[5e] Spell & Crossbones

[Queenie]

[MENTION=61026]tuxgeo[/MENTION] I'll respond to everything later, but let me just say: Mate, you are overthinking so many small details! No wonder you've been feeling paralyzed with your character creation.

I totally agree! Don't sweat the small stuff! It may even be just come up with a story you love. Don't worry about making all the details fir, we can't help you with that.

I was close to not having a character sheet at ALL for this game and just taking it as it came.

Relax and let loose a little, you'll be fine. I promise.


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[Quickleaf]

Pinning down this middle-aged sailor's Bond to the adventure: #2 sounds more like what I was going for: A former crew member aboard the Coral Curse who somehow survived the disease (reasons for survival to develop during story?), and who had previously been involved in a disastrously failed attempt to find and salvage the wreckage of La Gloriosa, thus having a very personal motive to repair his reputation by making another attempt.

That's a great starting point!

Remember the business card of Paladin on "Have Gun Will Travel?"
HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL
Wire Paladin, San Francisco

In that vein, if this 'Beck' character knew the "Dead Reckoning" Seafarer's Trick, his business card (calling card?) might have said:
Ship Mage For Hire
YOU BECKON, I RECKON
Contact Beck, Nassau

Lol

Not nearly so silly: Potential Character Arcs --
(1) Discovering that all that wealth won't buy you health: Watching as Capt. Van Djik and Blackbeard grow older and feebler, and as the character starts to feel the same effects himself.
(2) The Sea Is Big and You Are Small: your vaunted "simple tricks and nonsense" are no match for the power of The Force (of nature). The beginnings of wisdom lie in realizing the extent of your own limitations.

Good things to think about! Definitely, as DM, I appreciate hearing your ideas for your PC's character arcs and development.

A post about the timeline --
From the Introduction:
Okay, that's the piece of the timeline I was forgetting. La Gloriosa definitely sank after fleeing the raid on Cartagena 15 years ago; and given that any crew member (other than cabin boy?) would have had to be at least 18 years old (?) to serve aboard her, it seems to follow that any sailor who had been aboard would now have to be at least 33 years old, and likely quite a few years more. That fits for the timeline; but forcing there to have been any survivors of the sinking raises other issues.

So, it presumably sank. So far, nobody has been found to confirm that visually. There's a lot of details that haven't been explored in the game yet - clues that are part of the trail to finding La Gloriosa. Basically, it's a legend. There are truths, half-truths, and outright lies to fill the mystery of what happened.

For "#1" (i.e. having been directly involved with La Gloriosa): Did La Gloriosa escape pursuers long enough to reach sight of land, so survivors could row ashore, or did she sink far offshore? (I don't think we know that yet.) Was she scuttled, in order to keep important secrets (and gold) out of the hands of the pursuing French? If she was scuttled, that might have been delayed by hours until many or most people aboard her had a chance to escape to land (and to later give such conflicting interview answers about where the ship went down that the wreckage of La Gloriosa still hasn't been found). Or maybe she was scuttled because she was no longer sufficiently seaworthy (after the cannon-play and the fires) to be of further service to Spain, in the sense of braving the swells of the deep Atlantic.

Sounds like you're going with #2, so this is moot.

And furthermore -- "What the H-E-double-toothpicks, De Pointis?" Weren't France and Spain allied during Queen Anne's War? Then why was a Frenchman raiding Spanish Cartagena? Some dire villainy may have been at work.
Oops! Fifteen years before 1712 would be a raid on Cartagena in 1697, so that's before Queen Anne's War, and before Charles II favored the Bourbon dynasty to rule Spain. In 1697, Spain and France could have been at war, so the villainy might have been more political than diabolical. (But one can never tell without more facts.)

Correct, 1697 was the very tail end of the Nine Years War between French Jacobites led by Louis XIV and a European coalition (including the Spanish). It was a very tumultuous time, all these colonial powers fighting each other for scraps of the New World, only to turn around and become allies when the promise of profits outweighed their previous animosities. At least, that's how I'd describe it with my slightly jaded view.

Further timeline: the Coral Curse has now been beached for years. I'm going to reread to be sure, but it sounds as though this 'Beck' was some kind of senior member of the crew aboard the Curse. If he was 30-35 then, he could be 35-45 (or more) now, depending on how long ago the Coral Curse was beached.
Oops! again: Must add the number of months (or years?) the Curse was sitting offshore in quarantine while the various people aboard her either died of the yellow fever or recovered. . . .

I actually deliberately left vague the timeline with The Coral Curse. That age range for 'Beck' sounds about right to me.

Edit to add: I have done some rereading of Captain Van Djik's story, and learned more about this 2nd Mate Beck: he drove the slaves whom they had rescued from the Spanish slaver ship down to the galley at gunpoint; and Van Djik clapped then in chains himself.

Well...you're reading like an engineer, looking for limitations rather than for possibilities. No offense to engineers, my best and most brilliant friend is one.

So, yeah Van Djik ordered the slaves below at gunpoint. What exactly was Beck's role in that (if your PC = Beck)? What exactly was your PC's role in that (if your PC is different than Beck)? That's 100% up to you to decide. Maybe you dissented? Maybe you cast a charm spell?

Instead of looking for all these limits – most of which seem self-imposed rather than anything I'd actually be enforcing – I'd ask: What sort of character do I *want* to play? And how would that sort of character respond in such a situation with the slaves and Van Djik?

Er: Sorcerers and Warlocks don't automatically have proficiency with pistols or hand crossbows, though they get proficiency with light crossbows. Would a Ship Mage be proficient with pistols?

Sure! Pistol proficiency seems in keeping with the sort of character you're creating.

An officer on a naval vessel would have to obey the Captain about all matters; but on a privateer or a pirate ship, I thought the Captain ruled only in matters of combat. (Or was that during combat, which the encounter with the Acheron was?)

History texts make the distinction seem clear because the delineation between combat & everything else is clearly articulated in pirate charters. In the actual chaos of the situation...combat was imminent, Van Djik asked slaves to man the galley, Sambo the bokor refused on behalf of the slaves, Achéron fired a lucky shot killing half the galley, combat had begun, Van Djik (who historically was very progressive regarding natives & slavery for the era, due to his own experiences aboard a slave galley) made controversial decision to have slaves chained to galley and made to row at gunpoint to replace those killed by the Achéron. In the battle, he left other slaves on the sinking ship to drown.

The party just heard Van Djik's view of what happened. There are other views however.

In whichever case, my first inclination would be not to be Beck. Others of the crew of the Curse besides Beck and Van Djik survived the disease; and that gives a prospective character a few years to start advancing in ability and rank by developing a latent talent for magical practice. (He needn't have been 4th level while aboard her.)

OK then. Then you have a starting point for your character. Beck is an NPC. Were you the ship mage aboard The Coral Curse?

 

[tuxgeo]

. . . And . . . it's evening again. "The sun is over the yardarm," . . . , and my mind isn't as sharp as I would like for being specific right now.

Overall, I want to be able to have it make sense that he's an accomplished spell-slinger, regardless of whether this involves doing a certain number of special tasks for some spirit each year. If he was a ship mage before getting hired onto the Coral Curse, he would have to have been hired despite the previous failure of the "earlier" expedition to find La Gloriosa. Maybe he became a ship mage after that expedition, and developed the talent during a few years of knocking about the Caribbean and dodging the English press gangs who needed enough crew members to hold their own in the sea battles?
(If he was a member of the failed expedition to find La Gloriosa, but wasn't its ship mage during that effort, then it would be only a black mark against him generally, not against his magical prowess.) (Yes, I'm overthinking it again. . . .)

Edit to editorialize: "Begin digression":
However, my fancy gives me this: aboard the Coral Curse might be where he learned his craft! (Or not?)
With people dying right and left due to yellow fever, the existing ship mage might have started to fear for his own mortality and begun teaching something -- Mariner's Boon? (TBD) -- to a middle-aged "jack tar" who had an apt mind (having already learned the Semaphore or the Flag Code (TBD?) well enough before, and who had already suffered a debilitating fever, but who now seemed to be getting better slowly.

Better to see if the potential pupil was capable of benefitting from the training while there's still a chance to keep the tradition alive -- just in case. It was not as though either of them would be let off the hospital ship alive until the port authorities allowed it; and what else was there to do?
"/end digression"

---

My increasinglly febrile imagination also gives me another joke:
Scottish Dwarf from the Isle of South Uist: "Ah, the names of the isles of Uist come from the name of the wild uisge beatha which grows native there. The bottlers on the isles don't even have to add yeast to their brew, because that's its native climate." (They can't all be gems.)

---

Edit to just answer the danged question, already: Yes, he was the ship mage aboard the Coral Curse. Any questions about why anybody would hire him for that can be answered by pure handwavium, if nothing else.

 

[tuxgeo]

Responding belatedly to this one point. I had suggested two possible character arcs for future development of an in-process PC, but I neglected to give attribution to my source. QL commented:

Good things to think about! Definitely, as DM, I appreciate hearing your ideas for your PC's character arcs and development.

I do want to acknowledge here that I got the nudge to work in the direction of propounding potential character arcs from an earlier post by Matthan in this thread. (I'll see if I can find it again.)

Edit to add: Found it: Specific quotes:

Here would be my first note to you. As you're developing your background, you want to create a character that has a reason to be with the party and has a narrative arc that can be fulfilled within the game. . . .
You don't have to go that route, but you need to ask yourself those two questions. Why is my character going after La Gloriosa and what does his resolution look like? When you start to answer those two questions then ask yourself follow up questions to help flesh it out.

Who set you on the path to La Gloriosa? Who opposed you? Who helped you? What is at stake if you fail? Questions like that will not always give you something worthwhile, but it'll help you build something compelling and give Quickleaf plenty to work with to involve you in the story.

Alas, I've only scratched the surface of such possibilities so far. I still need to address issues of "what does his resolution look like" and "Who opposed you? Who helped you?" It does feel as though I've been working hard on building this character; but it also seems that I've been mostly wasting that effort in overthinking the minutiae. (Eh: I should better heed the common advice to "work smarter, not harder")

 

[tuxgeo]

And three days later I actually get back to this. Apologies for the delay. Somehow I ended up spending three days doing outside work in this glorious spring weather. (Out of shape, sweating heavily, and collapsing in a chair from the effort.)

< snip >Well...you're reading like an engineer, looking for limitations rather than for possibilities. No offense to engineers, my best and most brilliant friend is one.

Yeah, the S.T.E.M. disciplines train the mind to think in certain ways. Mathematician here, I'm starting to wonder whether I'm mentally suited to the kind of thing needed for this campaign.

So, yeah Van Djik ordered the slaves below at gunpoint. What exactly was Beck's role in that (if your PC = Beck)? What exactly was your PC's role in that (if your PC is different than Beck)? That's 100% up to you to decide. Maybe you dissented? Maybe you cast a charm spell?

Instead of looking for all these limits – most of which seem self-imposed rather than anything I'd actually be enforcing – I'd ask: What sort of character do I *want* to play? And how would that sort of character respond in such a situation with the slaves and Van Djik? . . .

I'll be thinking about this potential PC's actions aboard the Coral Curse when faced with the no-win situation of the attack by the Acheron when the Curse needed to maneuver and couldn't without oarsmen, but half of the old oarsmen were dead. (Schooners got rowing galleys? "Clams got legs!")*

Also to come: more limitations! -- This PC would achieve resolution of his desire for redemtion if the party finds the wreck of La Gloriosa and gains its legendary treasures; but he would also achieve resolution if he could find proof that La Gloriosa had run aground at high tide while still on fire, and the crew jettisoned all the treasure and took to the life boats, returning at low tide (after La Gloriosa had burnt up entirely?) to retrieve the treasure and bury it above the high-water line for later removal as opportunities allowed.
He would have resolution if she sank and the party found the wreck, or if she didn't sink and he could prove that, or if the party could retrieve treasure that was definitely on La Gloriosa (even if the fate of the ship remains a mystery). Nearly any way the legend of La Gloriosa del Mar changes or is concluded would give him at least partial redemtion of reputation. There are a lot of possibilities that would give resolution; and it almost seems that I should limit myself to choosing one.

That makes my head hurt. I believe I'll make more progress by deciding how he would have behaved aboard the Coral Curse. (Obey the Captain and end up cursed in his own way? Dissent but follow orders? He could do that and still end up cursed, if an angry bokor is as fallible as other people and can make bad decisions? Maybe my mind will be clearer in the morning.)

---

* Disregard Irish Bull digression:
The Coral Curse has banks of oars because she had begun her service as a barquentine, but later got reduced in rank to a mere schooner during the downsizing of the navy when peace broke out.

 

[tuxgeo]

. . . and another three days go by. . . .

Mea culpa. The delays in my forming an acceptable character are nobody's fault but my own.
For that, I wish to extend my sincere apologies to one and all: I'm sorry for having taken up so much space in-thread, and for having taken up as much of the mental resources of others as I have (in the form of offered encouragement and suggestions and advice), and for any inadvertent slights or insults that may have crept into my (too extensive and drawn-out) posts here.

My previous post is the latest example of this: I said I'd have to think about what my character would have done with regard to Van Djik's decision to force the rescued slaves into the galley to row. That's the same awkward approach I used before: trying to deduce the nature of the character, bottom-up, from the setting, instead of top-down from the character concept.
It is now well beyond the point where I should already have recognized that I don't actually have a clear, vivid, overall concept or image or plot imagined for this would-be character.
In fact, if I had had such a well-formed idea for a character, I wouldn't have had to think about it: I would have been able to tell within mere minutes what the guy would have done then.

For those reasons and others, I must withdraw my candidacy for playing a character in this campaign. I do thank everybody for the help they offered to me; and I offer in return my own wishes for a successful and exciting (and dramatic!) adventure filled with monsters and treasure as you progess on your way to La Gloriosa del Mar. This is a very flavorful and imaginative and fantastical setting, and your characters are all vivid and compelling and you've all been more than generous with your time. As for me, I am going to need to spend more time doing personal projects IRL, and to that end pry myself away from the keyboard and screen more of the time.

Best wishes to all. I doubt that I'll be keeping up with these threads in the future.

---

Another thing I didn't manage to do: Give the GM useful material to work with, as mentioned in the latest (yesterday's) "Table Titans" comic.

Here's hoping that any other potential applicants who have been holding back from asking to play here will now be more forthcoming now that I'm out of the way. . . .

 

[Queenie]

Sorry to see you go [MENTION=61026]tuxgeo[/MENTION]. If you decide to give another game a go, try not to overthink it too much

Everyone else, we're back from traveling. Again. Not that I don't like California, but it's not been a good reason to have to go there (court for my stepdaughter). We actually have to go back AGAIN in August and stay for a little while, [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION], any chance you'll be in CA in early-mid August? We will likely be there until August 19/20 and mostly free after the 4th.

I'll try to get a post up asap.

 

[Shayuri]

Hey, I thought I remembered the white buffalo skin being given to Nia a while back? Or is that still be kept by someone else?

I recall Nia thinking it would be useful in the confrontation with Yellow Jack.

 

[Queenie]

Do we know what we have to do to confront Yellow Jack?

 

[Shayuri]

I have some notion of the things that might lure him, or goad him. And we have some resources we can use. Nia's 'cookbook,' for example, and the buffalo skin.