Basic Information
The Sargasso Sea is a region in the North Atlantic Ocean in the surrounded by the Gulf Stream and other large ocean currents. This network of currents forms a vortex where seaweed and debris collected by the currents are deposited.
The area was discovered by Portugese sailors in the 15th Century, who named it after the sargassum seaweed growing there. When Columbus reached the Sargasso in his voyage across the Atlantic, his sailors thought that they were finally getting close to land. They weren't.
In popular legend, the Sargasso Sea is so dense with seaweed that ships can become entangled in the weeds and stuck forever. Not really, but like the fellow said, when fact becomes legend, print the legend.
The term "Sargasso Sea" is sometimes used to describe a region where, like the fictional version of the Sargasso, ships or things become trapped with no hope of escape.
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Game and Story Use
- The inescapable Sargasso of popular legend could make a good setting for an adventure.
- An example of it being done can be found in Paizo Publishing's Savage Tides adventure path.
- This is not actually an irrational place for a drifting hulk to end up, although you'd probably need better weather than the Atlantic gets to avoid it breaking up after a couple of storms. Put this somewhere like The Doldrums and you might stand a chance.
- More than one or two and you begin to suspect someone or something is up to no good.
- This might well go hand in hand with a plastic continent to create some kind of hybrid mat.
- Attach it to a kelp forest below and you'll have a real mess.
- Combine the dimensional and physical versions and you could create some bad-place style pocket dimension that gobbles up ships - perhaps like a sort of Bermuda Triangle - and in which ships from across the ages are trapped in a floating mass of weed, overgrown with creepers and their crews - if any survive - hunted by marine horrors.