D&D 5E Tomb of Annihilation - advice on current situation

[pukunui]

Hi all! I seek the wisdom of my fellow DMs.

I am running Tomb of Annihilation. The group is en route to Firefinger to do Azaka's personal quest so she'll help them find Vorn for free.

They've got both Azaka and the tabaxi siblings as guides, and there are five PCs all together, so they've got two canoes with four people in each canoe (plus gear).

About a day downriver from Firefinger, they randomly encountered a pair of plesiosaurs. I had them row frantically for the shore as one of the plesiosaurs made a beeline for them.

One canoe made it, the other did not. We ended the session with the plesiosaur flipping the canoe. Two PCs and the tabaxi are in the water.

The PCs are all level 3.

I think I'd like to make this more of an interesting skill challenge rather than a combat encounter.

Perhaps the plesiosaur mistakes the canoe for a creature and spends several rounds destroying it rather than going after the PCs.

Perhaps the friendly chwinga one of the PCs met earlier reappears and pacifies the plesiosaur or bestows a charm of animal friendship on a PC so they can communicate with the plesiosaur or something.

I also need to figure out what the PCs ought to lose in terms of gear. Obviously they're going to be down one canoe, which complicates things a lot. But I can't picture them wearing all their gear while paddling a canoe. Most of their stuff would be loose in the canoe. That said, the book specifically states that the rivers don't have much of a current outside the waterfalls and rapids, so as long as there are no obvious threats in the area, they could easily dive/swim to get their gear back (as long as it isn't something that would be ruined by getting wet).

How should I handle the gear loss? I'm thinking that "loss of gear" is preferable to "loss of life" at this stage in the game, but I don't want to be so punishing that the former greatly increases the likelihood of the latter happening. (For instance, my 12 yo daughter is playing an arcane archer, and she is worried about losing her quiver with all her arrows, including some silvered arrows, in it.)

Thoughts?

 

[pukunui]

I should add that previously the group encountered a group of flying monkeys. Two PCs failed their saves to avoid having the monkeys snatch some gear from them. I let the players choose what the monkeys snatched, and of course the players chose torches, because losing a bunch of torches didn't disadvantage them much, if at all. So I am hesitant to just let the players tell me what all they've lost in terms of gear, because I know they'll try to minimize the amount of damage as much as possible.

 

[Eltab]

Get a list of all their gear. Personal gear goes with that person; split the rest in half (so "20 days rations" has 10 in each canoe).
Heavy stuff (plate mail? gems?) sinks immediately.
Cloth-y stuff gets soaked and then sinks.
Light puffy things (like a mostly-empty backpack) float a ways downstream but can be recovered.
Edible things (the Rations) are, by some critter or other - or have bugs &c in them when the PCs open the package.

If the PCs go diving, this gives you a rough order they can retrieve their gear. Maybe write up several tables - top layer, main layer, sunk in mud.

The competent guides should also be able to Junglecraft a make-do replacement for some things (ex: arrows but not silvered) until the group can find a supply source.

Maybe a half-dozen Aldani (? - the lobsterfolk) follows the Plesiosaur around because they collect something it disturbs as it passes - and BTW they could retrieve the PCs' gear "for a small fee" and sell some of theirs at "reasonable rates". They have basic mundane jungle survival gear, nothing special.

Edit: after chewing on a PC for a turn, the plesiosaur decides it tastes bad and tries something else. Tabaxi give it hairballs and it will spend double movement in the square next to one 'sniffing it out' then move on. However dwarves taste like chicken to it and...

 

[pukunui]

Thanks @Eltab! That is helpful!

 

[pukunui]

All right, so we had our session earlier this evening, and it went pretty well!

I started off by having the two affected players go through their gear and decide for themselves what their PC would likely have had on their person while paddling the canoe vs what they would have stowed in the floor of the canoe. I then had the group determine what all was in that canoe in terms of party gear -- e.g. one of their two rain catchers and half of the group's foraged food.

It was a heavy rain day, so I set the scene by saying that the river was swollen with a visible if still somewhat slow current. The plesiosaur started off demolishing the canoe, which it mistook for a living creature.

My daughter decided her arcane archer would have had her quiver on her back already, and I graciously let her keep all her arrows. She opted to have her PC grab her backpack before it could sink / float away.

My wife, however, decided her PC would not have had much on his person aside from his "day bag" and so he went for his rapier but let his backpack go. She also decided that her PC lost his pet mouse in the river!

The tabaxi siblings were struggling to swim to shore, so my wife had her PC go after the rain catcher, which we decided would've been floating, and steer it over to the tabaxi to use as a floatation device. My daughter's PC also hung around to help. Because of that, I 'rewarded' them with a random bite from the plesiosaur as they swam away. It got a good taste of my wife's PC but the damage wasn't enough to take him out, so they all made it safely to the shore, minus one canoe, some food and some other relatively inconsequential items. Oh, we also randomly determined which canoe the sack of ghoul heads were in and it was the destroyed canoe, so they lost those too. They'll have to find some more to ghouls to behead before they return to Fort Beluarian for the bounty.

After hiding their remaining canoe, they proceeded the rest of the way to Firefinger on foot. Unless they can find another canoe in the vicinity or reduce their numbers to six in total, they're going to have to walk back to Port Nyanzaru as well.