Hell Harbor is an interactive fiction experiment that allows readers to choose the direction of the story. It relates the exploits of a band of pirates who, wronged by another crew of cutthroats, seek revenge and encounter events beyond mortal ken. That's it -- that's the only dictum in place. Pirates head out for revenge and something bigger than that happens.

Updates to Hell Harbor occur weekly, and the experiment has a finite duration of episodes known only to me. It's different from a "choose-your-own-adventure" or old-school text adventure in that the story isn't pre-scripted. Readers cast their votes and I write to suit the chosen solution. You tell me where to take the story and I follow your cues.

Writer Tim Dedopulos has his own interactive fiction project, The Great Game, that inspired the activity here at Hell Harbor. Fellow CCP/ White Wolfer Eddy Webb is also investigating the Whitechapel Project. If you're interested in serialized, interactive fiction, be sure to check them out.

Chapter One

Five years, it was, five years ago we almost lost our lives in a vicious tide of fire and water, manning the decks of the Streel, the fastest corvette on the Eastern Seas. With Captain Kray at the helm — here’s a drink to Captain Kray! — the Streel and her crew were the terror of the high seas. Fat with pillage, the Streel sailed for Kray’s hidden cove, where the Captain would bury the treasure and then we'd wait out the king’s armada in the pirate town Hell Harbor.

Treachery! Pecky caught sight of the Blood Diver on the horizon a day before we were supposed to make Kray Cove. Somehow the Diver and its crew of rusty-scupper galley whores, the Mar Bolig gang, knew we were laden to the stern. Under the command of the deplorable Captain Greeves, the Blood Diver caught up and laid waste to the Streel, pounding our ship with relentless cannon. After plundering its silks, rum, and heavy coin, the Blood Diver left the burning hulk of the Streel sinking into the sea, scorched with burning pitch and sucking water like a bilge rat. The last we saw of Captain Kray, he was sinking with his ship into the briny deep.

We'd all have drowned, too, if it wasn’t for the raft we'd managed to lash together from a few swamped barrels and a strake from the Streel. It took two weeks for our forsaken raft to wash itself near to Hell Harbor. We spent those delirious days drinking the spinal fluid of fish, eating whatever birds would alight on the raft, and using Pecky to deter the sharks — here’s a drink to poor, chawed-asunder Pecky!

So it’d been hard times in Hell Harbor for five years. The lot of us had been unable to find work, since no one wants a Jonas on his decks, and so we couldn't escape the town’s wretched plank streets. We'd been swabbies here, we'd been dockhands there, we'd been cutthroats and we'd been beggars.

Then something happened.

Two nights ago, one of the pirate swains from the Mar Bolig gang stumbled into the Gnarly Fin wearing a fat purse at his belt and spending like... well, like a drunken pirate in Hell Harbor. Without even pausing to look at each other we took him outside and thrashed him until he told us where he came into all that money. Surprise, surprise: It was the lost treasure of the Streel, or so he said, and Captain Greeves had just put to sail.

Let it be said that there’s no way in the depths of the Abyss that we were going to allow Captain Greeves and the Mar Bolig scumbags to counter-thieve our rightfully stolen swag, even these five years later. We're the better crew, we're the tougher scuttlers, and that was a low-down trick pulled by the Blood Diver, goddammit, so we swore to take back what was rightfully ours (in a manner of speaking). Captain Greeves had the lead, but that pirate we'd throttled — here’s a drink to ol’ what’s-his-face! — told us where the Mar Bolig hideout was. All we had to do was get there.

With the Streel sunk, though, we needed a ship. And we figured there was probably one down there at the Hell Harbor docks just waiting for us to christen it for its new voyage.

 

Chapter Two

Our eyes lit upon the bilge scows and crippled schooners moored at the docks, but none seemed able to float on their own, much less overtake an able buccaneer vessel with a head start. Only a few of the tubs in the quay even looked seaworthy, and the Streel's crew, fouled on their own rum-grime and thoughts of bloody vengeance, knew it.

Enthusiasm won over wisdom and the riotous sailors congregated around the most curious craft most of us had ever seen. It was a monstrous ship, a three-keeled freak of the seas that looked as fast a whore's bath on Sunday morning. The Sahagin, its main hull proclaimed her, and she all but beckoned the crew directly. And so we poured over her rails and onto her decks, a smooth-working crew, and had her loosed from the wharf's moorings before the port guards noticed her missing or roused her owner, fat Martino, from his slumber.

Once we had put out to see, our crew's efficiency fell off. We may be veterans of the waterways, but let never let it be said that a sea-rogue's inclinations don't favor himself. Fast as the Sahagin was, without a stern captain to lead her, the only race she would win was a race to the bottom. Running this way and that, the crew spent as much time looking busy or taking lax duties as it did eating up the knots between us and the Mar Bolig.

Under the sparse light of a smoky moon, we rigged the Sahagin's spinnakers as best we could, with our anarchic crew of forty-some wicked johnnies doing the work of a dozen less drunken men. When we barely managed to fight the hull over a rogue wave that roared out of the black night, we knew that our rash act needed tempering in the fires of order.

Fights erupted. The unsuspecting were hurled overboard, gaffed back out of the sea, and then cast in again if their peers deemed it necessary. Aboard a vessel on the water, the only peril worse than the siren's call is the ire of one's shipmates. With the Streel sailors having been trapped at port for so long, our tensions ran high and our skills had gone shabby. We were a mess, and until Mr. Wolcott's guts spilled across the Sahagin's deck — here's a drink to "Old Barnacle" Wolcott! — our way was doomed. Chaos at sea brings death. Which is to say, more death, since Wolcott had already met his end.

Even in our fumy states of mind, we knew that we'd never make it without a strict leader. But who among this motley crew of murderers, swabbies, and bowlegged villains could rise to the task?

 

Chapter Three

She had the pug face and flapping jowls of a pit-bred dog, did Mother Duggs, and when she waddled her way to the forecastle and demanded the sailors all pay her heed, no one even turned her way to acknowledge her voice. A woman on board was an ill practice, most sailors reasoned, and the fact that she was a whore wasn’t going to protect her from any of the rough-edged crew’s ungentle attentions. Surely she knew this as she stole aboard the Sahagin, and thus it was only she who didn’t stand, jaws agape, when she grabbed the quirt from Lash Whipley’s hand and drummed him to the decks with it.

"You half-damned scow-chaff are going to shatter this ship on a reef unless someone takes charge and keeps this crew in order!" she bellowed, her savage breast heaving like the breakers on shore.

The crew remained frozen, all but for Lash, who had brooked no insolence as Captain Kray’s first mate and had no intention of suffering this dreadful woman’s whim. He spoke but a single word, and none heard what it was before Mother Duggs stropped his chin with the quirt. "Enough from you," she insisted. As Lash’s head caromed off the deck, the hairy barbarian Olan pointed and laughed, and took up a burly pose behind Mother Duggs. Even quiet Groot, the oldest sailor on board, nodded in approval.

What could they say? Captain she had become.

"Enough grab-ass!" Mother Duggs roared. "You blazed out of Hell harbor without enough victuals to make Port Secundum. If this ragged lot is going to catch the Mar Bolig with any hope of putting up a fight, we're going to have to put in at Islip to supply."

"You chummed sow, this crew is no stranger to lean times and hardship," Lash hissed through split lips. "We'll subsist on octopus, bile, and anticipation of sweet revenge if need be." A few of the sailors, though no friends to Lash, murmured in agreement. None wanted to lose any time while they could practically still see the Mar Bolig's wake.

Mother Duggs squinted and raised her quirt again, but Lash stood his ground. "What would a dockside whore know about provisioning?" he snarled.

"What would a one-eyed bully know about the welfare of his men?" the hound-faced woman replied.

A torrent of nonsense syllables spilled forth from Olan, who made a movement with his hirsute arm that suggested an bypassing-type maneuver. The only intelligible word in his gout of guttural speech was Slurnspur, a little-considered port thorp on the savage coasts northeast.

"Maybe you trash are unfamiliar with what a captain does," Mother Duggs spoke slowly from beneath the great slabs of her face. "She decides. She's in charge. She--"

"She's a carking idiot," Lash interrupted, foamy flecks of blood-spittle flying from his lips.

The crew's mood had turned ugly. Whichever route they ultimately took, a nigh-mutiny against their new captain didn't put them any closer to the Mar Bolig. Knives slipped from their sheaths.