Session Four Recap
With the sails of The Wormwood now in the distance, the crew found themselves on The Man's Promise with the new Captain, Mr. Plugg giving orders to all on the main deck. He instructed the crew that the ship would be heading toward Port Peril to be sold as a prize. Some of the crew who suffered under the harsh discipline on The Wormwood scratched their heads in puzzlement when Mr. Plugg said that "order on the prior ship was too lax." He explained that his ship was one of work: there would be no entertainment in the evenings, no gambling, no one allowed above deck without permission at night, and no rum ration. Violation of these would result in punishment with the cat-o-nine, and the punishment for failing to work hard was increased to six lashes. Things looked to be very different, and far more miserable, under the command of Mr. Plugg.
That's "Captain Plugg" to you!
Captain Plugg also announced the new senior staff of the ship. Maheem would take over as sailing master, while "Badger" Medlar would be the botswain. And Master Scourge was promoted to First Mate, Captain Plugg's old position. With that, the crew was given their new tasks for their first day on the ship. Work that day was routine and rough, as shouting and occasional on-the-spot-lashes were far more prevalent. The galley crew in particular, Fishguts Kroop and Nika, were berated and yelled at by Captain Plugg for nearly an hour while the rest of the crew got to work--the demand of "you will cook until you get the food right" could be heard echoing below deck. Again, it seemed like they got the worst tasks, particularly Gilbert whose new boss Badger Medlar seemed to have not forgotten the terrible haircut he gave her. Jax worked the ropes, and did his best to make nice with some of the new riggers as well as Conchobar Shortstone--getting them involvled in a game of "point at it and say the name of it" language-swapping. The two new Rahadoumi Riggers, Akphir and Mutnodjmet, proved to be capable sailors who spoke only Rahadoumi, but were interested in learning the other words for parts of the ship. Meanwhile Conchobar focused on items of clothes, far more interested in learning the Rahadoumi words for "shoe buckle" and "sash". The swabs worked diligently for the most part, with Gilbert taking only a brief break to visit the busy galley. He found Nika slaving at the stove with Fishguts Kroop drunk again. Gilbert resumed his entreaties for Fishguts to put the drink aside for good, which ended with the old drunk weeping openly and for a second time swearing to quit.
Once dusk fell, a majority of the crew was confined below-decks. Sadie, Scolvus, Druna, Jax, Gilbert, Galfire, and Nika taking one corner of the cabin along with Shivikah and Jaundiced Jape. Badger Medlar came to the crew cabin and asked Conchobar Shortstone and Slippery Syl to join an "officers meeting." Jax, suspicious at this, quickly went to the door and when others were not looking in the busy and noisy cabin, popped the lock open and snuck out. He followed Badger and the two swabs up to the Captain's quarters, where Captain Plugg was holding a clandestine meeting.
With ear to the door, Jax heard Captain Plugg talking to selected crew members. Peeking through a crack in the door he could see the familiar faces of those pirates who seemed to be cronies or swayed with intimidation or reward to Plugg's side: Master Scourge, Maheem, Tam "Narwhal" Tate, Badger Medlar, Conchobar Shortstone, Slippery Syl, and a few of the higher-ranking impressed Rahadoumi crew. Plugg spoke, and Jax shuddered when he heard the plan: the ship was not headed to Port Peril as Captain Harrigan had commanded. Instead, Plugg was taking the ship himself, planning to go to a small cove on the southern shore called Rickety Squibb's, where the ship would get squibbed--the lines and sails superficially adjusted to make the ship look different and disguised. Plugg said it was time to start himself as his own Captain. Once the ship was changed, he would change his identity as well: from Mr. Plugg to Captain Shaft!
With a toast to Captain Shaft's plan, the meeting began to break up and Jax rushed back to his bunk below. There, in hushed tones, he told the basics of what was happening to his friends--as well as Shivikah and Jaundiced Jape who bunked close to them. As Conchobar Shortstone re-entered the bunks, he cast a greasy and transparent smile at Jax and the others as they tried their best to get to sleep with this disturbing news ringing in their ears.
And Jax had a bad feeling about what might happen to him and his friends in this new plan...
In the morning, both Druna and Sadie sense a directional change different than the path back to Port Peril, confirming what Jax heard the night before. The day of work was particularly nasty and rough, as the weather started to worsen. Many swabs and riggers performed their work poorly, and nearly half the crew was given lashes with the cat-o-nine during the bloody hour, with further punishment duties to keep the ship sailing during the night storm for some of the crew. However, the group found themselves not on evening duties--instead confined below decks under Captain Plugg's "no need for anything but work and sleep" policy. Sadie took time to heal the savage cuts on Ratline Rattsberger's back from the lashing, while Jax spoke with Slippery Syl and furthered Syl's hatred of Tam "Narwhal" Tate. Finding Syl quick to be willing to outright murder Tam, Jax felt he had found a dubious but useful ally for their side.
As night fell, the storms continued and the ship swayed terribly. Nearing morning, huge crunching sound and the ship lists to starboard, spilling them from their hammocks. Shouts quickly inform them that the ship hit a reef and has a huge hole in the starboard side. In the pre-dawn light, the crew could make out an island nearby, and the reef that the ship hit. For hours everyone worked the bilges just to keep it from going down.
As low tide finally arrives and the crew caught their breaths, a head count revealed that that two of the crew are missing: Sandara Quinn and Shivikah. Captain Plugg presumes they fell overboard in the storm, and announces that he's far more concerned about the ruptured water barrels, which are left dry. Both of the druids offered to create water, to which Captain Plugg responded "magic water don't last, and we might not always have ye on board" with a cruel smirk. Plugg commanded Druna, Gilbert, Jax, Sadie, and Scolvus to head to the island to find fresh water, and if they find Sandara and Shivikah, well all the better--but the ship leaves in 48 hours either way. As they ready for the expedition, Jaundiced Jape shows the group a medallion that belonged to Sandara Quinn, and indicates that he found it on the forcastle deck. Inspection of it reveals signs that it might have been ripped loose in a struggle.
The group set out on the ship's gig, first heading toward the nearest shore of the island where they could vaguely make out humanoid shapes in the water. Hoping to find Sandara and Shivikah waving for help in the shallows, the crew was horrified to find a pair of bound skeletons with strange language scrimshaw all over them.
One of the strange, lashed-together carved skeletons that are tied in the shallows around the island
The crew decided to skip the jungle section, and sail to the eastern side of the porkchop-shaped island where a broader and safer beach lay. There, they found more signs of humanoid habitation: fields planted in an attempt at orderly fashion. On the edge of the field, they found two things: a path, and a gruesome decomposing head impaled on a pike--some sort of warning or scarecrow? Cautiously, they followed the path up the hill to the fort. There they find the gate open, and inside the walls of the stockade they locate a source of fresh water and a fixed spyglass. Jax peers through the spyglass and sees a hidden cove tucked within the hilly cliffs, which would be invisible to anyone sailing along the island's coast. More worrisome, he spotted two small aquatic creatures with gills and nasty, grabbing hands, on the beach. The group figureed out that these creatures are grindylows, strange little creatures that abduct sailors, leaving the group with a distinct feeling of unease about Sandara and Shivikah's safety.
Bonewrack Island (signal fire C2, fields C7, stockade C8, hidden cove D)
As the group filled up their waterskins, they also started to inspect the small structure inside the stockade. Within, they found a grisly scene and a horrible smell. Hanging from the rafters was a rotting man in tattered remains of a Chelish sailor's outfit, the noose and overturned stool a sign of suicide. The group found a diary, and flipped through it despite the stink of the corpse and the flies in the air. The diary detailed how a Chelish warship sank about a year ago, and the survivors made their way to this island. They started to set up a habitation and signal fires. But they didn't realize that the "weapon" they kept caged on the deck of the ship didn't die when the ship sank. Instead, the weapon survived underwater and apparently eventually broke free, got to shore, and started attacking survivors of the shipwreck. The journal was fuzzy on details, but it sounded as if the Ship's Whores banded together with this "weapon" and turned on the rest of the survivors. Unclear what to make of that, but worried about the depressing final entry about the man unable to stand the whores returning each night to attack his fort causing him to kill himself, the group started to lift the man down from where he hung himself.
At that moment, the corpse started to move--with a sudden burst of speed it lifted itself up using the crews' bodies for leverage. With a deathly hiss, the stench in the room suddenly worsened as dropped to the ground and lay about the group biting and slashing with claw-like fingers. The smell sickened some of them, and others found that the creature's strikes paralyzed them. More and more of the group were falling still from the ghast's attacks, when finally Scolvus managed to cast a spell leaving a slippery area of grease around the creature. The reanimated sailor fell to the ground, and in that moment Druna managed to strike downward with an enormous blow of her cudgel, shattering the creature's skull into pieces. The crew managed to escape mostly intact, with only Jax receiving a nasty bite from the hanged man. Healing themselves somewhat, the group started back down to their boat to explore the cove.
Plenty of ghoulish fun yet to come!
Heading down the hill path, the group did not realize that eyes were watching them from the jungle. Yet as they walked along the strip of jungle at the base of the hill back toward the fields, the sound of sudden rustling in the path behind them was evident. Suddenly, four screeching, walking corpses burst from the treeline and rushed down the path toward the group. Their sallow, purplish skin glistened in the tropical heat, and their clothes jangled with jewelry--clearly the ship's whores the journal spoke about. Again, Scolvus' quick thinking with his grease spell proved to be the critical point of the battle. Placing a patch of slippery magical grease between the running ghouls and the group, a number of the undead ship's whores slipped and fell, sliding directly to the feet of the party. Sadie even managed to slay one as it slid past where she stood, caving its skull with expert precision. Druna fell herself, and managed so slay the final ghoul while wrestling with it on the ground--provoking no short number of snide comments about greased wrestling from Gilbert.
Hurt, slashed, cut, and yet not having rescued Sandara and Shivikah, the group decided to return to the stockade to get some rest and recover. By that point, Jax's bite wound had started to become infected with a nasty--and frightening--purplish tinge. Sadie cared for him as best he could, but knew little about the process of the malady that was starting to sicken him.
As they slept the night, those on watch and those trying to sleep noticed that the place was horrible with mosquitoes. While Scolvus had fun freezing one with ice spells, the group found themselves bitten up something fierce overnight. More disconcerting was the fact that Gilbert arose feeling quite sick--and with a similar purplish tinge to his skin around one of the mosquito bites as Jax had around his bite from the ghast.
Wanting to get off the island as soon as they could to avoid further risk to others developing this "ghoul fever", the crew climbed into the cutter and sailed around the southern end of the small island. There, through the extremely clear water, they could see the wreck of the Chelish ship The Infernus. They could see a man-sized rusted cage on the deck, where likely the first ghoul was held. Being already dead, the thing didn't drown when the ship sank and instead eventually pried the bars free and must have swam to shore where it--and mosquitoes gorged on its blood--infected the other shipwreck survivors.
Facing an unbroken sea cliff, the crew did some quick calculations and surmised that the cove would likely bereached through an underwater passage from the water's edge. With a bit of looking they located a crevice in the shore that seems to run deeper inland. Forced to swim, and to leave Druna's trained parrot and Sadie's trained spider on the boat, they swam out into the water.
Like this, but without the gear
While the distance should have been a mere 50 feet, the group found that the channel cut back and forth. Finally, they saw light ahead and above and burst gasping for breath into the cove. Unfortunately they only found a small ring of beach sunken in the deep rock walls--and a torn bit of Shivikah's clothing. Seeing no land entrance that took them further, the group located an underwater channel that bore them deeper under the island. They decided to split a water breathing potion to explore without having to worry about breathing, and then swam on into the flooded corridors.
After a series of continued confusing turns, and sections that were both submerged and only slightly flooded (as it was low tide), the crew came upon a large half-flooded room choked with seaweed in a bed. Jax decided to climb around the wall rather than swim through the seaweed, and as the others waited and watched his progress they saw a number of grindylows emerge from hiding in the thick tangle of plant mass. Jax threw daggers from the walls, while others dived into the water to battle the creatures there. The fight was a struggle, as while the grindylows were easily slain if hit, their defenses and the slowing effect fighting in water has on swinging a weapon proved difficult. In particular, the grindylows seemed fond of grabbing their foes with their strong grip and pulling them downward into the water to drown. The crew's secret that they could breath underwater was their only advantage, and they managed to triumph after a rough fight.
What followed was more twisted and flooded halls. One large room had a metal grate trap which fell upon Scolvus, Druna, and Gilbert. Designed to catch them and leave them drowning in the water, the trap proved mostly just a hindrance--as the water breathing spell kept them alive easily and Scolvus' grease spell created a slippery cloud in the water to ease their slipping free.
Finally, the crew found themselves in a tunnel filled with more water motion than they'd seen elsewhere. Not only that, but they started swimming into chunks of strange, half-eaten deep sea fish as the water clouded with blood and gore. They swam out of the tunnel into a large room where a current spiraled in a vile circular motion creating a slow whirlpool filled with more of the chunks of prehistoric-looking fish. The crew immediately heard two things. First, chanting in a strange language from the back of room where a strange creature (half grindylow, half octopus) seemed to be conducting a ritual at an altar. And second, shouts for help coming from the cavern's ceiling. There, suspended by seaweed ropes, hung Sandara Quinn and Shivikah, both tied and bound with heavy silver ingots dangling from them. Below, at the center of the slow whirlpool, the crew could make out two more humanoid forms--these two seemed to be chained with loose chains to the floor of the cavern. And they carried the unmistakable purple skin tone and savage eyes of the ghouls the party had encountered previously.
Hearing the captive's changed screams for help, the strange grindylow hybrid turned and saw the arrival of the crew into the cavern. Shouting in a language they didn't understand, the creature glowered at them evilly. Clearly whatever dark ritual it was performing, it was interrupted. With rage, the creature slashed its weapon--a nasty multi-pronged harpoon--across the seaweed ropes that suspended the two prisoners aloft. Sandara and Shivikah felt with a splash into the water, and began slowly sinking toward the ghouls beneath them who struggled with fury to reach this new helpless prey. Finally, and maybe even most worrysome, the crew could make out the shape of something enormous rise up from the bottom of the cavern floor and start swimming their way. Could they save their friends in time? Was the place where the lives of the crew might be perilously cut short?
Next time: an encounter with the Brinebrood Queen
NPC Matrix
The characters have a basic idea of attitudes of the other crewmembers to them, which will be represented on this matrix and updated after each session. The (current) indicates where the attitude is, while the names in boxes show who influenced whom. (Permanent) indicates that the character is now permanently that status relative to the PCs. While they can still directly benefit from interaction with that NPC, the attitude is fixed unless something extreme happens to push the NPC the other way (cruel or insulting treatment of a helpful ally, for instance). Where movement goes back and forth, the names will be numbered to show the order of influence. I make this information public because living in close proximity on a ship really cannot hide their interactions!
Name
|
Face
|
Hostile
|
Unfriendly
|
Indifferent
|
Friendly
|
Helpful
|
Description
|
Ambrose “Fishguts” Kroop
|  |
Start
|
Gilbert 1
|
(current)
Gilbert 2 |
Ship’s cook, perpetually drunk, smells of rum
Voice: Long John Silver
| ||
Aretta Banison
|  |  | | | | |
Swab, Bad tempered ex-harlot who escaped a pimp named Pepper Jack. Big ears.
Drowned by Galfire.
|
“Badger” Medlar
|  |
(current)
Master Scourge 7 |
Start
Gilbert 4
Mr. Plugg 6
|
Scolvus 1
Master Scourge 3
Sadie 5 |
Scolvus 2
|
Botswain, Older woman who has shaved white stripes like a badger on her head. Voice: Woman’s Low rumble
| |
Conchobar Shortstone
|  |
(current)
Sadie’s Spider 1 Mr. Plugg 3 Captain Plugg 5 |
Start
Gilbert 2
Jax 4 |
Rigger, overly dressy and fussy gnome
Voice: Olaf Peterson (“Hello beautiful ladies!!!”)
| |||
Crimson Cogward
|  |
Start
Mr. Plugg 2
|
(current)
Nika 1
Sadie 3 |
Swab, Easily angered loner, impressed only by stories of bloodshed. Voice: dark and brooding
| |||
Owlbear Heartshorn
|  |
Start
|
(current)
Sadie 1 |
Tarred-and-feathered simpleton lackey of Mr. Plugg.
Voice: pathetic | |||
Dovan from Nisroch
|  |
Start
Mr. Plugg 4 |
Gilbert 1
Master Scourge 3
Gilbert 5 |
(current)
Gilbert 2 Suspicion of Plugg 6 |
Swab, Colorful rogue mercenary captain, tells stories from Fitzburgh.
Voice: Sexy guy voice
| ||
Fipps Chumlett
|  | | | | | |
Swab, Fat, Pushy bully.
Drowned by Galfire.
|
Jack Scrimshaw
|  |
(current)
Captain Plugg 7 |
Start
Master Scourge 2
Master Scourge 6 |
Sadie 1
Scolvus 3
Master Scourge 5 |
Gilbert 4
|
Swab, Talented young man always doing scrimshaw
Voice: meek and mild
| |
Jaundiced Jape
|  |
Start
|
Jax 1
Nika 3
|
(current)
Jax 2 Scolvus 4 |
Swab, Humorless, greedy mute
Voice: Mute
| ||
Maheem
|  |
(current)
Mr. Plugg 1
Master Scourge 3
Mr. Plugg 5 |
Start
Jax 2 Gilbert 4 |
Sailing Master, Rahaddoumi half-elf with a permanent scowl
Voice: Arabian Nights
| |||
"Ratline" Rattsberger
|  |  |  |
Start
|
Druna 1
Mr. Plugg 3
|
(permanent)
Scolvus 2
Druna (saved life)
Gilbert/Nika/Jax (helped)
|
Rigger, Rat faced Halfling missing fingers
Voice: Chuckles constantly (think heh heh heh)
|
Rosie Cusswell
|  |  |  |
Start
|
Scolvus
|
(permanent) Gilbert / Fiddle
|
Swab, Swears constantly.
Voice: stream of expletives
|
Samms Toppin
|  |
Jax 1
Master Scourge 3
|
(current)
Start
Jax 2
Jax 4
Jax 6
Mr. Plugg 8
Master Scourge 10 |
Jax 5
Scolvus 7
Scolvus 9 |
Rigger, Former fisherwoman, never wears shoes
Voice: Sweet melody
| ||
Sandara Quinn
|  |
Start
(current)
Nika
Jax
|
Swab, Believer in Besmara’s guidance
Voice: Moonbat
| ||||
Shivikah
|  |
Start
Master Scourge 2
|
Nika 1
Jax 3
|
Druna 4
|
(current)
Scolvus 5 |
Swab, Mwangi ex-slaver
Voice: Deep African voice, says “My friend” to everyone
| |
Slippery Syl Lonergan
(or Greasy Pete)
|  |
Master Scourge 1
|
Start
Mistrust of Tam 2 |
Jax 3
|
(current)
Plot against Tam 4 |
Swab, Unhinged murderer who escaped to sea
Voice: Dirty Harry (You feelin’ lucky punk?)
| |
Tam "Narwhal" Tate
|  |
Start
(current)
|
Swab, old friend of Master Scourge, Huge Nose
Voice: Sniveling Toady
|
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