Diving Bell

Ultimate Equipment Guide II

Author Greg Lynch, J. C. Alvarez
Publisher Mongoose Publishing
Publish date 2005

Nine of every ten sailor tales deal, in some way, with the great treasures that lie lost but not forgotten at the bottom of the sea. Amara has spent her entire life listening to these tales, first from her father and his friends, then from the customers who come to By Sail and Wain. Though her practical side always told her not to believe them, especially since it seemed every sailor had a different story and fully half of them claimed to know exactly where this lost treasure lay, she nevertheless found these stories always fired her imagination. When she was a little girl, she asked her father why magic couldn’t be used to retrieve all these treasures, if the sailors knew where they were. He told her that though magic could let men breathe water, it was impossible for a man to survive the crushing weight of the water at the depths where most of these lost treasures lay.

Amara never forgot that lesson, and as she grew older, she began to work on designing a means by which people might be able to descend unharmed into the crushing depths. The submersible was one such experiment, but Amara found she could not make it strong enough to descend to a great depth without making it too heavy to ever surface again, and nearly lost her own life several times testing the limits of submersible construction. After deciding there was no way to construct a craft able to go as deep as she would like and still be able to return to the surface independently, she realised she needed to pursue this goal from another direction. She noticed that, depending on how it entered the water, the drag anchor (see below) could trap air within it, and was inspired to create an entirely new craft with a construction similar to that of a drag anchor. The diving bell was the eventual result.

The diving bell is, unsurprisingly, shaped like an enormous bell. The bottom is not completely open, but rather has a narrow walkway around a large opening. The sides of the diving bell are made of steel, four inches thick, and pierced with four small round windows of equally thick glass. The diving bell is lowered into the water with a winch, its immense weight causing it to sink despite the reservoir of air trapped inside it. The diving bell can accommodate two Medium-size occupants for as long as an hour, though this time might decrease as the diving bell descends further
into the crushing depths of the ocean. A diving bell can go as much as 600 feet down into the sea before the weight of the water threatens to crush even the thick metal sides of the device. So long as the occupants remain inside the diving bell, however, they are safe from the crushing weight above them. Diving bells come with a number of long-handled scoops and clamps, allowing the people inside it to reach into the water and collect objects from the ocean floor.

Diving Bell: 2,000 gp