Post date: Sep 01, 2016 7:45:5 PM
These session summaries were originally posted to The Piazza in October 2011, and have been edited to remove spoilers for future sessions.
Session 1 (9/24/2011)
We've had our first session, which consisted of finishing up character creation, working out how the characters came to meet each other, and what they've been doing to make ends meet recently.
Harissa, the azhar corsair, is a crew member aboard the Midwife, the pirate ship she stowed away on in order to flee an arranged marriage back in Kizmir years ago.
Marisol, the azhar wizard. splits her time between the Virgin's Veil, a merchant ship whose crew found her as an amnesiac castaway and adopted her, and studying with her arcane tutor, Sylas Crant.
Larkspur, the part-human spirit shaman, spends most of her time in the jungles of A'val. She visits Freeport periodically to trade furs and skins, cast spells for hire, etc. She knows Harissa from when the Midwife's cleric was too dead drunk to deal with a haunting, and the two have been friends since.
Inacio, the hadozee ranger/scout, has recently been kicked off yet another boat due to his lack of social skills. (Even for a barbarian ape-man, he's tactless and abrasive.) He served briefly on the Virgin's Veil, but couldn't even get a berth on the Midwife. However, he still keeps in touch with Marisol and Larkspur.
We had just enough time to get the group together (Harissa & Marisol hadn't met) and do a little roleplaying between PCs during the first day of Drac's Fall. They are going to be roaring drunk (Larkspur's alter liquid spell makes her an invaluable drinking buddy!) when things start to happen...
Session 2 (10/9/2011)
Part of the festivities of the first day of Drac's Fall is dressing animals in yellow cloaks and chasing them down in the streets; the animals are killed and cooked for a feast that night. The PCs got involved in one of these chases, but after dealing with their competition, cornering the pig, and killing it, the corpse transformed into a dead human: George, a deckhand from the Midwife. This shocked everyone, particularly Harissa. (We're trying out the d20 Freeport Companion's insanity and madness rules, so all but one PC gained 1d3 IP from the unnatural, gruesome sight.)
The PCs went to talk to a livestock trader to learn how the animals were procured for the holiday, and learned nothing useful or even suspicious. Discussing the possibility of lycanthropes among themselves, they grew concerned about the bites Harissa suffered, but they didn't seem to be infected. They consulted with Marisol's teacher, who told them a bit about polymorph magic, then they reported the death to the Midwife's first mate. They learned that George had planned to spent his shore leave with a pretty barmaid, who they questioned. She had seen her paramour dragged off into an alley by two cloaked men, who vanished with him before her screams could summon any help. Searching the alley, Inacio found a brass button with a paw print design, torn from some well-to-do person's garment, presumably one of George's abductors.
Next time they hope to find some significance to the button's design, and will have to deal with even more interesting interruptions to their holiday...