Maiden Voyage and Dead Man's Quest

[Morrow]

In about a month I'll begin DMing a new campaign set in Freeport. I intend to use Atlas' Maiden Voyage, perhaps coupled with Dead Man's Quest from Dungeon #107 as the introductory adventure. Please share your experiences with either adventure and suggest any improvements that I should make. Their both pretty solid adventures and I'm confident that they will provide a solid introduction to adventure on the high seas, but I'm looking to tune them up from solid to YAHOO!

Morrow

 

[spacemonkey]

I ran Dead Man's Quest, thought it was pretty good. One of my players whined about sharks not doing this or that as they did in the adventure, but I told him to cut it out

<slight spoilers for this adventure follow>

Spoiler

I liked the goodly ghost captain (except the name - Ned? I keep picturing him as Flanders...) and kept him around for a while. I turned the Sahuagin encampment into a bit more long-term affair as well, seemed to work out nicely.

I would familiarize myself with underwater combat a bit before going into this one - as you are pretty much guaranteed to hit at least a little of that. you may also want to flesh out the 'isle' where the devil-fish enclave is located, if your players are as curious and investigative as mine are anyway.

Also, I believe the adventure says there are cannons in the sunken ship, even though the Freeport official info says swivel guns are the heaviest they have (I think that's right) - anyway, if you don't want that level of artillery available in your game (whether running Freeport or not), make sure to call them something else when the players see them down belowdecks.

Pretty good adventure though. I thought the 'huge ruby' was a bit too much temptation for some players though... some might opt for trying to sell it (which could be fun too, as they run afoul of everyone and can't find a fence with that much clout)

 

[Morrow]

I thought the 'huge ruby' was a bit too much temptation for some players though... some might opt for trying to sell it (which could be fun too, as they run afoul of everyone and can't find a fence with that much clout)

Fair enough, maybe the Eyes of the Sea Dragon should be carvings of some sort or some object that derives little value from the material it is made from. I like your idea to keep Ned Fletcher around. Perhaps he should haunt Harrimast's temple.

Morrow

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I've run Maiden Voyage twice, both times as part of a Freeport campaign and I thoroughly recommend it.

Spoilers:










The first time I ran it, one of the players who has a very dim female monk (very wise but Int 6 or 7 -- don't ask!) befriended Vincenz with some very entertaining results. At the end of the adventure, the party helped him escape only for him to turn up at a later point in the campaign along with another previously encountered NPC villain and make them wish they hadn't done let him go.

Cheers



Richard

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I consistently rank Maiden Voyage as my favorite first level adventure ever. I used it exactly as you are planning: to get my players to Freeport.

The adventure is almost completely dependent upon the DM's ability to recognize and adequately convey the motivations and speaking patterns of several different NPCs, often during the same scenes. This is a challenge for all DMs, and extraordinarily difficult for newer DMs. I know that I couldn't have pulled it off a few years earlier.

If this is a concern, I highly recommend pulling in one or two "guest stars" to play the NPC(s); actually, this would probably be ideal even if you're not concerned with your ability to go MPD-on-demand. If you do have to go it alone, be sure to photocopy the small sketches of the NPCs and have them handy to hold up so there's no ambiguiity as to who's doing the talking when.

One thing I wasn't able to do, but would do now, is use sea voyage sound effects. Do whatever you have to do to get them ... make digital recordings of the ocean-going sounds in movies, buy SFX CDs, whatever. Run it as ambient sound for the session, and be sneaky when you turn it off ... those players paying attention will get seriously worried; maybe even creeped out. ("Yes, bwana ... too quiet.")

I can't remember if the "new monster," which is basically just a different and faster zombie, has turn resistance, but if not (and you have a cleric in your group), I'd add it (say +2). Otherwise those encounters designed to be most challenging and scary will be anti-climactic. There was no cleric able to turn worth a damn in my group, so it wasn't an issue.

All in all, I think the adventures put out by Penumbra were uniformly above average, and several were exceptional. It surprises me that almost nobody but me mentions them in the periodic "best adventures" threads, but I guess that explains why that part of Atlas folded. Another absolutely phenomenal NPC-heavy adventure of theirs is In the Belly of the Beast, if you end up liking Maiden Voyage.

 

[Morrow]

SPOILERS for Maiden Voyage and Dead Man's Quest below! You have been warned.


Okay, inspired by Crothian's thread, let's talk a little about story.

First, why do I want to use material from these two adventures to begin the campaign?

Maiden Voyage

• The crew of the Albers is interesting and well fleshed out. Any survivors of the journey will make excellent reoccuring characters once they reach Freeport.
• Undead pirates are cool. The campaign will include lots of undead and pirates, so Maiden Voyage introduces the right feel right out of the gate (or port). Plus, undead pirates are cool.
• It makes sense to start off a swashbuckling pirate campaign with healthy doses of shipboard intrigue, mystery, and violence.
• While it seems unlikely to happen, the most obvious way that Maiden Voyage can go off the rails (the PCs decide to take over the ship) would be just fine for this campaign.

Dead Man's Quest

• Undead Pirates are cool.
• It introduces Peg-Leg Pilgaro (sp?) an important reoccuring character for the campaign.
• It introduces the cult of the Unspeakable One, an important reoccuring foe for the campaign. I also have ideas how to tie these cultists to the Unspeakable One cultists in Dead/ Terror/ Madness in Freeport, and other U.O. cultist plots I've cooked up.
• It makes sense to start off a swashbuckling pirate campaign with a little underwater action.

There are, on the other hand, obvious problems with running these two adventures back to back. For one, you kill a bunch of zombie pirates, only to have an unrelated ghost pirate show up. There are some obvious segues from one series of events to the other:

• The ghost of Ned Fletcher was attracted by the Sea Maiden and the portal to the Abyss.
• The Albers was damaged in the battle with the Sea Maiden. They need to stop for repairs, water, food, whatever, and the nearest island just happens to have a band of sahaugin and a ghostly pirate running around.

However, neither of those options are entirely palletable, and the compination of the two scenarios seems to inevitably lead to a, "Our luck can't really be that bad, can it?" phenomenon. So the question at hand is how to stitch the two scenarios together into a semi-attractive flesh golem that will preserve most of the good stuff listed above.

Okay, I can't leave this without offering up some suggestion of my own. What if the Albers encouters Ned Fletcher and the Sahaugin first and, assuming they succeed in recovering the Eye of the Sea Dragon, it turns out to be cursed and attracts the Sea Maiden? Perhaps Fletcher's ship was sunk not by the sahaugin, but by the undead crew of the Sea Maiden. The sahaugin just came along later and looted the sunken vessel. This would create even more conflict within the Albers crew when the Sea Maiden comes after them. "I said it was a bad idea to listen to a ghost. They brought his treasure on board, string 'em up!"


Morrow