It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three. By thy long beard and glittering eye, now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
Attributes:
The Mariner represents humanity’s relationship with the Sea, that greatest and most mysterious of natural forces, and the archetype is one that is constantly changing, because our relationship with the Sea is a rather complicated one. In some incarnations the Mariner is a devoted protector of the vast ocean, who sees it as a nurturing mother and a caring lover. In other times the Mariner has been an explorer and a conqueror of unknown waters, a lone sailor who challenges the mighty Sea.
In all cases, the Mariner has always had one unifying trait. The archetype represents a human who has abandoned land, and normal human society, and embraced life on the open sea. The Mariner is not necessarily a leader, nor does he have to occupy an important position on a ship. He is devoted to the lifestyle, and to the sea itself, even more so than to his crew members. Again, he may look at the Sea as an enemy or as a friend, but he is committed to living with it and understanding it.
(It is worth noting that the Mariner does not have to be male. Although men were traditionally the ones who went out to sea, this hasn’t always been the case, and female avatars of the Mariner have become more common worldwide in the 20th century).
Taboos:
The Mariner may never willingly spend more than a month on land, or his power will slowly ebb away with the tide. If someone were to force a Mariner to stay on land (which isn’t that hard to do), his powers will stay intact as long as he retains the desire to return to the sea, and actively tries to do so. A Mariner can’t work around this taboo by dipping his feet in the water once a month either. He has to actually return to the open ocean, well away from port, and he can’t return until he has completed whatever task he set out to do.
Symbols:
The Mariner has many symbols: A sailor’s cap and a thick wool sweater, a compass and nautical charts, oars, anchors, buoys, knotted ropes, life preservers, the old ship’s helm is an especially strong symbol. Even older ones include the image of the albatross, the Pisces symbol, or the trident.
Masks:
Jason (Greek), Agwe (Vodou), Njord (Norse), Maui (Pacific Islands)
Suspected Avatars in History:
St. Brendan was more than likely a conscious avatar of the Mariner. More recently there was Kay Cottee, who was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly in her boat, First Lady.
Channels:
1%-50%
While you are at sea you are calm and collected, and few things can break your concentration. As long as you are at least a mile away from land, you can flip-flop any stress checks that you are faced with for any category. No skill check is needed, although this ability becomes negated when you are on land or just off shore.
51%-70%
At this point you achieve a oneness with your vessel and your crew. You can use your avatar skill for any skill check that deals with the operation, navigation, or repair of a sea-going vessel. You can also use it for skills that are meant to be used on your crew, like charm, first aid, intimidation, authority, etc. The GM will ultimately decide if it is an appropriate use or not.
71%-90%
You have now become so in tune with the power of the Sea that you can survive underwater indefinitely. With a successful check, you can breathe underwater for the next hour, and you also become resistant to cold temperatures. You have to make the check again every hour if you want to continue staying underwater. There are a few limitations to this power, you can’t use it to improve your swimming abilities, and it won’t help you to resist the pressure of deeper waters. Also, if you fail your check while you are still underwater, you get one last chance to roll your avatar skill, but you must roll a minimum of 30. If you fail that check, you start drowning (UA rulebook, pg 57).
91%+
At this level of power you can actually exert limited control over the sea, and even the local weather patterns. This channel can only be used once per day however, and can’t be used for something as dramatic as summoning a hurricane. With a successful skill check, you can either increase or decrease the force of the wind or waves within a mile of your location. If you are caught in a violent storm, you can use the channel to create an area of calm around your ship. It will follow you until you are safely out of the storm. You can also use it to slow down your pursuers, or even potentially sink an enemy’s vessel, but remember that you will also deal with those effects, and once you use the channel, you can’t reverse the effect that you created. There are also some limits on the strength of the effects. Generally speaking, you have to work with what you have. You can make a regular storm into a deadly storm, but if you have nothing but blue sky and calm waters, you won’t be able to do much more than slow people down. Powerful avatars of the Mariner have been known to use this channel on each other while traveling on the open sea. In that situation, whichever Mariner has the higher roll gets control, and the other will lose the ability to use it for that day.
This is my first avatar submission, so feedback is very welcome. I realize that Mariners may not make very good player characters, and I didn’t really design them that way. I’m coming up with ideas for a nautical Unknown Armies game, and I just thought the Mariner would be appropriate.
I just got finished watching The Life Aquatic, (btw, Wes Andersons’ films are actually excellent UA fodder), and I’m thinking Steve Zissou could be an unconscious avatar of the mariner, maybe he used to be near 70%, but now he’s dropped down to below 50%.
Also, really good. Avatars need to be timeless, essential archetypes, and the Mariner is definitely one of those, and it doesn’t quite fit into any existing Avatar I’ve seen.
Thank you.
And yeah, I think the movie would have been pretty weird if Steve Zissou could breathe underwater or control the weather.
Actually re: breathe underwater – by the point they can breathe underwater, they’d be mythic seafarers already. Not necessarily captains, but that grizzled crew member who has survived shipwrecks that no one else should have survived, the one who knocked overboard during a storm and should have been drowned, frozen and dead but was found floating on a bit of driftwood once the storm abated.
That’s part of it, though: with powers like “breathe underwater”, until you TRY it, you don’t necessarily know you have it. With Steve Zissou, he had (or had had) great diving equipment. When would he test out his lung capacity?
I even like the Weather Control bit (one that when I read the first line feared might be overpowered). It fits pretty well into the “lucky to have on board” aspect of a weathered crewman AND works well (if back-asswards) with the idea of “Weather Sense” that seasoned mariners often possess (the weather sense is also probably aided by the earlier 51%-70% level power). The weather control, seen by an outsider, can also easily be seen as the sailor’s mood being in tune with the weather (though they may think that it’s the sailor matching the mood of the sea, not the other way around). Even the sailor themselves may not know explicitly that they have weather control, instead just thinking that, finally, the stormy mistress that is the sea is willing to show that she loves the sailor back (or some other, similar external rationalization that fits with the sailor’s perceived relationship with the sea).
The one thing I was thinking about was how to tweak some of the requirements/parameters so that it could also apply to some of the mythic Americana figures that plied the Mississippi. They were nearly always in sight of shore, but some of them were quite clearly mariners, if of a more limited sort.