The Black Fleet

The pirate fleet of Captain Rinder Mardek — named in Archivist Gianni's Itinerary of Pyrirtras as one of the most active and violent fleets terrorising Orathi waters. Its trade is not commerce raiding but the systematic destruction of coastal settlements: incendiary grapeshot fired from offshore into unarmed civilian towns, followed by a landing party that loots the wreckage and carries off the survivors. Its crimes are catalogued as piracy, mass murder, looting, slavery, arson, and reaving, filed under Crimes Against Atollia.

Command and known personnel

• Captain: Rinder Mardek, commanding from the fleet's lead vessel
• Third Mate of the lead vessel: Pyrirtras (1380–1395) — the raid-frontliner, prisoner-selector and executioner, marked for death on sight, presumed drowned in 1395 and in fact alive in Rivalon under the name Latar
• Allied with: Seadog Jon Thomas, the pirate captain who rules Atollia from Hitihare and permits raiders to work its waters for a share

The toll

The itinerary's confirmed aggregate — counted only through the actions of a single third mate, over fifteen years:

The archivist records that the true numbers are believed higher. Whatever the fleet's total is, it is a multiple of this.

Method

The doctrine is stand-off bombardment before contact. Rinder Mardek is described as launching volleys of incendiary grapeshot against unarmed civilian settlements from afar, then shoring to raid — burning a town's defence and its will out of it at no risk to his hulls, then landing to take goods and people. The abductions are not incidental; unlawful enslavement is a standing charge, and the kidnapped are counted separately from the missing.

What the party already knows about this, without the name

The Black Fleet is the machinery behind testimony the campaign has heard since the crossing:

• Laku, an Atollian aboard The Expedition Ship in Session 05, described pirates and marauders sailing into the Isles' waters at will — taking people, money and weapons, sometimes killing for sport — with the Hydra dead and nothing left to stop them. His hometown Amos walled itself in at the cost of its harbour; Scala survives only because reefs and rough northern water make it too much trouble.
• Atollia lists the Seadog and his brother Barty among its villains precisely for letting pirates and marauders raid freely for a cut — the arrangement under which a fleet like Mardek's operates unmolested.
• The Coalition's Atollian objective (free or resurrect the sea-guardians) and the Varian Navy / House Mayfore militia branch (attack Jon Thomas) both exist to break exactly this hold on the trade routes and the coast.

Threads

• Latar. The fleet's third mate is inside the reclamation, in Rivalon, in one of the parallel adventuring groups. See Pyrirtras.
• Is the fleet still at sea? The itinerary's active window closes at 1395 for Pyrirtras only; nothing in the record says the fleet stopped.
• The broken seal. The itinerary reached its present reader with the original wax removed. Someone read the Black Fleet's dossier before it arrived.
• The Varian question. House Mayfore plunders shipping in the same waters with its own government's studied ignorance. Whether Varia's tolerated pirates and Orathos's untolerated ones have ever done business is unasked and unanswered.