Events · The Free Muster

Two grey picket sloops emerge from the fog with hooded lanterns. Their captain hails you across the water: no one reaches the Free Muster by accident. Either you take a local pilot aboard to guide you through the floating rocks, or you risk the reef alone.

A small smuggling sloop, weighed down with flour sacks and iron bolts, bursts out of the clouds heading for the Free Muster. A Crown customs cutter is two ship-lengths behind her and closing fast.

A Free Captain is struggling to tow a captured Crown supply ship toward the Muster against the wind. "Pass over a second tow-line!" she hails you. "Help me haul her into port and we'll split the prize money!"

A black-hulled sloop hails you by name. Her captain used to serve as an enforcer on the Collector's flagship—until your clash with the Collector cost her that job and drove her to join the Free Muster.

A Free Muster captain accuses one of your crew of cheating at cards. Under the Articles, disputes are settled with blades on a narrow plank laid between two lashed ships: first blood wins, and the loser pays a forty-silver forfeit.

For three nights in a row, someone has flashed a signal lantern from your stern rail while the crew slept—and an unseen ship out in the fog has been flashing back.

The stowaway is a terrified young Crown clerk clutching a codebook filled with the Free Muster's secret patrol lanes. "The Crown holds my mother and sisters on the Peak," he pleads. "They threatened to put them on the Lowborn rolls as debtors if I didn't spy for them!"

A small mail boat intercepts you in open sky. At the tiller sits the young Crown clerk you spared, gaunt and hollow-eyed. "The Crown put my family on the Lowborn rolls anyway," he says bitterly. "So I stole their codes and came back."

An Undertow envoy boards your ship, ash staining her sleeves and a Leadglass lantern hanging from her belt. "We offer three hundred silver for the Shard," she says. "You've carried that burden far enough. Let someone who understands its power take it to the Cistern."

Scout boats from the Crown blockade are probing the fog to map the Free Muster's hidden channels. One of them spots your hull and readies a signal flare!

A gnome purser in a tarred coat rows out to your ship carrying a massive account book. Every vessel using Free Muster waters must pay war dues: forty-five silver, a crate of contraband, or a very good excuse.

A pirate brig flies a knotted black flag—the Free Muster's signal that a crew has voted to depose their captain. They caught him secretly selling prisoners to the Crown, and they want a neutral ship to transport him to the prize court for trial.

Two unlit Hollow vessels are creeping along the outer rocks of the Free Muster harbor. Wherever they pass, the picket boats' lanterns dim to tiny blue sparks. The Undertow's Hush-ships have never pushed this close to port before.

A navy longboat with its royal insignia crudely painted over drifts under a tattered sail. Nine starving sailors who deserted the Crown blockade are aboard, carrying a stolen ward-tap wrapped in a coat. They are trying to reach the Free Muster before a navy patrol catches them.

An unmarked cutter pulls alongside your ship. An Admiralty intelligence officer stands at her rail holding an official royal pardon with your ship's name already filled in. In exchange, he wants your charts of the Free Muster's secret approach lanes.

A squadron of clan warbirds is flying alongside the Free Captains this season, drawn by mercenary pay and old grudges against Crown hunting laws. Their wing leader circles your masts, testing whether your crew flies well enough to be treated as allies.

The Free Captains claim to despise Crown bureaucracy, yet they built their own harbor office complete with three queues, a registry book, and a bespectacled pirate stamping privateer licenses. Even rebels insist on proper paperwork.

The Free Captains' war council convenes on an open gun deck. Tonight's vote will decide whether the fleet attacks the Crown blockade immediately, or waits for the Undertow's Hush-ships to weaken the royal fleet first. As a captain in port, you have a vote.

The Free Muster's prize court convenes inside a beached warship hull, where the judge bangs a gavel carved from a Crown admiral's wooden leg. By local standards, it is the fairest court on the Mountain.

At the Muster's war yard, veteran shipwrights who deserted the royal dockyards refit rebel vessels for the front line. They work fast, charge fair prices, and never ask where you got your ship.

At the Free Muster's hiring board, Deep beastborn walk the docks as equals alongside humans and gnomes. Nobody here asks who is Lowborn or demands bloodline papers.

A smashed blockade runner lies wedged across a floating reef, her cargo crates still lashed to the deck. A Crown navy pennant has been nailed to her broken mast as a warning to other smugglers.

A Crown customs cutter lies wedged on her side in a rocky cleft, her hull still warm. Her crew evacuated in their boats, but the captain's cabin is locked—and the blockade's master signal book is still inside.

The Free Muster shelters behind a permanent barrier of stacked squalls and crosswinds. Only captains who know the Articles' secret bearings can thread the calm lanes between the gales.

At dusk, the anchored rebel ships begin a slow memorial shanty, passing the song from hull to hull across the harbor. Each crew adds a verse naming their fallen comrades until every ship has sung.