[Icelander]

Originally Posted by D10

Some ocean related lore that might give you some material

Thank you, again. This sort of thing is always useful.

Originally Posted by D10

There is an entitity that is widely revered in coastal cities called Yemanja with dozens of thousands making offering to her by laying flowers and baskets of goodies on the ocean at new years eve

Ah, indeed!

I had read about this goddess (as Mami Wata) during prior reseach of Afro-Caribbean mythology, but neglected to incorporate any mention of her into notes on Brazil

In real life, are those who make offerings to Yemenjá likely to practice a version of Catholicism, Candomblé or Umbanda that incorporates rituals believed to have magical powers?

Do you imagine that if there were real supernatural threats associated with the ocean in the 2000s and 2010s, and that occasional gifted people could accomplish subtle effects using some rituals with roots in the 19th century and earlier, that an organized religion / order of ritual magicians could arise under the name of Yemenjá in Rio and elsewhere in Brazil?

If so, any thoughts on how such a thing might develop (in secret from the authorities, most likely)?

Originally Posted by D10

however stories about mermaids and whatnots have been relegated to river dwelling drunk fisherman, specially in the amazon as you mentioned. I think this could be in part due to the aggressive exploration of the oil basin on brazil's coast with oilrigs. too much tech on the sea, too many educated individuals that will claim an unusual incident or sighting is better explained by occams razor

Interesting. And, of course, in my campaign, most people do indeed somehow manage to explain away anything inexplicable they hear about or even experience.

On the other hand, my setting and the real world have begun diverging ever more widely and in the world of the setting, ships and oil rigs anywhere within a few hundred miles of a point 120 miles SE of Rio de Janeiro have suffered many more 'accidents' in the last couple of decades than in real life and by 2018, working on the sea around Rio is probably regarded as even more dangerous than joining BOPE or Comando Vermelho.

Originally Posted by D10

There was one weird incident regarding sea things that fit your timeline tho that maybe you could use, the P-36 incident , it could have been a coverup of something much bigger.

Well, that was obviously the first strike by the hostile underwater entities. Likely enough, some brave roughnecks responded to ichtyoid horrors invading the oil platform, in search of a filling meal of human entrails, by fighting back, in true PC fashion. Also, like PCs, they saved most of the people on board, but ended up causing explosions, astonishong property damage and truly incalculable environmental harm.

It is from the aftermath of this event, and the many unanswered questions that remained, that the formal beginning of the Brazilian Navy's secret research of the undersea threat dates.

Originally Posted by D10

Also, there have been many sightings of UFOs around the western beaches of rio de janeiro, disproportionate to other regions, one theory is that there is an underwater UFO base somewhere off the coast of rio on the western side, and the sightings are the UFOs coming and going from their underwater base. I have no data to back this up, just my personal experience and several anecdotes.

Indeed, the Vile Vortex that lies outside Rio de Janeiro is plucked from the pages of Ivan T. Sanderson's theories on pseudoscientific subjects. The same Sanderson who wrote Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs, where he popularized theories of underwater UFOs and an undersea civilization unknown to us.