Beneath the Missing Sea Episode 6

Back in Brost

Episode 6, the Crab Wranglers returned to Brost to pursue a lead about a diving suit and discovered the holdouts besieged.

Played September 29, 2023

The Party for Episode 6

• Frosty the Pig playing Neville Branston-Rothschild
• CaptainSabatini playing Esgorman
• mtb playing Manqoba

The next day the Crab Wranglers found themselves down Fiske, who had disappeared after the previous trip, but did find themselves joined by someone new: a diplomat named Neville Branston-Rothschild. They decided to once again rehire Hemmingway the porter and Albert de Manc the hedge knight. Buying some food, they loaded up and headed out for Brost, intending to hunt down this thread about a diving suit that they'd left weeks ago. An uneventful two days on the road ended with them hiding in a random building in town for the night.

During the night they witnessed a group of anglergoblins passing down a nearby street, but among them were a few unusually tall and lanky examples along with one of the shamans. Manqoba volunteered to shadow them from across the rooftops to discover where they were going, which ended up with the entire group following along.

They soon found the goblins hunting around the largest and most distant warehouse which was clearly barricaded. They seemed as if they'd been there before but seeing no change in the situation didn't force it. While surveilling they heard a strange baritone singing that seemed to come from everywhere. The party returned to their camp and planned a trip back the next morning.

Manqoba was tailing the goblins while the party tailed Manqoba, so I only tested Manqoba's sneaking ability. And that was handled normally, following across rooftops just meant that the price of failure was much higher as the price of being less likely to be noticed.

Morning came and they approached the warehouse to find "Bloody" Annie Stalfin guarding the barricade. A large, tough-looking woman with a well-worn knife and a bloody leather apron, she first noted that they seemed well-fed and inquired where they'd been eating. The party realized that they'd been holding out and asked her if they had plans to leave. Annie confessed that she merely guarded the gate, that Ava was the one who made the plans. She was willing to let them inside to meet Ava but first insisted on seeing the inside of their mouths as a plague precaution.

Ava was just inside. An old woman in a gray robe and using a wheelchair, she was in the middle of dissecting an anglergoblin arm. It turned out that she was studying the plague, knew that the goblins didn't seem to be infected, and that the first sign was usually found in the mouth, but was reluctant to share more with strangers. Esgorman blurted out that they were looking for boots, which she found strange, but said boots might be found in the back...in the area that they couldn't get into to get the food because of the singing monster. The party was dubious, wondering if she was just using them to help deal with her problem, but decided that it was worth a shot regardless. They did request that someone local accompany them since they were doing a favor, and that's how they met "Two-Toes" Brostchild, a smoking teenage girl with a knife and an attitude. The three PCs, Albert, and Two-Toes went through the door into the back and heard it lock behind them.

They faced three doors surrounding a well. Immediately suspicious of it, they sought out ways to block it off but had little means to. They then approached the door starting on their right, a big metal one. It was frigid inside, filled with blocks of ice and bloody fish. Their eyes immediately lit up and they started gathering up handfuls of them so they didn't notice the shambling corpse skewered with fishhooks until it abruptly grabbed Manqoba. Fortunately, it was just the one and the five of them were easily able to hold it off long enough to kill it. So they decided to clear the rest of the room before returning to the fish and immediately found the boots they were looking for in the back. Returning to the seafood, they decided that being out in the open with an infected for weeks maybe wasn't the best for food and so ended up leaving it all anyway. They did knock the pins out of the door and place it atop the well just in case.

The next door in line was large and wooden. It opened to reveal the gutting room. Inside they found something far more macabre. The chains previously used to hold fish were hooked human corpses, some of them still twitching. All of the furniture had been drawn to the back to surround a copper vat that had a bloody net knotted with fish hung above it like an altar.

The PCs crept forward carefully avoiding the hooked corpses until the ever-bold Esgorman decided he needed to see the inside of the tank and started dragging furniture over. Inside he glimpsed a large bulbous face atop a massive round body and big black eyes that snapped open as he peered down at it.

"Roll dexterity to tell me how quietly you've been moving this furniture," definitely provoked a reaction. Probably my favorite use of an ability check the whole game so far.

In general it's best to assume competence on the part of PCs. However, in both this and the sea plagued in the cooler the PCs singlemindedly persued a course of action and so I left it up to the dice to decide how careful they'd been: a wisdom check and a dexterity check. 

The party quickly fled back to the door they entered, but the eery singing beat them there and the survivors refused to unlock it. Scanning the area quickly, they wedge the metal door against the door to the gutting room as they glimpsed the massive creature pulling itself free of the vat. 

There was one more door to the area that they hadn't tried but were wary of looking inside. On the other hand, the courtyard clearly had walls that weren't the walls of a building, so they started boosting people up and over the wall. Manqoba and his merfolk bow stood watch and attempted to slow it as the creature burst out of the room and charged. They were just able to get everyone up and over before it crashed into the wall, causing the masonry to quake. The party beat a hasty retreat.

Now having all of the parts to the suit, they headed over to the dwarf inventor Vorst to hand it all over. Happy to finish this latest work, he paid them for their troubles and offered to let them take the suit as long as they promised to return and tell him how it worked out.

Finally, they headed back to the survivors to camp for the night and plan their next actions in Brost.

Statistics

Days Passed: 39
Total Party Members: 6
Hexes Explored: 9
Caves Explored: 3
Dungeons Explored: 0
Players Participated: 5
Megafauna Captured: 2

Skirmishes Survived: 7
Foes Vanquished: 1 feral dog, 6 anglergoblins, 1 anglergoblin shaman, 1 albatross, 4 sea plagued (1 this session)
Treasure Obtained: 1858 previously + 160 coins = 2018 coins + 2 magic anchors + 1 suit of plate armored diving suit
Wages Spent: 480 previously + 90 = 570 coins
Tragic Deaths: 1

Map

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Session 6 Notes

The new players don't stop: Frosty the Pig playing Neville Branston-Rothschild, a berserker diplomat. Frosty seemed to be looking for a bit more worldbuilding to build off of for their PC, though I've kept that pretty light. Black Sword Hack provides a list of languages and we've basically just used that, which is interesting because I've made the contention before that languages actually tell you a lot about the world. That's not a typical way to do it so I can understand the hesitation, but I'm generally very against Gazeteer Fantasy so it'll stay that way.

Two things I was inspired to try for this campaign were retrospective backstories and quantum inventory. In both cases, these are tools to quickly get players into the game and avoid detailed character backstories and in-game shopping trips as much as possible. Of the two, the inventory slots have been used much more than the backstory. If I want to make that a tool worth keeping, I'll have to consider what purpose it serves and if I need to handle checks differently. Perhaps they compete with the system's ability checks? If languages spoken were an issue in the region it would probably come up more often.

The other thing new for this campaign is the experience system. They've not engaged with it at all. I feel like they could reach at least 3rd or 4th level with some luck and smarts but the means of achieving any of that have not really shown up yet. On the other hand, Fiske's player Igneous mentioned that they'd stopped thinking of the game in terms of mechanical advancement but instead in terms of hirelings and equipment and connections, which I loved to hear.