In the earliest days of treetop sailing, crews stocked their cargo holds with port-grown provisions. There were fruits and berries on the waves as far as the eye could see, but the effects of crezzerin were as horrific as they were poorly understood - no first-generation wildsailor would risk surviving on plucked vegetables and stolen mushrooms when there were safer, less mutative meals to be eaten.
But times changed for the better. Before long, it was commonplace to hunt and gather as part of a journey, eager chars and portside butcheries learning the most effective ways of removing or countering crezzerin, mites, spores, and a whole host of waveborne toxins. Galleys were stocked with only the bare essentials, and most crews relied on the generosity of the thrash to bulk out what little they packed.
Ship-gardens were the natural next step - removing chance from the equation, and lessening the danger. Why head out over the rail time and time again to feed a crew when you could do it once, treat the seeds of whatever you found, and grow more of it within the safety of the ship? Why force steeps and chars to contend with crezzer-soaked ingredients when (after some careful cultivation and a few cycles of sowing and reaping) you could produce foodstuffs with wild variety and pre-V safety?
And as the popularity of deck-based gardening increased, the technologies that made it possible continued to advance. From clay pots to algae farms, from leaky buckets to engine-driven irrigation systems, from dust-like stolen soils to thriving centimulch and purpose-grown ironsprigs... Just as every wildsailor is unique in their own way, every shipgarden is an ecosystem unique to the deck (or cabin roof, or towed barge) it grows upon.
The Expansion
The 40 pages of Ship-Gardens add the ability for crews to sow, grow, and splice their own produce right there on their very own decks. It's essentially a minigame, an add-on for those that want to really get into the meat (or in this case the fruit) of the wild world. Within the pages of Ship-Gardens, you'll find...
+ Mechanics for creating a ship garden, and for growing some extremely weird stuff within one
+ A whole mess of wildsea fruits, vegetables, legumes, mushrooms...
+ A new post, the Agronaut, with aspects that make the most of a ship's new garden.
+ A giraffe.
