When all seems to be against you, remember, a ship sometimes has to sail against the current, not with it.

― Matshona Dhliwayo

She is here! There are many myths surrounding ships and the reasoning of why people refer to them as ‘she’. One myth says that’s because “men love them”. Another one says that “like a woman, a ship is unpredictable.

The most possible scenario explaining this phenomenon is a combination of the above; The ‘ship as she’ is a linguistic habit as a leftover from tradition, a reflection of a world which saw women as a mystery of the world, like Mother Earth and Mother Nature, someone whose purpose and utility is to carry life on the one hand, but ‘needs a man to handle her’ on the other.

If we want to take a look strictly linguistically, this lingual peculiarity can be possibly traced to the fact that the gender of the Latin word for “ship” — Navis — is feminine.

You can find more info on why a ship is called a ‘she’ – here.

But let’s not waste our time on the thoughts of the past (some of them very wrong!) and let’s focus to the point.

RMS Mauretania – the Queen of the Ocean is here!

In this release you will find the Orlop Deck. For those of you (including me before starting to work on this map) that don’t know what that is, it is the lowest deck of a ship where the engines, furnaces & boilers are.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the floor-plans of the ship and I had to research a lot of how steamboats work. I hope that I managed to bring to you a glimpse of how life was in a huge ship as RMS Mauretania.

Below you can see the floor-plan I used as inspiration for designing this map. 

When the whole ship is ready I will publish it as whole including all the possible fixes I will do until then. For Foundry users I will create a single module with all the decks of the ship when they are ready.

This is a long-term project and because of that I may post updates on the existing maps during the development of the ship.

Those of you that may have more experience than me on ships – please let me know of any inconsistency and I will try to fix it on the next revision.

• grid & gridless maps
• low (70 PPI) & high (140 PPI) resolutions
• dd2vtt files for FoundryVTT & Roll20
• WebP files
• A monthly Foundry Module with all the maps of the month personally curated by me with walls, windows, doors, lights and more.