An Oceanic Nightmare Table

The ocean is a terrifying place. It's an unconquerable liquid desert. Its chasms holding more secrets than our far distance moon. An attempt to traverse the ever moving expanse can kill you and it does enjoy torturing you first. The fear of starving on a ship, or clinging to a piece of driftwood with your body slowly freezing, is enough to give even hardened sailors a moment of pause before they walk the ramp onto the deck. Then there are the storms where great waves could tear apart a Galleon as if it was made from paper.

Lets not forget those that lurk beneath the surface. They stalk  from below. They creep from above. They can attack from all sides and all angles. Everything out there in that endless expanse of dark water and certain death could consume you at any time. The things that shift silently beneath the ocean are far better suited to their own dreadful environment than the floundering mammals who attempt and fail to conquer it. There are alien places down in the depths where the pressure builds so strong your body crumples in on itself. It is a terrible place.

If your players are travelling by ship, hopefully this table will give you something to fill the journey with other than your usual bout of sea sickness of monstrous kraken. Or ,perhaps your oceanic adventure needs something dark and uncomfortable thrown in to keep your players from thinking you have gone soft.

Below is a D8 table of Nightmares. Have your players experience these nightmares, perhaps because they ate a strange fish or simply fell asleep at the wrong time. It's always fun to have the players detail what they would actually do in the dreams so use the descriptions as a template. With all FTOAMG tables, feel free to ignore the effects or give them a rejiggle as you see fit.

Dice Roll	Nightmare Description	Nightmare Effect
1	You wake to find yourself adrift a piece of slowly sinking flotsam. The sun beats down upon you and you wait for hours staring out into the harsh blue of sky and sea. You are not sure where the sea ends and the sky begins. Suddenly, the wood dips and bounces in the water strangely. The surface of the sea appears to be calm and yet your meagre vessel is bumped and rocked. Surrounding you on all sides is a gaping maw. You can see the roof of the creature’s mouth rising in front of you and from its bloody gums protrude serrated teeth the size of the flotsam you cling too. You scream as the jaws close down around you.	Save Vs. Paralysis. If you fail, you are paralyzed by fear for 1d20 minutes. Regardless of the save, when your player wakes they find themselves in agony. As they look down their clothing has been punctured by great jaws. Take 1d4 damage.
2	You are a small fish. You dart happily among your thousands of brothers and sisters. To and fro you go, courting prospective mates with a flash of your scales. Your fish family is all you have known and you love every single one of your shiny comrades.  Around you the water swirls and birds dive from the air snatching away your children, sisters and brethren. Sharks join the swarm, you pack tighter and tighter until only a few of you remain. Alone, you have escaped and around you the ocean seems much more ominous without the wall of fellow fish to save you.	Save Vs. Paralysis, if you fail you develop a fear of the open ocean so rooted in your psyche that you have a 2 in 6 chance of being driven temporarily insane by it. Any vast body of water is now your sworn enemy. If you roll a 6 when you see a vast body of water, you think you are the terrified fish of your dreams for 1d20 minutes.
3	Three beautiful women rise up out of the ocean, naked and garbed in shells and pearls. They smile at you and their singing voices shake the very essence of your being. You lean over the side of the boat, compelled to touch one of the maidens if only for a moment. The reach out and their limbs snake over your body dragging you down into the black. The moment you are submerged you see their faces are protruding like the eels that lurk in the deeps and your horror is reflected in their wide lidless eyes.	Save Vs. Magic, when you wake you can hear the sirens song and you are compelled to drown yourself in the nearest body of water. You can be restrained until this wears off. Effect duration at discretion of the GM.
4	You are a shark. A powerful and agile beast. Your hunger only consumes you temporarily. Your nature is one of exploration and you follow the wondrous magnetic pull of the planet on your mission to swim, swim, swim. In a moment of hunger, your great jaws engulf a half torn tuna. It is then that you, terrified, encounter something more powerful than you. You are wrenched from the ocean and hang in the biting air. You feel gills flapping as you gasp. Then pain as your fins are sawed away from your body. You are tossed, still living, back into your home. You wriggle, unable to move and sink slowly down to die.	Save Vs. Magic, if you fail you wake and notice something feels lighter about yourself.  You go to wave your hand in front of your eyes and a splatter of warm blood hits your face. As you go to light a candle you realise in horror that there is nothing connected to your shoulders. You wriggle and when you look down the sight of bloodied legs greets you.
5	You cross out into the water for a leisurely swim. The sun shines above you and the light dances over the blue ocean waves. You feel completely relaxed. You notice a long piece of seaweed has snaked its way about your leg. Curious, you tug it off. It comes back. You tug it off. It come back. On the third attempt it constricts about your thighs and forces its way into your genitals in a horrifying explosion of pain. You stare down in horror at the bloodied water where the tendril had been.	Save s. Magic, if you do not save you wake to find yourself six months pregnant with a swollen belly filed with strange creatures wriggling. If you were pregnant before, this has been consumed.
6	A great storm has almost destroyed the ship. The deck is too dangerous. Months from land, you have been without food and fresh water for days. You and the other players are sat hunched in a small cabin. It smells of human urine and faeces. The barrels are empty and the heaving ship causes one or two of you to empty your stomachs into the already fetid room. As time passes you each draw straws. The unlikely are choked to death, before you slice away their parts and eat them raw. Eventually, you have eaten every player. You have the knife in your hand and hunger grips you. You look down at your own leg, grit your teeth, and slice.	You awake to find yourself in good health. Over the course of the next few days, the allure of your comrade’s flesh becomes over-powering. Food turns to ash in your mouth and the only thing that might hold any taste, any pleasure, is the flesh of the other players. This effect is only in place when you are near or on the ocean.
7	Your ship sunk and you thought yourself as good as dead. You cough up sea brine and bile and heave yourself up onto your shaky feet. As you look around you see a great city stretching out before you in a gargantuan bubble. The ocean hangs above you like an ominous, gelatinous sky. Your ship is shattered upon the spire of a great tower whose shapes make no physical sense. The sheer size of it and the unnatural shapes of the buildings, their large gaping windows like great mouths, overwhelms you.  As you go to rouse the other players lying around you, you see streaking towards you great creatures with bulbous eyes and gelatinous bodies. Their great maws jut forward with huge transparent teeth. Do you abandon your comrades or stand and fight?	If the player fights, they wake to suddenly find they have a deep and unnatural understanding of “Those That Lurk Below”. What this means is up to you, perhaps they understand the signs of a storm better or they can see when an attack is about to happen. They have gained oceanic knowledge superior to that of a normal human. If the player runs, they are suddenly marked for death by “Those That Lurk Below” who will hunt the coward to the ends of the earth. The player doesn’t need to know this, yet.
8	You and the person you feel you love the most have taken a little boat out to a small coastal island on which you intend to spend the day. As you and your chosen companion explores the island you realise that your boat is being dragged away at a high speed by the mooring line you set. The boat is then dragged down into the water. Nothing emerges, not even splinters. As you stare in horror your companion has foolishly chased after it. Knee deep in water they turn their wide open eyes at you and mouth “No.” Suddenly, their legs are shredded as if they have been introduced to a blender and the entire island shifts and moved. Your companion is struggling, half devoured by the islands great mouth and you are thrown, into blackness, from the creatures back as it rises up out of the water in a great explosion of water and rock.	Your player wakes up. Somewhere in the world if their chosen companion is still alive, they are no longer. They have been discovered in their bed with half their body gone as if they have been devoured. Your player will soon receive a communication. If the players chosen companion is already dead, they find the old corpse the next day. If the players companion is another player, they must make a Save Vs. magic, or die.