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[Pathfinder] Reavers on the Seas of Fate

mxyzplk

mxyzplk

Explorer
Our group is starting a new campaign, and this time I’m the gamemaster! It’s a homebrew adventure path called "Reavers on the Seas of Fate," and is using the Pathfinder RPG rules to tell tales of piracy and horror on the high seas of the world of Golarion.

As usual, we’ll be posting session summaries, character writeups, etc. on the campaign home page. Since I’m GMing, I’ll also be sharing "behind the scenes" reports on how I design and run the game.

Expect a wild mashup of the first bit of Second Darkness, the Freeport Trilogy, Sinister Adventures' Razor Coast, and more!

The Characters:
  • Melako “Ox” Chaalu, a barbaric Garundi slave from Rahadoum (Bruce)
  • Tommy “Blacktoes” Burrowbank, a halfling rogue from “around” with an attitude (Kevin)
  • “Serpent” Ref Jorenson, an Ulfen druid with a pet constrictor snake (Paul)
  • Sindawe H’Kilata Narr, aka “Freak”, a Bonuwat Mwangi (Chris)
  • Wogan, a cleric of Gozreh from Cheliax (Patrick)
 

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We've already had our first session of Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

First Session (12 page pdf) – The characters, still lowly seamen, meet for the first time upon a poorly-disciplined ship, the Albers, bound to Riddleport from Kintargo. With women on board and gambling and fighting allowed, it’s only a matter of time till the captain turns up dead, filling the crew with mutual suspicion, and then a mysterious ship comes out of the fog…

For this first adventure, I combined the old Atlas Games 3e scenario Maiden Voyage and the new Sinister Adventures pdf Mysteries of the Razor Sea. Both are first level ghost ship scenarios; Maiden Voyage focussed more on the ship and crew the players were travelling with. Mysteries of the Razor Sea was totally about the ghost ship - it had more horror and is tougher. So I felt they complemented each other well; basically I am using the ghost ship from Razor and everything else from Maiden Voyage, with some changes to lead in to the next part of the adventure, which will be in Riddleport. Entertainingly, the crewman "Bull" was actually named "Ox" in the adventure. I considered letting him keep it and having him and the PC "Ox" really hate each other in the same way chicks wearing the same dress to a party would, but even with the minor name change they're both bald Garundi and I got a lot of the same dynamic.

As a side note, lots of the Atlas Games stuff is on clearance sale at paizo.com and it's good material. Besides this adventure, I may use some of their other scenarios like Three Days to Kill, and I'm using Nyambe: African Adventures to flesh out the Mwangi Expanse. Heck, if I decide to cross the sea to Arcadia I may use Northern Crown: New World Adventures. Stock up while it's cheap and still available!

I felt the first session went well - I thought we'd get a lot farther, but the players got into the interaction with each other and the NPCs; we played three hands of the card game Skulls, investigated the death of the captain... There were only two very minor combats, a boxing match between Bull and then the PCs helping to subdue Bull when he attacked the first mate, convinced he had murdered the captain. The rest was all roleplaying fun!

And it'll be a great object lesson for when later in the campaign the characters sign on to a pirate charter and read "no women, no gambling, no fighting..." They will nod sagely to themselves about the wisdom of all these strictures.
 

The second session of our new Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate, went off like gangbusters.

Second Session (15 page pdf) - Insanity and chaos reigns as the crew of the Albers investigates the derelict Sea Bear. Soon, they are turning their suspicions against each other. And then, things get out of hand.
Later, the survivors struggle against the uncaring sea and the fury of random encounters!

This is the second part of the intro adventure I was running as a heavily modded combo of Maiden Voyage (3e, Atlas Games) and the new Mysteries of the Razor Sea (3.5e, Sinister Adventures). In this episode, the PCs board a ghost ship that had its mainmast replaced with a native totem pole. As you might expect, things started getting weird fast. I was impressed with how much the players went with it - I started passing them notes about "You think person X is acting suspicious" and they just up and started stabbing one another.

Fun scene - Ellis went running down into the hold to stop Ox and Bull, and Ox failed a Perception check so he got "a figure suddenly looms behind you in the hold!" He stuck his pike right through the poor sea dog's chest.

The biggest DM dilemma I faced was when the PCs had the good idea of tossing the skeletons overboard. The skeletons, incidentally, were the new Pathfinder "bloody skeletons" that have fast healing. I had the totem pole raise them back to full unlife with two rounds of its drumming (it couldn't attack with animated objects during those rounds). So Chris, quite innovatively, dumped them overboard when killed. The big question - can a skeleton swim? I ruled yes just to keep the heat on, but await the rogues' gallery's dissection of the physics involved.

I'm really happy with how the NPCs are working out. Thalios Dondrell and Vincenz especially are being treated like "real people." In find that by portraying NPCs as competent, but not infallible Mary Sues, PCs respect them - it's just that most NPCs you meet in games are such one-dimensional chumps, they don't get that.

After the ghost ship, a pretty large percentage of the crew was dead, including the navigator. I am using a combination of the Stormwrack (WotC) and Broadsides! (Living Imagination) sea/shipfaring rules, so as they wandered the seas they exercised their skills trying to follow the charts and keep safe and on course as storms hit. They weathered a big one, but got blown somewhat off course and got their rigging fairly jacked up. They've come up on some islands they think delimit the Gulf of Varisia and stopped in a cove to refit, and had a more lighthearted combat with a dozen demented goblins.

I love the Paizo take on goblins; they are well and truly insane. Dangerous in their way, but spend half their combat actions running around like butt monkeys instead of actually fighting. One clambered up to the crow's nest and was doing the Pantsless Goblin Victory Dance over the shrieking Old Pete when Ox finally got to it.

Seems like everyone enjoyed themselves! Wogan was happy to get a wheellock pistol off the dead captain of the Sea Bear, Serpent was happy that his snake had the biggest kill count in the goblin fight, Ox liked being able to go nuts and kill allies, Sindawe liked the massive combat, and Blacktoes... liked fleeing a lot, I think.

As a final bonus - it turns our our group played Maiden Voyage once before! I didn't remember because I was a player then and GMing now, and it was like four years ago. Here's the session summary of our Eberron party going through Maiden Voyage! I think you'll see some similarities and some differences...
 

Our aspiring pirates get their first taste of honest ship-to-ship combat in the third installment of our Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate.

Third Session (12 page pdf) - The crew of the Albers goes foraging on an island to replenish their stores, and comes across some escaped slaves. Of course, the Chelaxian naval frigate bearing their former owner arrives shortly thereafter. Just as they discover a goblin pirate ship! It's hot three-way action in a naval boarding action. And then it's off to Riddleport!

This was a stretch session. I had planned for them to get to Riddleport and get into that this session, but the character who has lived in Riddleport and has most of the hooks for them wasn't going to be there. So I figured I could expand the travel part enough to fill a session.

Leafing through some random supplements, I found a couple things that struck a chord. In WotC's Stormwrack, there is an adventure called "The Sable Drake," basically an encounter with a goblin pirate ship. I had thrown some canoes full of goblins at the PCs last time, supposing they came from a village on the nearby island. By converting those to goblins on two ship's boats from the Sable Drake, it was a lead-in. Then in Atlas Games' En Route II: By Land Or By Sea, there's an encounter called "Water Stop" detailing some escaped slaves hiding on an island; the PCs meet them and then their old master shows up looking for them. This was perfect; I wanted to start pulling in elements from PCs' backgrounds, and most of them have a beef against the Chelaxians. Ox had been the slave of Captain Marcellano, a Chelish seafarer. Thus I mixed the two together.

It wasn't too hard to convince them to go onto the island and poke around; they thought maybe the goblins came from there and they'd get to kick some more ass. They came across the slaves and managed not to kill them (the way the encounter's written is that the poorly armed commoner-type slaves surround the PCs and try to get them to surrender to figure out if they're likely to rat them out; somewhat dangerous in that often PCs take any manner of threat as an invitation to maximum overkill). The slaves tell them about a "weird black ship" in a hidden cove and then the Chelaxian Navy ship Raptor appears and approaches the Albers to see if they have seen some missing slaves. Soon, they're both going after the goblin ship, who the PCs finger as having drug off a bunch of escaped-slave looking people.

Really, the tough part about all this was that in Golarion, goblins are all total meatheads. It was hard to believe they could pilot a ship, even with a wererat captain and a handful of adepts. But hey, you work with what you're given. I changed them substantially from the "leet ship" in Stormwrack to a barely actionable converted fishing ship.

In the end, everything worked out for the PCs and the slaves. The PCs hoped that the goblins would whittle down the Chelaxian marines enough that they could take them; they were quickly disabused of that - one of the things I wanted to get across before they took up their future life of piracy is that the Chelaxian navy is no one to screw with. They were pretty sober as the goblin ship took three massive broadsides and sank to the bottom.

The noble was Marcello Marcellano, the son of the guy who owned Ox. I expected him to go to greater lengths to try to kill him, but he played it cool. A shame, I built a pretty good 4th level swashbuckler using the new class from Tome of Secrets (Adamant Entertainment) and the duelist feats etc. from Way of the Duel (Sinister Adventures).

They went back and started diving the goblin ship for loot... It was funny, they encountered a reefclaw and after beating it all borked their Knowledge: Nature checks so that they were "sure those things live in large colonies!" (They're solitary). They made the checks in the open and came up with the alternate interpretation themselves.

Selene, Vincenz, and Thalios Dondrel son of Mordekai are now at large in Riddleport as well, so I'll have some good NPCs the PCs are very familiar with to use. Next session's based on Pulp Fiction!
 
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Our would-be pirates are at large on the streets of Riddleport in this, the fourth session of Reavers on the Seas of Fate - "Cheat the Devil and Take His Gold."

Fourth Session (11 page pdf) - First, I hand out fake pirate gold coins I bought at a party shop to represent each character's Infamy Points! I explain how they work (very powerful but rare hero points) and the group seems to like the idea.

Then, the PCs wander around Riddleport and I take the opportunity to introduce various local NPCs. Snake meets Samaritha Beldusk outside the Cypher Lodge and they hit it off. Tommy and Ox go to the temple of Calistria (aka whorehouse); Tommy gets real friendly with the tiefling prostitute Lavender Lil, and Ox gets requested by Selene. Faithful readers will remember Selene was the captain's woman aboard their last ill-fated voyage; she was a hooker before meeting the Captain and so it's back to the life of a working girl. Sindawe goes to find an altar to his god Shimye-Magalla; he finds something that looks kinda similar (the Mwangi worship a janiform incarnation of the god of wind and wave Gozreh and goddess of dream Desna) and has a bad string of luck - a stirge discovers him, and when he tosses himself into Riddleport Harbor to get it off, a swamp barracuda takes notice. It chased him to shore and then chased him onto shore; there was an entertaining chase scene with both of them only moving like 10 feet a round (uphill in mud for Sindawe, and swamp barracuda aren't all that fast out of water).

I open up "Shadow in the Sky," the first installment of the Second Darkness Adventure Path, for the next part. Tommy knows a local guy named Saul Vancaskerkin who owns a gambling hall; they go to his big devil-themed gambling festival "Cheat the Devil and Take His Gold" and end up thwarting an armed robbery by two colorful miscreants and their gang of thugs. I took Thuvalia's opening line from the restaurant robbery in Pulp Fiction; our session scribe didn't get it quite right in the summary but close enough. I decided it would be fun to kinda base the two principals on Pumpkin and Honey Bunny from that fine film. A more notable omission is that Sindawe used one of his Infamy Points to run across the heads and shoulders of a bunch of patrons to jump-kick Thuvalia and take her out before she escaped. Also, Wogan got to use his gun (and my firearm rules) for the first time - and the damage dice exploded; he shot Angvar right through the heart. They end up being recruited by Saul to help run the Gold Goblin and, perhaps, some "side jobs" as well.

A lot of the session was spent getting introduced to Riddleport, the staff of the Goblin, et cetera, so not much action, but everyone had a good time role-playing!
 

The characters decide to take the fight to the mean streets of Riddleport in the fifth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, "St. Casperian's Salvation."

Fifth Session (11 page pdf) - Michael Vick, eat your heart out. The PCs start off by arranging one of the Gold Goblin's underground animal fights. The NPC ranger, Bojask, got a diseased bear off the back of a ship somewhere, and their boss Saul wanted a championship match with the current champ, Pigsaw the boar.

I based this on reality - I read a recent news article about how all the spectacled bears at this German zoo all lost their fur all over except for on their faces. Zoo staff is baffled.

Anyway, player reaction: OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT THING. They then spent an inordinate amount of their funds buying some drugs to knock it out so they could paint it green. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. They started channeling Don King and dubbed the fight "Pigsaw vs. Bearclaw."

The PCs wandered through Riddleport separately to go spread the word and got the worst end of the deal. It's a rough town, and when Ox went into the gambling district run by the head crimelord and started putting up flyers, three goons quickly showed up, beat his ass senseless, and robbed him. Others fared slightly better.

I was planning to run the 3e Atlas Games adventure "Three Days to Kill." I handed out some rumors, though, gleaned while beating the streets doing fight promotion, and they were fascinated by a (totally false) rumor about a haunted treasure hoard in the cellar of St. Casperian's Mission, a local derelict flophouse where, it turns out, their old buddy Vincenz is hiding out. I had planned to run "St. Casperian's Salvation," a side trek adventure set there, later, but the PCs were all over that mission like white on rice as soon as they heard a rumor of cash. Ever prepared, I switched and ran that instead. Basically there's a local small street gang using the second floor as a hideout. This was somewhat of a surprise, and it was a brutal tight quarters battle. The gang leader, the "Splithog Pauper," got away with the gang's loot.

Eventually they had the fight and the bear won. In attendance was Captain Scarbelly, the orc pirate, a clear warning to those in the know that the Freeport trilogy is almost upon us.

Next time - Three Days to Kill! I hope.
 

The characters become more proactive in their criminal enterprises in the sixth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, “Three Days to Kill.” It's based on a 3e Atlas Games adventure also called “Three Days to Kill.”

Sixth Session (14 page pdf) - One of Clegg Zincher's capps, Braddikar Faje, is headed out of town on the road to Roderic's Cove to conduct some kind of sale at a villa in the hills. Jacking up Zincher's day is more than enough motivation for Saul to send his favorite scum off to break up the deal.

But first, Tommy heads to the local whorehouse/temple of Calistria to see his favorite gal, Lavender Lil. He finds her hiding behind a tapestry; Captain Scarbelly and his orc pirate crew are visiting, and, as she says, "I like it a little rough, but not orc rough." So Tommy tells her he and his comrades are headed out into the woods to try to find the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy they hear tell of, as a cover story for their real job.

It's probably about this time I should share the rumors the PCs got from hitting the streets of Riddleport. It may explain otherwise bizarre behavior on the part of the guys. (The weird terminology is mostly Riddleport slang... As you can tell they are meant to be exactly as a random Riddleporter would relate them.)
Bonfires are sometimes seen in the mountains to the northeast. I hear a bunch of priestesses of Calistria gather there every new moon for secret all-lesbo orgiastic rituals, and they murder any man who glimpses them. It still sounds pretty tempting to try. Woooo! Man, I wonder if that Pamodae sideshow goes there… Mmmmm…..

When the missionary who founded St. Casperian’s Mission died, he left behind a treasure cache of the money he defrauded from credulous citizens. Although the building is dilapidated and overrun with grog-blossoms, there is a secret room beneath the ground where the priest hid his ill-gotten gains. They say it’s guarded by a magical protector that has disappeared everyone that’s tried to claim it.

There are orcs wandering the streets of Riddleport! Captain Scarbelly’s pirate ship, the Bloody Vengeance, is in town and the whole crew is orc. People say he’s killed twenty-nine men in hand to hand combat. He’s probably hooked up with Boss Croat, that snout-lover. I could totally take an orc. It’s about speed, not strength!

Gebediah Crix, keeper of the Riddleport Light, got killed by one of those devils he summons. His parts were strewn all over the lighthouse. The gendarmes have posted guards outside the place. I wonder if the devil’s still around? Hey, I recently came across some Vudran charms, guaranteed to keep evil spirits away. Wanna buy one?

There’s some kind of gang of whiskers that operates in the Rotgut District. I have a cousin who got robbed by a bunch of rats in an alley that suddenly turned into people. And the gendarmes don’t do jack crap about it, say they’re low on funding. The rats must be connected and that’s why they’re getting a pass.

Some guy, an out of town wizard, wanted to become a fancyboy, but when they wouldn’t let him in, he insulted Elias Tammerhawk, the Speaker of the Order of Cyphers. They had a duel in Zincher’s arena. Tammerhawk totally wasted that guy’s dumb ass in short order and magiced up a swarm of rats to eat the body. He said that was what he got for running his rathole. Haw haw haw!

There’s been some turf changes on the streets lately. I hear Avery Slyeg is totally Croamarcky’s bitch now and they’re consolidating and looking to squeeze competitors out of the gambling biz.
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The completely false St. Casperian rumor is what caused them to go all SWAT team on the mission last session. Although their minds are going overtime, and they mentioned that "planting a rumor like that would be a good way to get someone to go in and kill of a rival gang..."

Anyway, they head out to the Trail's End villa and get a lot more than they bargained for - besides Faje and his men, there's Asmodean cultists, Marcello Marcellano (the Chelish son of Ox's former owner from "Water Stop"), and a bunch of raiding Shoanti braves. They actually carve through the guards OK, but when the Asmodeans start summoning freaky demons from the mirror Faje is selling them, they decide to bail (over Serpent's objections, who really really wants to kill Faje and everyone else, despite Saul instructing them not to kill him.)

The PCs for some reason thought they had done poorly, I guess because of the default D&D expectation that the only success is found in killing everything in sight and looting it. But Saul praised them - they killed everyone but Faje and one of his goons, who had to ride into town two to one horse. The Asmodeans got the mirror without paying for it. So Clegg is out like 8 guys, a bunch of horses, and the mirror with nothing to show for it, and Faje did NOT get killed and bring the wrath of Zincher and potentially other crime lords down on the Gold Goblin. The PCs kinda wanted to murder the Asmodeans, Marcellano, and the Shoanti (which Saul couldn't care less about) and Faje (which would have pissed him off mightily).

But before they got back... They happened upon the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy ritual. Or, at least, Tommy snuck up onto something that might have been it and promptly got chased off by a manticore!

I was prepared to run an actual chase scene here, with the mounted PCs fleeing from the manticore, using chase rules from Adamant Entertainment's Tome of Secrets for Pathfinder. It was not to be, however, as the usual D&D group problem emerged of one guy refusing to run and that making the rest of the party stand with him. We then had a weird start-and-stop chase as Sindawe stopped to fight. But when the manticore dropped his horse in one shot, he thought better of that and hid in the underbrush. But of course Wogan and Serpent had stopped to help him... They got away by popping obscuring mist and letting the manticore eat all their horses. Ah well, all's well that ends well.

Once they got back, they went with the guy that they let live from the Splithog Pauper's gang, Madrat, to hit one of Avery Slyeg's couriers. Of course, Madrat was a mole working for Slyeg. So we left off with the PCs facing down a dozen crossbowmen and a crime lord in a warehouse. Will they sleep with the fishes? Find out next time, in Reavers on the Seas of Fate: Death in Freeport!
 

Ok, I have to say this is a fantastic way to handle a story hour. I love the associated documents, as I can download them and read at my leisure. It also allows for non-forum intrusive text (like cast lists for every session). The inclusion of GM commentary is nice, as it gives me ideas on things to do with my own campaigns and is not something you see everyday.

Being an avoid fan of the Pathfinder Setting, as well as the upcoming Razor Coast, I am quite interested to see how this continues. Also, my Second Darkness campaign players had a crush on Clegg Zincher, so I like seeing his name show up again... though in my game he was reincarnated as a bugbear.
 

Thanks! Yeah, I suspect this story hour doesn't get as much reading as the ones that post everything in the forum itself, but as you can see we keep much more detailed session summaries than anyone else. I'm glad you're enjoying it! I run the next session this Sunday.
 

I too enjoy your adventure write-ups. I usually just read them on your web page, however. I like your style, irreverant and a little tongue-in-cheek without taking yourselves too seriously. It's a nice change from most story hours. Please keep posting!
 

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