The Tyrnabay Naval Charter

In the two thousand years since the Great Strife, the Kingdom of Tyrnabay has developed a reputation of being a nation fueled by piracy. That reputation is well deserved, but few outside Tyrnabay itself are aware of how it came to be. This is a tale of how a Kingdom rose from the rubble at the end of the war when gods almosts broke the world. This Kingdom that would be feared and reviled by the rest of "civilized" Cartyrion, but tolerated nonetheless.

A Brief History

Over the next few hundred years, the Kingdom of Tyrnabay grew out of the efforts of ragtag refugees from the losing armies of the god-war to create a new home for themselves. (For a telling of that history, see A Brief History of the Kingdom of Tyrnabay.) By about the year 500 of the Common Era (after the Great Strife), the mostly human ruling nobility had established itself and declared the Kingdom of Tyrnabay to exist. The crude settlment of Wolf's Bay had grown into a city - the nominal capital. Several other coastal cities had sprung up as well, with fishing being a major source of food supply, since much of the land of the kingdom still bore battle scars and and traces of poisons unleashed during the Strife.

Tyrnabay was a poor kingdom, and received no recognition from the other established Kingdoms of Cartyrion. The Kingdoms and Duchies around the Inner Sea showed the most disrespect. These lands had started a practice of punishing their own criminals with exile. These criminals were put on ships and taken to the shores of Tyrnabay where they were sentence to "live out their lives among the defeated dregs of society - the minions of the The Imprisoned Ones".

One of these exiles was a Felisean female who went by the name of Jennyfur Greeneyes Greeneyes. Young, ambitious, and not afraid of getting into a bit of trouble, Jennyfur became quite vocal with her ridicule of this "Kingdom" that was little more than a prison for the rest of the world. When she finally got the attention of the nobility and was dragged before the king's court, though, she discarded the insults in favor of suggestions as to how Tyrnaby could gain the respect it surely deserved.

Commanding Respect

In brief, Jennyfur convinced the ruling nobles that for them, the Great Strife never really ended. Five hundred years after the rest of the world was at peace, ships were arriving here unthreatened to cast off their undesirables in a place where they felt they kept all their other undesirables. This would have to stop if Tyrnabay were to be recognized as a sovereign kingdom worthy of respect - and she knew just how to do this.

Jennyfur convinced the king to establish a navy and charter it with the task of dealing with any foreign ships that were flaunting Tyrnabay's sovereignty. She further convinced the King to name her the first Captain of that navy, and equip her with a vessel and a copy of the charter which would effectively be her Letter of Marque as a privateer. In short, Jennyfur became Tyrnabay's First Pirate.

The Charter

The Charter itself was brief and sufficiently vague enough that it would serve as a quasi-legal basis for the organized piracy that would come to define Tyrnabay. It basically stated that Tyrnabay was being insulted by the rest of the world, and Tyrnabay wasn't going to put up with it anymore. Furthermore, it created a "navy" whose captains had essentially complete discretion as to who to attack, how to attack, and how to deal with ships, cargo, and passengers taken during such attacks.

When, years later, other kingdoms got actual copies of the charter, they were appalled at the blatant authorization of piracy they saw in the document. But by this time, Tyrnabay was well on its way to becoming the master of the seas that it is today, and there was little they could do about it.