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The Stygian Spear flies the black. Rarely seen, it often appears in stories as the ultimate prize for Polonian military patrols, but the strength of the ship and the daring of Captain Josiah are always sufficient to triumph over the superior numbers of cowardly Polonians. |
Captain Josiah Mercurio’s success as a pirate is a testament to the power of obsession wedded to a fortunate find. A man of average height, with hawkish features and dark hair, moustachemustache, and beard always kept neatly trimmed, he had enjoyed an unremarkable career as a privateer, taking a few prize ships but almost losing his own to an uncharted reef. His daring endeared him to his crew, as he sought always to close with his opponents and led from the front in all boarding actions. However, his ship always came out worse for wear, battered by so many repeated close encounters.
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His luck changed dramatically when he surprised and sacked a black-painted vessel with a most unusual cargo , a coterie of enterprising drowmerchants carrying a cargo of adamantine weapons, armor, and raw ingots. Enchanted by the dark luster of this cache of starmetalstar metal, he hit upon the solution to his difficulties, resolving not only to arm himself with purloined adamantine weapons, but also to clad his very ship and its ram in the potent metal. He immediately set about scouring the seas for additional adamantine, buying it, stealing it, trading for it whenever possible, and building his vessel into an unstoppable dreadnought!
Josiah’s ship is a sleek 3-masted sloop of war, the Stygian Spear. This swift vessel is sheathed in deep black metal. In a mocking memorial to the drow who began his obsessive quest, he He adopted a spidered sigil on his pirate flag and mounted a piercing bowsprit and a ram of adamantine shaped like a drider. He had once thought to make the whole ship from adamantine, but his shipwrights reassured him that it would be slow and unwieldy and prone to foundering. Instead, they strategically replaced metal fittings and joints with adamantine alloys for strength and installed cladding along the prow, the keel, the hull, and the rudder to help the ship deflect hostile fire and survive collisions. In fact, its strength proved so formidable that Josiah now bears down on his foes to ram with abandon, letting loose broadsides from his 20 guns aboard as his ship passes by or even through any vessel in its path.
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