Let me pitch something

By Chris Riddell

Here goes:

A setting guide and ruleset for sky ship operation and combat; to work in accordance with any adventuring ruleset you desire.

Adventure, obsession, madness, and death.

Think Moby Dick, Sunless Sea, and The Edge Chronicles.

Think Veins of the Earth but sky instead of rock; agoraphobia and horror vacui instead of claustrophobia.

The players are crewing a sky ship, a rickety death trap with a thousand essential mechanisms each of which can and will go wrong. This hunk of junk is the only thing standing between these brave or insane souls and the Long Drop.

They explore an impossible archipelago of broken rocks. Mountains and islands, forested and wild, slowly drifting in the wind, skirting the yawning void of the upper air: the Mountains Untethered. Above; the Verge, too close to the stars, where the air and reality itself are too thin, below, the Murk, where the only sky is the darkness of millions of tonnes of rock, where ramshackle towns squat in darkness in which washed-up and has-beens drink themselves to death, and where listless scavengers paddle the Murk Sea for the wreckage of those who made the Long Drop.

The Mountains are a region uncharted and unchartable, filled with creatures strange and people yet stranger - certainly the natives and creatures of this odd land are bizarre, but perhaps moreso are the ones who come here voluntarily.

Cloudpiercers they are called: idealist settlers building utopia, discontent colonists hatching secession, treasure-hunters seeking their fortune, merchants want trade routs and to fatten their wallets, pirates slit throats and loot bodies, stormhunters and galechasers hunt in the shrieking air, flotillas of desperate men and the navy of empire - all fighting it out in the open skies.

Wild-eyed and manic to a man, they brave the abyss below and the void above for their particular obsession, their private insane drive - but all of them desire to make a mark on the maddeningly empty air before they too go to their Long Drop.