Wet Planks' Usurper

The biggest long-term challenge that Wet Planks faces is that the foundations of the world are thinning. While planks always spontaneously generate on the inside surface of the Wooden Rim around the world, and flake off into the World Sea, this doesn't in itself erode the World Rim or the Bowl. The World Rim and Bowl had the capacity to regenerate itself. This is how the World Bowl maintains its integrity over time! (Of course, all the sawing and chipping that is going on at various points on the Wood Rim of course does not help!)

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The Wood Rot is a different process. It is weakening the world's bowl-shaped container that is due to the natural Tidal Pools that form between wood, earth, and water on the surfaces and even spontaneously inside the grain of the world's Wooden Rim and Bowl. Most of the damage is below water, and deep inside the living, regenerating wooden flesh of the Bowl. You can see its traces in some wood planks on the World Rim, but more often on waterlogged planks that pop up from deep below the World Sea.

The Worms are not indigenous to Wet Planks. They migrated along the Tidal Pools from world-to-world. Normally these are not dangerous - in most places these worms simply manifest as earthworms. However, the isolating nature of Wet Planks has mutated these creatures over times. They've become aggressive, fractalized, forking creatures with multiple mouths - a hyper-aggressive ivy spreading across and eating their way into the foundations of the world.

The Tidal Pools that invite these creatures into Wet Planks form deep below the 30 Water gates that connect  Wet Planks to other realms. They seem to feed and grow on gate radiance. One solution might be to close all the world's gates. But that would provoke other challenges for the people of Wet Planks.

Three groups are starting to see clues about the presence of a Usurper force:

• The Lumber Ships and Chipping Ships that visit the World Rim have noticed that the world's water level is decreasing
• Certain cultists  in the Parliament of Hulks and the School of Ruddermen have heard of rumors from the Gill Men that the world is leaking away.
• Fishing boats are seeing evidence of large scale spontaneous fish kills in the areas near Water gates. That phenomenon is quite new; usually the areas around Water gates are teeming with marine life of all sorts.