Ninth Session – We brave the Tower of the Black Pearl to get its… Pearl! A little on the nose but we do get to murder pirates aplenty so there’s that.
This is apparently from a DCC adventure called Tower of the Black Pearl. After Ned decides to mutate himself heavily to become a tentacle-god follower, and Hemp has a not terribly satisfactory conversation with a random chess-playing cyclops, we take a boat to a sunken tower that Mordecai hears has magic that will let him be a fighter/mage.
When we get there, there’s pirates! We fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight… Fight fight fight, fight fight fight! After some dungeon weirdness (animated statues… Charon taking us downriver…) we find the pirate leader, Savage Quenn, who teams up with us for all of 3 pages of session summary. His attempted betrayal goes poorly because we knew he was gonna do it, so Gallfred Weasel interrupts his evil soliloquy with a backstab.
We clear the dungeon and get the goody, and flee as the dungeon floods. DCC adventures love for the most dangerous part to be “make lots of checks or die to escape the dungeon collapsing.”
Mordecai is very pleased with a pearl that can “allow him to wear armor and use weapons as a fighter, and gives him +1 to saving throws, AC, and attack rolls as an added bonus.”
Hemp tries out the rapier from the pirate captain – it is super cool and powerful, but makes him make DC10 Will saves to not stab random people for kicks. He is not made of Will and fails the first one and murders a captive we found. I decide that random forced thrill-killing isn’t a great upside so he packs the rapier back up.
Ninth Session (6 page pdf) – “The Gnoll Cartel” – To get proof of their crewman’s innocence, the crew pursues drug dealers back to the lair of their boss and his menagerie.
This is a pretty focused session – the PCs ambush some drug smugglers who also have a captive – who turns out to be the famous pirate Falken Drango, who busts loose and helps them! Entertainingly, the session almost completely omits his sad story to them about how his crew and ship, the Nightslink, are missing and he needs help to reclaim them. But, they like him and partner up with him, which is good.
The drug smugglers were an encounter from the Razor Coast book (The Midnight Deal) but I added Drango so the PCs would have another chance to meet him.
They track back to the gnoll smuggler Bonegnaw’s cove where his ship, the Dragon’s Tail, berths. He smuggles in both drugs and exotic monsters. That makes for a lively and very dangerous fight full of chimeras and cockatrices and chuuls and girallons. And many of the monsters don’t differentiate between smugglers and PCs in terms of murder opportunities.
Eighth Session(13 page pdf) – “Back To The Sewers” – Among other shenanigans, the crew heads back down into Port Shaw’s sewers to find a bard’s corpse at his postmortem request.
The plot threads come quickly. Dragonsmoke pushers are working for Bonegnaw who is also the chimera smuggler that burned down the warehouse! They need to go back into the sewers to set a bard’s corpse to rest to find Garr Bloodbane’s treasure! More Salty Dog dock gang issues! New NPCs a’poppin’!
The love of treasure wins out and they go back to the sewers with Cap’n Lester, where they make friendly contact with a crab-man and unfriendly contact with gator-men. Oh, fantasy RPG racism, when will you let us live in peace?!?
Anyway, they find the dead bard and emerge from the sewers with a bunch of skulls from people the gator-men have killed. The locals and Dragoons are just happy it’s not all child corpses this time.
Seventh Session (7 page pdf) – “Arson, She Wrote” – As usual, while our PCs have been off adventuring, their crew has gotten into various forms of trouble. Their Nidalese fisherwoman Arsonee has been arrested for being close to the scene of an arson, and… Her name is “Arsonee.” Open and shut case!
One of the fun parts of the PCs having an entire crew of pirates is that when they leave them alone, they don’t just peaceably swab decks on the ship, they go ashore and get into pirate style trouble. I put entire charts together to randomly determine it.
There’s some other minor problems but the biggest one is that Arsonee, the fisherwoman they picked up from Nidal (the shadow torture country), got arrested for arson, largely based on being near a burning warehouse and having the name “Arsony.” “I mean, we’d get busted down to private for *not* arresting her,” reasoned the Dragoon responders.
Naturally, they immediately take her to the torturer to elicit a confession, in standard fantasy (?) cop procedure. Being from Nidal where recreational torture is an art form, it’s getting them nowhere. The PCs are on good terms with the Dragoons mainly via making friends with Sergeant Darenar, so they go get them to chill out on the torture while they investigate, and as a bonus take crazed fisherman Harok McFarrow who saw his family eaten by weresharks and was then blamed for the crime to Father Zalen to see if he can cure his insanity, but he’s “only” a ninth level cleric.
Zalen explains he doesn’t have the magics personally to heal peoples’ minds. And the local asylums have been closed down by the city council.
Some discussion ensued about “Oh, just like Ronald Reagan!” which should have been a tip to them about who the bad guy is…
But anyway, Arsonee tells them a weird story about a chimera inside the warehouse and the prostitutes starting to set up the new brothel they’re establishing provide some leads as well. The PC crime wave in Port Shaw is well underway!
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.
Fifth Session (12 page pdf) – “Shadow Conspiracy” – The night gets longer as they have to dispose of a body. Finally they check in at their ship and split time between planning to fund a brothel and searching down leads related to their phantom attacker, which sends them from the church to a bar to a sewer.
“And then guess what the fourth shark took?!?“
The party struggles on, having been awake for several days at this point. Every time they think about turning in some new demented entertainment is offered up by Port Shaw. They go to dispose of the phantom/businessman’s mortal remains at a local inn that offers that as a value add service, And, of course, drink and gamble some more. Even when they get back to the ship, they take some reports before finally turning in…
But Serpent’s family has moved out (he forgot that this was the plan, to be honest) and Sindawe’s captain’s quarters are occupied by Lefty and a local girl. A rough night on an improvised pallet for both of them then!
They then split their time between investigating phantom sightings and arranging to own a proper brothel that their four new prostitute besties can set up in. Since Lavender Lil was a proper (?) brothel prostitute back in Riddleport they put her in charge, which is a great idea except for the fact she and all the other women immediately decided they hated each other on sight.
I generally roll informal reaction checks whenever people meet each other to see how well they get along. Years ago the group was entertained by Samaritha and Ameiko Kaijutsu of Sandpoint (the latter eventually travelling to Tian Xia and being the empress apparent in the Jade Regent adventure path) both rolling nat 1’s when meeting each other, causing them to fall into that inexplicable state of implacably cold hate that only women just meeting each other can immediately muster. Well, many years later it happened again, so the rowdy whores are quite a handful and it’ll take a while to get to some equilibrium on that (more to come!).
And finally, they find a sad native girl who indicates that the “Roach King” took one of her friends into the sewers to be eaten. The sewers are suspiciously locked and guarded by Dragoons. This is their cue to find Capt’n Lester Farrows, a swamp pirate (no really) and his raft to venture therein!
Fourth Session (9 page pdf) – “Fight Club Raids and Noose Races” – The crew isn’t done with having fun yet, so they continue to cut a swath across Port Shaw. A Dragoon raid and an infamous pirate cause an early end to the fight club for the evening, so they go find the “Noose Races” they have heard so much about. But after a Conan-esque night of debauchery, an old threat appears.
Anyone who refers to time an adventuring party spends in a city as “downtime”, give yourself a big ol’ wedgie and then read on.
Last session went great so I took a chance. In the Razor Coast book there’s a very “Captain Jack Sparrow” type of infamous pirate named Falken Drango. However, I know that Chris (Sindawe’s player) hates Captain Jack Sparrow.
So how do I introduce him without triggering that? I mean, he’s not plot critical, but I wanted to use him as a recurring NPC to introduce them to the local piracy scene, so I wanted to do something where they wouldn’t kill him/avoid him. So instead I had him be in disguise and be Sindawe’s first foe in the Broken Skull fight club ring!
Some background – Sindawe decided he really, really hated a Riddleport NPC called the Splithog Pauper who was always in disguise. They were “frenemies” sometimes on the same side, sometimes opposing, like every character in Sons of Anarchy. The last time they saw him was in 2011 and left it like this:
“Our heroes fail to lure the Splithog Pauper to his death behind the building; he makes a “I am keeping my eyes on you” gesture which is reciprocated with “I am going to kill you” gestures.”
For whatever reason he has become Sindawe’s greatest nemesis (in Sindawe’s mind) and so when the fighter was in disguise he was convinced it must be the Splithog Pauper. When it wasn’t, he was so relieved – and then the Dragoons went after him – and the relief plus their normal “fuck the police” sentiment meant they helped him escape!
As they wandered the active night streets of the Bawd District after that, eating lizards on a stick or whatever, they are clearly ready for more hijinks so it’s time for the noose races!!!
What’s a noose race? Beats the shit out of me, but it’s mentioned in the Bawd District writeup in the Razor Coast book and then never after:
The low-burning, smoky tar lanterns of Bawd call sailors and other visitors to her dark twisting alleys and dock-ways, luring them to experiment with exotic and far-ranging narcotics, to lose their shirts (and occasionally their teeth) at gambling dens, to enjoy Port Shaw’s infamous houses of ill repute and to attend her myriad entertainments: performances from the Speckled Eyes snake charmer’s guild, baboon fights, gourd-gazing seers, legendary scorpion baths, noose races and other wild spectacles.
I had read this to the players at some point and the noose races captured their fancy, so I worked them up as a minigame. They give you a swig of arsenic, tighten a noose around your neck so you can’t breathe, and then loose a greased naked Keleshite you have to catch. As there are no other rules, violence between the runners is encouraged. Used our custom chase rules plus the normal Pathfinder “holding breath” rules and losing 1 “breath” per action.
As this is a pirate campaign, they were way into it, and emerge victorious after a hilarious action sequence romp through the nighttime crowds of the Bawd District.
And then they meet up with their new favorite quartet of hookers from last time, Ophelia, Molly, Feather, and Joy. They had them set up a meeting with a local businessman and john of Joy’s that was looking to join the Lodge, the local ruling council. You need their approval to buy businesses and stuff, so from an organized crime point of view they figure he’s a good guy to talk to.
So they meet their friends in the bar, in comes Joy and the businessman – and cyper glyphs burn. He’s a phantom!!! A sudden, brutal fight breaks out.
This was sobering (in and out of game), they hadn’t come across phantoms in Port Shaw yet. So after all the hilarity it was like throwing a bucket of cold water on them at the end of the session! I love GMing. Definitely wound them up for the next game.
Third Session(7 page pdf) – “Drinking, Whoring, Gambling, and Brawling” – Our crew is in the mood for some shore leave. They meet a quartet of hookers that they take a shine to and gamble with. Then they go fight at a fight club. Good clean fun!
Port Shaw is a city of 20,000 people. Sindawe is originally from this area but it’s pretty different from when he left as a youth. Whaling and overfishing and plantations have driven off much of the wildlife. Native practices are considered an entertaining diversion in the city, and something to be whipped out in the plantations. It has four proper districts – Tide, Bawd, Silk, and Jade, plus the plantations and outskirts. In the words of the city’s stat block, Here’s a little interlude that sums the place up pretty well:
Silk: Home to Port Shaw’s artisans and artists.
Jade: The lair of Port Shaw’s wealthiest upper crust.
Bawd: Entertainments abound–narcotics, gambling, prostitution, pugilism and more.
Tide: The mercantile heart of Port Shaw encompassing trade, fishing and whaling.
Plantation: Slave estates growing pineapples, taro, sugar cane and mangos.
Outskirts: Tulita ghetto struggling against disease, famine and aggressive predators.
They got into town and went right into wandering around to fight weresharks, and they want a break. Now it’s time for a slice of life on the mean streets of Port Shaw’s Bawd district. I had a boy (Tanga) offer himself as a guide, it’s helpful to the PCs but also for me to plausibly infodump about local places and practices.
He leads them deeper into the district, past ale houses, houses of ill repute, drug dens, apartments, nice walled compounds, and the general chaos of its denizens going about their business. Dragoons keep the peace by watching and doing little, including a halfling robbing an elder gnome openly on the street. Sindawe intervenes by kicking the halfling robber away. Olgum the gnome leaves with his wallet intact. He sobs and clings to Wogan a moment; the group invites him to lunch with them later. He begs off given a prior engagement, and scuttles off with Wogan’s coin-purse (unbeknownst to them).
They wanted to go to a random inn to eat, so I used this random inn generator to create one on the fly, the Cursed Spear. Then, I can’t even remember what I was using for random encounter tables, might have been “Lawless Port City” from d20PFSRD (576 pages and no random encounter tables for Port Shaw, boo), but they ran across four local hookers in robes and togas, and for some reason they really took to them! Even though none of them had prurient interest, because Sindawe knows Mama Watanna is a jealous loa-lover, Serpent knows his wife Samaritha is a jealous serpentfolk wizard-lover, and Wogan knows his god is jealous of his weiner (or whatever Gozreh’s motivation is).
I pulled up this random brothel generator to generate them but I lost the initial pdf – my notes simply record quick descriptions and who they were hitting up. “Molly (Wogan, impressive, nice, varisian neck tattoo, hood piercing, knows business guy), Ophelia (Sindawe, clean, dragon face tattoo, potter’s apprentice), Feather (Serpent, greedy, dextrous, tiny, long hair, hottest), Joy (30, left out, matching Molly tattoo).”
The PCs and prostitutes (P&P, the exciting new OSR variant) hit it off and gamble, drink, and chat the afternoon away. In a followthrough from the previous quote…
Wogan discovers all his money is missing when the call to ante up comes and has to borrow money to get started. Molly asks him if “He’d like to make 14 gold the hard way,” which he declines to the amusement of the other pirates.
Sometimes, players are really in the mood to role-play and the GM is firing on all cylinders role-playing as well, and you get magic moments that end up being more lasting than the actual locations/NPCs in the source material and session prep. Eventually the PCs leave to go to the Broken Skull and get back on plotline, but expect to see the girls again soon! Spoiler alert, they become long term NPCs.
At the Broken Skull, they discover that Sindawe’s long-lost brother Ochiba (well… technically Sindawe is the long-lost one, since he’s from here and went up north to whitey-land for a decade or so) is currently the champion of the bare knuckle brawler fights the place features. They bet on the fights and Sindawe signs up to fight as well!
Second Session(6 page pdf) – “Wereshark Conspiracy” – The crew tracks down tales of wereshark attacks on the Razor Coast.
First they meet Mokoli Ali’i, the leader of the local Tulita who are trying to maintain their traditional ways instead of living as plantation slaves or servants in the city. They are told about the evil shark god Dajobas and that weresharks herald his return. They get some poultices to fix the wereshark bites, since they are a more dangerous form of lycanthropy, “fel lycanthropy.”
Now, what exactly does that mean? This is one of the real problems with the Razor Coast book. Information is spread all over and called different things. (fel lycanthropy? Kiss of Dajobas?) And they have all these summaries (multiple kinds, and very long) in an attempt to be helpful with campaign planning, but instead they thwart searching the PDF quite effectively because it guarantees that encounters, NPCs, etc. are mentioned in literally hundreds of places. You’d think they’d summarize everything about it in one place, but once you finally find the “fel lycanthrope” (not wereshark, that’d be too easy) template it doesn’t mention lycanthropy or spreading the Kiss at all. The Tulita poultices to cure it are mentioned just in equipment in Milliauka’s stat block.
I love Razor Coast but man… I know organizing such a huge amount of content is difficult, but I have spent a lot of my life control-F’ing over the last several years.
Anyway, then they go fight some weresharks. Choppity chop!
First Session (6 page pdf) – “Port Shaw” – The Chainbreaker reaches Port Shaw, on the Razor Coast, in search of its long-awaited prey! New friends and enemies are made in the southernmost outpost of civilization (by which of course we mean white colonizer civilization).
Ah, the first day in a new city! Buying! Selling! Meeting the new crop of NPCs! Collecting quest leads!
They make friends with Fr. Zalen Trafalgar, the priest of the local chapterhouse of Gozreh, and then try to make friends with both the Dragoons and the native shaman Milliauka they’ve arrested, and both hear about recent unfortunate shark attacks and go to meet the local would-be native leader, Mokoli Ali’i.
This session’s pretty self explanatory. It took a lot of prep – one of the most difficult kind of sessions to prep for is when a) there’s a whole bunch of pregenerated content and b) the PCs are free to go wherever and interact with any bit of it. As the DM you can try to lure them into specific things but I really had to bone up on several full chapters of the Razor Coast book to keep it rolling!
The Reavers on the Seas of Fate keep on goin’! In Season Seven, we investigate Port Shaw on the Razor Coast, from the Frog God Games Razor Coast setting/campaign. (It was started by infamous Pathfinder author Nick Logue, but abandoned and picked up by Frog God, I actually helped proof it and have a credit in the book!)
The Story Thus Far
Our PCs are pirates from the Riddleport area, plying the seas in their ship the Chainbreaker.
Captain Sindawe is a Bonuwat Mwangi monk. His patron is the voudou wendo Mama Watanna (a fantasy version of RL African goddess Mami Wata). He is lawful and violent.
Quartermaster “Serpent” (real name: Ref Jorenson) is an Ulfen barbarian/ranger/druid. He has a large serpent pet (Saluthra), a serpentfolk wife (Samaritha), and can turn into a serpent. He is chaotic and violent.
Master gunner Wogan is a Chelaxian gun-wielding cleric of Gozreh, the god of wind and wave. He guards his chastity carefully and is less violent than the other two, but a hefty dose of rum covers over the differences.
Back in Riddleport, they got embroiled in a plot by an ancient serpentfolk wizard who took over the identity of Elias Tammerhawk, head of the Cyphermages, a group dedicated to unraveling the secrets of the massive arch known as the Cyphergate. He of course tried to use it to loose a shadow army upon Golarion. The PCs thwarted him, though the opening of the gate did cause problems including a tsunami that trashed Riddleport, and various phantom enemies to deal with that can only be harmed by an ultra-rate metal, orichalcum.
Now, with cypherglyphs embedded in their bodies from that event that burn in proximity to phantom foes, they are hunting the serpent man known as Elias Tammerhawk to the ends of the globe to finish him off. They have tracked him to Port Shaw on the coast of the Mwangi Expanse (fantasy-Africa), which is the southernmost outpost of fantasy-European civilization. With, of course, some detours for random acts of piracy, navigating the remains of the sunken continent of Azlant, and a variety of hair-raising encounters as they made their way south of the equator.
Port Shaw in Golarion
Part of the challenge of GMing this is weaving this large setting into the Pathfinder world of Golarion. Here’s how I did it.
First, the map. I’m looking for the Razor Coast to be part of the western Mwangi coast south of the Shackles, Sargava, and Bloodcove – right off the edge of the published maps and south of the Equator!
Right about here in the big empty region on this interactive map of Golarion.
I basically took the map of the Razor Coast and flipped it both north/south and east/west to fit.
In fact, I had to just eyeball it, but now we’re in the age of AI, let’s see what it can do… Here’s what ChatGPT did! OK, not perfect, but pretty good; Gemini and Claude boofed it pretty hard. And I must say that “Freeport Anal” is pretty on point as a place name.
Razor Coast MapPlayer Version
I also decided on a real-world location analog to pull weather, culture, and other elements from.
One of the things that always appealed to me about D&D is that it was a good prompt to do real world research – all of Gygax’s fiddly polearms in AD&D, understanding what medieval life was like (I have copies of Life In A Medieval City and Life In A Medieval Village whose purchase was prompted by D&D; I even took a medieval history course in college to learn more). In my opinion the “made up fantasy lands” people do nowadays are weak, tepid, lacking in the texture and realism of – real world stuff! So I embrace Golarion lands being “fantasy <wherever>” and then it makes me go learn something real.
I declided that the Razor Coast would be equivalent to the Gulf of Guinea, from Ghana in the north to the end of Nigeria, rotated 90 degrees to the right.
Really the part of the coast from Gabon to Angola is a better geographic analog to the Golarion map; I could have used the Fang people as a guide and made Angola more of an analog to Port Shaw, which would also be a solid choice – but I wanted more a “medieval” feel (when Elmina was colonized) than an “early modern” feel (when Libreville was colonized). Ghana’s later colonized by the British and called the Gold Coast in this later period. And Sargava to the north, when it throws off its chains, will be kinda like the Mali Empire.
I used the RL Ghanian city of Elmina as the Port Shaw reference point, it was colonized by the Portugese in 1482. Tell me this Port Shaw art and this Elmina art don’t look the same!!!
ElminaPort Shaw
And thus Fort Stormshield is represented by Elmina Castle (originally St. George Castle):
Here’s a concrete example of how having real world places to draw from pays off… So there’s some whaling ships in Port Shaw in the Razor Coast book. That seems like a less tropical and more arctic thing, I wasn’t sure what to do with it – change it, but to what… Insert research… Oh look a whole fucking Wikipedia article on “Whales in Ghanian Waters.” Turns out “Ghana’s coast forms part of the distribution range of a ‘Gulf of Guinea’ humpback whale breeding stock with estimated population at over 10,000 individuals.” Sperm whales wash up from time to time. Well consider me educated and I have enough info now to add realistic details when the PCs engage with it.
Converting the people groups over was easy, the colonists are Chelaxians like in Sargava, the natives are Mwangi, and the local Tulita tribe is just a specific tribe of Bonuwat.
Converting the religions was also easy. The only real church mentioned is the church of Quell which is a sea god, so that maps directly to Gozreh, who’s the deity of all the party as well so they’ll have affinity with those plot threads – there’s a plot to blow up the church of Quell/Gozreh, and Bethany Razor’s ship, the Quell’s Whore, becomes the Gozreh’s Whore.
What about when they start poking deeper into the natives’ beliefs? Real world research to the rescue again – I used these Wikipedia entries as starting points, West African Vodun and Yoruba Religion. We often get a bit of a “New Orleans” view of voodoo from films and stuff. I went more to the original Orisha for details and insipration.
Frank Mentzer’s add-on Razor Coast adventure has voodoo loa based on the same sources (Oggun is even in there by name). In the adventure, PCs go find mystical trinkets for Aizan, the loa of water and the seas (Yemaya, in the Yoruba religion). Sindawe is already hooked up with her under the name Mama Watanna, so we have PC linkage! (OK so technically Mami Wata and Yemaya are different in RL African mythology, but it’s better for my game to combo them… And Mami Wata has a relation to serpents which plays into our party and themes… And again, I have learned something about the real world while figuring this out!)
I mean, I can’t say the tie-ins were all completely accidental as I had a good knowledge of Razor Coast and knew it was the capstone of the campaign from the beginning, but with just a little stage-setting the incorporation of this monster (546 pages in Razor Coast, plus more in Heart of the Razor) into Golarion, and fleshing it out with real world details, was pretty seamless.
Sixteenth Session(5 page pdf) – “Mama Watanna’s Thanks” – After escaping Lo Lulu’s realm, they return Mama’s things to her! She thanks her lover, Captain Sindawe, in the traditional “Angel Heart” fashion, but thanks the rest of the crew in a way most unusual!
The PCs are annoying enough to Lo Lulu that even though they get the comb they have to fight as he throws “skelespiders” (guecubus reskinned to look spidery) at them. They finally find out via healing bursts that positive magic can free the souls held here which causes Lo Lulu to let them go.
I don’t recall who the other dead were – I think I had the PCs fill out a card about someone that died that they felt guilty about. The one that made the summary this time is an elven wedding party woman who died back in the first session of Season Three. It’s always interesting to ask questions like this to see what’s stuck in your players’ minds.
Anyway, they get Mama Watanna’s effects to her, and as a gift she says they can emerge from the spirit world wherever they want – so they pop out right at Port Shaw, avoiding several more months of sailing.
Wogan says, “How long have we been in the spirit realm?” Several crewmen overhear him and begin to wail.
And of course, it’s not a Mama Watanna visit without an Angel Heart style sex scene with Sindawe. I don’t want voodoo to be “just another religion like the others” in my game, so I make sure there’s a strong overlay of very visceral stuff whenever it happens to make it real different from the more “Presbyterian with some Disneyland theme on top” kind of fantasy religions you usually see.
And that’s the end of Season Six – a shorter one, basically a travel segue with two big adventures, but structured to introduce the two big themes of the rest of the campaign! The decadent ancient elves and the tension between the Mwangi natives and their own religion and the Avistani colonizers and the “standard” religions.
Geek Related 