Tag Archives: story hour

Twenty-fifth Session (13 page pdf) – “A Stacked Deck” – the Teeth of Araska and the Wandering Dagger grapple with the Chelaxian frigate Dominator and its Hellknight contingent for their very lives. And two more suspicious characters escape from the enemy’s brig during the fray, a Mwangi man and a half-elven woman.

The Dominator is a canonical Chelish pirate hunting ship, and the Hellknight they escaped from in Magnimar is on board, Paralictor Devreth Rotani. Captain Clap of the Dagger hates this guy. No discussion, he throws himself into the frigate’s broadside to try to attack them.  The Dagger gets blasted, marines board the Araska, Samaritha’s spells get dispelled… Pirates are riddled with wooden shivers, blood runs in the scuppers!

Meanwhile, we have two new PCs joining the game! They’re both in the Dominator’s brig, but use this opportunity to escape. (This is also an important part of balancing this fight, putting some distractions on board, so that the Dagger and Araska don’t both just get sunk out of hand. That kinda works.)

One of the enemy signifers casts Vision of Hell on their ship, our session scribe Chris renders the results in particularly inspired fashion thus:

The Dominator has one more trick. It shimmers as a desert mirage, then solidifies into a different vessel. The ship looks like a hellscape. Hatchways are now pleading mouths, wet with hunger and full of teeth. The ship’s rigging is a combination of wanton tentacles and leaking intestines. Each sail is made up of six hundred and sixty-six skinned faces of the damned that howl in agony. More skinned faces make up the Chelaxian flag, the skin pigmentation matched perfectly to that flag. Those faces moan Queen Abrogail II’s favorite waltz. The hull is formed of writhing torsos that provide a handsome and unexpected buoyancy, but uncertain footing. Everything is heavy with the stink of brimstone. The shrill noises of Fox News waft up from below decks.

Meanwhile, Mitabu and Zoamai make their way out of their cells and out of the ship… But the Wandering Dagger is pounded so badly by cannon fire and fire spells that it begins to sink, and after a hard fight the Paralictor kills Captain Clap – Sindawe and Serpent come to the rescue, but too late. Serpent and Sindawe wreak havoc on the enemy ship while the Araska tries to win free, and meet our two new PCs in a rush of Chelaxian murder. That being sufficient resume to become a pirate, they wordlessly fight free together and make the deck of the Araska… Will they escape?  Read on!

Man-shark (adaro)

Twenty-fourth Session (6 page pdf) – “It Was Nice While It Lasted” – The pirates ply the sea lanes, until a derelict ship is revealed to be a Chelish trap!

We have more wavecrawling action – the Wandering Dagger takes a ship out of sight of the Teeth of Araska, which means they don’t have to share!  And then man-sharks attack the ship.  I’m ambivalent about these nuisance sea humanoid attacks; trying to attack up onto an elevated, bobbing ship seems… Unlikely. These guys just wanted to drag off someone to eat at least.  The PCs fight them off and get a couple spears with paralyzing toxin on them.  “Can we keep some?” they ask?  “Sure,” I say, with a devious grin.

After the first crewman is paralyzed “accidentally” by a man-shark harpoon, Captain Sindawe has the lot thrown overboard.

A pirate ship is much like a frat house with even more violence.

And then… a Chelish trap!  The PCs are lured onto a derelict ship with a bound hellcat on board, which is bad, but even worse is that while they’re still over there a fully armed Chelish warship appears from behind a veil with a full Hellknight on board and demands the two pirate ships surrender!

Twenty-third Session (8 page pdf) – “On The Road Again” – The Teeth of Araska and Wandering Dagger take to the sea lanes to raid Chelaxian shipping! They take a prize, but are harried by fish-men.

Fish-man (sahuagin)

The guys like the wavecrawling aspect of the campaign – taking a break from “plot” and just going out and pirating. And sometimes the tables are turned, like when they get attacked by some fish-men at night… The NPC pirates on guard (which I let the players run) are more than up to the challenge of running them off, however.

Samaritha gets tired of the pirates calling them fish men and says, “They are called sahuagin!”
This news upsets Pirro. “What? Why can’t we call them fish men?”
Samaritha explains, “There are over a dozen fish man races.” She goes into great detail about the differences between them.
Pirro replies, “What? What is the government doing about all these aquatic monsters!?!”

I try to bring my knowledge of realistic naval stuff to the table for the rest of the session – two allied ships hunting for merchants, there’s a lot of details about keeping each other in sight, who sees what other ships, primary claim to the booty coming from whoever boarded first, etc. They take the Dowager Queen and get some booty and a defecting Chelish marine, Luca Caletti, who is soon referred to as “Spaghetti” by the not-so-fond-of-Chelaxians crew.