Project Seaborne

The year is 1510. The whole world is open, and the sea has never been charted.
Project Seaborne is an age-of-sail voyage across the real Earth: every coast, every strait, every river mouth, on a globe you can sail all the way round. You start with a small hull and a thin purse. What you become is not picked from a menu. It is what you did, and the docks will give you a name for it.
Sail alone, or bring your friends into the same world through Steam.
A real ocean
The sea is simulated, not painted. Waves build with the wind, your hull rides on real water, and she heels into a turn. Press a small boat too hard and she goes over.
The winds and currents come from modern ocean records: the trades, the westerlies, the doldrums, the Gulf Stream. Learn them the way the old pilots did. You cannot sail into the wind, so you beat up to it in tacks. A clear morning turns into a gale that will tear canvas you were too proud to furl. Night falls for real. Far land sinks below the horizon and rises again as you close it, and in the far north the aurora lights your sails.
More than fifty rivers run inland. Take a shallow hull up the Thames or the Guadalquivir, and trade where deep-water ships cannot follow.
Every port its own place
Every port has its own painted harbour view, and a page in your Codex with the name it went by in 1510. Behind its doors are the trade house, the shipyard, the chandler, the taproom and inn, the harbour office, and a palace where there is one. The great capitals stand as they stood then, cathedrals and towers and all.
Towns grow when money comes in and put up walls when they fear the sea. Crowns own them, and towns change hands.
Trade that makes sense
Prices are not random. Raw goods come from the places that grow or dig them, go to the works that make them into something, and are sold on as the fittings that build ships. Learn that map and you can see a profit two ports before you reach it.
Keep a price book. Take the long, dangerous run instead of the safe one. Hold stock in a warehouse until the market turns. Put a mate in command of a second ship and send her trading on her own, with an escort if you can spare one, because raiders hunt the lanes whether you are watching or not. Every town has a job board: freight, passengers, bounties, and work no honest captain would take.
Powder and shot
Run out the guns and lay your battery along her waterline. Round shot to hole her, chain to cut her canvas, grape to sweep her deck. Damage stays. Holes below the waterline flood her, torn sails slow her, and shoot away enough rigging and the mast comes down. Kill enough of her crew and she cannot work her guns.
Enemy squadrons fight as a line, and a beaten ship will break and run. When she strikes, you choose: take her as a prize and sail her home, plunder her and let her go, or send her down. In war a prize is lawful. In peace it is piracy, and the world remembers who fired first.
Make the ship yours
More than twenty hulls, from sloop and caravel to carrack, galleon, East Indiaman and junk. You can capture every one, buy her second-hand at the quay, or have her built at a yard big enough for her.
Fit her guns, mount a carved figurehead, and paint her sails in your own colours. Design your own house flag, or fly false colours and hope nobody looks too closely. At the drafting table you can draw a hull's lines yourself and share her with other captains. The best of the players' ships now sail the world as ships of their own.
Sail in company
Host a voyage for friends, or open your sea to any captain who finds it. Everyone sails one world: one economy, so the cargo your friend sells ahead of you moves the price, and one shipping lane, so the merchantman you both sight is the same ship. Every broadside is seen from every deck. Strike up a shanty and the ship alongside can hear you and join in.
Then go ashore together and play Liar's Dice, poker or hazard for real gold.
A crew, not a number
Your crew eat, drink and have opinions. Cross a hot latitude and the water goes faster. Run the casks dry and men die. Pay badly or sail badly and morale turns into desertion, and desertion into something worse. You can watch them on deck working the ship and singing the shanties they know.
Your officers have their own loyalties, skills and price. Hoppy, your sailing master, teaches you the ropes and the great guns in his own voice.
A new voyage opens with a twelve-chapter prologue out of Lisbon: your first ship, your first fight, and an old rival who will not let you go.
The kind of captain you become
Seven callings: Trade, Battle, Carpentry, Discipline, Survivalism, Exploration and Infamy, each with a skill tree of three branches. You cannot have them all, and there is no respec.
Riddle-clue treasure maps with no waypoint and no arrow, only the clue and your reading of the coast. Curiosities that cost little where they were made and a great deal on the far side of the world. A stranger with ten errands and no explanation. An estate granted by the crown, acre by acre, worked while you are at sea. And in the end a family: children who serve aboard as your officers, and an heir who takes up what you built.
Project Seaborne is in active development. Wishlist to be there when she sails.