Tag Archives: story hour

Sixteenth Session (14 page pdf) – “The Cypher Lodge” – Looks like the phantoms have taken over the Cypher Lodge, and the PCs have to throw down with Thorgrim and some old friends.

Yep, this was a big finale boss fight. It was built in three parts. (you may want to check out Thorgrim’s character sheet).

First, they (the three PCs and Pirro, an ex-slave and one of their crew) fought a bunch of phantoms and Valgrim down  in the sand-floored fighting ring he has under the Cypher Lodge. He cast a mess of spells that were really sweet – shifting sands, hungry pit, etc. Sindawe surprised me with his ruthless innovation – Salvadora was chained over a rafter, so he leapt up and crushed her hand with a vicious blow – shattering the bones, but also immediately causing her to fall to her semi-freedom! She’s a no-nonsense half-orc so she holds no grudge whatsoever about that.

Second, once Thorgrim figures they’re a legit threat, he goes gaseous form and guards and wards kicks in and also everyone gets teleported around the Cypher Lodge – and phantom impostors get seeded into the mix.This was loosely adapted, believe it or not, from a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode where Discord causes all the ponies to turn on each other. My daughter said “you should put this into your next game!” I was looking for something interesting and interstitial to happen – in Madness in Riddleport, they had part one of a fight, then an excursion to the shadow realm, and then the second part and this session was deliberately mirroring that one (shadowy mirrored reflections being a major trope in the game). And it creates a more interesting dramatic structure than “long ass fight to the death in a single location.” So I figured, “Sure!”

The funniest part was how Serpent told Pirro “I’m out of healing!” and then proceeded to heal himself. He’s just an NPC, what does he know?

He heals Pirro to consciousness, then announces, “Pirro, I have no more healing for you.” He turns and heals himself with the last charges from the wand. Then he guzzles some healing potions. Then notices his Lesser Restoration potions at the bottom of his pack, and exclaims, “Oh hey!” He drinks those too. A large tear rolls down Pirro’s cheek.

That’s exactly how it happened; everyone was in stitches.  Paul (Serpent) was just like, “What?” Although second funniest moment was Wogan running invisibly from an impostor Samaritha just to run into another Hatshepsut and Samaritha.  Everyone enjoyed the portly cleric trying to sneak around to avoid all the potentially killer women.

Third was the big fight with Thorgrim. Thorgrim is bad ass. He is a Fighter 4/ Wizard 5/Eldritch Knight 5. He has a pair of magical axes that he throws along with a Sliding Axe Throw feat that lets him trip with them – like a machine gun. He was getting six thrown axe attacks a round. Despite there being three PCs, three PC-level NPCs, and one goon NPC, they were all unconscious or prone when Serpent had Samaritha case erase to get the rune off his forehead.

I like when the cinematic thing happens! They could have killed Thorgrim just through damage – in fact, he was down to like 21 hp or something; he might have gotten another attack routine in (certainly killing someone!) but he wasn’t unbeatable through sheer fight.  He had, however, seen what was going on when Chmetugo the shadow demon was taking control of him/seducing him via the extraplanar connection of his glyph fragment, and cast hidden knowledge – a spell that conceals information you know even from  yourself, but you can release it later. In this case he had encased more than a simple piece of information, more of a concept – his Ulfen-ness.  He comes to his senses and cries out, “I am Thorgrim, son of Halgrim, the Bloody, the berserker! We do not bend our knees to spirits! Demon, show yourself!” Thorgrim has a complicated backstory, he was an Ulfen (Viking) warrior back in the day and got turned to stone by a gorgon for 200 years and was rescued by the Cypher Lodge – he swore fealty to protect them and also learned magic there. But, in a bit of a Howardian theme, his primal, savage origin is stronger than his subsequent civilization and enchantment. (He’s actually originally from Green Ronin’s Freeport, and I expanded on him.)  Anyway, I allowed for several end states; they just about did the “fight to the end” one but Serpent put it together and went for the cool story ending instead!

And then they all leveled!  I’m doing XP by fiat in this campaign, and it’s been a long time since 5th (there’s just so much fun to do in the low/mid levels) so they were psyched.  Level 6 is where you become independently dangerous in Pathfinder, so it’s a benchmark level.

Fifteenth Session (13 page pdf) – “Shadows Over Riddleport” – The PCs get back to Riddleport at long last with their new ship and spoils, but it’s not all booze and broads – the phantoms from the Devil’s Elbow are here too!

Welcome to Riddleport!

It’s the Teeth of Araska’s first time into port under their new charter, so there was a lot of fiddling around with how to calculate treasure shares and when to pay out what amount and the like. Chris and Paul spent a good part of the first hour of the session cross-checking their cargo lists against each other, valuating the goods, etc.

Prepping a session like this now requires me to bring a metric ass-ton of materials to the game. They can go anywhere in Riddleport, which I have cobbled together from Riddleport and Freeport materials; vex me with questions about past and future adventures that I need to look up, and you never know what high level NPC it’ll enter their mind to try to kill. I had a duffel bag full of books, another full of papers, and a computer will all past session summaries and other notes in it.

Anyway, after briefly contemplating murdering their hostage, they dock and take the traditional pirate crew’s pilgrimage to the temple of Besmara. All pirate crews go there and toss a coin per man into the beast-haunted pool before doing anything else to thank her for a safe return. They run into friends new and old, but it’s not long before the gendarmerie shows up and tells them the Overlord wants to see them. Apparently the All Due Restraint’s absence has been noted and all pirate captains who dock are being hauled in for questioning.

Along the way, another squad of gendarmes turns out to be phantoms in disguise! The characters’ sigils warn them by flashing with pain at their approach.  Once revealed, they float about with shadowy bodies, have broad sword-blades for arms, and impassive white masks for faces. “Very anime,” noted Paul. And they seem to absorb blood at a frightening rate. They kill all but one of the gendarmes before the PCs manage to defeat them with their orichalcum weapons. (Wogan healed the head gendarme, which is the only reason he survived.) Which was a bit of a disappointment, I had hoped they’d kill all the gendarmes – let the PCs try to talk their way out of that! “Oh, it was disappearing monsters that killed all those cops that were taking you in last time they were seen? Sure it was…”

The PCs manage to parlay their questionable decision to retain the corpses of the dwarves from the drifting All Due Restraint into a full pardon for past crimes from the Overlord, once he is convinced they had no hand in it. So despite two cunning plans to entrap them, they come out smelling like roses! Ah well, I’m sure they’ll do something demented in the future where I can get them all on the run and underground.

Speaking of that, then they wander by the Cypher Lodge looking for boots and poontang (no, really, pretty much) and discover the place is mostly abandoned and really creepy and Thorgrim, who was there when they fought atop the Riddleport Light, is in charge now and has portraits of himself hanging everywhere. They poke around until they find some trouble, and we left it at a cliffhanger – hey, why is half-orc God Squad member Salvadora Beckett hanging from shackles in Thorgrim’s battle circle?  Why are our sigils burning?  Why are the shadows moving? “I CAST THINGS” cried all the PCs at once, and I said “And that’s where we’ll pick it up next time…” Always leave them wanting more!

Fourteenth Session (11 page pdf) – “Return to Riddleport” – Extracting the Teeth of Araska from its precarious harbor at Shatterhull Island is difficult, and becomes more difficult when some merrow show up to the party.

Shatterhull Island

The first part of the session was the PCs sweeping and clearing the hags’ lair looking for treasure. But quickly they had to turn their attention  to getting  their ship out of its dangerous perch surrounded by rocky spurs.

This wasn’t a trivial maneuver and proved to be the action setpiece of the session.  It actually got a lot worse by dumb luck – I was rolling random encounters by the hour and three sea ogres showed up first thing in the morning, which was when they decided to try to extract the Teeth of Araska. So what I figured would be an important but minor part of the session turned into most of the session!

Maneuvering a large sailing ship is very imprecise work. They wisely decided to try to tow it out with the longboats.  This is safe if arduous in open water, but in the swells that near the island it was extremely dangerous. The first critical step was swinging the ship’s prow around to point away from the island. Sindawe and Serpent each led a longboat and Wogan and Tommy kept order on the ship. Many Profession: Sailor checks were made and they got the ship reoriented OK (though Serpent’s launch was bashed against underwater rocks enough that it was starting to leak). And then the sea ogres attacked.  Dude, the saltwater ones are fricking huge!

This was complicated for me, the beleaguered DM. The PCs had a crew of twenty diverse crewmen (some pirates, some ex-slaves) I was handling, along with the merrow and the forces of nature. There was fighting, sailing, paddling, shooting of cannon, falling overboard… My goal with this game is to make the naval stuff not just “color” but to make the sea, and the ship, important characters of their own and I think it was a success.

Then they loaded on the cargo from the island and headed out. They came across the Riddleport ship that left the Devil’s Elbow before them, the All Due Restraint.  All the gendarmes had been killed and were missing; all the dwarves had been killed and hung by ropes off the ship so that sharks and whatnot would eat their lower halves. This caused a lot of debate amongst the PCs. Bringing in or trying to claim the ship would almost certainly get them hung for piracy against Riddleport. They made the somewhat questionable decision to leave the ship, but take all the dwarves with them, stuffed into barrels in the hold. The crew was so not happy about that. The PCs, ever frugal, seriously asked “Can’t we fit more than one dwarf per barrel?” “Fuck you, man,” was the general tenor of the response to that. Then Wogan spent a lot of time down in the hold muttering to the barrels. This revealed that Morgan Baumann of the Kraken’s Claw took the ship, and further convinced the crew of the monstrousness of their new officers.

And then finally, Riddleport hove into sight! R&R at long last?  Fie on that!

Thirteenth Session (16 page pdf) – “Shatterhull Island” – The PCs follow a treasure map to the wreck of the Sandspider. But who will plunder who’s booty? Only time will tell…

Welcome back to Reavers on the Seas of Fate!  Long hiatus due to summer vacation. But we’re back and played an extra long session to get going again.

Our PCs have ownership of a pirate ship and a crew (half pirates and half escaped Chelish slaves) and Sindawe had a treasure map that’s been burning a hole in his pocket.  Serpent really wanted to go back to Riddleport and get the magic boots he’s had being made there for like four months, but he got outvoted due to the lure of TREASURE!

Early on in the session, they joked that maybe someone was sending out loads of maps to the wreck. I have a good poker face, thankfully, because that was the exact setup.  I adapted “Shatterhull Island,” a mini-adventure from the D&D 3.5e Stormwrack supplement.It was a hag coven that sent out magicked maps, and used their coven powers like vision and dream to lure people in.  One hag appeared in Sindawe’s dream as Mama Watanna a couple times.

When they approached the island, the hags used illusion to obscure the sharp rocks to the south of the island.  Only Wogan making a DC30+ skill check let him see there was something wrong with the wave patterns and make a Will save. The ship managed to avoid being shattered on the rocks due to quick action with an anchor feather token, but was in a bad spot.

Cue the hot woman, Amber, running from ogres! The PCs were of course suspicious of this.  But she had a mantis tattoo, and Mama Watanna had a mantis with her in the dream… And Sindawe is never one to resist sexual advances too much, so they banged in the wreck of the Sandspider while the rest of the group cooled their heels. “She’s so strong,” he noted.

Then a hag attacked the ship to lure the PCs off and more ogres “kidnapped” Amber. The hags knew they needed to all be together to use their uber powers. The PCs dutifully went up to the cave lair and fought the cool, weird zombie ogres – the hags believe a creature’s strength is in its hair, so they shave the corpses and make hair ropes to bind driftwood to their limbs and sew their mouths shut.  The PCs kept collecting the gemstones from their eye sockets, never figuring out they were hag’s eyes. It took them a bit to realize there was more than one hag.

There were gold coins (Infamy points) spent… They forcecaged Sindawe but Wogan spent a coin to let him avoid it. Alas. I would have been content to keep them all in a cage with the hags charming them to love them up while they dined on their crew. I’ve been reading a lot of A Song of Ice and Fire so don’t think I wouldn’t do it… But they managed to hack down one hag, and once one goes down and all the Super Coven Powers go away, they are meat for the beast.

Although it’s funny, Ambraga (Amber) was a low level witch, and when Granny went down she got her back up with a Cure Light Wounds – Serpent freaked out and was giving up; he was sure that they were just all immortal or something.  It’s funny the little things that can demoralize even experienced players.

They are about done with the island; they just have treasure and intel to gather up and then figure out some way of getting their ship out of the rocks safely. Then it’s back to Riddleport! And Tommy should be rejoining us next time (the player’s been on hiatus so it’s really just been Wogan, Sindawe, and Serpent with souls for the last bit).

We all had fun; we played extra long, like 8 hours, but we got the whole adventure done in one session – I’ve got a bad habit of letting them really stretch out.