Sixth Session (8 page pdf) – “The Roach King” – Disappearing children lead the crew down into the sewers of Port Shaw, where they make various disgusting and gruesome discoveries.
Trigger warning – violence against children. Well, and bugs and slime and stuff but mainly the kids.
There’s a whole section in Razor Coast about Port Shaw’s sewers, which is are a little weirdly sophisticated for a little colonial town, but whatever. They go in with the halfing sewer pirate captain and poke around. I don’t want to spend too much time in the sewers so get them to fun encounter locations quickly. They fight sahuagin! They fight skum! They find the Jawbone of Kaho Ali’i, which is a scrimshaw relic super important to the local Tulita tribe, which they don’t know will be super important later, but it will be.
They fight a quasit and dretches! They need to retreat… But then hear a crying child. They go save her from the Roach King! Which is a big ass (9′ tall, >100hp) roach mutated from an ogre by toxic magical runoff that controls roach swarms. And every Pathfinder player knows that swarms are the most dangerous thing in the game.
After a hard fight they kill it and find, unfortunately, a large number of child corpses from local kids it’s been snatching and bringing down here, “Stephen King’s It” style. The PCs are pirates but not monsters, they want to retrieve the bodies – but the problem is, they’re down here illegally. There being no Erin Brockovich in fantasy Golarion to address the legal side of fatal toxic runoff related problems, this instead generates a side quest to go get a forged set of papers, which all goes well and lets them meet more local power players. Bodies recovered and turned over to authorities and grieving families. Not really a victory to feel all that good about, but… something.
Then Sindawe finds out their crewmember and suspected serial killer Slasher Jim is at it again.
Sindawe is also shown by Serpent that one of the “head” barrels contains the corpse of an attractive young woman that he hears was put there by Slasher Jim. Sindawe concludes this is like the twentieth most pressing thing in his life.
On the one hand, serial killer. On the other hand, it is right next to the barrels they keep the pickled heads of their enemies in (for speak with dead and light entertainment purposes, mainly), and he’s a solid crewmember, and it’s been a long day. Sindawe just tucks it down into his feelings lockbox and goes about his business.
Geek Related 