Tag Archives: reavers

Ninth Session (15 page pdf), “Holiday In The Sun/Flat On Rat Street” – The characters help Saul celebrate Swagfest in the streets of Riddleport, and there’s a startling amount of violence.  Then, they go to a local moneylender to find out what happened to the bar’s floor manager… and there’s a startling amount of violence.

First, I ran “Holiday in the Sun”, an interstitial Freeport adventure from the Freeport Trilogy.  There’s a big street festival, like Riddleport’s answer to Mardi Gras.  They got to have some random fun, choosing costumes, drinking, that kind of thing.  An assassin tried to take out Saul, and though the PCs stopped her, she totally took out Tommy in one shot.  He didn’t take that well; he took her back to the animal cages and tortured the crap out of her.  Explicitly enough that it took the other players aback.  And when they came back and she was missing, he really got scared.  Mmmwah hah haaaa!

Then they participated in various festival games.  Sindawe had a bad turn when he ran off solo and stumbled into the lair of an ettercap and some dream spiders!  In the original adventure it was a rogue aranea; in this one I decided it made sense for one of the crime lords to have an ettercap working for him as tender for the dream spiders, whose valuable venom is used to make a drug named shiver.  He got bitten repeatedly by the spiders till he was tripping his balls off, and then he got webbed up.  Bruce (Ox) spent an Infamy Point to have him rescued by the Splithog Pauper.  Funnily enough, when the rest of the PCs found him in an alley with a note from the Pauper, their reaction was “We told that guy to leave town!  We hate him!”

Then, the Yellow Shields organize a hit on the PCs, which they get out of without a lot of trouble.  After, when Tommy’s back at the Gold Goblin, he complains to Saul that they’re all pretty beaten up and don’t want to go back to the festival.  He tells him, not unkindly, to “Sack up and get back out there.”

Next, it’s “The Flat On Rat Street,” from Shadow In The Sky (the first chapter of the Second Darkness adventure path, which I am somewhat using for inspiration).  Saul tells the PCs that the floor manager, Larur Feldin, went to make a payment to a moneylender named Lymas Smeed and hasn’t come back.  The PCs go, bust in, kill his baboon, and beat him with a phone book for some time.

This scene really frustrated Sindawe’s player particularly (he was already a little ill-humored about the spider thing).  He was convinced that he just wasn’t beating the guy hard enough or searching good enough to find the answer, and it just wasn’t appearing – that they must just be doing something wrong.  He got pretty upset about it (not till debrief afterwards did I fully understand what was going on).  Of course, in this particular scene, there is absolutely no way to figure out what really happened from within the scene; you have to move on and find out from other sources.

I blame training from bad D&D modules for twisting players’ expectations.  Too many D&D scenarios wrap everything up nice and cozy.  Whenever you kill a bad guy, he always has a long note on him detailing his God-damned life story.  It’s from the same playbook that states “monsters” fight to the death, et cetera.  There’s always a convenient self-contained answer to the problem in the dungeon – the “silver weapon when there’s lycanthropes coming” syndrome.  Real mystery, intrigue, or complication is rare.  I try to run things very “realistically” – meaning if something in the game world doesn’t make sense to a reasonable person, it’s not because Gary Gygax decided that “weather is magical” or other such bullshit, but instead because yeah, there is something wrong here.  Afterwards, I told the frustrated player that really he was more on the right track than everyone else – that yes, it doesn’t make any sense that a common moneylender would let himself be tortured to death rather than give up the info they wanted, and that it shouldn’t be a source of frustration, but instead an opportunity to use that correct first step to re-engage with the game world and find out the next step.  We got things back on track, but I think it’s so unfortunate that there’s so much crappy D&D that trains people to not trust their own senses because the answer’s always “GM fiat” or “that’s just what the module said” or whatnot.  In my mind, the acme of achievement (in a simulation-focused game) is to get it to where everyone feels like they can engage completely in the game world, without having to second-guess about what metagame stuff is going on.  Metagaming is for pussies.  Yes, you can quote me on that.

Eighth Session (14 page pdf), “Death in Riddleport, Part II” – The PCs find a hidden temple under an abandoned house and engage in vicious combat with serpent men!  “Sorry, Vincenz, but that’s too tough!” they conclude after a couple runs at it.

The adventure was a beefed up version of Green Ronin’s “Death in Freeport.”  (Spoilers for that adventure ensue).  Did I beef it up too much?  The weakest part of the Freeport Trilogy, I thought, was that the great legendary serpent men were 1 HD (and 3.0 HD are like worth 1/2 a Pathfinder HD) pieces of crap.  Paizo printed some more “real” serpentfolk in their 3.5e Into the Darklands supplement.  I had to do the degenerate-statting and conversion to Pathfinder myself, but was left with some nice CR4 brute types.  I didn’t think that would be a horrible problem – these PCs are Pathfinder and pretty optimized, and have pretty much happily rolled over all the other fights so far.

Well, they got tromped by two of them.  There were a couple reasons why.  One, they were down a PC because Blacktoes wasn’t here, which means they were only four men against an unknown foe.

But shouldn’t a party of 4 second level PCs be able to take (though have it be tough) 2 CR4s?  Well, secondly, they’re pretty tough even for CR4s, I think, and I made a mistake in not nerfing their poison more (I converted from 3.5e to Pathfinder poison on the fly and the latter procs each round for 6 rounds, so needs a much lower penalty value).

But also some of it, the third part, was the PCs I think.  I’m trying to get them to think more tactically as part of a “gritter” campaign, but I’m afraid they still default to “screw it, let’s run around like butt monkeys.”  The villa assault in Three Days to Kill was a good example; they started in decent SpecOps style but then all started running round solo (and still did well – I tried to scare them some but I guess they may have gotten the lesson that that’s OK…).

Although maybe it worked out kinda decently in the end.  Samaritha went with them and they fought ten skeletons and three serpentfolk at once!  (You don’t hit a dungeon, leave, and return after two days without them getting a good reaction plan in place.  Sorry.)  And once the players got scared into really thinking hard, they did a good fighting withdrawl that they converted to a hasty ambush and took the enemy all out (albeit with using all their remaining action and Infamy points).  Which would have been fine, but that fight demoralized them enough that they bailed – not even to come back after healing, but just “bah, maybe after we level.”  I made it crystal clear that they were leaving Vincenz to his death, but that didn’t impress them.  They figured any more of those serpentfolk and they were meat.

Ironically, they had killed all of them off and just had the boss to fight – he’s tough but not as tough CR-wise as e.g. two serpentfolk.  But they didn’t know that and I don’t like giving metagame info; courage isn’t real courage if you are told the risk was low, so they walked away and I didn’t do much to stop them (except having the voice of an NPC speak as a conscience.  “You’re gonna leave your friend to die?”).   They pushed me to get a level at the end of the session.  Perhaps I’m cussed, but I didn’t want to reward failure with a level (and have them think on some level that I gave it to them so they can go back and succeed).  Not like they’re going to hang around awaiting the PCs’ leisure; I’m not big on static dungeons or villains that don’t respond to stuff like that.

They got some of the disappointment out of their system by going and beating the crap out of Braddikar Faje.  Second Darkness has some badly balanced encounters; as if a third level NPC fighter with some goons is going to be a credible threat to a whole party of PCs.  I had built up his street cred enough that they took him seriously, at least, but he couldn’t damage them worth a darn.

Now I have to figure out what’ll happen next.  I pretty much run things from a simulationist point of view during a session (what would logically happen next) but from a story point of view during sesssion prep (it might be interesting if person X goes and does Y…).  I reckon trouble will start coming to them; my hope is that they snap and become the ruthless pirates they are destined to be…

This group of players is a little of a challenge as I found out when they hated my Mutants & Masterminds campaign.  They really don’t like being bested, even if it’s nonfatal or dramatically good.  I guess we’ll see if this demoralizes them or what.

Our heroes (?) continue in their shenanigans in Riddleport in Reavers on the Seas of Fate: Death in Riddleport, Part I.  I’ve been borrowing from Green Ronin’s excellent Freeport setting to flesh out the pirate haven of Riddleport and here’s where we kick into their classic adventure, Death in Freeport, but adapted to Riddleport and generally getting beefed up.

Seventh Session (14 page pdf), “Death in Riddleport, Part I” – Crimelord Avery Slyeg makes the PCs an offer they can’t refuse, so they hunt down the Splithog Pauper (the leader of the criminal gang from “St. Casperian’s Salvation”).  And they look for their kidnapped friend Vincenz – rubbing elbows with Cyphermages requires them to clean up a bit.  The practical and moral dilemmas get harder as they work to rescue their friend.

I was pretty happy with this session.  The trick to a good campaign is having interesting NPCs that the PCs believe in enough to deal with realistically, and this session was all about that.  Man, the Splithog Pauper has gone from a side sub-boss with no real personality – less backstory than the average Paizo NPC, really – to a major player.  The first time he escaped, the PCs found his disguise kit and decided he was a master of disguise – to the point that as they were walking out right after the fight, they interrogated a legless homeless guy to ensure he wasn’t the Pauper in disguise.  This time, he lived up to their expectations by being disguised as a peg-legged pirate captain.  Once they caught him and took him back for interrogation, he managed to talk his way out by trading the location of his hidden treasure for his life, and after they let him go, he told them the treasure was in the artificial leg from his disguise they already had in hand.  They were all impressed and like “Damn, he totally conned us!  That took balls of steel!”  Now they’re convinced he’s Golarion’s answer to James Bond.  DM pro tip: every time the PCs decide an NPC is really bad ass, give them a level.  Ding!

And besides the Pauper, the interactions with Avery Slyeg, Samaritha, and Iesha are all going well.  When the PCs are taking NPCs as or more seriously than fights or loot then you can get some real stories going.

Other things I was proud of – I don’t like when NPCs know things they shouldn’t; I hate the “hivemind complex.”  So the Pauper had a signal arranged – if he started singing “What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor,” that meant trouble, and his new rent-a-goons should come downstairs shooting.  Well, the PCs were spread all over the bar doing various things and the goons had never seen them before, so they just started drive-by style random shooting at anyone that looked dangerous.  And in turn, that galvanized the PCs much more to immediate action than a standard thug attack.

During this session I made use of two of my custom rulesets – the gather information/random encounter/rumor combo I discussed in Life in the Big City – Gather Information, and the chase rules I laid out in Life In The Big City – Chase Rules.  Both chases (the Pauper and Enzo) went well; I think after another use or two the chase rules will be nice and solid.  The trick is to not make them too much of a “separate minigame” that causes problems with interactions with all the skills/feats/spells/etc of 3.5e play.

Next session – some shockingly brutal fights!

The characters become more proactive in their criminal enterprises in the sixth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, “Three Days to Kill.”  It’s based on a 3e Atlas Games adventure also called “Three Days to Kill.”

Sixth Session (14 page pdf) – One of the crime lord Clegg Zincher’s capps, Braddikar Faje, is headed out of town on the road to Roderic’s Cove to conduct some kind of sale at a villa in the hills.  Jacking up Zincher’s day is more than enough motivation for Saul to send his favorite scum off to break up the deal.

But first, Tommy heads to the local whorehouse/temple of Calistria to see his favorite gal, Lavender Lil.  He finds her hiding behind a tapestry; Captain Scarbelly and his orc pirate crew are visiting, and, as she says, “I like it a little rough, but not orc rough.” So Tommy tells her he and his comrades are headed out into the woods to try to find the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy they hear tell of, as a cover story for their real job.

It’s probably about this time I should share the rumors the PCs got from hitting the streets of Riddleport.  It may explain otherwise bizarre behavior on the part of the guys.  (The weird terminology is mostly Riddleport slang…  As you can tell they are meant to be exactly as a random Riddleporter would relate them.)

Bonfires are sometimes seen in the mountains to the northeast.  I hear a bunch of priestesses of Calistria gather there every new moon for secret all-lesbo orgiastic rituals, and they murder any man who glimpses them.  It still sounds pretty tempting to try.  Woooo!  Man, I wonder if that Pamodae sideshow goes there… Mmmmm…..

When the missionary who founded St. Casperian’s Mission died, he left behind a treasure cache of the money he defrauded from credulous citizens.  Although the building is dilapidated and overrun with grog-blossoms, there is a secret room beneath the ground where the priest hid his ill-gotten gains.  They say it’s guarded by a magical protector that has disappeared everyone that’s tried to claim it.

There are orcs wandering the streets of Riddleport!  Captain Scarbelly’s pirate ship, the Bloody Vengeance, is in town and the whole crew is orc.  People say he’s killed twenty-nine men in hand to hand combat.  He’s probably hooked up with Boss Croat, that snout-lover.  I could totally take an orc.  It’s about speed, not strength!

Gebediah Crix, keeper of the Riddleport Light, got killed by one of those devils he summons.  His parts were strewn all over the lighthouse.  The gendarmes have posted guards outside the place.  I wonder if the devil’s still around?  Hey, I recently came across some Vudran charms, guaranteed to keep evil spirits away.  Wanna buy one?

There’s some kind of gang of whiskers that operates in the Rotgut District.  I have a cousin who got robbed by a bunch of rats in an alley that suddenly turned into people.  And the gendarmes don’t do jack crap about it, say they’re low on funding.  The rats must be connected and that’s why they’re getting a pass.

Some guy, an out of town wizard, wanted to become a fancyboy, but when they wouldn’t let him in, he insulted Elias Tammerhawk, the Speaker of the Order of Cyphers.  They had a duel in Zincher’s arena.   Tammerhawk totally wasted that guy’s dumb ass in short order and magiced up a swarm of rats to eat the body.  He said that was what he got for running his rathole.  Haw haw haw!

There’s been some turf changes on the streets lately.  I hear Avery Slyeg is totally Croamarcky’s bitch now and they’re consolidating and looking to squeeze competitors out of the gambling biz.

The completely false St. Casperian rumor is what caused them to go all SWAT team on the mission last session.  Although their minds are going overtime, and they mentioned that “planting a rumor like that would be a good way to get someone to go in and kill off a rival gang…”

Anyway, they head out to the Trail’s End villa and get a lot more than they bargained for – besides Faje and his men, there’s Asmodean cultists, Marcello Marcellano (the Chelish son of Ox’s former owner from “Water Stop”), and a bunch of raiding Shoanti braves.  They actually carve through the guards OK, but when the Asmodeans start summoning freaky demons from the mirror Faje is selling them, they decide to bail (over Serpent’s objections, who really really wants to kill Faje and everyone else, despite Saul instructing them not to kill him.)

The PCs for some reason thought they had done poorly, I guess because of the default D&D expectation that the only success is found in killing everything in sight and looting it.  But Saul praised them – they killed everyone but Faje and one of his goons, who had to ride into town two to one horse.  The Asmodeans got the mirror without paying for it.  So Clegg is out like 8 guys, a bunch of horses, and the mirror with nothing to show for it, and Faje did NOT get killed and bring the wrath of Zincher and potentially other crime lords down on the Gold Goblin.  The PCs kinda wanted to murder the Asmodeans, Marcellano, and the Shoanti (which Saul couldn’t care less about) and Faje (which would have pissed him off mightily).

But before they got back…  They happened upon the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy ritual.  Or, at least, Tommy snuck up onto something that might have been it and promptly got chased off by a manticore!

I was prepared to run an actual chase scene here, with the mounted PCs fleeing from the manticore, using chase rules from Adamant Entertainment’s Tome of Secrets for Pathfinder.  It was not to be, however, as the usual D&D group problem emerged of one guy refusing to run and that making the rest of the party stand with him.  We then had a weird start-and-stop chase as Sindawe stopped to fight.  But when the manticore dropped his horse in one shot, he thought better of that and hid in the underbrush.  But of course Wogan and Serpent had stopped to help him…  They got away by popping obscuring mist and letting the manticore eat all their horses.  Ah well, all’s well that ends well.

Once they got back, they went with the guy that they let live from the Splithog Pauper’s gang, Madrat, to hit one of Avery Slyeg’s couriers.  Of course, Madrat was a mole working for Slyeg.  So we left off with the PCs facing down a dozen crossbowmen and a crime lord in a warehouse.  Will they sleep with the fishes?  Find out next time, in Reavers on the Seas of Fate: Death in Freeport Riddleport!

The characters decide to take the fight to the mean streets of Riddleport in the fifth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, “St. Casperian’s Salvation.”

Fifth Session (11 page pdf) – Michael Vick, eat your heart out.  The PCs start off by arranging one of the Gold Goblin’s underground animal fights.  The NPC ranger, Bojask, got a diseased bear off the back of a ship somewhere, and their boss Saul wanted a championship match with the current champ, Pigsaw the boar.  Here’s the naked bear:

I based this on reality – I read a recent news article about how all the spectacled bears at this German zoo all lost their fur all over except for on their faces.  Zoo staff is baffled.

Anyway, player reaction: OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT THING.  They then spent an inordinate amount of their funds buying some drugs to knock it out so they could paint it green.  It seemed like the thing to do at the time.  They started channeling Don King and dubbed the fight “Pigsaw vs. Bearclaw.”

The PCs wandered through Riddleport separately to go spread the word and got the worst end of the deal.  It’s a rough town, and when Ox went into the gambling district run by the head crimelord and started putting up flyers, three goons quickly showed up, beat his ass senseless, and robbed him.  Others fared slightly better.

I was planning to run the 3e Atlas Games adventure “Three Days to Kill.”  I handed out some rumors, though, gleaned while beating the streets doing fight promotion, and they were fascinated by a (totally false) rumor about a haunted treasure hoard in the cellar of St. Casperian’s Mission, a local derelict flophouse where, it turns out, their old buddy Vincenz is hiding out.  I had planned to run “St. Casperian’s Salvation,” a set piece adventure set there, later, but the PCs were all over that mission like white on rice as soon as they heard a rumor of cash.  Ever prepared, I switched and ran that instead.  Basically there’s a local small street gang using the second floor as a hideout.  This was somewhat of a surprise, and it was a brutal tight quarters battle.  The gang leader, the “Splithog Pauper,” got away with the gang’s loot.

Eventually they had the fight and the bear won.  In attendance was Captain Scarbelly, the orc pirate, a clear warning to those in the know that the Freeport trilogy is almost upon us.

Next time – Three Days to Kill!  I hope.

We’ve already had our first session of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, entitled “Maiden Voyage.”

First Session (12 page pdf) – The characters, still lowly seamen, meet for the first time upon a poorly-disciplined ship, the Albers, bound to Riddleport from Kintargo.  With women on board and gambling and fighting allowed, it’s only a matter of time till the captain turns up dead, filling the crew with mutual suspicion, and then a mysterious ship comes out of the fog…

For this first adventure, I combined the old Atlas Games 3e scenario Maiden Voyage and the new Sinister Adventures pdf Mysteries of the Razor Sea.  Both are first level ghost ship scenarios; Maiden Voyage focussed more on the ship and crew the players were travelling with.  Mysteries of the Razor Sea was totally about the ghost ship – it had more horror and is tougher.  So I felt they complemented each other well; basically I am using the ghost ship from Razor and everything else from Maiden Voyage, with some changes to lead in to the next part of the adventure, which will be in Riddleport.  Entertainingly, the crewman “Bull” was actually named “Ox” in the adventure.  I considered letting him keep it and having him and the PC “Ox” really hate each other in the same way chicks wearing the same dress to a party would, but even with the minor name change they’re both bald Garundi and I got a lot of the same dynamic.

As a side note, lots of the Atlas Games stuff is on clearance sale at paizo.com and it’s good material.  Besides this adventure, I may use some of their other scenarios like Three Days to Kill, and I’m using Nyambe: African Adventures to flesh out the Mwangi Expanse.  Heck, if I decide to cross the sea to Arcadia I may use Northern Crown: New World Adventures.  Stock up while it’s cheap and still available!

I felt the first session went well – I thought we’d get a lot farther, but the players got into the interaction with each other and the NPCs; we played three hands of the card game Skulls, investigated the death of the captain…  There were only two very minor combats, a boxing match between Bull and then the PCs helping to subdue Bull when he attacked the first mate, convinced he had murdered the captain.  The rest was all roleplaying fun!

And it’ll be a great object lesson for when later in the campaign the characters sign on to a pirate charter and read “no women, no gambling, no fighting…”  They will nod sagely to themselves about the wisdom of all these strictures.