Tag Archives: pirates

Forty-First Session (11 page pdf) – “All Aboard” – The Chainbreaker rescues some crewmen et al. from Bloodcove, leaves others, hits the high seas, and brings on yet more!  Some of them are even invited.

Here’s the Fulvous Cabal in PDF – I use Hero Lab so I basically search around for things kinda like what I want (an urban druid and some random cultists in this case), lightly customize them, and off we go! It makes for some strange things I wouldn’t have picked myself (Lily Pad Stride!) which is cool.

Anyway, they thought they defeated the Fulvous Cabal, sent some of the crew including Wogan back to the ship, and interrogated the leader and then killed him. And then they got to find out he was inhabited by a phantom! This will become a theme later on but was novel at this point. This was more dangerous than anticipated since it was only Sindawe, Serpent, and Klangin remaining, they had sent everyone else away. Luckily it was during the daytime, so they managed to flee.

As they get back to the ship, I had decided on a way to bring the chaos plot to an end too, it had gone past “fun game” scary to “players angry” scary. Mitabu had realized that Zoamai was obsessed and being a danger with the book so he was trying to shuttle it away from her. But she finds out and comes after him. Now it’s up to our wise captain Sindawe to negotiate a resolution! Zoamai grabs the book and he decides she can have it if she is fleeing into Bloodcove – on the grounds that this place is a shithole and it’s their problem. (Just like the rat king they leave behind.)

“Mitabu, are you going or staying?”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Depends. Did you bring that book back from Ulduvai?”
“No. It just appeared one night.”
Sindawe pauses for a long moment. “We are good then… As long as you stick to that story.”
A trio of eight-pointed metal stars scuttle down the gangplank and head out after Zoamai.
Both men grimace at each other.

Tension is lifted, so they make deals with the Aspis Consortium to get some ships they can go plunder, and get underway.

Then we have a fun character moment. Rucia and Klangin both have the hots for Wogan. He’s bound and determined to keep his Gozreh-priesthood celibacy going. Sindawe has him and Lavender Lil go in and check out Rucia, who was stripped naked and had runes put all over her by the Fulvous Cabal. Wogan wants Lil to interrogate her using a zone of truth, which she does, but then also uses to interrogate Wogan about his feelings about Rucia as well. After a bit of this Lil goes “to get her clothes” and just leaves the two of them in the cabin.

Wogan and Rucia stare quietly at each other, then make small talk about his curio collection. Lil doesn’t return, so after a long awkward period Wogan orders Taunya to retrieve Rucia’s clothes. Lil rolls her eyes when she sees Wogan scuttle out onto the deck.

Wogan has his chastity, Serpent has his wife, and Sindawe has a jealous voodoo goddess, but they all like to see their fellows wriggle uncomfortably with temptation. For her part, Lil just can’t get her mind around it, she tries to set him up with Klangin too to no response. As a former hooker and succubus’ thrall she just does not get how he can not be interested in anyone.

Then they manage to take the Boastful Shaman without a fight. They have settled into their revamped ship. This is the end of Season Five – now they need to head south along the Razor Coast to Port Shaw to hunt the source of their phantom problems, the serpent man formerly known as Elias Tammerhawk!

Fortieth Session (11 page pdf) – “Reality In Flux” – Things start getting weirder than usual on board the ship; reality seems to be deviating from what the PCs remember. Identity changes.  More babies. More chaos parrots.  More eight-pointed stars scratched into the ship’s wood…  Hey, we burned that weird Mythos tome from Ulduvai didn’t we? The Prophecies of the Blind Star-God?

So yes, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew Mitabu had squirreled away an Azathothian artifact (not entirely his fault, he’s crazy and artifacts take action to not be destroyed) and brought it back. And our other crazy spellcaster, Zoamai, started experimenting with it. (She was a PC for a player that was here a brief time and left; Mitabu was a player for a longer time but eventually left too.)

And things got weird fast. Initially it’s bad dreams and “normal” chaos stuff like the eight pointed chaos star they took from Ulduvai as a memento getting loose and scuttling around the hold, but soon reality is shifting without warning. I’m pretty sure the first reality change was a mistake on my part. I randomly rolled Crazy Jake as being on watch forgetting he was supposed to be a captive in Bloodcove, and when the conflict was noted instead of retconning it I leaned in and said “Yes… that’s what you thought… But everyone else says no, what do you mean, it’s Rucia.” I realized how much more effective an undeclared narrative change is than the usual “spooky trappings.” So as time went on suddenly this Elder God chaos infraction has made it so:

• It’s not Crazy Jake being held by the Fulvous Cabal, it’s Rucia
• Samaritha suddenly has twins
• Mandohu from Ulduvai is a lizard man not a flying ape

This interacted strongly with the PCs’ less than perfect memories (“Wait… did both eggs hatch and I just misunderstood?”) and normal screwing around (Sindawe convincing Klangin that Wogan needed a kiss a day to avoid death) and they were actually getting pretty upset. And the cold locker looking like a hellscape is because that true seeing lens Serpent found was cursed. It all turned into one big shit sandwich from their perspective.

Wogan replies, “Sindawe, slap me.” Sindawe slaps him. The pain makes him unprepared for a kiss from Klangin who explains, “It is for your own good.” The unclear distinction between truly surreal phenomena and the usual shipboard surreal phenomena leaves the command crew puzzled and distrustful.

They have a conversation in earnest about simply destroying their ship and escaping. Sindawe’s player was serious. I realized “shit I need to tone this down and give them a little more sense of control or else we might get seriously derailed.”

Sindawe discusses setting fire to the ship and walking away from it all to Wogan, Serpent, and Mitabu. An extra baby, an unfindable eight-pointed star, the carvings, hellscape cold locker, etc. all point to something worse than “they are still dreaming”. Worst case, the old timey snake man cult is teaming up with the shoggoth… or something like that. It may be time to burn it all down and walk away. No one disagrees, but none are eager for all that implies.

Luckily they get to Bloodcove and go kill cultists and rescue Rucia and that gives me enough time to plan the next part of that arc, since I was improvising a lot of it during the first part of this session.

Thirty-Ninth Session (9 page pdf) – “Sky Pirates” – All of the crew doesn’t get away cleanly from Bloodcove, so the newly christened Chainbreaker heads that direction.  Things start getting a little weird with the local rat population, however.

They try to break Sexy Beast Sapier out of prison and then get everyone back to Rickety’s Squibs, but the message of a dawn showtime with one day’s notice fails to make its way to everyone. And Thalios Dondel makes it just in time, escaping the clutches of the Fulvous Cabal, but they still have Crazy Jake.

I can’t remember where I got the Fulvous Cabal from – I was stitching together random bits that mentioned Bloodcove in Heart of the Jungle and other sources and still using some of the 3.5e adventures from Paizo, Green Ronin, etc. I can’t find them in a search and I have a vague idea of using some random cult name generator, probably this one.

Anyway, on their way back to Bloodcove with the newly christened Chainbreaker to recover him and any other remaining crew, during which they have two agenda items that come up – one, a rat king causing trouble on the ship. I was foreshadowing it with a bit of a rat infestation, but they fast-forwarded by using a crystal ball to find their missing seamunculus crewman JJ trapped by some rats. There was a great moment where Wogan put it all together and everyone else had the sudden “well of course” realization that is part of a good reveal.

Wogan guesses, “Oh, he’s on board and our sudden rat infestation is his jailer.” Everyone stares at him a moment and then springs into action.

Then they try out their new hover-platform! It turns out to not be as simple as “stick a hover platform inside your ship, suddenly it flies like a bird” – but they experiment and figure out what kind of rigging and ballast and such would be required to make a flying sailing ship actually navigable.

Thirty-Eighth Session (14 page pdf) – “Return to Bloodcove” – The party takes their new friend, loot, psychological disorders, and parasites back to the newly squibbed ship – where their newest crewman awaits them!  More refitting is necessary to build in the Shory hover-platform, so it’s off to Bloodcove for debauchery galore.

They get back to Rickety’s Squibs and good ol’ Rickety has refitted their ship, and now gets to add in a Shory hover-platform!

The big news is that Samaritha, Serpent’s wife, has given birth! “A perfectly normal, live human birth,” all the crew members are happy to repeat verbatim. Really he’s a serpentfolk that hatched from an egg, but Samaritha is happy to mind-control people into believing differently. They name him Jormun, son of Ref (Serpent’s real name is Ref Jorenson).

A technique I like to use with this group of “bad guy” pirates is that when something that would be horror movie fodder if aimed at them – like everyone parroting the same stock phrase about something clearly indicating there’s mental influence at play – when they’re the ones “in on it” and it’s to their benefit, they are really tickled pink. It reinforces that they’re “bad guys” even if they’re not really being that bad, it gives them a sense of power, and it reassures them that all these NPCs (family, friends, crew) they accumulate aren’t just a DM trick to give them vulnerabilities.

This then segues into technique two – adding realism to the game world and having things happen when they are not around. They have lost a couple crew members, including one who just got drunk and drowned in a ditch. When they leave a pirate crew on leave in a settlement for a while, especially one made of some fundamentally different subgroups, shit happens. I always make a random table and then roll for every single crew member. Roughly, 1 means something permanently bad happens, 20 means something really permanently good happens, and proportionately inbetween, and I’ll slap together a mini-chart for each option.

I’ll customize it to the place they left them. Rickety’s Squibs and Bloodcove:

• 1: Something really bad. Roll 1d4:
  • 1: Death by misadventure
  • 2: Death by murder
    • 1: crew member
    • 2: monster
    • 3-4: random NPC
  • 3: Permanent injury
  • 4: Something else appropriate
• 2: Something bad. Roll 1d6:
  • 1: Equipment loss
  • 2: Abducted
  • 3: Lost
  • 4: Arrested
  • 5: Wanted by the authorities
  • 6: Made an enemy
• 3-5: General bad times, -1 morale
• 6-15: Another day in the life
• 16-19: General good times, +1 morale
• 20: Something really good. Roll 1d4: (l run out of good ideas a lot faster than bad ones)
  • 1: Item
  • 2: Money
  • 3: Intel
  • 4: Friend

So they have a couple deaths by misadventure, one abduction, one permanent injury, one equipment loss, an arrest, an enemy, and so on. I’m always surprised how loyal the PCs are to their pirate crew; at some point you’d think they’d just say “fuck that guy let’s leave” but it inevitably turns into a whole game session of them helping clean up after their crew. Which results in high crew numbers and morale, so there’s utility to it as well!

Though sometimes they cut bait on one of these mini-plots, like they almost go infiltrate an Eyes Wide Shut type rich people sex club but they smell a rat and walk away forever.

Random generation is leavened with real ongoing plots like the pregnancy and Flavia’s extracurricular habits. But then some randomness helps add texture to these, too – like Serpent botching four consecutive Charisma rolls with his wife; clearly his going off gallavanting while she’s hatching an egg didn’t go down real well.

This is one of my key DM cycles for a long running campaign. Use randomness to spice things up, it turns into people/plots/things the PCs get interested in, so substitute those into later random rolls when they are appropriate, and also give them all a life of their own that keeps the PCs realistically engaged.