Thirty-fifth Session (10 page pdf) – “The Empress’ Hand” – A fat Chelish merchant ship beached on a sandbar proves a difficult prize, as there’s limited time to board, best, and loot it before the Chelish Navy shows up!
Well it’s the last episode of Season Four and our pirates have their latest plunder-taking go sideways. It gets worse fast as Wogan has one of his gunpowder bombs go off prior to throwing it. They finally manage to rally and get the captain to surrender. Sindawe is healed – he would have been killed outright except for use of an Infamy Point – the net result is he’s lost an eye!
They plunder the ship some and skedaddle before their escort arrives. This adventure was an interesting and largely successful experiment in a “timed” adventure – every round spent fighting and looting was measured against the progress of the overwhelming-force enemy ships.
Besides money, they come away with a hostage – Octavia Selene, a Chelish diva!
The rest of the session is accounting and me taking the temperature of the players on what they want to do next. They have a voyage planned, so I get their feedback on how much of each thing they want – Rahadoum, Ilizmagorti, Shackles, Sargava… Their votes and other feedback on what they want more or less of is recorded in the summary. I’ll try to make it happen!