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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tuxgeo" data-source="post: 7112888" data-attributes="member: 61026">So many useful ideas here:Re: his having been a crew member aboard the Coral Curse, but having survived the Yellow Fever epidemic and now having the attacking french captain as an enemy: Hmm. Captain Van Djik survived this long, and apparently others did as well. The Capt. is a dwarf, having resistance to poison damage and Adv. on saves vs. poison; but not having the same for diseases. Now he's about to succumb after these years. . . .I think I should work on other parts of the story for bonds and relationships and fortunes before circling back around to the question of how this guy survived the epidemic. If there were Divine/Spiritual intervention, that would seem to indicate that this character offers (or offered) sacrifices to spirits, or prayed really devoutly to Bondye ("Bon Dieu"). The retired Doctor Hawken Varlock had a loa patron, so other people in the region could easily do the same. "Reason for survival" may be a bridge to cross another day.That's certainly something I had not even considered. Were there any survivors of La Gloriosa? Did it reach some distant shore in extremis without sinking? Did The Kraken grab it whole and drag it down to the Abyss before anybody had a chance to jump off? Did the seas become strange while La Gloriosa was under cannon fire from pursuers, with parts of the poop deck blown clean off the superstructure, only to fall to the sea with the still-living bodies of sailors cast like puppets into the air to fly clear of the flotsam? Did the flotsam's fall to the water, and temporarily under it, extinguish any flames, so survivors could swim to and cling to (or mount) the wrack? Did the remains of La Gloriosa continue on from there through the "seas-became-strange" portal into the seas of another world, leaving pursuers behind? Would any survivors who were blown clear be able to discern where the rest of the ship went after that? If the ship sank as they watched, could they find the spot again? If it was near land, there might have been visible landmarks; but then, why did they take this long to tell people what those landmarks were? (Temporary or magical amnesia?)I think it's likely Quickleaf already has answers to most of those questions, and is saving them for the party to discover later. For now, I'll hold off on trying to overwrite that part of the setting with my character's attempted backstory; but those are really intriguing ideas all the same.So he survived the epidemic but never fully recovered from it? That's a compelling concept in its own right. Umm. I think that not deciding finally on a Bond is a good idea at the moment, with this proviso: for now, before the character gets built to match, he has three Bonds to La Gloriosa! They are: Vengeance/Justice, either to find the guilty french privateers who aided in the raid on Cartagena, or to clear his own family of suspicion and accusations of having been among those; Redemption because he failed to find La Gloriosa before; and Recovery, because the Yellow Fever isn't gone from his body, it's merely in abeyance.[HR][/HR]Bonus stuff: (0) Was Cartagena named after the historical Carthage? Might we expect Hannibal and elephants? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />(1) The reason nobody can find La Gloriosa del Mar by scrying magic is that, while they were under pursuit, the people aboard her held a ceremony to re-christen the vessel, using a mixture of French and Spanish to throw off investigators, renaming it "La Furiosa del Gloire." Nobody would think to scry for its location under that name! (2) I finally did watch Swiss Family Robinson on Sunday. There were pirates in the movie, but they were more the plot device and the villains than being main characters. That's to be expected for that story. More connections: SWR featured James MacArthur as Fritz, the eldest son, and John Mills as the father, with Janet Munro as the girl who is first mistaken for a boy. (a) What, Munro died at the tender age of 38, in 1971? (I had seen her before in Darby O'Gill and the Little People.) (b) John Mills and James MacArthur teamed up again in "The Truth About Spring," featuring a maturing Hayley Mills as the girl (tomboy in her case) who is first mistaken for a boy. </blockquote>

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