Magic at the Masthead

Magic at the Masthead

You are the new first lieutenant on the MNS Meredith, a neat, fast little frigate in the Measarrean Navy. Officially, your orders are to get out there and harass the enemy. In fact, Measarrean naval intelligence has tasked you with finding out if there is any truth to the rumours that your enemies, the Oriolenn, have developed a weapon powerful enough to manipulate the fundamental laws of nature. It’s a mission that will take you into the heart of enemy territory, and challenge your crew to the utmost. And if you can find, or even claim, this weapon, what then? Will you allow it to transform the world forever? Claim it for yourself? Or attempt to destroy it?

Play as cis or trans; male (he/him), female (she/her), nonbinary (they/them), agender (e/em), or set your own pronouns; gay, straight, bisexual, asexual and/or aromantic with alternative ‘particular friend’ paths available for platonic intimacy.

Focus on naval prowess and hone your crew into a fighting force that can win any battle - with your tactical genius, of course.

Focus on naval intelligence and gain as much information as possible on the enemy’s plans - while using your skill and guile to sew sedition in their ranks.

Focus on natural philosophy, and become a world expert on magic and all the ways it can - or can’t - be harnessed.

Survive attacks from magical creatures and miasmic magical storms. Build diplomatic relationships with mer people. Build a happy and efficient ship - or let it become lubberly and mutinous.

Use your influence over your fellow officers to shape them into very different possible versions of themselves.

Map of the archipelagic world of the game

You

You are a newly qualified lieutenant in the Measarrean navy. You first went to sea at 14, so this has been your life for a long time. You’re now in your mid twenties, and your new captain has promoted you over the heads of your more senior new colleagues into the role of first lieutenant - second in command of the ship. You’re adept at the major skills needed for a sailor. But in the Measarrean navy, all command officers also have a second specialism, and you chose to be either a ship’s navigator, surgeon, or bard (something between a ship’s counsellor, a master of revels, and a cultural consultant). You also have some unique abilities that got you recruited for this secret mission in the first place.

Main NPCs

The following characters are available for romance, or to become particular friends (depending on how things play out - they might hate you!)

You will also have a high level of influence over the kinds of people they become by the end of the game, and what happens to them. They are all pansexual.

NOTE: I have used they/them/theirs throughout, but all genders are variable as detailed above.

Second Lieutenant (and navigator) Ferhan Ahmet [25, Measarrean Kuz-Kusi]. Dashing, intelligent, ruthless. Beloved by the crew for their daring and tactical innovation, they are also deeply ambitious, far more interested in their own professional progress than the good of the service. They are bold and forthright, and give short shrift to those they consider intellectually beneath them, but they take their responsibility to the people under their command very seriously, sacrificing their safety for their crew’s without a thought, and are passionately loyal to the small group of people they consider friends.

Third Lieutenant (and bard) Celyn Davies [24, White Maesarrean]. Celyn is very observant about things that interest them. Those things are magic, and people. They are a capable officer when they remember to be, but they come alive when engaging with their passions. They’ll spend hours on deck, wrapped in a cloak, studying the patterns of magical light on the surface of the water, or making extensive notes on the magical creatures that sometimes break from its depths. They get completely wrapped up in their intellectual passions, potentially to the extent of neglecting their duties. But they notice people, and are well loved among the crew for their quiet compassion.

Fourth Lieutenant (and Surgeon) Ellis Evans [27, Measarrean Malimbean]. Sweet, earnest, honorable. Tender hearted Ellis never wanted to go to sea, but it was the wish of their two very forceful diplomat parents, and they had no choice. Their true calling is as a doctor, and they are very good at it. They are trusting, tender hearted, and have an unfortunate hatred of violence. They think war is fundamentally A Bad Thing.

Magic (please note that you might have more fun inferring all this from the game than having it laid out for you here)

In this world, magic is a natural force, like the winds, or gravity, or the sun. It can be harnessed, but not controlled. There are three main elements to it. Here is how they are understood by the people of the world:

Magic heals and purifies. If you leave barrels of seawater out on deck, the salt will gradually sink to the bottom, leaving pure drinking water on top. If a person has an autoimmune disorder, their symptoms will be vastly improved at sea, where most of the magic is. If a person is trans, and they wish it, the magic will cause a Sea Change, in which their outer form comes to resemble their inner self.

Magic hates injustice. Try to take a group of people prisoner and transport them across the sea, and your ship’s wooden hull will petrify and break, the sails will molder, the food will spoil. Vengeful magical storms will assault the ship from above, and magical creatures will attack from below. The ship will sink before you’ve gone five miles. Try to invade a nation by sea, and you’d better be stealthy. If your intended victims spot you, the magic of the oceans will rise up in their defence, and your ships will suffer the same fate before they can reach the dock. Try to go to sea with a largely conscripted crew, and you’ll have a very hard time of it.

Magic is especially powerful at sea. All hospitals are on ships for this reason.

As it happens, the people of this pre-technology world have got quite a lot of this wrong. Maybe you’ll find out what’s really going on.

Do you like overthinking? Wordlbuilding? Obsessively managing fictional communities? Then you might enjoy my newsletter!

Content Warnings

This game is set on a tall ship during a war between nations with no technology and limited medical knowledge, so you should expect genre-typical content. The following things can happen:

Death of unnamed members of your crew in battle or through battle or starvation or sickness or accident.

Death of named tertiary characters through some of the above.

Mutilation or injury in battle.

Amputation without anesthetic.

Pre-technology naval medical care generally (blood, gore etc.)

The symptoms of scurvy, which can include old scars opening up.

The MC getting a chronic injury that never fully heals.

Violence with cutlasses, boarding axes and pistols.

Murder.

Drunkenness and alcohol consumption.

Drowning.

Classism.

Things that will not happen:

There will be no…

…transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, racism, sexism, ablism, ageism etc. Prejudice does exist in this world, but it is based around social class. The MC is middle class, so does not come in for this personally.

…sex scenes. There is romance, but everything fades to black beyond the level of heavy petting.

Feedback

I love feedback! I am deliberately putting up this demo very early in the process so the game can benefit from your insights as much as possible.

Please tell me:

What you loved (this really is very useful to know)

What didn’t work for you

Suggestions for changes

Hopes for what will happen later in the story

General comments

Sailing/ships/historical inaccuracies or inconsistencies (it is set in a fantasy world, but the ships are the same)

Anything about gender and sexuality that isn’t sitting right with you (especially if are LGBTQ+ - I am queer myself but obviously we are a diverse bunch!)

Requests for things you would like to see

Bug fixes

Points where you were confused

Spelling mistakes/Britishisms/weird grammar etc.

Genre cliches/suggestions. CYOA is a new passion for me, so please tell me if I am missing cool tricks, or putting in things that are old hat

Literally anything else you can think of. I have been writing for a long time, and I’m used to having maybe a handful of readers pre-release. The idea of an audience that can just literally tell you what they want before you actually finish something is VERY EXCITING!

Links

My Choice of Games WIP page. 

If you like worldbuilding and/or history, you might enjoy my new newsletter. It’s called Wheat Googling: speeding up your research one fanatical deep dive at a time. Right now, it’s all background detail for this game, so expect lots of chat about ships and how to blend history with magical worldbuilding.

My website, if you’d like to see what else I get up to.

How do you measure individual happiness?

Well. People have basically been trying to do this for a very long time, and the problem is it’s massively subjective, probably changes quite often for each individual, and is really hard to quantify.

But that hasn’t stopped everyone having a crack at it.

Having looked at a few options, I have decided to go with the World Happiness Poll again. As I told you last time, they have a lot of society-level things they measure, but they do also have some questions designed to measure people’s personal feelings. The first of these is called the Cantril Scale. Here it is:

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.

The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.

On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (ladder-present)

On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? (ladder-future)

It was designed by Hadley Cadril in 1965 as a way of letting people ‘self-anchor’, and correlates very strongly with income.

On its own, people don’t seem to think it’s that useful. But it is useful when combined with other metrics, because then you can put them side by side and basically use it to help you assign numerical values to the more subjective questions. For example, people who reported their current life as 7+, and their future expectation as 8+, usually also reported fewer sick days and more happiness when answering other questions.

Still, for my purposes it isn’t all that useful because it doesn’t tell me anything about why people place themselves where they do on the ladder.

How do you actually measure happiness?

Luckily for me, Gallup also include ten questions in their poll that are designed to measure personal emotional wellbeing. No matter how much googling I do, I can’t find anything that will tell me why they chose these particular ten questions, so I am just going to have to trust that they had good reasons.

All ten questions have yes/no answers. They split them into two categories:

Positive Experience Index Questions

Felt well rested yesterday.

Treated with respect all day yesterday.

Smiled or laughed a lot yesterday.

Learned or did something interesting yesterday.

Experienced enjoyment during a lot of the day yesterday.

Negative Experience Index Questions

Experienced physical pain during a lot of the day yesterday.

Experienced worry during a lot of the day yesterday.

Experienced sadness during a lot of the day yesterday.

Experienced stress during a lot of the day yesterday.

Experienced anger during a lot of the day yesterday.

In my wholly subjective opinion, this seems like a pretty solid list. It doesn’t make any assumptions about what you might find interesting or enjoyable, but it does consider both these things to be as fundamental to human wellbeing as getting enough rest. I would struggle to think of a day that I would describe as ‘high wellbeing’ on which I couldn’t tick at least four of those. Like, maybe I didn’t laugh a lot because I was working, but I enjoyed myself, found the work interesting, and was well rested enough to actually participate.

The list of negatives seems to me equally uncontroversial. It’s basically a list of the four most miserable emotions, plus physical pain. All more or less incompatible with happiness. I suppose ‘despair’ isn’t in there, or ‘hopelessness’, but I suspect someone who felt despairing or hopeless would probably also be experiencing some of the others.

So I am going to use this list as my basis, and figure out how to build the positives and mitigate the negatives.

What shall I do?

When it comes to the game I’m writing, I can basically split the things on this list into two categories: ‘kind of dealt with’, and ‘too big to go into today’.

Kind of dealt with

Sleep. I went to really quite extensive lengths to deal with this in my second letter to you.

‘Treated with respect’. I think this one makes more sense to treat as a result of lots of other changes rather than one thing I can implement. If you live in a weak hierarchy, in a culture that demonstrably cares about your wellbeing, and you can leave if your boss/lover/family is horrible to you, I think you’ve made a good start here.

Too big to go into today

Having a good time (this covers three of the questions!) will need a whole letter about leisure time.

Pain, and healthcare aboard ship generally, is definitely getting its own letter.

But there is one thing I can address now while still keeping this letter short enough that you should be able to get through it in under one cup of tea.

Therapy

Yeah. They’re going to need it. They’re all going to have experienced the trauma of battle, and most of them will have lost loved ones to violent death. A lot of them are also going to have problems with chronic pain because of the injuries they’ve sustained. And they’re all going to know that their job could get them killed at any time.

So I’m creating a new seat at the wardroom table: alienist. It was one of the words people used for roughly what we would now think of as a psychiatrist, but I love it for my world because the magic (and therefore the focus of government) is influenced by the emotions of cohesive communities. A person who is alienated, even alienated from themself, might be actually dangerous. I am really enjoying the implications it creates about the purpose and direction of therapy in this world.

The bread room

But where will I put my alienist’s consulting room? A ship was famously a place with absolutely no aural privacy. Well, I’ve come up with an answer. It’s a bit bananas, but it’s literally the only place I can think of. The bread room! Ships of this era had one large, waterproof tin room located low down in the ship, so they could keep the bread dry. I’m going to put a consulting room in the middle of mine. The bread, and the physical distance from all other parts of the ship, will act as a natural sound insulator! It will be devoid of natural light, but hopefully that will make the experience more intimate rather than claustrophobic.

PS: What do you think of the questions GALLUP came up with? What do you think should be added/omitted?

Next time

I want to think about the sickbay, and how I can use it to relieve pain, stress, and anxiety.

This week’s interesting link

State of the World’s Emotional Health 2025

Some really interesting tidbits from their results, sometimes looking at them in conjunction with the Global Peace Index.

Game

Right now, the project for which I am doing most of my wheat googling is a choose your own adventure IF game I’ve been commissioned to write for Choice of Games. You can find out all about it, and play the 60K word demo, here. You can also find my newsletter in actual newsletter form here.

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What makes the ROs in Magic at the Masthead happy?

Ferhan needs to be physically athletic and present in their body to be truly happy. They also have a fair amount of pride, so they need to feel acknowledged for their brilliance!

Celyn is one of those people who rarely smiles when they are truly happy, because for them, perfect happiness means total immersion in a project.

He decides that all successful societies share eight characteristics, which he calls the ‘social suite’, and that these are based on eight human capacities so fundamental to us that any society that doesn’t allow their expression is doomed to fail. Here they are.

The capacity to have and recognise individual identity

The capacity to love our partners and children

Friendship

Social networks

Co-operation

In-group bias

Mild hierarchy

Social learning and teaching

I think given the massively subjective nature of the question, the social suite is about as good a starting point as we are going to get, so I’m going to use it. But this list is about ‘success’, which is more about a society’s ability to endure over time than it is about how happy its members are, at least directly. So I need to know about happiness.

What do the happiest societies have in common?

Well, thanks to data from the World Happiness Report, we do basically know the answer to this now. Or at least, we know the six factors that account for three quarters of the variability in happiness between countries. Here they are:

Having someone to count on

GDP per capita

Healthy life expectancy

Freedom to make life choices

Generosity

Freedom from corruption

The report acknowledges that it has limitations (for example, they can’t include unemployment as an option because they don’t have comparable data from all the countries they collect from). They are also really clear that these factors are correlative, not necessarily causative.

Still, I think these two lists between them can create quite a coherent picture of a basically stable society that at least meets the necessary conditions for happiness. Here’s my attempt to combine them:

A successful, happy society has…

…wealth (GDP per capita)

…a robust welfare state (I am taking a leap here, but it’s hard to imagine a nation with high healthy life expectancy that hadn’t dealt with the major causes of early death/poor health: poverty, adequate housing, nutrition, and access to healthcare)

…a clear in-group whose people take care of one another (‘generosity’, ‘having someone to count on’, ‘social networks’, ‘co-operation’, ‘in-group bias’).

…meaningful choice of work, and the chance to pass on your skills (‘capacity to have and recognise individual identity;’ ‘freedom to make life choices;’ ‘social learning and teaching’).

…highly accountable leadership (this is ‘freedom from corruption’, obviously, but I think also ‘weak hierarchy’ because a leadership that is accountable to its people and faces real consequences for breaking their trust is necessarily un-autocratic).

…adequate leisure time (I’m counting this as part of ‘freedom to make life choices’, ‘capacity to have and recognise individual identity’, but also it’s ‘capacity to love partners and children’, and ‘friendship’: these things require time for them to happen in).

What shall I do?

My game is set on a warship, and its the crew is the society I’m working with.

Some of these criteria are really easy to meet. Wealth, for example. The nation I have invented for this navy is already wealthy. Similarly, this is a ship of war. They definitely already have a clear in-group, and sailors are famously protective of their shipmates.

The others require more thought:

A robust welfare state. This one is, obviously, going to involve a pretty hefty deviation from the historical ships of the period. My sailors will be paid a decent wage, housed in much better conditions, and have access to a much more varied diet (I will go into this in a later newsletter when I tell you all about the food they brought for a three year trip on the Discovery in 1901!). They will also need to upgrade from the standard ‘barber-surgeon’ to an actual physician.

Meaningful choice of work. Actually this one is probably OK if I make the navy ‘volunteer’ only, and give them plenty of chances to leave if they want to. That way, I can assume that everyone on the crew has chosen to been there.

Highly accountable leadership is a lot more difficult, because of the promise of the premise. I think when you read an Age of Sail book, you’re sort of expecting rows with short-sighted admirals, and protagonists being placed in difficult situations by ignorant superior officers. This sort of thing is also a really good way of generating plot, and I am loathe to do without it. So I think I’m going to fudge it a bit. I can’t turn my fictional nation into a democracy without losing a great deal of the flavour of the setting and an inconvenient amount of the plot. But I can have a system in which sailors can vote with their feet and simply refuse to serve with a particular officer again. In a situation where you just can’t sail the ship without a certain number of crew, and you can’t press them into sailing, this would essentially make leaders accountable at least for keeping their crew happy. I think I will also allow a crew (if they have a majority) to insist on a court martial of a superior officer.

Adequate leisure time. Well, if you saw my giant chart in Wheat Googling #2, you’ll know I’ve already got them adequate leisure time. But what are they going to do with it? A friend of mine who worked in the merchant navy for many years told me that, without enough to do, too much leisure time is a hindrance. This is a big question, so I’ll save it for another letter. For now I’ll just say that although the navy in my game can make a special effort to keep partners and friends together, getting to see your children is going to have to be a shore-leave only thing. Maybe they get their transport costs home from port covered.

All of this has precedent to some extent. Pirate ships and even the American Navy were a lot more democratic than the British Royal Navy. Sailors in the British Navy had a bunch of hobbies they fitted into their very limited leisure time: they could all sew, and a lot of them could do complex embroidery, and play instruments, and dance. There was loads of teaching and learning amongst the ordinary crew and the midshipmen (the teens).