A Drowned (ByThePowerOfScience)

Prologue: Downed and Drowned

San Jose was lost at sea
Along with a Spanish company
Their powder caught under fierce attack
The king never got his emeralds back
They’re down… Downed and drowned…
Downed and drowned and never found…

Staring back at you from the reflective surface is a human face, or at least it once was. Now it is the face of a drowned spirit, still clinging onto what few bits of life you still had. Your skin was slightly gray, betraying your undead nature. Your eyes glowed blue, able to pierce the darkness of the deep sea, and a red bandana atop your head kept your black hair from swaying constantly to the ocean’s currents.

While most of that was pretty generic to the idea of you being some undead, it did give you a smidge of an idea of what you once were. Perhaps a pirate or a trader on the high seas? Or maybe you were merely a deckhand on some vessel whose name was long forgotten here in the briney deep. Your clothes didn’t really tell you much of your life before . A simple loose fitting white shirt, black pants, a single leather boot for your one leg, with the other just fading away into strips of cloth and smoke. All of these things were just… too generic of a sailor. You could have been a member of some royal navy, or some random bloke who took a bad fishing trip. Even your character sheet didn’t really help, keeping your information as generic as possible.

Level 2 Drowned
Monster, Undead, Explicit
Experience to level up - 0/200
Attributes
STR 30 DEX 20 END 20 CHA 25 MAN 25 APP 15 PER 30 INT 30 WIT 30
Skills
Athletics 50 Awareness 40 Melee 60 Performance 20 Resistance 85 Sail 60 Stealth 25
Feats

Spirit Form - You have the ability to make your body incorporeal, no longer bound by physical limitations. You take 75% less damage (rounded down) from all physical sources in this form, but take 100% more damage from magical sources.
Undead Resistance - Due to not having the limitations of the living, you are immune to poison and most diseases. Additionally you have a higher threshold for pain from non-magical sources.
Undead Appearance - When attempting to use Appearance in a positive way on creatures without the undead subtype, you have a chance to inflict the target with fear until the target gets used to you.
Monstrous Appearance - When attempting to use Appearance in a positive way on creatures without the Monster subtype, it counts as 20 points lower until the target gets used to you.
From the Depths - You can swim through water as easily as walking and you suffer no natural ill effects from the depths of the sea.

Again, nothing really too… explicit, at least in terms of what you once were. All of your abilities were tied to your current undead status, and your skills just told you that you were good at sailing and fighting in melee, as well as having the resistance of the undead. Sure you had a few other small bits, such as being athletic and a bit stealthy, but nothing else really to tell you who you were.

As for where you resided, it didn’t give many clues either. Your home was known as The Galleon’s Graveyard, a ship's graveyard full of rotted timbers and monstrous creatures. There were ships of all kinds here, from small fishing boats to large war galleons filled with cannons and corpses. As for the residents, it was mostly populated by you and your fellow drowned who stalked/swam through the corpses of the various ships. Most life tended to avoid your home, with the exception of the more viscous of the sea’s creatures. Things like saltwater snapjaws or hungry stalkers tended to swim alongside the undead, eager to snap up any adventurers who were unlucky enough to fall to a swarm.

Oh right. The adventures.

They were… well, annoying. Every day some group of adventures would come down to the depths using some magic spell to let them breathe underwater, kill the lot of you, and then take some random trinket from the crashed ships. You had no idea why they did it or honestly what they were coming after, but it always happened. And somehow despite having so many adventures come to pick the place clean, there was always some new random treasure lying about for them to pick up and take.

Part of you wondered if it was the gods' orchestration. Maybe this area just drew treasures to it like moths to a flame, and that was why there were so many crashed ships. Fools who thought they could take treasures by the hundreds only to end up wrecked themselves.

But the rest of you was content to just assume that whatever the reason, it was bad news for you either way. Treasure shows up, adventurers soon follow, you end up dead and respawn in only for everything to repeat. Who would have guessed being dead would end up killing you so often?

Well, no point in dwelling on the inevitable you were sure to face sometime soon. You quickly stand up, walk away from the small freshwater spring in this cave, and head over to the pool that lead out into The Galleon’s Graveyard.