INTERLUDE ADVENTURE!!!! Manhunt on the Unmoored Island!
One of our players (Ti, playing Sir Glad Turnhand) had a family event that required their presence in another state urgently (nothing emergent, but pressing enough to take him away), and so our scheduled Dolmenwood session had to be postponed.
In lieu, I gave the ladies a few choices of theme for a one-shot. Pirates, non-Dolmenwood fantasy, sci-fi survival horror (Death in Space, not Mothership), and they chose Pirates!
So, with one day's notice, everybody rolled up some scallywags, I quickly prepped a 2-3 hour-sized module, and today we rocked it in the Dark Caribbean, on the Unmoored Island, somewhere near the Dark Yucatan...
The module we used is "Unmoored," by M. Allen Hall. Can't recommend it enough, a very fun, very cleverly designed island point-crawl. One of my favorite mechanisms that seems to pop up in Pirate Borg games more frequently than many other systems, is the "Why Are You Here" roll... Basically allows one module to be heavily flavored multiple different ways. We'll come back to this.
The players were Ny (normally Meowianne), Er (normally Ddane), No (normally Sherbert), and today a guest, De, who plays in my regular Greyhawk home game.
Ny played See-Sea (a haunted soul) and a Zealot.
Er played an Uhnoly Diver named Gulth-Kluth, and a Cannibal Cook named Bonita.
No played a Sade (pronounced "Sad"), a rapscallion, and was the only player to not die during the entire adventure!
De played a Swashbuckler (Thii Winde), an Unholy Diver (Yoreys), then a Zealot named Hernando.
First off, we rolled the motives for the story...
They rolled a six, which meant that they sailed to the island hot on the trail of somebody who owed them a great deal of money. Using the Pirate Borg pirate generator, we determined that they were looking for Sir Esteban Alva. Back in Barbados, they'd done a job for this snaky Spaniard, and when they went to get their payment, he'd skipped town with an entire chest-worth of coins... Rifling through his offices (before they burned them to the ground), they found the references to this island, and a map to locate it.
So, morning broke as their bedraggled tartane, The Purge (slinking by with 5/20 hp left), made landing on the western shore of the island.
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| Un-Keyed map I prepared for the players, which they then filled in with locations as they point-crawled. |
meally-white skinned humanoids, bald and glabrous, with sloppy, droopy skin that hung abour their heads like a basset-hound's jowls, wearing thick water drenched robes all coaxing clearly magical totem-pillars up our of the ground around the village, they just sailed farther on.
They landed at the fort, and used See-Sea's dingey to land ashore. Inside the courtyard, they investigated a giant whale carcass, and were sprung upon by the alien, cryptid octopus creature inside! Multiple shots were fired and Gulth-Kluth narrowly avoided having her brain sucked by the cosmic monstrosity, before they all turned and ran for the dingy. Thii Winde didn't make it, and was pulled under the waves and turned into chum as they cast off...
Next, they sailed around to the wharfs on the eastern side of the island. There were two small sailing dingies moored there, and See-Sea and Sade decided to loot them. See-Sea's was, unfortunately, trapped with a black-powder explosive, and blew up in her face. Luckily, the agile character was able to leap out of harm's way. Sade found, after killing a bilge rat, a chest with a magical skull inside... She tucked this in her bucket, slung across her shoulder.
Paths moved north and south along the island from here, as well as inland. They opted to use none, and went back to The Purge, sailing south to the lighthouse, taking the only remaining sailing dingy with them. As they rounded the horn, a strange earthquake shook the sea, making the very island seem to tip and dip in the water. The Purge was dashed against the shoreline rocks, and dropped to 3/20hp.
As they beat their way towards the lighthouse, a group of undead, drowned sailors broke from the trees as well, and took a hitherto unseen secret path inland, running up a long ridgeline towards the center of the island. As they followed them past the lighthouse, more of the strange glabrous-skinned, pasty humanoids popped out of the door, and surprisingly asked for assistance! There were, apparently, a party of skeletal miscreants locked up in the lantern of the lighthouse, and they promised the party ASH that they knew to be stored back at the warehouses in Angual...
Well, at the offer of drugs, the party enthusiastically agreed. The plan was to break down the water-logged door, and fire/cat-o-nine-tails into the room... It went off, more or less, well, and they destroyed the four skeletons inside with relative ease. The cultists shambled out, like waterlogged sea-sponges, murmuring for the PCs to come to Angual for their compensation.
So, eschewing the paths, they took back to The Purge, and sailed up to Angual... Where they realized the island had apparently sunk, and the entire town was under water! Only the strange, stone totems broke the surface of the lapping waves. Clearly visible above the cliffs over the town was an inaccessible castle, and, strangely, a sloop...
Gulth-kluth and Yorey, both being Unholy Divers, decided to anchor The Purge above the city, and just dive down to the warehouses... They found a small watertight box with 2 doses of ASH left (my players almost revolted when I told them all the ASH was ruined!), and a large pearl, fist-sized!
Then the second earthquake struck. As the water churned, sloshing further northward up the coast, they watched as a group of pirates hitherto hidden among a tree-line smuggler's camp scampered northward... Including the scarlet doublet of a familiar figure---Esteban!
Before they could react, however, the totems jutted up from the water, spearing The Purge and striking the magazine. An explosion shattered the side of the hull, shredding Gulth-Kluth and See-Sea, and flinging the large pearl out into the open ocean... The Purge sank, dragging the dingy and the sailing dingy into the jungly depths with it...
Thee survivors swam to shore, Sade, Yorey, and a few others from the ship, including Ny's new character (whom I freely admit... I can't for the life of me remember), and Er's new character, Bonito, the butt-ugly Cannibal Cook!
They dragged themselves to shore, struggling after Esteban and the pirates.
They caught up with him at the old fort, where the pirates stood panting over the corpses of the strange, eldritch octopuses.
"Please, forgeev me," Esteban cried out as the party descended upon him, just as another earthquake struck!
Water surged up as the island fell lower into the waves, clearly surging into the fort. The pirates turned and ran east along the shoreline path, but Esteban turned and ran inland, towards a secret path, as the waters sloshed into the courtyard... However, Ny wasn't having this, and (through an amazingly good set of crit rolls) gave the poor Spaniard a wedgie so hard it yanked him off his feet, dropping him into the receding tide of the waves. As his body was swept out, she took his hat, a striking tricorn with a scarlet feather, and placed it on her own head.
Thankfully, Esteban regained his footing, and rushed out of the courtyard. They followed him northward as the fort was submerged under the sea.
Up through the jungles they ran, until they came to a small clearing with an ancient stone tomb, carved with the markings of serpent gods. Esteban sat panting near the door. As they approached, he began to beg for his life, telling them that he buried their chest at the wharfs where his boat was (not knowing they'd already stolen the boat, and it was now at the bottom of the 'sea,' in Angual).
A few plans were quickly bandied, and the group argued between cutting off his fingers, kneecaps, feet, tongue, ears, or eyes... Finally, Bonita character kicked him back into the tomb. He was lost to the shadows. Bonita and Yorey followed him into the tomb---the surroundings spun, and they suddenly found themselves on the shoreline of a high, clear, placid, mountain lake (on the southern ridgeline of the island, just above the Lighthouse!), with Esteban growling in exhaustion from the sand, where hey lay on his back.
Back at the tomb, Ny and Sade decided to walk up the path that seemed to lead to the castle and sloop. They came to an opening, and spied three skeletal guards near the entrance to the castle. They decided to sneak to the sloop, since it seemed apparent the island was sinking, and their own ship was gone. The guards, however, spotted them, and fell upon Ny's character, clawing her to shreds. Sade and Ny's new character, a Zealot with the prayer of Blessed Guidance, made the sloop unobserved... Where they sat, smoking tobacco and gambling with a rigged deck of cards until the end of the adventure!
Back at the mountain lake, as another series of earthquakes struck the island, Yorey and Bonita fell upon Esteban, who tried to fight back with a long dagger before he was overpowered. Bonita tore out his eyes with her fingers, and they left him tied up to a tree while they investigated a few semi-sunken shipwrecks in the lake.
In addition to the shipwrecks, in the center of the lake was a large cage, clearly visible in the crystal-clear water. Inside was a large, heavy, web-fingered cultist, guarded by three skeletons in a rowboat above him. Despite his frantic waving for help, the party members ignored him.
In the shipwrecks, Yorey was devoured by Tigerfish, while Bonita used the eyes of Esteban as chum to draw them away from the submerged chest in the partially sunk wreck. She was just able to drag the chest out before they returned. Inside was a mummified monkey in a glass jar, that strangely twitched as the jar was moved. After some inspection, she stowed it in her pack, and she and Hernandez (De's new character, a zealot), rushed down the secret path to the lighthouse they'd seen the undead sailors using earlier in a bid to go to the wharf and dig up their treasure...
As they rounded the horn, however, they realized that the wharfs were long-since submerged, and as they approached an abandoned town, another earthquake struck. Water surged towards them, as a burly rifleman (Bruce of Blue Water) ran back past them towards the lighthouse.
Well, they decided to follow Bruce, since he seemed to know where he was going.
He led them up past the lighthouse, past the mountain lake, along a precipitous ridgeline path northward towards the peaks of the island mountains, near the castle. To the east and west, they could now see that most of the island was under water, with only the ridgeline itself above-water.
Also, bobbing in the waves like seals, were the glabrous pasty heads of the cultists, and a strange changing was now audible.
At the peak of the mountain, a large clearing opened out, with a pedestal in the center. Surrounding the clearing were nearly 850 skeleton hordesmen, all watching the figure on the pedestal.
On the pedestal stood a tall, abnormally large and lank figure in lush purple robes. He had a skeleton head with eyes that shon like rubies, and a lime-green glow emanating from his bony body. Before him was a large, glowing orb. His face was visibly concentrated, and he would occasionally grimace in effort, the island noticeably rising up when he did so. The orb would dim, however, and the skeleton hordes would grow restless and violent. The cultist chanting would climb in intensity, the orb would glow brighter, the skeletons would grow penitent, and the island would begin to sink.
Bruce ran up and called, "Gransko! The sloop?" The lich-king merely shrugged, and waved Bruce away. Bruce turned and high-heeled it towards the castle and the sloop, followed by Hernandez.
Bonita, however.... Er looked at me and said, "Well, I really want that orb..."
Bonita rushed Gransko, slamming into him and grabbing the orb in the same motion. The light flicked out, and the 850 skeletons surged forward. Narrowly avoiding them, she rushed along the path towards the castle. Looking back, the last she saw of Gransko, as the island plunged down into the water, were the hundreds of skeletons clamoring over him. A spark of light, and a shockwave erupted from the place where Gransko was, shattering nearly 200 skeletons into bony debris. The gap was closed immediately by the chargin remnants of the host.
Bonita barely made the sloop as the waters crashed together, sending the little vessel rolling and twisting through the churning waves.
Then all was still.
Bruce made a persuasive argument for allowing him to stay with them (which included a cutlass and the rifle, and a decidedly mean and murderous air of competency in killing), and they sailed off into the horizon. As a blood-red sunset lowered across the skies, the last they saw of the Unmoored Island were great, scything, green shafts of light angling up from deep below the waves, and a rumbling that felt as though it came from the heart of the ocean itself as Gransko struggled to raise his island once again, as he'd done for decades upon decades past...
Total play time was 2.5 hours. Fun seemed had by all, and we all agreed that there is certainly more Pirate Borg in our futures.
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