned, with her mother’s silver hair and her father’s clever fingers. The halfling sailing communities wouldn’t take them—the mother reeked of Underdark cruelty. The drow would have killed them both on sight.

So they lived in the spaces between ports, working the docks, learning the tides.

The First Laugh

The Shadow’s Laugh was a derelict halfling racing sloop, abandoned after its crew died of plague. She was seventeen, working as a rigger, when she found it rotting in a hidden inlet. The ship’s name had been “The Swift Laugh,” but weather had worn away the first word, leaving only shadows of letters.

She spent two years rebuilding it in secret, using techniques her mother taught her from the Underdark—treating the wood with mushroom lacquers that made it resist rot, weaving the rigging with techniques that made knots hold better in darkness than in light. When she finally sailed it out, the harbormaster said he’d never seen a ship move quite like that—as if it found channels in the wind others missed.

The Gathering Tide

She found others like her—not mixed-bloods, but the forgotten ones. Halflings whose families had been cheated by larger folk one too many times. Sailors blacklisted for refusing to stay silent about captain’s crimes. Those who’d sailed through the Void’s Wake and returned changed—not magical, just… different. Able to see currents others missed, hear storms in the distance, feel when a ship was being followed.

They came to her because she understood: the world had overlooked them, so they’d make their own world on the waves.

The Void’s Wake Calling

The Void’s Wake had always been there—a dead zone where compasses spin uselessly and thick fog never quite lifts. Ships avoided it, marking it on charts with warnings. But she’d grown up hearing her mother’s stories of navigating the Underdark’s twisted passages, and her father’s halfling knowledge of reading wind and water.

She realized the Void’s Wake wasn’t cursed—it was just different. The magnetic fields were reversed. The currents ran in spirals instead of straight lines. The fog had patterns if you knew how to read them. Where others saw chaos, her mixed heritage let her see a different kind of order.

The Shadow’s Laugh was the first ship to use the Void’s Wake as a hunting ground. They’d strike from the fog and vanish back into it before naval forces could respond.

The Fleet Structure

The Tide’s Hierarchy

The Black Bitch - Supreme Admiral of the Forgotten Tide

Rules from The Shadow’s Laugh
Final word on all major raids and territorial disputes
Maintains the master charts of the Void’s Wake

Tide Captains - The inner circle of seven captains who’ve sailed the Void’s Wake solo

Each commands 5-8 ships in their “Current”
Meet monthly at hidden anchorages to coordinate
Identified by silver-black sashes made from spider silk and sailcloth

Wake Riders - Experienced captains who can navigate the Void’s Wake edges

Command individual ships
Have proven themselves in at least three major raids
Wear black pearls taken from Void’s Wake oyster beds

Navigators - The most valued non-captain position

Many are halflings trained in Wind-Whispering
Keep the secret charts and fog patterns
Often paid more than first mates due to their crucial knowledge

Shadow Mates - First mates trained in both combat and the Tide’s special techniques

Learn the Underdark wood treatments
Master the halfling rigging systems
Often command prize ships temporarily

Tidewrights - Ship crafters and modifiers

Blend drow alchemy with halfling shipbuilding
Maintain the fleet’s special advantages
Guard their techniques jealously

Salts - Regular crew members

No questions asked about past
Share in profits equally after officers’ cuts
Can challenge for advancement through proving raids

The Current System

The fleet divides into seven “Currents,” each with its own character:

The Black Current - The Black Bitch’s personal fleet

Elite crews, fastest ships
Strikes the most dangerous targets

The Fog Current - Specializes in vanishing tactics

Masters of misdirection and false flags
Often runs decoy operations

The Trade Current - Handles smuggling and black market operations

Maintains legitimate merchant covers
Manages the Tide’s finances

The Blood Current - Former naval deserters and pressed sailors

Most aggressive fighters
Handles military targets

The Small Current - Predominantly halfling crews

Smallest, fastest ships
Scouts and intelligence gathering

The Deep Current - Those most changed by the Void’s Wake

Sail the deepest into the dead zone
Handle… unusual cargo

The New Current - Training fleet for recruits

Proves newcomers before full acceptance
Led by veterans teaching the Tide’s ways

Laws and Traditions

The Tide’s Code

No slavery (the Black Bitch’s absolute rule—her drow mother fled slavery)
Equal shares for equal work (halfling fairness)
No betraying the fleet’s anchorages (punishment: marooning in the Void’s Wake)
Children and scholars sail free (unless they’re carrying gold)
A captured ship’s carpenter and navigator may join or go free (practical—need good craftsmen)

The Three Challenges

Any crew member can advance by:

Taking a Prize - Capturing a ship single-handedly or with minimal crew
Sailing the Wake - Solo navigating through the Void’s Wake and returning
Drawing Blood - Defeating a superior in combat (rarely to death—waste of good sailors)

Sacred Traditions

The Naming Tradition: Every member takes a “Tide Name” when they join—their old name is literally forgotten. These names are always two parts: something dark (honoring the drow heritage) and something small or overlooked (honoring the halfling way). Examples: Shadowcoin, Darkpenny, Blackmirth, Voidwhistle, Inkrat, Nightspark

The Forgetting Ritual: When someone joins, their past is ceremonially “forgotten”:

They write their old name on sailcloth
The cloth is burned with special incense
As smoke dissipates, so does their past
The crew shares “Void Water”—rum mixed with water from the Void’s Wake

The Shadow Hour: Every ship observes one hour after sunset where no lights are lit, teaching crews to work in darkness.

The Small Share: Before plunder is divided, a “small share” is set aside for ship maintenance, bribes, and supporting crew families.

The Laughing Charge: The Tide attacks in silence until boarding, when they burst into laughter—deeply unsettling to enemies.

The Void’s Wake Toast: “To the forgotten and the overlooked—may we stay that way!”

Calendar Observances

The Night of Small Shadows: Annual new moon when the entire fleet goes dark for maintenance and planning.

The Turning of the Tide: Celebrates the Black Bitch’s first successful raid with races, contests, and competitive lying.

Mourning Current: Dead crew are wrapped in black sailcloth and given to the sea at the Void’s Wake edge, their Tide Names forgotten so they can rest.

Hidden Anchorages

Forgotten Reach - Main base, hidden in the Void’s Wake itself

Built in a bubble of calm water surrounded by the dead zone
Constructed from shipwrecks fused together
Contains the Tide’s treasury and archives

Inkwater - Drow-style cave port

Carved into volcanic cliffs
Ships painted here with light-absorbing mixture
Underground freshwater lakes for supplies

The Scatter - Dozens of tiny islets that appear disconnected

Actually connected by underwater passages halflings can swim
Each islet holds different supplies
Looks uninhabited from above

Port Nowhere - A “floating” port

Actually five large ships lashed together
Moves location every season
Acts as mobile resupply point

The Forgotten Wharf - Hidden in plain sight

Looks like a derelict pier in a major port
Actually fully operational at night
Bribes keep authorities blind

Relations with the World

The Halfling Maritime Guild

Officially condemns the Tide while privately passing information about vulnerable targets. The unwritten “Copper Penny Accord” ensures mutual non-aggression between Guild halflings and the Tide.

Crystal Dwarves of Nagburim

Mutual avoidance—the Tide won’t touch Arcanite shipments. The Silent Market allows Crystal Dwarves to move goods without documentation in exchange for crystalline navigation equipment.

The Knight Orders

Knights of the Tide respect them as fellow servants of the sea. Other orders view them as pirates—criminal but not priority threats. The Black Bitch avoids knight transports: “Let heroes reach their destinies.”

Drow Houses

House Vel’Sharen seeks vengeance for the Black Bitch’s mother’s disgrace. House Mal’Drakon secretly trades Underdark goods for surface intelligence. Most drow view the Tide as proof of surface corruption.

Other Pirates

The Scarlet Fleet fights them on sight but avoids their territory. The Coral Throne (merfolk pirates) maintains a non-aggression pact. Independent pirates either admire or resent their organization.

Coastal Nations

Salandrian Empire offers bounties while secretly using them against enemies. Free Ports tax their plunder for safe harbor. Northern Reaches respect them as fellow raiders.

The Greater Powers

The Luminari (Serane): Carefully neutral—“Heroes and pirates shouldn’t mix”
The Prisoner’s Agents: Kill on sight, no quarter given
Dragons: Find them amusing—small creatures causing large disruptions
The Titans: Acknowledged but not worshipped, except professional courtesy to Jal’Kara

Current Power

The Forgotten Tide now commands forty-three confirmed ships, each modified with:

Drow lacquers making them nearly invisible against dark water
Halfling rigging techniques for maximum speed
Crews trained in seventeen different disappearing techniques

The Black Bitch rules from The Shadow’s Laugh, painted with light-absorbing mixture of squid ink and Underdark minerals. At night, the ship is just a darker piece of darkness on the water.

They control no ports officially, yet their cut appears in every major maritime trade. Every smuggler knows to pay tribute. Every merchant captain knows to avoid the Void’s Wake. Every halfling sailor knows that if the world becomes too cruel, there’s a fleet where being small and overlooked is actually an advantage.

The Shadow’s Doctrine

Three principles guide the Forgotten Tide:

“The sea doesn’t care about your bloodline” - Your past means nothing here
“Small advantages compound” - A dozen tiny edges win more than one big gamble
“They can’t catch what they don’t remember” - Leave no survivors, but also leave no memorable traces

Superstitions and Warnings

Never count your ships—being too precisely known brings bad luck
The Third Laugh—if you hear laughter thrice before a raid, abort
Spider’s Silver—spiders aboard mean the Black Bitch’s blessing
The Halfling’s Penny—keep one copper you never spend for luck
The Black Mark—betrayers are tattooed with Void’s Wake ink that burns in sun and freezes in moonlight

The Great Question

What is the Forgotten Tide? A pirate fleet? A maritime nation? A philosophy made manifest on the waves?

Perhaps they are what happens when the overlooked realize their invisibility is armor, when the small understand that size is just one dimension of power, when those cast out from two worlds create a third world between the waves.

Or perhaps, as the Black Bitch says when deep in her cups, they’re just the punchline to a joke the universe doesn’t yet understand—that the forgotten, by definition, cannot be defeated, because defeating something requires remembering it exists.

A Warning to Sailors

If you sail the eastern waters and the fog rises where no fog should be, if your compass spins without reason, if you hear laughter carrying across the waves—lower your weapons, raise a white flag with a copper penny tied to it, and prepare to pay the small tax of sailing through forgotten waters.

Because the Forgotten Tide doesn’t need to destroy you. They just need you to forget you ever saw them. And you will. Everyone does.

They say if you sail toward the Void’s Wake on a foggy night and listen carefully, you can hear it: the sound of The Shadow’s Laugh’s crew singing working songs in three languages, while their captain stands at the helm, silver hair catching moonlight, proving that the overlooked can rule the waves.

“We are the tide that charts forget to mark, the current that shouldn’t exist. We are what happens when shadows learn to sail.” —Final entry in a merchant captain’s log, found floating with no ship in sight

Compiled from sailor’s tales, port authority records that contradict themselves, and the testimony of those who claim to have sailed with the Tide—though of course, they’ve forgotten their own names

Extended Lore of the Forgotten Tide

Additional chronicles, customs, and mysteries surrounding the most enigmatic pirate faction to sail Lumia’s seas

The Deep Current: Those Changed by the Wake

Of all the Currents in the Forgotten Tide, none are more whispered about than the Deep Current—those who’ve spent too long in the Void’s Wake and returned… different.

The Changes

It starts small. A sailor notices they can hold their breath for ten minutes instead of two. Their eyes adapt to darkness faster than they should. They begin to hear voices in the sound of water against the hull—not mad voices, but instructions, navigation tips, warnings about storms three days distant.

Those who sail deeper into the Wake report more dramatic changes:

Hair that moves like seaweed even in still air
Skin that develops a faint luminescence in absolute darkness
The ability to taste the difference between waters from different parts of the ocean
Dreams that show events happening on other ships in real-time

Captain Morrow “Deepdrinker” Vane

The leader of the Deep Current went into the Void’s Wake alone for thirty days. When she returned, her crew barely recognized her. Her eyes had gone completely black—no whites, no iris, just deep pools that reflected things that weren’t there. She doesn’t eat anymore, just drinks seawater and seems nourished by it.

But she can navigate in conditions that would destroy other ships. She knows where every reef is before charts mark them. She can feel schools of fish from miles away. The Deep Current follows her because she’s become something between human and ocean, and in that space, impossibilities become mere difficulties.

The Theorized Truth

Some scholars who’ve studied the Void’s Wake from a safe distance theorize it’s not cursed but alive—a massive colonial organism like a jellyfish the size of a city, existing mostly in dimensions we can’t perceive. Those who enter it don’t go mad; they start perceiving reality from its perspective. The Deep Current aren’t corrupted—they’re translated.

The Copper Penny Accord: A Secret History

The Public Story

The Halfling Maritime Guild publicly condemns the Forgotten Tide as pirates and criminals. They issue statements, post bounties, and warn their members against any association with these “traitors to halfling maritime tradition.”

The Private Truth

The Copper Penny Accord was struck five years ago in a neutral port, between the Black Bitch herself and Harfoot Bronzebeard, the Guild’s Shadow Admiral (a position that officially doesn’t exist).

The terms are simple:

The Forgotten Tide never attacks Guild-certified halfling vessels
The Guild never provides intelligence about Tide movements to naval forces
Information about corrupt merchants who cheat halflings flows quietly to the Tide
Retired Tide members can purchase Guild certification for 10,000 gold—no questions asked
Both sides deny this agreement exists

The Penny’s Journey

Every Guild ship carries a copper penny nailed to the inside of the crow’s nest—invisible from deck level but clear to anyone who climbs high enough. It’s the same with Tide ships. If you know where to look, you can see the alliance hiding in plain sight.

When Guild members need to pass information to the Tide, they leave three copper pennies stacked at specific taverns. When the Tide needs to warn the Guild about naval movements, they ensure a Guild ship “accidentally” finds floating salvage with intelligence hidden inside.

The Bronzebeard Question

Harfoot Bronzebeard is rumored to be the Black Bitch’s actual father—Willum Brightpenny was an alias. Others say Bronzebeard is her uncle, or that there’s no relation but a shared understanding that halflings must stick together, even the criminal ones. The truth is guarded more carefully than any treasure.

The Tidewrights: Masters of Impossible Ships

The Craft

Tidewrights don’t just build ships—they create vessels that shouldn’t work but do. Their masterwork is blending three traditions:

Drow engineering that assumes no access to wood or open water
Halfling efficiency that makes every inch of space useful
Human ambition that refuses to accept limitations

Sacred Techniques

The Mushroom Treatment: Using Underdark fungi to create a lacquer that makes wood actively repel water rather than just resist it. Ships treated this way are 30% faster because water doesn’t “stick” to the hull.

Spider Silk Rigging: Invisible threads woven through normal rope that triple its strength. In fog, these threads catch moisture and become visible, creating an eerie glowing web effect that terrifies enemies.

The Living Nail: Nails grown from a special coral that continues to grow after installation, becoming stronger over time. A ship maintained with living nails essentially heals itself.

Void Glass: Windows made from sand collected from the Void’s Wake beaches, melted with driftwood fires. The glass is perfectly clear from inside but appears black from outside, and it never fogs regardless of temperature difference.

The Laughing Wood: Planks from trees that grew near the Void’s Wake, whose grain creates a whistling sound in high winds that sounds disturbingly like laughter.

Master Tidewright Korvus “Saltwood” Grimm

The chief Tidewright is a human who spent seven years as a Crystal Dwarf slave, learning their construction techniques before escaping. Combined with his subsequent education in halfling shipbuilding and drow alchemy, he’s created ships that seem to violate physics.

His masterwork is the Probability’s Jest, a ship with sails that can catch wind from any direction, including directly ahead. He won’t explain how it works, saying only, “If you understood it, it would stop working.”

Hull Singing: The Three-Voice Harmony

The Practice

When Forgotten Tide crews perform maintenance, they sing. Not sea shanties but something older and stranger—a combination of three traditions that creates harmonics that some say help bind the treatments to the wood.

The Three Voices

The Drow Chant: Low, rhythmic, almost subsonic. Sung in the Drow tongue, it speaks of darkness as a living thing, of shadows that protect rather than threaten. The words are actually chemical formulas disguised as religious verse, timing the application of treatments.

The Halfling Wind-Song: High, lilting, matching the rhythm of waves. It contains coded information about wind patterns, current directions, and navigation markers. New crew members often don’t realize they’re learning to navigate while they sing.

The Sailor’s Drumbeat: Percussion using hammers, brushes, and bare hands on the hull. This keeps time but also tests the wood for weak spots—experienced singers can hear rot or damage by how the rhythm changes.

When all three combine, witnesses describe an almost hypnotic effect. Naval spies who’ve gotten close enough to hear it report being unable to remember the words afterward, just a feeling of profound sadness mixed with defiant joy.

The Night of Small Shadows: Hidden Truths

The Public Face

Once a year, during the new moon, the entire Forgotten Tide fleet goes dark. No raids, no movement, no lights. It’s described as maintenance time, planning season, a chance to honor both drow and halfling heritage.

The Secret Ritual

This is when the Black Bitch performs the Wake Binding—a ritual that ties new ships to the Void’s Wake itself. The process involves:

Sailing the ship to the exact center of the Void’s Wake
Dropping anchor with chain made from metal mined below the ocean floor
The crew spending the night in absolute darkness and silence
At dawn (though dawn doesn’t really come to the Wake), pulling up the anchor

Ships that undergo Wake Binding can enter the Void’s Wake without getting lost. More importantly, they become slightly uncountable—census takers skip them, naval logs forget to record them, and even direct observers have trouble remembering exact details about them.

The Price

Every Wake Binding costs someone their memory of life before the Tide. Not magically erased, just… forgotten. They remember skills, faces, events, but not how they felt about them. It’s voluntary—there’s always someone ready to forget a painful past—but it’s permanent.

The Forgotten Wharf: A Port That Doesn’t Exist

Location: Everywhere and Nowhere

The Forgotten Wharf isn’t in one place—it’s in seventeen. In every major port, there’s a pier that everyone knows is abandoned, derelict, unsafe. The boards are rotten, the pilings are worm-eaten, the whole thing should have collapsed years ago.

But between midnight and dawn, if you know the signs, these piers become the Forgotten Wharf. The rot is illusion, the decay is paint, and the “abandoned” warehouses are full of very active smuggling operations.

The Keepers

Each Wharf section is maintained by a Keeper—usually someone who appears to be a homeless drunk living under the pier. They’re actually intelligence officers, tracking every ship that enters the harbor, every cargo that moves through the port, every sailor who drinks too much and talks too freely.

The Keepers communicate through a complex system of seemingly random debris placement. A broken bottle here, a coil of rope there, and suddenly every Forgotten Tide ship knows which vessels are carrying what cargo and when they’re sailing.

The Emergency Protocol

If a Keeper is discovered, they trigger the Forgetting—a combination of arson, staged structural collapse, and careful rumor-spreading that makes everyone “remember” that the pier was destroyed years ago. Within a month, a different pier in the same port becomes the new Forgotten Wharf, and the cycle continues.

The Laughing Death: When Pirates Become Legend

The Phenomenon

Ships found drifting, cargo intact, crew alive but… wrong. They laugh constantly—not hysterically, but quietly, consistently, as if they’re in on a joke no one else understands. They can’t (or won’t) explain what happened. They function normally otherwise but never stop chuckling.

The Truth

This is the Black Bitch’s ultimate mercy. Crews that fight too hard, that wound her people, that can’t be allowed to report what they’ve seen—they receive the Laughing Death. It’s not magic but a combination of:

A fungal spore from the Underdark that affects the brain’s humor centers
Carefully staged traumatic events that create dissociative states
Post-hypnotic suggestions planted during the raid
A final dose of Void Water that makes the whole experience feel like a dream

The affected crews are harmless but useless. No navy wants sailors who giggle during combat. No merchant wants crew who chuckle while counting cargo. They’re discharged, pensioned off, forgotten—exactly as intended.

The Cure

The Black Bitch knows the cure—a specific combination of herbs that grows only on islands in the Void’s Wake. She’s never used it. As she says, “They’re happier this way. They’ve seen the joke of existence. Why would I take that from them?”

Future Legends: What’s Coming

The Great Convergence

Rumors speak of the Black Bitch planning something massive—gathering every ship, every crew member, every ally for something she calls “The Great Convergence.” Some say she’s planning to attack a major port. Others believe she’s found something in the Void’s Wake that requires everyone to retrieve.

The truth might be simpler and more ambitious: she’s planning to make the Forgotten Tide into a recognized nation, with the Void’s Wake as its territory and Forgotten Reach as its capital.

The Successor Ships

Seven ships are being built in absolute secrecy, each one incorporating different experimental techniques:

The Inverse Current - Sails backwards as fast as forwards
The Null Meridian - Exists in two places simultaneously
The Probability’s Edge - Arrives before it departs
The Drowning Star - Sails underwater as easily as above
The Echo’s Wake - Creates false copies of itself
The Forgotten Name - Erases itself from memory as it sails
The Last Laugh - Purpose unknown, even to its builders

The Transformation Theory

Some scholars believe the Void’s Wake is spreading, inch by inch, year by year. If true, the Forgotten Tide aren’t just pirates—they’re the inheritors of a transformed ocean, adapted to new rules while others cling to old ones.

The Black Bitch neither confirms nor denies this theory. She just laughs—that particular laugh that could mean anything or nothing, the laugh that echoes across water on foggy nights, the laugh that says the universe’s greatest joke is yet to come.

“We are not criminals. We are evolution. The sea is changing, and we’re changing with it. You can join us in forgetting the old ways, or you can be forgotten with them.” —Attributed to the Black Bitch, though she denies saying it in those exact words

Part of the Lumia canon, drawn from the LuminariMUD world-lore project.