The Abyss
Miles beneath the open sea south of the Reef, a realm of perpetual darkness and crushing pressure where life runs on chemistry rather than sunlight. The Cecaelia live here, come up rarely, and would rather you did not call them Benthies.
The Land
Hydrothermal vents and cold seeps supply the energy the sun cannot, feeding an ecosystem of strange and largely bioluminescent creatures that use their own light both to hunt and to lure. Nothing above marks the Abyss except the weather: the southern sea over it is stormy year-round, which the Undine consider fitting.
Below and beyond it, at depths where even a Cecaelia expedition turns back, the cold weed-choked water of the Black Meres begins — and Vahl the Weedking's boundary is somewhere down there, being quietly moved.
The Cecaelia
Adapted to the extremes: bioluminescent markings, specialised gills, and squid-like tentacles in place of a fish's tail. Secretive to a degree that reads as rudeness on the surface and as ordinary good manners at depth.
They meet surface-dwellers seldom and the Merrow not much more often. When they must go up they carry their own pressure with them, holding a bubble of deep water by magic — though a small and suspiciously regarded minority have begun wearing engineered pressure suits instead, on the grounds that it hurts less.
Encounters
Roll d100. No sunlight, and everything that makes its own light is using it as bait. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1d4 Cecaelia on a vent survey, who would rather you had not come down | — |
| 10–16 | a cold seep field, and the chemosynthetic mats around it holding a whole small nation | — |
| 17–23 | 2d6 blind amphipods grazing a vent chimney, and delighted to be spoken to | ¼ |
| 24–30 | a pressure incident: 1d3 of a Colddoor expedition, bubble failing, still conscious | — |
| 31–36 | 1d4 bioluminescent lure-fish, each pretending to be something safer | 3 |
| 37–42 | 1d3 backswimmers of an abyssal strain, hanging inverted in the dark | 2 |
| 43–48 | 1d2 vent-crabs contesting a chimney they consider inherited property | 4 |
| 49–54 | 1d4 deep diving beetles, blind, and hunting entirely by pressure wave | 4 |
| 55–60 | 1 cicada-killer analogue: a wasp-form that takes prey away alive and awake | 5 |
| 61–66 | 1d2 abyssal tarantula kin walking the seep flats on stilt legs | 7 |
| 67–72 | 1 giant water bug, deep strain, ambushing from beneath the sediment | 7 |
| 73–77 | 1d2 crayfish of the vent shelf, armoured, clawed, and certain | 10 |
| 78–82 | 1 greater centipede analogue swimming the black, hunting by touch alone | 10 |
| 83–87 | 1 huntsman spider kin running the chimney walls at pressure | 9 |
| 88–91 | 1 abyssal frog-form at a seep, and the tongue arrives first here too | 9 |
| 92–94 | 1 Cecaelia hold's watch-beast, which is a bullfrog in every way that matters | 13 |
| 95–96 | 1 lesser snake, eel-formed, with no sound to give it away at this depth | 14 |
| 97–98 | 1 garter snake kin quartering the shelf | 18 |
| 99 | a Weedking patrol out of the Black Meres, where the boundary should not yet be | 16 |
| 00 | 1 greater snake out of the deep water, lit along its whole length | 25 |