Beneath the Missing Sea Campaign

I've recently started running a weekly campaign of Beneath the Missing Sea. This post will contain my initial thoughts as well as the eventual table of contents.

Beneath the Missing Sea is a small hexcrawl written by Sam Sleney and Zachary Cox for Best Left Buried by Soulmuppet Publishing. The nautical theming hooked me the instant I read it and so have been sitting on it since looking for an opportunity to run it. My adventure description to the group, drawing mostly from the text itself, went like this:

Some weeks ago a great and terrible storm wracked the Andrussian Inland Sea and its surrounding provinces for several days. Travellers and merchants alike called it ‘the storm of the century.’ Thunder heaved through the sky, rain lashed at the rooftops and darkness reigned supreme. In Brost, a prosperous coastal town on the Andrussian shore, all ships due to set sail remained in harbour and those at sea were solemnly considered lost after the first day. Even the most jaded sailors knew that no ship could survive a storm of such magnitude. Brost’s townsfolk battened down the hatches and waited out the storm beside their struggling fires. 

Nobody left the dark roads leading out of the town, and nobody came in. Several days later, when the storm passed and the people of Brost emerged from their homes, they found themselves atop a great cliff overlooking a vast and barren tundra where the Andrussian’s waves once rolled. The sea was gone. 

The missing sea has revealed treasures untold, attracting opportunists, adventurers, and other unsavoury sorts from leagues around.

SoulMuppet Publishing produces a number of games including the aforementioned Best Left Buried, which is an OSRish, dungeon-focused, horror-themed game. It seems fine, it just didn't hook me the way that the adventures did.

Black Sword Hack is a game by Alexandre ‘Kobayashi’ Jeannette with incredible art from Goran Gligović, published by The Merry Mushmen. It's a Moorcockian-themed hack of Black Hack, a game that didn't impress me. Somehow the changes it makes to backgrounds and powers make it far more palatable to me and I'd been excited to give it a shot.

So basically I grabbed two books I had on my shelf and smooshed them together.

Session Reports

My goal is to provide both a narrative of events as they unfold as well as a summary and analysis of my thoughts while running the module. The former should help me keep track of the adventure; hopefully, it'll even be entertaining. The latter will appear as block quotes within the report as well as summaries at the end.

Episode 1: Beer Run

Episode 2: Barricades and Boiled Dog

Episode 3: Crabcakes
Episode 4: People with Barrels
Episode 5: Do we need a hallucinating albatross?

Episode 6: Back in Brost

Episode 7: The Second Retreat from Brost

Episode 8: Leviathans

Episode 9: Our Virtuous Lady

Episode 10: The Sea Speaker's Tower

Episode 11: Gank the Mage

Episode 12: Suspisciously Knowledgeable About A Murder

Episode 13: The Temple Andrussia

Episode 14: Into the Depths
Episode 15: Leviathan's End

Episode 16: Dragons in Dungeons

The Party

Fiske	Manqoba	Esgorman
played by Igneous Sessions: 12	played by mtb Sessions: 13	played by CaptainSabatini Sessions: 13
Fiske, a crazy wizard surgeon with a katana and a razor whip, was born on a frontier farm that got seized by nobles and he made a habit of sneaking around and stealing their money, becoming a sneaky bastard in the process.	Manqoba is a traveler from a fierce tribe out on the borderlands. He was apprenticed to the shaman, who also kept the oral tradition alive, but never finished his training after being forced to flee from an attack by strange warriors. He went into exile, learning to use the techniques of some of the warriors in the stories to become stronger. Now he wanders the region looking for fame, fortune, and glory, ideally the second, although either of the other two will do.	Esgorman was born in the palace of the Caliph Raashid el-Shaheed. The son of a tryst of minor nobles at court he was left to be raised by the legion. His minor royal privilege gave him access to a tutor and free access to the library, but also raised to fight. When he came of age he had the freedom to leave the palace and decided that instead of a life of service and military discipline, he would lead one of adventure and finding his own future. On the day he left his mother pricked his neck with a snake charm giving him the supernatural immunity to poisons and venom. Now he travels with his walking stick and iwisa to seek his own name and fortune
Agamemnon	Brambles	Neville Branston-Rothschild
played by crumblesthefarsightedghost Sessions: 1	played by Vampirfella Sessions: 1	played by Frosty the Pig Sessions: 2
Agamemnon was born the son of the chief of a nomadic tribe of performers, roughly 63 years ago. Named a prince, the tribe, and his family, worshipped him and forced demonic contracts upon him. 30 years ago, the demons told him that he was being used, that he was an unwilling figurehead for a cult, and that he should set off on his own and seek immortality. Several decades of lucky solo exploration have led him from one desert to another, an emptied-out sea with secrets ripe for the picking.	Brambles is a young barbarian woman. She doesn’t know her real name. She was found by a group of barbarian Druids. Growing up they taught her everything she knows. She always felt a little different though; She is a changeling and is unaware of it. She is a little less civilized than the people around her usually are, even in the barbarian camps. She isn’t as big as the other barbarians and she isn’t as fast as them either. She is smart though and that has kept her one step ahead of death. She longs to prove herself worthy of her adopted home.	Only son of Thomas Branston and Sarah Rothschild. Thomas was a wealthy trader in the Thyrenian Merchant league. When Neville was six, Thomas didn't come back from a trip to Amar with his brother. All thought he was dead. Debt collectors started knocking at the door demanding payment on debts. A few weeks later, Neville's uncle, Aleusius returned and gave Neville the bad news that bandits had fallen upon the encamped traders at night. Aleusius was lucky to get away with his life. Not long after that, Sarah married Aleusius. The debt collectors stopped knocking. Shortly after, Neville was sent to serve the Minister of Cadberry at his palatial estate. There, thrown into the deep end of a pool of backstabbing, gossip and politics he learned how to make friends quickly and to be equally as capable of telling a lie as the truth. Years passed and Neville had found a place at the court assisting the minister. He had become like a son to him. Unfortunately, this made the minister's actual son very angry and he blamed Neville for the theft of his most valuable Magic: the Gathering cards and had him banished him from the court. At loose ends, Neville found his way to Coiner's Shelf, desperate for money.
Malakar
played by Seba Sessions: 1
Malakar grew up moving from castle to castle, as his father was the overseer mason for all the defenses of a small kingdom inland. His family's good station and the envy of pretenders for the same posts caused their own home to be burned to the ground. The King gave no support to Malakar's family for fear of risking the rage of the court, so they defected from the crown and settled near the coast, where Malakar and his father put up their services as builders and bodyguards. But Malakar may not be the best mercenary out there, as he tends to choose his jobs following his heart, and not his purse.

Prepwork

My prep involved rereading both the adventure and the game system again and making notes about what I'd like to change and what I'd like to add...none of which I'll talk about now because my players are likely to read this. There isn't a lot of information out there about the module so unlike prepping for Delta Green there wasn't an available surfeit of existing GM resources. Beyond that, I had to figure out how to make the various pieces fit together.

Converting between Best Left Buried Coin and standard fantasy gold coins is nontrivial. D&D has a problem that leveling up takes silly amounts of treasure, and while we aren't really using that sort of advancement, we are using D&Desque price lists. So while every 8 Coins of experience in BSB amounts to one advancement, I've ultimately decided to multiply their numbers by 10 to get coin values. I'll have to keep an eye on this so I don't run into the B/X problem of parties reaching level 3 and having more money than they'll ever be able to spend.

I made a few more adjustments. Porters (called "carpers" in Beneath the Missing Sea) are listed as costing 4 (BLB) Coins per week. After some hemming and hawing, I eventually set them to 10 gold per day, which would match the magnitude difference above for a period of 4 days. Close enough. Half of an advancement does seem staggeringly expensive by the book as if a torchbearer cost 1000 gp at level 1. 

Speaking of levels: BSH uses leveling by adventure. Does a whole hexcrawl count as a single adventure? Meanwhile, BLB uses gold for XP, but I was already struggling to figure out Coin to coins conversion. So I decided to do neither. Instead, I borrowed the list of deeds from Retired Adventurer's Into the Depths. Some deeds can be done once per career, others multiple times, but they all grant you half a level's worth of XP. Included therein are deeds for both recovering treasure and wasting it all. I let the players know that it's more suggestive than absolute, especially since I didn't think there was a town of the necessary size anymore in the region, for example.

Leveling Up from Retired Adventurer's Into the Depths

Figuring out how to convert monsters was also a challenge. Best Left Buried uses 3 stats rather around 0, Armor that tends to start around 8 and go up, and Hit points about the same. Black Sword Hack is far more unusual, with a table showing approximate hit points and damage per level combined with a package of power or traits befitting the monster in question. The module helped slightly with conversion from BLB to 5e, but I'm still a little unsure and will probably lean on the power and traits combined with vibes to stat up monsters.

For character creation, I've added a couple things:

To skip shopping so as to get straight into the game, I gave them each two quantum items that could become any reasonable thing that they might require, which gets swapped with 25 gp at the end of the first session. I got the rule from Ariel's Blood and Treasure game, and as someone who despises shopping trips in games, fell in love with it immediately.

I even riffed on it in a comment I made on the OSR Discord, describing slots of retrospective backstory so as to avoid cumbersome pre-adventure tales that are so popular these days. Instead, each character gets 2 slots of "backstory" that, when it comes up that they need a language or a skill or to have a connection, and it's conceivable that they might have learned it, they can add it to their sheet and tell us the story of why they know that thing. Other than Igneous proposing that Fiske was an amnesiac person from the future, backstory hasn't come up at all, so we'll have to wait to see how this works out.

There is a notable lack of encumbrance rules in BSH. I'm just utilizing Cosmic Orrery's Bundling Inventory because it's simple and neat. In short, everyone gets 10 slots, a slot can hold any one thing, and items that make sense can be bundled together but then retrieving them takes time.

Sorcery (used by Igneous' Fiske) is a touch unclear. It sounds like you have to roll to cast any spell at all, which is pretty lame. After talking it out with Igneous, we settled on two castings of his known spells per day, with potentially more if he rolls to keep the spell unless we find that this is unbalancing.