Welcome to the Black Ship of the Sunless – Episode I, Black Waters. This book equips you with the information necessary to run this episodic adventure for your players, maximizing your ability to imbue character, context, and conflict into your game session. If you are a player about to embark, I urge you to stop reading as the intended audience is your Game Master. This adventure assumes an experienced party of 2-4 players with characters levels 8-10 with moderate magic items.

Compatible with

OSRIC™ System (Old School System Reference and Index Compilation™). Which means you can run this with out of print versions of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

As a larger body of work, Black Ship of the Sunless has a central theme – corrupted history. This first episode, Black Waters, serves as the inciting incident, transitioning your players from reality to the surrealistic version of the island of Cozumel on the Yucatán peninsula in the year 1519. The player’s ship is about to smash into a coral reef and find themselves marooned and trapped at the footsteps of a pre-Columbian Maya temple at Tantum Cuzamil.

Each episode is free-standing, so you can weave this adventure into your own campaign as a one-shot or stay the course with the entire Black Ship of the Sunless campaign as a singular story. You may find the bound-in-time theme works a unique way create drama around a player character’s death, simulating what happens during the casting of the spell, Resurrection, where the “…recipient’s memory of whatever transpired between death and resurrection is erased” (52). This opening episode, Black Waters, works well as a way for characters that have never met to begin working together as they awake after an unsettling dream. If you have a group of strangers playing, having a unified goal helps bind the group together facilitating a fast start.

I also include recommended ambient sounds for each major location, created by Sword Coast Soundscapes, found on YouTube. Be sure and give them a like and subscribe.

My goal with the Black Ship of the Sunless campaign is equipping you with creative backdrops, mystical history, and dramatic plots so your players will really dig in and engage in your world. Feel free to modify and tailor details to suit your idea of fun for your players.

T. Elliot Cannon – April 2022