This summary is out of character and intended to be brief. New players should be able to read it and get a rough orientation.

• The game is set in a world where a very strong current flows west to east among subcontinents, islands and archipelagos, occasionally stopping only for periods of days. Ships can in practice travel up-slope only during these pauses. Ships that fail to reach their destination are swept out into the empty ocean east of the setting where everyone dies.
• If you're very lucky you might manage to land on Lasthope, the last island before the empty ocean. Unfortunately Lasthope's government is something like a mediaeval theocratic version of North Korea and routinely kills refugees it perceives to be useless or who "don't fit in".
• Lasthope happens to have an ocean-capable ship called Slope Runner that's surplus to requirements. Rather than killing its latest batch of useless and dissidents it is stuffing them on this ship, along with any volunteers, and telling them to found a colony somewhere. This is controversial, some Lasthope theocrats think it's a bad idea and cut off food supplies to the crew. Diplomacy gets the food flowing again before departure but the ship departs notionally empty of food. (A little got snuck in but not much.)
• Lasthope seems to have decided a dwarf named Scriallig (was PC, now NPC) is the owner. He appoints Captain Johnnen Embrar (NPC) who insists on an absolute authority that most people seem willing to give. There are (check) 30 crew and 100 passengers.
• The crew votes to make for Oxxten, a large subcontinent NNW of Lasthope. (There was an alternative, nobody liked it.) Chances of surviving this journey is maybe fifty percent.
• Some things happened at departure time that mean Lasthope is not a place we want to go back to.

Continue to Chapter One