Sessions 8-10: Dead Man's Quest
Post date: Sep 01, 2016 8:5:56 PM
These session summaries were originally posted to The Piazza in March and April 2012, and have been edited to remove spoilers for future sessions. Out-of-character commentary is in italics.
Dead Man's Quest is an adventure by Graeme Davis that appeared in Dungeon 107/Polyhedron 166 (February 2004). It is a D&D v.3.5 adventure designed for four 1st-level characters. My players' characters were 2nd level at the time, and reached 3rd level partway through the adventure, so I uses the magazine's guidelines for scaling up the adventure.
Session 8 (3/3/2012)
After some more discussion of the problem with the Weal, we started Dead Man's Quest. Harissa, as a devotee of Harrimast, received a summons from Father Peg-Leg Peligro. She brought her friends, and they were introduced to Captain Fletcher's ghost and his little problem.
The party has no boat of their own, and didn't want to involve either of the crews they've served with (Harissa's fellow pirates and Marisol's honest merchantmen). To fix this problem, Peg-Leg pointed them towards an easy mark: the Brinewolf, which had recently made port with a depleted, half-mad crew. The three women lured most of the pirates off ship with promises of liquor (and implications of more), then Inacio snuck aboard to deal with the two men left behind. The hadozee made quick work of them, then brought the party's provisions (hidden nearby) on board and readied the ship to sail. Meanwhile, the pirates on land didn't want to wait until reaching the tavern to have some fun with the ladies, whose armed resistance brought that excursion to a messy end.
Once they were all assembled at the ship, Fletcher joined them and led them to the wreck of his ship, the Stingray. We paused there, just before the real fighting begins. The PCs had earned just enough XP to reach 3rd level, so we're in the process of making those changes before next session.
As some of you know, I build most of my RPG minis out of LEGO, and this adventure is no exception. Here are some of the minis I've built for it:
The party (L-R): Marisol, Harissa, Inacio, Larkspur
Fihyr (or gibbering mouther)
I'm also using several standard pieces: pirates, Pirates of the Caribbean zombies, black skeletons (lacedons), shark, Manta Warrior (sahuagin), Portal Emperor (Srathulas), and Count Dooku (Mordekai).
My other LEGO creations--the vast majority of which are RPG minis--can be found at my Brickshelf gallery. You may occasionally get a message that a folder is not yet public; this means that I've added new content which still needs to be screened by the site admins. (Unfortunately, that means that if I add just one new thing to a given folder, that folder can't be viewed for a while afterwards.)
Session 9 (3/17/2012)
Last night's session was a bit short, because we got a late start. The party investigated the wreck of Stingray, fought off some lacedons, and found the trail of dropped loot leading to the underwater cave. They handled the shark quickly, then blundered into the sahuagin cleric's cavern, but survived her blood frenzy with just a few scratches (though that was enough to leave the wizard hurting).
As far as scaling goes, I advanced the octopus on the cannon deck, but they bypassed that encounter by leaving Fletcher's remains for the return trip (in order to conserve water breathing's duration). I left the lacedons and shark unchanged, but added a level to each of the two named sahuagins. (I also added another level to the Brinewolf's pirates in the previous session, which made for a better fight.)
The underwater combats have proved...interesting. The spirit shaman has a natural swim speed, and the wizard cast a swim spell, so those two had no trouble moving around. However, the better melee combatants (the corsair and scout/ranger) had to blunder around at a much slower speed, and in between fights they were towed by the spellcasters. Once they have more 2nd-level spell slots, giving them the capability to cast more swim spells, the rest of the party will be much more effective in the water.
The most entertaining part of the session was when the party crawled out of the water in the cleric's cavern and found the shrine to Sekolah. After looting the treasure lying among the pile of skulls, they were flummoxed by the fact that the sea chest "altar" beneath them held nothing inside it. After a fruitless search for secret compartments, one of them finally shrugged about "nonhuman priorities."
Session 10 (3/31/2012)
In our last session, the party encountered and defeated a pair of (average) sahuagin. They then started a more systematic search of the caverns, in order to not leave any undiscovered enemies between themselves and the way out. This led them to the cave of Mother Merrow, who had enough warning from the sounds of their splashing about to set an ambush. She turned invisible, cast a couple of protective spells on herself, then caught a couple PCs with a color spray. (Unfortunately for Merrow, the party spread out just as she was finishing her defenses, so she couldn't target them all at once.) Inacio, the hadozee, was blinded and dazed, while Larkspur was merely stunned for a round. Harissa and Larkspur--and Larkspur's summoned animals--kept the sahuagin illusionist too busy to take advantage of Inacio's inactivity. Marisol attempted to shoot her from a distance, without any success. When Harissa finally managed to wound her, she frenzied and fixated on the corsair, nearly killing Harissa before Inacio could rejoin the fight and help whittle down the crazed sea-devil. They finally KO'ed Merrow but her dogshark familiar continued to attack Larkspur. The fight ended on an anticlimactic, comedic moment as the PCs struggled to land a solid hit on the tiny fish, while it failed to do more than scratch one or two of them.
The party then had the leisure to explore the room and its treasure. They found the Eye of the Sea Dragon on Merrow, and Marisol pointed out a few magic items among Merrow's effects and scattered among the coins, jewels, and weapons. Larkspur also found a masterwork shortspear to replace her own, but the party otherwise put off searching the loot until they knew the caverns were cleared. They found the higher, dryer caves, dispatched a half dozen pirate zombies there, and found the tunnel leading to the land exit. They did a quick search of the small island, found nothing else dangerous, then went back to start packing up loot to take back to their ship. Searching the island, carrying loot, and retrieving Captain Fletcher's remains took them several hours, but their water breathing potions held out long enough to finish.
They are now headed back to Freeport to deliver the Eye to Harrimast's temple (and play the final part of the adventure).
For this session, I scaled up the adventure by adding an extra sahaugin and a couple more zombies. I also gave Mother Merrow another level of illusionist, which gave her 2nd-level spells: invisibility and mirror image. The latter, in combination with mage armor and her good natural armor, made it very challenging to hit her. Larkspur made good use of summon nature's ally II to call 3 octopuses. Merrow easily shrugged off their grapple attempts the couple of times they actually hit, but the little beasts were effective at quickly reducing her mirror images and providing flanking to the PCs, so Larkspur will be calling more of them in future aquatic fights.
The party has decided that they like having their own ship, even if it is in shabby shape. They plan to spend most of their loot repairing the ship and improving their personal gear, but haven't made definite plans yet. Marisol also has Merrow's spellbook, and will eagerly add those spells to her own when the PCs next have some downtime.