LRRTS // COLLECTION
Historical-Fantasy · Psychological-Thriller

Lure of
the Abyss

The fog hides things. Things that prevent them from leaving.

An abandoned outpost. A fog entrenched current that turns the ship around every time. And a man scrambling out of the darkness with a single warning: sink the ship.

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Lure of the Abyss cover
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The Story

Every time they point home, the fog turns them back.

Early 1900s: Captain Orrin Black delivers supplies to a remote arctic research outpost, only to find it abandoned. Not in disarray, but eerily, methodically put back in ordered disorder. Tables set. Logs closed. As if whoever arranged them was still here.

The crew turns for home. The fog comes in. And when it lifts, they are anchored off the same island again. The outpost still waiting. Still empty.

As night falls, a man scrambles from the tree line with hollow-eyes. He is barely coherent repeating a single mantra. Begging everyone who listenes: Sink the ship.

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The World

Early twentieth century. Arctic supply routes. A distant completely ordinary research post.

The period is early industrialism's furthest edge, rigid ships, wireless telegraph, the confidence of a world that had just mapped itself and found everything accounted for. This book is set at the edge of that confidence, in the latitudes where the maps run out of things to say.

A short historical-fantasy with the pacing of a psychological thriller. What's at the outpost isn't explained so much as accumulated, each loop adds a layer, until the weight of it becomes unbearable.

The Island
The outpost is not abandoned. It is waiting for its supplies. The distinction matters enormously.
The Ship
Navigational, spatial, temporal. It hosts something. Something the crew have no words for yet.
Lure of the Abyss
LURE ABYSS
The Game

Lure the fish of the Abyss, for free.

Set on the events before the book: the research crew's food supplies are beginning to run low, and there is no sight of the supply ship. You play as one of the crew members whose job is to fish food for the rest of the research team. Fail to catch enough, and they will die of hunger.

Upgrade your gear and pull strange artefacts out of the sea to bribe your crew members. But beware: not all fish are edible, and there seems to be something in the mist that disturbs the minds of your fellow crew.

Free to Play
Keep any member of the crew a live for 40 days and win a code to get the shrot story for free.
The Sea God
Runs right in your browser and can be played without downloading the llm model. An optional local AI that you can manipulate to give you more fish. Can be played offline after downloading.

The game features a way to manipulate the RNG of praying the favor of the wrath of the sea god using a small language model that downloads about 100 MB to your browser's memory. It runs on your computer locally and does not send or collect anything. You can play without it if you prefer and I completely understand if you do. Gaming the favours out of a very dumb AI acting as a god is a design choice, made to make the experience just a little more unsettling to play. (For mobile, downloading it isn't recommended: it probably won't work.)

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What did the reseaechers find on that island?

Historical-fantasy psychological thriller set at the early-twentieth century edge of the known world. The fog keeps them stuck. The stranger says sink the ship. They think he's insane until they see it for themselves.

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