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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sorry_Charry" data-source="post: 5118893" data-attributes="member: 49866">You could start there. Perhaps in an effort to secure naval dominance in the upcoming conflict, the Shahalesti have begun commandeering vessels from their lesser (read: human) seafaring neighbors (the shahalesti elves in my campaign are awfully haughty... almost to the point of outright racism).   These PCs (each for their own reasons) may have chartered passage on the doomed voyage. They are not a party yet, they may not even like eachother. Doesn't matter though, events larger than them are about to force them to cooperate. Since the encounter that strips the PCs of their ship will need to be one in which they lose, you might want to consider playing it out in a 'flashback' sequence of sorts. You could intersperse scenes of the PCs trying to land navigate throught the countryside with ample scenes around a campfire or other conversation inducing plot device... and then cut to a few rounds of combat. For example: The weary heroes gather around the campfire, each keeping their own council. The events of the day having drained them, both physically and mentally. The bard, seemingly unable to see the bad side of things attempts to cheer up the crestfallen captain.  "He may have taken your ship, that's true enough... but his victory did not come without sacrifice. I'd wager that if it takes you twenty years to cross his path again... he'll remember the face that crippled him so. Seems fitting to me... that a thief would be wounded so, in the very act of stealing a man's property." Then... Boom! Cut back to a scene of the raid that will eventually cause these seagoing heroes to be lost in a hostile land. Their goal: Gate Pass... the one place that owes no allegiance to either Ragos or Calanis. You could concoct a scene aboard the ship whereby the soon-to-be-shipless captain relieves the elven raider of his hand. Each PC could recieve a similiar vignette, one after the other right around the table. With one PC setting up the general outline for the next PC and so on. Each time, you could cut back to a few rounds of the doomed combat. This way, by only telling the story a few rounds at a time, the focus of the encounter won't be how the PCs lost everything and the badguys won. It will be how the Barbarian maimed his new bloodsworn foe, or how the bard saved the day by securing access to to the lifeboat... or whatever.  It'll really be up to your players to flesh out the scene, but it'll be one that they remember. Of course, you'll have to make it clear that this scene, and this scene only, will enjoy this type of 'collaberative flashback' storytelling. Once the PCs arrive at Gate Pass... the encounters are deadly again and there are no guarantees that they will survive the adventure without keeping their wits about them.</blockquote>

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