Beneath the Missing Sea Episode 1

Beer Run

Episode I, in which our brave heroes made it to the tragedy-stricken Andrussian Sea and immediately set about delivering kegs of beer for cash and running over feral dogs with their rickshaw.

Played August 18, 2023

Abbreviations

• BLB : Best Left Buried, a horror-themed fantasy roleplaying game.
• BtMS : Beneath the Missing Sea, the adventure we're playing.
• BSH : Black Sword Hack, the Moorcockian system we're using.

The Party for Episode 1

• CaptainSabatini playing Esgorman
• Igneous playing Fiske
• mtb playing Manqoba

The party, made up of the legionnaire bookworm Esgorman, the wizard surgeon Fiske, and the storyteller herbalist Manqoba, made their way southeast into the region of the inland Andrussian Sea, which had until a few weeks ago been teaming with life. After several continuous days of terrible storms, the residents awoke to find it empty of water. Dubbing the phenomenon the Andrussian Drain, or simply The Drain, the locals quickly realized their primary means of subsistence had disappeared overnight. If that weren't bad enough, creatures formerly hidden in the depths, either driven by the Drain or emboldened, swarmed the only town in the region, Brost, and sent its residents fleeing. Many left the area entirely, but those that remained quickly threw together a makeshift settlement attached to the side of the cliff to the north, calling it Coiner's Shelf, and found new professions in scouring the revealed seabed and catering to opportunists and investigators coming through. This is the party's initial destination and the starting point of surely many adventures to come.

How far can they see from the cliff edge? That's dependent on height and how clear the air is. How tall is Coiner's Shelf? Looking at the elevation of the town, I can estimate somewhat over 100 feet, perhaps 130. Conveniently, on a clear day a person can see about 12 miles from a height of 100 feet, and assuming there might be some fog or mist collecting in the drained sea, that amounts to a very neat 2 hexes.

Like adventurers have from time immemorial, they immediately made their way to the local flophouse, Ogden's Tap. They quickly learned the lay of the land, including the Sea Speaker's Tower far to the southeast, the remains of the pride of the fishing fleet, Our Virtuous Lady far to the east, and the body of the dead god, the Andrussian Leviathan, somewhere in the center of the Sea, but were warned away from there. They were also warned of a contagious disease, Sea Rot, that had been spreading since The Drain, which causes barnacle-like growths and incredible thirst, and whose sufferers have been cast out for want of any means to treat or cure them.

Looking for something more manageable for three broke adventurers, Ogden let them know that he had sent for some additional ale stored at his bar in Brost, The Black Sail, but had heard nothing back, and would pay to have barrels of his prizes beer, Black Sail Stout, brought to him in Coiner's Shelf.

It's always a good idea to start an adventure with a manageable task (perhaps related to the hook), and this is probably especially true for something with horizons as broad as a hexcrawl. No one travels across the world or fights an archdemon on their first trip out of town. It's probably better to be a little railroad-y now before opening up rather than providing too few guidelines and watch the party wander off the page.

They quickly decided that this was the most approachable task for their current condition. They hired a porter with a rickshaw named Hemmingway to help carry the beer and headed up and out of the basin to travel to Brost along the traditional roads rather than risking their first experience along the seabed.

Beyond noting that travel on the seabed occurs at the rate of one hex per day, no information is given for distances or travel time, which is particular notable when the map shows a road passing between Coiner's Shelf and Brost. This road doesn't even appear in hexes, it's entirely beyond the bounds of the tools provided. 

I decided that this route would be twice as fast. Being off the hexmap and outside the basin, it was also lacking in random encounters. I decided that if they rolled a 1, they'd come across some ever-dependable bandits, but fortunately for me I never had to so improvise.

Note to self: get some hexcrawl rules and some random encounters for a more normal setting.

Quickly passing a forest, they spent most of the next two miserably overcast and drizzly days traveling along the edge of the former sea, spotting nothing but stragglers and people passing through.

Finally reaching Brost, but having heard of the monsters prowling at night, they decided to camp outside the town and head in the next morning. Morning arrived uneventfully and so they made their way through the quiet and deserted town. They asked the former resident Hemmingway to lead the way, who took them near the great fishing warehouses and toward the main square. 

Along the way, they came across a pack of feral dogs howling at and scratching at a particular door. They decided to try to sneak by but clumsily drew the dog's attention. First attempting to scare them off, they quickly found themselves surrounded. Deciding that the best way out was through, Esgorman and Fiske shoved Hemmingway into the cart and took off directly at one of the dogs, with Manqoba filling close behind to protect their backs. They managed to catch one by surprise with this unusual maneuver as one dog fell under their wheels. Another took a bite at Manqoba but was unable to catch him. The party raced into the square, dogs at their heels, and were happy to quickly spot The Black Sail. Deciding to just run for it, they jumped through the door with the cart left in front as a further obstacle and managed to just get the door shut as the dogs snapped at their heels. 

Failed dexterity saves by more than half the group meant that they got caught, middling reaction roll meant the dogs pursued their expected goal, and an even worse result for the attempt at frightening them away amounted to nothing. BSH universally uses 1d6 for armed attacks and 1d4 for unarmed so I rolled the cart as unarmed, and a high damage roll was enough to take out a dog, so it went under the wheels. I rolled to check to see if any other dogs were near enough to make an attack; one was but failed to hit (successful dodge by Manqoba). Finally I rolled 2d6 to see how their plan would work out. They rolled well enough to get to the bar. Then I think I had them tell me the order they were filing in the door and rolled to see if a dog would reach the last one in line, which it failed.

The inside has enough dim light to make the corpses in the room visible but even the former surgeon Fiske shied away from the potentially infected bodies. The party headed downstairs to find, shockingly, everything in order and the ale clearly labeled and ready to move. Their cart would only carry 3 of the 5 barrels, so they had a choice to make: take what they could carry or spend time looking for an additional cart in town. Fearing overstaying their welcome (or at least the sunlight), they decided to take what they could carry and leave the rest for later.

Fiske headed upstairs to look around and watch for dogs or other visitors while the other two and Hemmingway hauled the beer upstairs and got it ready to leave. Each found something strange: Fiske found a bag of mysterious purple powder while Manqoba found a strangely packed box with some sort of industrial tubing. Deciding both might be valuable and seeing the dogs had left, they loaded their cart and left, but not before noticing a distant person passing quickly between buildings, confirming that some still lived in Brost.

Back in Coiner's Shelf, they quickly turned over the beer to Ogden and were rewarded handsomely. 

BtMS lists 1 found keg for 2d6 coin, which is both sorta lame and also running into the difficulty of converting Coin to gold coins (more on this below). I rolled a d6 to find 5 kegs, then grabbed 6d6 for the 3 they managed to bring back, then multipled by the x10 conversion. I rolled a very lucky 3, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6 for a sum of 300 coins. Not bad for a beer run.

After making their exchange, they had half a day of light left, so they spread out to track down the answers to some questions that the trip had raised.

Rules as written BSH is supposed to operate on an organized turn basis at all times, so even outside of combat you're supposed to establish how long the next task will take and then go around the table checking with each player what their PC is doing. This is just encouraging good GM practice: move the spotlight around and keep everyone involved. It obviously applied this time because each PC was pursuing separate goals.

Esgorman headed down to the seabed at the foot of Coiner's Shelf to see what was going on since no one had been there yet. He found carefully guarded mounds of trash. These heaps, collected by scavenging "carpers", was picked through by furtive "pickers" for anything of value to be sold to the merchants above. All he found down there were glares.

Meanwhile, Manqoba headed to Merchant's Alley, the lowest elevated part of the shelf, to find out about the valuable-looking tubing they found. He had the most eventful time, meeting Arms Guard the Walls, a local elven proprietor of fine weapons and armor who was willing to pay coin for any Merfolk equipment they could bring him; then he met Garvym,  a local alchemist with a hideous scar across his face, who let Manqoba know that he might have work for some discrete delvers later; and finally, Dagweyn, a former fisherman turned local tough turned self-declared peacekeeper, who ran a ring of thugs blurring the line between police and protection racket, and who was looking for his prized boat hook that had been lost on the fighting retreat out of Brost. He also managed to learn that the industrial tubing looked like something a dwarf named Vorst Brandelsson would have ordered and that he lived in his workshop outside of Brost and would undoubtedly be seeking what they had found.

Finally, Fiske met with a local wizard to suss out what the purple powder was. For a small fee, the wizard identified it as ground purple lotus, a potent hallucinogen. Fiske quietly pocketed it and started making plans.

Note to self: Figure out how to do both NPC and PC hallucinations in a tabletop game. This may be the greatest challenge.

The sun began to set so the party reconvened at Ogden's Tap to spend the evening and plan their next move now that they were flush with cash.

Episode 1 Notes

I realized that an issue I'd been deliberating on I had accidentally solved: there are no trees on the bottom of a former sea.  mtb rightly pointed out that sunken ships would be harvestable, but I couldn't recall how often they appear. But upon describing Coiner's Shelf, I had offhandedly described it as having a lot of heavy abandoned stuff above that hadn't made it down the cliff side, including furniture! So I guess sojourns onto the seabed will include smashed-up chairs carried out with them.

The module seems to lack anything like hexcrawling rules beyond noting that it takes 1 day to cross 1 hex and providing a d6 weather table. A different BLB adventure has slightly more that I can crib from. Other than that, I'll have to search the net for tips.

While the module itself is sometimes lacking in a few details, the running of a hexcrawl, my first, is going more smoothly than I expect. Perhaps it's helped that the party has so far avoided actual hexes, but the shortage of resources has narrowed their goals to what's achievable quickly and cheaply. Anxious GMs undoubtedly overprepare dozens of hexes for their games, but you really seem to be able to get by with much fewer if there are interactive things to do there. Further, you can make your job even easier by giving them an initial goal and giving yourself potentially weeks to prep other stuff. Players will be players, so caveat emptor, but you're probably overprepping. My only concern now is balancing the stuff I'd like to create for the adventure with now writing these session reports that I've publicly committed myself to.

The book has a map, and it's pretty neat, but it's not player-appropriate in the least. Normally I'd run a dungeon and normally I'd use mipui for player mapping but a hexcrawl adds a new wrinkle. I'll need to see if there are any resources or tools out there for this purpose. I know that some people treat hexes as purely a GM-side element but then I'm going to have to get very good at providing descriptions of distances.

Stay tuned for Episode 2, hopefully out early next week.