NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8626568" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 50: Nov/Dec 1994part 2/5The Vaka's Curse: A currently underused aspect of nautical journeys is the possibility of creating a bottle adventure, where the PC's are trapped on board with a monster, or one of the other passengers is a murderer, so you can't escape the plot and it would be a very good idea to solve the problem before the journey finishes. A murdered man was transformed into wood and then used as a ship's figurehead to dispose of the evidence. This left his spirit angry and restless, so he's stuck around to haunt the ship. A random PC will find themselves having terrible dreams and losing stat points each night on the trip. They don't recover naturally, so after a few nights they'll hopefully be suspicious and highly motivated to keep watch for trouble. Even if they catch the spirit in the act and have weapons that can hurt him, he won't be permanently destroyed unless they also destroy the figurehead, which might catch them out, and they'll need solid proof before the ship's crew will let them destroy it. A short one that manages to balance the horror story atmospherics with the need to make the monster mechanically interesting, and just different enough from a stock one in the manuals that players won't be able to easily metagame their way through this. A decent challenge that's easy to use whenever they have a sea voyage from one bigger adventure to another, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm likely to actually pull out and play to string the campaign out.</blockquote>

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