Salt & Steel: Factions & Civilizations
Document type: World & Lore — Foundational
Status: Canonical
Last updated: 2026-04
See also: World Overview | Mythology & Supernatural | History & Timeline | Design Pillars
Overview
The Shattered Expanse is a world of pressure and proximity. Ten thousand islands, a half-dozen empires, a hundred smaller polities, and a sea full of people who have decided — for reasons ranging from ambition to desperation — that they would rather chart their own course than sail someone else's. These factions define the political, cultural, and supernatural landscape the player navigates. They have histories. They have grievances. They have things they want and things they fear. None of them are entirely wrong.
This document defines the major factions of Salt & Steel: who they are, what they want, how they look and sound, what they mean mechanically, and how they relate to each other. It is the foundation from which every quest involving faction relationships, every reputation gate, every political decision, and every moment of moral complexity is built.
Major Civilizations and Empires
The Aurantine Concordat
Core Identity: The Mediterranean-inspired trade empire. Wealthy, bureaucratic, ancient, and increasingly nervous.
Tagline: "Commerce is civilization. Civilization is peace. Peace is ours to keep."
Who They Are:
The Aurantine Concordat is the largest single political entity in the Ember Seas, built over four centuries on a foundation of trade networks, diplomatic marriages, and a navy so large that most rivals chose accommodation over confrontation. They did not conquer the world; they bought it, port by port, treaty by treaty, until buying looked indistinguishable from ruling. The Concordat's capital, Aurantis Prime, is a city-island of marble and tilework, its harbor a forest of masts from every nation that trades within the Concordat's network. Its bureaucracy is ancient, layered, and self-perpetuating — a thousand offices staffed by families who have held them for generations, each protecting its particular corner of the institutional architecture.
The Concordat sees itself as the world's adult: the power that maintains order, enforces contracts, suppresses piracy (which they call "commercial violence"), and keeps the sea lanes flowing. From their perspective, the alternative to the Concordat is chaos — and they are not entirely wrong about this. Their trade networks keep island populations fed, their navies suppress the worst predatory activity on the sea lanes, and their diplomatic corps prevents dozens of small wars per decade that would otherwise happen.
What they don't acknowledge, or only acknowledge in carefully coded internal documents, is the cost of this order: trade agreements that impoverish smaller partners, port taxation that makes independent commerce nearly impossible, a legal system structured to benefit Concordat-affiliated merchants at the expense of everyone else, and a navy that is increasingly used to enforce economic compliance rather than suppress genuine piracy.
Appearance and Aesthetics:
Aurantine architecture is derived from the old Mediterranean — marble columns, terracotta roof tiles, tilework facades in geometric patterns, courtyard gardens open to the sky. Their navy favors pristine white ships with gilt detailing, triangular pennants in gold and blue, and officers in formal uniforms that communicate hierarchy at a glance. Their merchant vessels are heavier and more imposing than their counterparts in other factions — the wealth they carry is visible in the construction quality.
Aurantine citizens and officials have a visual language of status expressed through fabric and jewelry: linen of particular quality, gold thread work, specific stone types in signet rings that indicate institutional rank. An Aurantine trade representative can be identified by their clothing before they open their mouths.
Gameplay Implications:
The Concordat controls the largest number of ports in the launch region. High Concordat reputation grants access to the best-equipped markets, the most reliable supply networks, and diplomatic immunity in Concordat territory. Low Concordat reputation (which piracy naturally generates) locks players out of major trading hubs and adds Concordat naval patrols to their threat landscape.
The Concordat's quest lines involve navigating bureaucratic complexity: forged letters of marque, diplomatic interventions that require social skill, smuggling that must appear legitimate, and the possibility of becoming a Concordat privateer (legal sanction for piracy against Concordat enemies, at the cost of independence). Their internal faction politics — the merchant families, the navy, the bureaucracy, and the reformist elements — create opportunities for players who prefer intrigue to confrontation.
What They Fear: The Ironclad Dominion's growing technological advantage. The Tidecallers' predictions about returning old-god activity. Any pirate captain who becomes too famous to ignore and too skilled to catch.
The Maelstrom Confederacy
Core Identity: The Caribbean-inspired pirate confederation. Democratic, chaotic, and held together by the Code of the Deep.
Tagline: "No flag but your own. No law but the Code."
Who They Are:
The Maelstrom Confederacy is not a government in any conventional sense. It is an agreement among those who have chosen to live outside conventional governments, formalized just enough to prevent mutual annihilation. Founded approximately eighty years ago when three major pirate captains settled their differences and signed the Articles of the Deep, the Confederacy has grown into a loose association of several thousand pirates, organized into independent crews but bound by a shared code and a shared council — the Grand Muster, which meets twice yearly on the neutral island of Kaldera Bay.
The Code of the Deep establishes the Confederacy's rules: no pirate attacks another Confederacy member without first challenging them formally. Prisoners taken by Confederacy ships are offered a choice (join or be ransomed, not killed). Captains must share prize money according to the schedule set by their Articles. The Grand Muster has authority over disputes between Confederacy captains and over decisions that affect all members, but individual captains are sovereign on their own ships.
The Confederacy's democracy is real but messy. The Grand Muster is genuinely a voting body where a one-ship captain has as much voice as the admiral of a fleet. In practice, the most powerful captains dominate through reputation, intimidation, and the simple fact that their opinions matter more when they are backed by sixty guns. The Confederacy is fractious, argumentative, occasionally violent within its own ranks, and deeply committed to the principle that no one person should hold power over the rest of them — a principle born from the experience of living under exactly that kind of power.
The player begins affiliated with the Maelstrom Confederacy. It is the faction that most directly enables the pirate fantasy, provides the scaffolding for early reputation building, and presents the moral complexity that defines Salt & Steel's tone: the Confederacy is not good, but it is free, and freedom — real freedom, with its consequences and its costs — is a serious thing.
Appearance and Aesthetics:
Confederacy ships and people are visually diverse by design — the Confederacy draws from every maritime culture in the world, and its visual language reflects that. The unifying elements are pragmatism (everything is chosen for function before appearance) and a certain deliberate defiance: Jolly Rogers in dozens of variations flying from every masthead, clothing assembled from prizes taken across the years, weapons worn visibly because concealment is not their way. Ship designs vary widely, but Confederacy vessels tend to be modified — reinforced for combat, stripped for speed, with customizations that communicate their captain's particular approach. No two Confederacy ships look quite alike, but they all look like they have been somewhere.
Gameplay Implications:
The Confederacy is the player's starting faction and their primary social structure. Confederacy reputation opens pirate ports, provides crew recruitment networks, and enables the political content of the Confederacy's own governance — players can participate in Grand Muster politics, broker deals between rival captains, and influence the Confederacy's evolving response to external pressure.
The Confederacy's internal factions — the aggressive raiders who want to expand operations, the pragmatists who want better trade relationships with willing empires, the idealists who believe in building a genuine alternative society — create the Confederacy's main narrative tension. Players must navigate these internal politics while managing external threats.
What They Fear: The Aurantine Concordat eventually deploying its full naval force against them. The Ironclad Dominion offering a deal that splits the Confederacy. Any captain within their own ranks becoming ambitious enough to want to end the Code and rule alone.
The Ironclad Dominion
Core Identity: The industrial maritime power. Steam and steel, mining the old world's bones for the new world's future.
Tagline: "What is buried is wasted. What is extracted is progress."
Who They Are:
The Ironclad Dominion is the newest major power in the Ember Seas, risen to prominence within the last century on the back of a technological breakthrough: the practical application of Urrathi artifact energy to drive mechanical systems. Their engineers have reverse-engineered fragments of the old civilization's power infrastructure — not perfectly, not safely, but well enough to run steam engines, drive specialized drilling equipment, and power the weaponry that makes their warships different from anything else on the water.
The Dominion began as a mining consortium — several wealthy investor-captains who pooled resources to exploit the seabed for Urrathi salvage. It grew into a state when the wealth generated required protection, the protection required ships, the ships required a navy, and the navy required, eventually, a government to direct it. The Dominion is thus structured like a company that became a country: its governing council is a board of directors, its laws are commercial regulations, and its military exists primarily to protect economic interests. It is extremely efficient at what it does, somewhat indifferent to what it costs others.
The Dominion is not evil. It employs hundreds of thousands, provides wages and stability to populations that had neither, and produces technological goods — medicines, tools, materials — that genuinely improve lives across the Expanse. What it is, is aggressively indifferent to the supernatural implications of what it extracts. The Urrathi didn't hide their power generation infrastructure by accident. The Dominion's engineers know this and have developed a comprehensive institutional attitude of not thinking about it.
Appearance and Aesthetics:
The Dominion's visual language is industrial contrast — the organic chaos of traditional maritime architecture next to the geometric precision of their facilities. Their ships have a distinctive profile: lower in the water than comparable vessels, with machinery visible on the deck (pumping equipment, crane arms, drilling rigs), and a characteristic smell of machine oil and coal smoke. Their military vessels are armored with iron plate in ways that make them slower but significantly harder to damage conventionally. Dominion soldiers and sailors are uniformed with mechanical precision, their equipment standardized in ways that distinguish them from the individual expression of Confederacy pirates or the status-marking of Aurantine merchants.
Their port facilities are the most technically impressive in the world — cranes, warehouses, dry docks capable of servicing the largest ships, and always a facility for processing whatever has come up from the seabed.
Gameplay Implications:
The Dominion represents a specific moral and narrative tension: technological progress powered by reckless exploitation of dangerous old-world material. Players who engage with Dominion content gain access to the most powerful conventional equipment in the game — their smithed goods, their engineered ship components, their salvaged Urrathi tools. But Dominion engagement also implicates the player in what the Dominion is doing to the seabed and the communities around its operations.
The Dominion is valuable as an ally against the Aurantine Concordat (they are the primary naval counterweight) and as a source of technological content. They are a threat in the Obsidian Deep expansion, where their deep-drilling operations are actively disturbing things that should not be disturbed.
What They Fear: Proof that what they're extracting is dangerous in ways they can't manage. The Tidecallers being right. Anyone with enough evidence to turn the Concordat against them.
The Tidecallers
Core Identity: The mystical island nation. Ancient, strange, necessary, and deeply aware that the world is in worse trouble than anyone else will admit.
Tagline: "The tide knows what we have forgotten. We know what the tide has not yet said."
Who They Are:
The Tidecallers are the world's oldest surviving civilization that is actually aware of what it is surviving. Their island nation — a scattered archipelago on the edges of the Ember Seas, with outposts in every major region — predates the current age by at least a thousand years, and their oral traditions extend back before the Cataclysm itself. They did not merely survive the shattering of the world; they preserved knowledge of why it happened, and they have spent two thousand years trying to prevent it from happening again.
The Tidecallers are organized around a spiritual and navigational practice called the Calling: a combination of astronomical observation, acoustic communication with the deep sea, ritual song-tradition, and what might be described as meditation or might be described as something that has no name in any other language. Through the Calling, Tidecallers develop a sensitivity to the Ley Lines of the Deep — the magical currents that run beneath the ocean — that allows them to navigate without charts, predict weather with extraordinary accuracy, and occasionally communicate with the things that live in the deep in ways that stop just short of being conversation.
Other nations simultaneously need and fear the Tidecallers. Their navigational knowledge is the most reliable in the world; any admiral who wants their fleet to survive a crossing of the Drowned Reaches wants a Tidecaller navigator. Their predictions of weather events and supernatural phenomena have a track record that makes them impossible to dismiss. But the Tidecallers' politics are entirely oriented around the threat of a second Cataclysm — and their advocacy for halting certain kinds of seabed exploitation, limiting the use of Urrathi artifacts, and maintaining the Ley Lines' integrity puts them in direct conflict with the Ironclad Dominion, the Sunken Crown, and anyone else whose interests involve extracting power from the old world.
The Tidecallers do not regard themselves as a political faction. They regard themselves as the world's immune system, working to prevent a disease that most of the world doesn't believe in.
Appearance and Aesthetics:
Tidecaller aesthetics draw from a composite of Pacific Islander, East African coastal, and Caribbean indigenous maritime traditions, rendered into a distinctive world of their own: flowing garments in deep blues and greens patterned with geometric designs derived from Ley Line maps, extensive tattoo traditions that record navigational and spiritual knowledge in patterns that cover the arms and sometimes the face, hair traditions influenced by water and wind. Their ships are elegant without being ornate — built to the sea's demands rather than human aesthetic preference, optimized for the conditions they sail through rather than the impressions they make in harbor.
Tidecaller music is the most distinctive element: their navigation is partly acoustic, and the sound of a Tidecaller ship is unlike anything else. The crew sings — not sea shanties, but something older and stranger, harmonics that communicate with the sea rather than with each other. Hearing a Tidecaller ship's song at distance on an open ocean night is an experience that every sailor who encounters it describes differently, but consistently describes as affecting.
Gameplay Implications:
The Tidecallers unlock access to the Ley Lines of the Deep as a navigation system — a form of supernatural cartography unavailable to any other faction. Tidecaller reputation also opens access to their predictive information (weather warnings, supernatural event forecasts, and intelligence about Old God activity) that cannot be obtained through any other means.
The Tidecaller quest lines deal with the supernatural threat directly — the Old Gods' stirring, the Ley Lines' disruption by seabed mining, the signs that the world is approaching a threshold similar to what preceded the Cataclysm. Their perspective is the game's clearest window into what is actually happening beneath the surface of the world's politics.
What They Fear: The Ironclad Dominion breaking a fracture that cannot be closed. The Leviathan Cult succeeding. Anyone reaching the Obsidian Deep without knowing what they'll find there.
The Jade Fleet
Core Identity: The Asian-inspired maritime trading empire. Ancient, sophisticated, sitting on secrets that predate everyone else's history.
Tagline: "The sea has always known its course. We learned to ask it."
Who They Are:
The Jade Fleet is simultaneously the most sophisticated and the most inscrutable major power in the Shattered Expanse. Their civilization predates the Cataclysm — their oldest records go back to the age of the Urrathi First Empire, which means they have three thousand years of maritime history compared to most civilizations' few hundred. Their navigation techniques, developed over that span, are so advanced that Jade Fleet captains can sail routes that no other navigator can reliably follow, in weather conditions that would drive anyone else back to harbor.
The Fleet is organized as both a government and a trading organization — the two are not distinguishable from inside. The Great Houses of the Fleet (extended family networks that control specific trade routes, goods categories, and regional sea lanes) are the political structure, and the politics of the Great Houses are complex, layered, and conducted in a social grammar that outsiders struggle to decode. Insult within the Fleet's court can be delivered through the arrangement of flowers. Alliance is sealed by the gift of specific teas. Warfare within the Fleet's internal politics is largely economic and tends to leave no visible bodies.
The Jade Fleet's relationship with outsiders is cautiously welcoming at the commercial level and intensely private at every other level. They trade with everyone, ally with no one permanently, and share very little of what they actually know. What they know includes: the most complete pre-Cataclysm records in existence, the nature and behavior of sea dragons, the locations of Urrathi facilities that no one else has discovered, and what appears to be a prophecy — written three thousand years ago — that describes something very much like the current age and what comes next.
Appearance and Aesthetics:
The Jade Fleet's visual language draws from East Asian maritime traditions — the junk-style ships with their distinctive square-cut sails and high sterns, the architecture of port cities where every building reflects different principles of space and balance than any Mediterranean-derived structure, the textile traditions (silk, specific dyeing techniques, embroidery that conveys meaning in its patterns). The Fleet's color language is jade green, gold, and deep crimson, with the specific blue of monsoon water as an accent.
Their ships are beautiful and functional simultaneously — three thousand years of refinement has made them exceptionally efficient, and the beauty is not ornament but evidence of that efficiency. The figureheads are sea dragons, carved with extraordinary precision by artists who have observed the real creatures closely.
Gameplay Implications:
The Jade Fleet becomes fully accessible in the Jade Currents expansion, but Jade Fleet representatives and ships appear in the Ember Seas throughout the game's launch content as trading partners and occasional quest-givers. Players who build Jade Fleet reputation early gain access to their trade networks, which are distinct from Concordat networks and offer different goods — including materials and knowledge unavailable anywhere else.
The Jade Fleet's quest lines are, uniquely, almost entirely about information: discovering what the Fleet knows, deciding what to do with that knowledge, and navigating the Fleet's internal politics to earn enough trust to be told more. The narrative payoff comes in the expansion, when the three-thousand-year-old prophecy becomes directly relevant.
What They Fear: The Ironclad Dominion reaching the Obsidian Deep first. Anyone else finding the pre-Cataclysm records before they can decide what to do with them. The sea dragons being disturbed by forces that don't understand what they're dealing with.
Pirate Factions: Player-Joinable Crews
Overview: The Four Pirate Factions
Within the Maelstrom Confederacy's umbrella, four major pirate factions have developed distinct identities, philosophies, and playstyles. Players can align with any of these while remaining nominally within the Confederacy, and deeper alignment with one faction affects how the others perceive the player. These are not mutually exclusive in the early game — a captain can work with multiple factions — but endgame storylines will require players to make commitments that strain relationships with non-aligned factions.
The Crimson Wake
Core Identity: Aggressive raiders. Red sails, intimidation, the pirate fantasy at its most visceral.
Tagline: "Fear is the fastest ship. Red sails have never needed the wind to make prey run."
Who They Are:
The Crimson Wake is the oldest organized pirate faction in the Ember Seas, founded by the legendary captain Scarlett Mourne roughly one hundred and fifty years ago. Mourne's innovation was institutional: she recognized that a pirate's greatest advantage was reputation, and she built a fleet-wide reputation program. Every Crimson Wake ship flies crimson sails. Every Crimson Wake captain flies the same specific variant of the Jolly Roger — a red skull on black. Every Crimson Wake engagement begins with the same opening parley: "Strike your colors. Throw over your cargo. Live."
The reputation has worked. Crimson Wake ships capture an extraordinary percentage of their targets without a shot fired, purely because merchant captains know the red sails and know the Crimson Wake's policy: comply and survive, resist and suffer consequences. The faction is aggressive but not wantonly violent — violence is expensive, and a reputation for letting compliant captains go unharmed is good for business.
The current Crimson Wake leadership is a council of seven captains, called the Red Tribunal. They are not as unified as Mourne's original single-captain structure, which creates internal tensions — different captains read "intimidation" differently, and what one calls reasonable force another calls recklessness that damages the brand.
Gameplay Implications: High Crimson Wake reputation improves intimidation-based social skill outcomes and applies a morale debuff to enemies before combat. Players aligned with the Crimson Wake favor Ferocity reputation accumulation. Their quest lines involve naval raids, prisoner negotiations, and managing the tension between profitable intimidation and the reputational damage of going too far.
The Phantom Tide
Core Identity: Smugglers and spies. Information is their currency, invisibility their power.
Tagline: "The loudest ships move the least valuable cargo."
Who They Are:
The Phantom Tide has no headquarters, no uniform, no flag that any casual observer would recognize as theirs. They operate in the space between factions — carrying messages that official channels can't, moving goods that official inspection would confiscate, knowing things that powerful people don't want known and profiting accordingly.
The faction began as a loose network of experienced smugglers who realized that what they had in common was more valuable than what separated them: route knowledge, safe house networks, contact lists, and the practical experience of moving through the world without being noticed. Over time, this network formalized into something closer to an intelligence organization with a sideline in smuggling, rather than the reverse.
The Phantom Tide's leadership is deliberately obscured — even members of the faction often don't know who the central organizers are, only their immediate contact within the network. This is a security feature, not an affectation. The faction's primary vulnerability is infiltration, and compartmentalization is their answer.
The Phantom Tide is not exclusively pirates. Their network includes Concordat customs officials, Ironclad Dominion engineers, Tidecaller initiates, and Jade Fleet representatives who find the faction's information services useful. The Phantom Tide's neutrality — their willingness to work with all sides — is both their strength and their ethical complication. They have information about atrocities and choose not to release it when doing so would destroy valuable relationships.
Gameplay Implications: Phantom Tide reputation opens information-based content: intelligence on enemy patrol routes, advance warning of Voyage events, access to the black market networks that move rare goods, and social skill options in every faction's questlines. Players aligned with the Phantom Tide favor Cunning and Mystery reputation accumulation. Their quest lines involve stealth navigation, social engineering, and uncomfortable choices about what to do with information they probably shouldn't have.
The Sunken Crown
Core Identity: Treasure hunters obsessed with the old civilization's power. Brilliant, dangerous, and running toward something they don't fully understand.
Tagline: "The old world doesn't rest. It waits. And we alone are patient enough to find it."
Who They Are:
The Sunken Crown is the faction most focused on the world's supernatural inheritance. They are treasure hunters in the specific sense of the Shattered Expanse: what they hunt is not merely gold but the artifacts, knowledge, and power of the drowned Urrathi civilization. They dive the Drowned Reaches with more expertise than anyone. They have assembled the largest collection of surviving Urrathi documents outside the Jade Fleet's archives. They know the locations of sites that don't appear on any other chart.
The Sunken Crown began as an academic society — scholars and navigators interested in the old world — that gradually became something more practical and more dangerous as it became clear that the old world's treasures were not just interesting but powerful. The faction's current members range from genuine archaeologists who agonize over every artifact removed from context to enthusiastic looters who regard Urrathi ruins as loot caches, with most of the spectrum in between.
The faction's obsession makes them valuable and alarming in equal measure. They know more about the Urrathi than anyone outside the Jade Fleet. They also have a troubling tendency to bring home things they don't fully understand and experiment on them until something goes wrong. The Sunken Crown has a higher incidence of curse affliction than any other pirate faction, which they regard as an occupational hazard and everyone else regards as a warning sign.
Gameplay Implications: Sunken Crown reputation unlocks the deepest lore content — access to their archives, dive-site maps, translated Urrathi documents, and the quest lines that most directly address the game's supernatural mysteries. Players aligned with the Sunken Crown favor Mystery reputation accumulation and have the strongest connection to the curse system mechanics. Their quest lines involve dungeon diving, ruin navigation, artifact identification, and recurring confrontations with the consequences of previous expeditions that retrieved things they shouldn't have.
The Free Sail Alliance
Core Identity: Idealistic pirates fighting for liberty. The Confederacy's conscience, which makes them simultaneously beloved and inconvenient.
Tagline: "Every ship flying an empire's flag is a person who forgot they could fly their own."
Who They Are:
The Free Sail Alliance is what happens when piracy develops a political philosophy. Founded forty years ago by a captain named Doria Vance, who had previously been an Aurantine naval officer and had developed strong opinions about the Concordat's use of its navy during a trade dispute suppression that killed three hundred civilians, the Alliance has grown into the Confederacy's ideological faction — the group that articulates why being a pirate matters.
The Alliance's position: the empires of the Shattered Expanse are not natural facts of the world. They are arrangements of power that serve the powerful and exploit the weak. The sea is, by its nature, free — it belongs to no one and everyone. Pirates who operate on the free sea are not criminals; they are people who have refused to participate in an economic and political system designed to extract value from everyone outside the elite. The Alliance's version of piracy is explicitly about disruption of unjust power: they target empire-affiliated shipping, they protect marginalized port communities from Concordat taxation enforcement, and they offer refuge to people who have fled empire justice (whether for genuine crimes or for political inconvenience).
The Alliance is the most internally diverse faction — their commitment to genuine equality of voice means they attract members from every culture and background, and their meetings resemble a chaotic university seminar more than a military command structure. They are infuriating to organize and deeply compelling to belong to.
Gameplay Implications: Free Sail Alliance reputation opens content with oppressed communities, refugees, and port populations who have reason to distrust empire-aligned players. Alliance quest lines are the most politically complex in the game — they require players to make difficult choices about ends and means, to consider the actual consequences of empire policy on specific people, and to decide what they actually believe about freedom and justice in a world where those words mean different things to different people. High Alliance reputation dramatically increases loyalty-based crew options and improves morale mechanics.
Supernatural Factions
The Drowned Court
Core Identity: The cursed dead of the sea. Neither alive nor dead. Ancient grievance made manifest.
Who They Are:
The Drowned Court is not a faction in the conventional sense. It is not organized, does not have leadership that meets, and does not make decisions in any way that human political vocabulary captures accurately. The Court is the collective expression of a supernatural fact: the sea remembers what it has swallowed, and some of what it has swallowed refuses to be forgotten.
The members of the Drowned Court are individuals who died at sea in circumstances that left them caught — not released by the Veil into whatever comes after, but held in the threshold between the mortal world and the Drowned realm. The cause is not always consistent. Some were cursed before their deaths. Some drowned in waters where the Veil is thin and the dead cannot fully pass through. Some simply refused to let go of something — a ship, a crew, a mission, a vengeance — and the sea holds them in their refusal.
The Drowned are not uniformly hostile. They are uniformly preoccupied with whatever held them. A Drowned captain who was pursuing a particular ship at the moment of their death is still pursuing it, or whatever seems like it to their preserved obsession. A Drowned navigator who was trying to chart a particular passage is still trying to chart it. Interacting with the Drowned Court means understanding what they want and deciding whether to help them want it or exploit their fixation.
The Court's supernatural power is real. Drowned entities can pass through solid objects, cannot be harmed by conventional weapons without specific preparation, and have access to knowledge accumulated over centuries of watching the sea's depths. They are also vulnerable to specific conditions — they cannot exist in still, fresh water; they are bound by the compulsions that held them in life; and they cannot cross certain Tidecaller-maintained boundaries.
Gameplay Implications: The Drowned Court represents the game's most morally complex supernatural faction. Helping individual Drowned Court members complete their unfinished business allows them to pass through the Veil — which is merciful, if those members have been suffering, and which also removes them as potential allies or threats. Players who prefer to use the Drowned Court as resources must find ways to keep the unfinished business active while extracting value from the members' knowledge and power.
The Leviathan Cult
Core Identity: Worshippers of the old gods, seeking to complete the Cataclysm.
Who They Are:
Every generation produces people who look at the world and conclude that its current order is not merely imperfect but fundamentally wrong — wrong enough that destruction is preferable to continuation. The Leviathan Cult is the supernatural expression of this impulse. They believe that the Cataclysm was not a disaster but the beginning of a transformation that the old civilization's survivors interrupted by simply surviving. The old gods were in the process of reclaiming the world when humans got in the way by rebuilding it. The Cult's mission is to complete what the Cataclysm started.
This is not a small minority of isolated fanatics. The Leviathan Cult has infiltrated every major civilization in the Expanse. They have members in the Aurantine bureaucracy, in the Ironclad Dominion's engineering corps, in the Confederacy's Grand Muster. They are patient in the way that only people who believe the universe is on their side can be patient. They have been working for two hundred years toward their goal, and they believe they are close.
Their internal organization is hierarchical and secret. Members know only what they need to know for their current mission. The upper tiers of the Cult hierarchy have direct contact with the supernatural phenomena of the Obsidian Deep in ways that have changed them — not into Drowned Court entities, but into something adjacent: living people who have been partially claimed by the old gods' realm.
Gameplay Implications: The Leviathan Cult is the game's primary antagonist faction — the organization whose machinations drive the main narrative across all regions and Voyages. Players do not join the Cult (the player-side moral framework makes this untenable), but they uncover the Cult's operations, counter their specific plans, and gradually work toward understanding their ultimate goal and the faction structures of the people who can stop them. Cult encounters are initially mysterious (who are these people? what do they want?), then alarming (the goal is the end of the world as currently organized), then urgent.
The Lighthouse Keepers
Core Identity: The mysterious order that maintains the magical beacons keeping sea lanes safe. Neutral. Ancient. Stranger than they appear.
Who They Are:
Every sea lane of significance in the Shattered Expanse has at least one Lighthouse Keeper beacon — a permanent magical light that functions even in the worst weather, visible at extraordinary distances, and calibrated to pulse in ways that convey navigational information to those who know how to read it. These beacons have been operating, in some cases, for over a thousand years. The organization that maintains them has been operating for the same span, and they are considerably more interesting than their civic infrastructure function suggests.
The Lighthouse Keepers are, on the surface, a fraternal order of lighthouse operators and navigational-aid maintainers, organized across the Expanse and politically neutral in all conflicts. In practice, they are the most informed intelligence organization in the world, have been gathering information for a millennium, and have a relationship with the Ley Lines of the Deep that suggests their beacon technology is not simply mechanical but is drawing on the same supernatural infrastructure the Tidecallers navigate.
Their leadership — the three individuals known only as the First, the Second, and the Third Light — are never seen in public. Whether this is organizational discretion or something stranger is unclear. Members of the Keeper organization have been known to display abilities inconsistent with any natural explanation, and the Drowned Court gives Keeper beacons a wide berth, which is suggestive.
The Keepers do not take sides in the world's political conflicts. They maintain beacons for every faction's ports, provide navigational information equally to all, and enforce their neutrality with a degree of capability that has, on several documented occasions, deterred the Aurantine navy from actions they considered politically necessary. But the Keepers clearly have goals of their own — they observe everything, they know everything, and they are waiting for something.
Gameplay Implications: The Lighthouse Keepers are available as a late-game faction alignment that opens narrative content related to the Ley Lines, the Veil, and the history of the world before the Cataclysm. Their quest lines are the most cryptic in the game — the Keepers communicate in ways that require interpretation — but the payoff is access to world knowledge unavailable anywhere else. Players who align with the Keepers in the endgame are positioned to understand the game's ultimate narrative revelations.
Faction Relationship Matrix
The following matrix defines the standing relationships between factions. Relationships are rated on a scale from active allies to active enemies, with the nuances specific to each pairing described below.
| Faction | Aurantine Concordat | Maelstrom Confederacy | Ironclad Dominion | Tidecallers | Jade Fleet | Crimson Wake | Phantom Tide | Sunken Crown | Free Sail Alliance | Drowned Court | Leviathan Cult | Lighthouse Keepers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aurantine Concordat | — | Enemies | Rivals | Uneasy Partners | Trade Partners | Enemies | Wary | Suspicious | Enemies | Ignore | Infiltrated By | Neutral |
| Maelstrom Confederacy | Enemies | — | Complicated | Respectful | Cautious | Members | Members | Members | Members | Wary | Contested | Neutral |
| Ironclad Dominion | Rivals | Complicated | — | Hostile | Trade Partners | Ignore | Use | Clients | Oppose | Ignore | Infiltrated By | Tense |
| Tidecallers | Uneasy Partners | Respectful | Hostile | — | Respectful | Wary | Neutral | Opposed | Sympathetic | Oppose | Enemies | Respect |
| Jade Fleet | Trade Partners | Cautious | Trade Partners | Respectful | — | Ignore | Use | Cautious | Ignore | Acknowledge | Enemies | Neutral |
| Crimson Wake | Enemies | Members | Ignore | Wary | Ignore | — | Rivals | Rivals | Opposed | Wary | Ignore | Neutral |
| Phantom Tide | Infiltrate | Members | Use | Neutral | Use | Rivals | — | Observe | Observe | Use | Know About | Know About |
| Sunken Crown | Suspicious | Members | Clients | Opposed | Cautious | Rivals | Observe | — | Neutral | Entangled | Infiltrated By | Ignore |
| Free Sail Alliance | Enemies | Members | Oppose | Sympathetic | Ignore | Opposed | Observe | Neutral | — | Neutral | Opposed | Neutral |
| Drowned Court | Ignore | Wary | Ignore | Oppose | Acknowledge | Wary | Use | Entangled | Neutral | — | Partially Serve | Avoid |
| Leviathan Cult | Infiltrate | Contested | Infiltrate | Enemies | Enemies | Ignore | Know About | Infiltrate | Opposed | Partially Command | — | Wary Of |
| Lighthouse Keepers | Neutral | Neutral | Tense | Respect | Neutral | Neutral | Know About | Ignore | Neutral | Avoid | Wary Of | — |
Key Relationship Notes
Aurantine Concordat / Ironclad Dominion: Not enemies, but genuinely competitive. The Concordat controls commerce; the Dominion controls production. They need each other and resent needing each other. The Dominion's growing military capability is a genuine concern for the Concordat, which has always relied on unquestioned naval dominance.
Maelstrom Confederacy / Ironclad Dominion: The Dominion regards the Confederacy as a nuisance to be managed rather than destroyed. The Dominion would prefer a deal — exclusive access to certain sea lanes in exchange for leaving Confederacy ports alone — and some factions within the Confederacy would accept it. Others consider this the beginning of the end of the Confederacy's independence.
Tidecallers / Ironclad Dominion: The closest thing to genuine enemies among the major civilizations. The Dominion's seabed operations are specifically what the Tidecallers warn against, and several Dominion facilities have been targeted by Tidecaller-affiliated interference. The Dominion regards the Tidecallers as obstacle superstitionists; the Tidecallers regard the Dominion as people actively digging the world's grave.
Phantom Tide / Everyone: The Phantom Tide maintains working relationships with all factions simultaneously, which means no faction fully trusts them and everyone finds them useful. This creates the Phantom Tide's characteristic social position: invited everywhere, seated near the door.
Drowned Court / Leviathan Cult: The relationship is complex and not fully voluntary on the Drowned Court's side. The Cult has developed techniques for compelling Drowned entities — not fully controlling them, but making their obsessions temporarily aligned with Cult goals. The Drowned Court is not the Cult's ally; individual members are sometimes its tools, against their preferences.
Sunken Crown / Leviathan Cult: The Cult has been systematically infiltrating the Sunken Crown for decades, finding that the Crown's obsession with Urrathi artifacts makes its members susceptible to Cult recruitment. Several major Sunken Crown expeditions have been led by Cult-aligned members who ensured that the most significant artifacts reached Cult hands. The Crown's leadership is aware there is a problem; they have not identified its full extent.
Jade Fleet / Leviathan Cult: The Jade Fleet's three-thousand-year records include detailed documentation of the Leviathan Cult's historical forerunners — predecessor organizations who attempted to complete the Cataclysm during the Dark Tides and were stopped at enormous cost. The Jade Fleet's hostility to the Cult is not philosophical but practical: they know what the Cult is trying to do and they know what it would mean. Their caution in sharing this knowledge is itself a problem — information that could warn others is instead kept as a diplomatic asset.
Faction Aesthetics: Quick Reference for Visual Teams
| Faction | Primary Colors | Architecture | Ships | Sound Identity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aurantine Concordat | Gold, white, deep blue | Marble, tilework, colonnades | White hulls, gilt trim, formal pennants | Formal brass, Mediterranean modal scales |
| Maelstrom Confederacy | Varied; black and red dominant | Improvised, layered, practical | Modified and diverse; individualistic | Shanties, African-diaspora percussion, call-and-response |
| Ironclad Dominion | Iron grey, coal black, orange forge-light | Industrial facilities, mechanical precision | Armored, low, machinery-visible | Steam percussion, mechanical rhythms, low industrial bass |
| Tidecallers | Deep blue, sea-green, white | Open, wind-designed, woven | Elegant, efficient, wind-optimized | Harmonic song, deep water acoustics, non-Western intervals |
| Jade Fleet | Jade green, gold, deep crimson | Tiered roofs, organized space, garden integration | Junk-rigged, high sterns, carved figureheads | Pentatonic scales, wind instruments, silk-percussion |
| Crimson Wake | Crimson, black | None consistent; they use what they take | Red sails, identical Jolly Rogers, heavy armament | War drums, aggressive brass, impact percussion |
| Phantom Tide | Grey, deep navy, nothing memorable | Hidden; they use other factions' spaces | Unmarked, designed for speed and silence | Sparse, quiet; conspicuous only in its absence |
| Sunken Crown | Deep gold, antiquity-brown, pale blue | Dive equipment, archive spaces, artifact displays | Fitted for diving operations | Academic quietness; the sound of careful work |
| Free Sail Alliance | Every color equally | Deliberately diverse; making a point | Individual; flying personal flags | Joyful polyrhythm; music that crosses cultural lines |
| Drowned Court | Deep blue-green, black, bioluminescent white | Ruins; they inhabit what was abandoned | Ghost ships; wrong physics | Distorted silence; sound that shouldn't carry but does |
| Leviathan Cult | Deep crimson on black; old god symbols | Hidden; borrowed; abandoned spaces | Unmarked or false-flagged | Subsonic; the sound of something large breathing below |
| Lighthouse Keepers | White, warm amber light | Lighthouses; precise, maintained, functional | Unmarked; extremely capable | The sound of a beacon cycling; harmonic, patient |
See also:
World Overview — the geography these factions inhabit
Mythology & Supernatural — the supernatural forces these factions interact with
History & Timeline — how these factions came to be
Design Pillars — the Captain's Fantasy and how factions serve it