The Ship and the Voyage

Here are some notes on the nature of the Flying Dutchman, its captain, and its voyage.

• The Dutchman is a cursed ship filled with the animated corpses of the long dead; in addition, the player characters and perhaps a few NPCs in the crew are not truly dead, but damned to Life-in-Death;
  
• The damned who escape the ship always carry the Dutchman with them and will return to it in time; until that happens, their presence in the lands of the living has dire consequences;
• Escaping damnation, on the other hand, frees you from the ship and the consequences, although you can always backslide back into damnation; breaking the curse of the ship is much harder, but permanent;
• Until the curse of the ship is broken, the Dutchman, its captain and crew cannot be truly destroyed, but will always be restored;
• If the damned are physically killed, they join the rest of the crew as truly dead;
• The crew does not speak more than a word or two at a time; the captain (Hendrik van der Decken) occasionally says a full sentence, but is mostly as mindless as the rest of the crew; they are permanently part of the cursed ship as a whole and have no individual personalities;
• The captain and crew will act in the best interest of the ship, attempting to maintain the curse and keep the damned from escaping their damnation;
• The damned can attempt to persuade the captain to choose a course for a port of their choosing; while in port, they can attempt to escape damnation, but there is a risk that the crew will bring death to the port;
• The voyage to the port has the potential to be interrupted by storm, sea monsters, encounters with ships of the living, and interactions with the crew.