Gank the Mage
The Party for Episode 11
- mtb playing Manqoba
- CaptainSabatini playing Esgorman
Continuing their exploration of the Sea Speaker's Tower, Esgoman and Manqoba crept up the stairs from the hostile library into a nice lounge. A dusty, disused lounge, but one that would have been quite nice at some point before the giant hole in the wall and all the dust and dirt. They peeked around the room, observed the top of the pillar of rock the lighthouse was set atop a couple floors below, and then continued upstairs.
The next floor contained a hallway of doors before continuing up, so they checked behind each.
The first contained little but a large puddle of water, that on further observation looked much deeper than the half-inch puddle it initially appeared. In fact, as they peered into it, they could see shapes moving several meters deep. Choosing to stay, they were shocked when several anglergoblins burst from the hole. Quickly dispatched, Manqoba decided to dive into the water. Below, he found a world that extended several meters in every direction bet which was bound by...something...which didn't give or scratch. Unable to go far from the hole, he climbed back out and they continued on.
The second room was just old stored furniture, nothing exciting was found within.
The third was a bedroom with a large bed, a wardrobe, and a cold hearth that Esgoman noted wasn't aligned with the chimney below. The wardrobe was nothing but old clothes but the hearth contained two interesting things. One, Esgoman sifted around the ashes and found was seemed like a lost earring.
Secondly, the mantle held a ship in a bottle, and as they looked at it Manqoba felt himself drawn into a memory where he was about to board a ship, the original of the model, that was setting out to commemorate the leviathan with its high priest, the Sea Speaker, Marienn Agon. Manqoba, in the memory, chose to follow Agon onto the ship. With a whiff of salt water, the memory disappeared and he was back in the room.
Shaken slightly, they continued on to the fourth room, likewise a bedroom but much smaller, with an old writing desk and a box of shells on the window sill. They didn't spot anything to loot and headed towards the stairs.
Above they found themselves on an observation level, with glass walls that subtly magnified their vision. For the first time, they could see the whole basin. They could see the bulk of the leviathan in the middle, the Silver Blades encampment outside a stone structure to the north, and small blots of Brost and Coiner's Shelf miles away. They filled out their maps and continued upward.
Staring across the miles, they were drawn into another memory. This time, they were aboard the boat, and the captain and Agon were speaking to them, revealing that they weren't there to celebrate the sea monster, but to kill it. They were given a choice: stand with the captain or accept an honorable death. The players chose to stand with him on their quest to end the creature...and with a clap of thunder, they found themselves back in the observatory.
Atop the tower they found the Sea Speaker himself standing amidst burned runes and gazing mindlessly out across the empty sea. Hesitating, eventually Esgoman spoke up and approached him. The wizard coughed, spilling seawater across the roof, and in fact, was sodden with brine that wept from him. Eventually, he'd discharged enough to talk, and rasped at them, seemingly unclear about a lot of things, including why they were here. As his confusion and anger grew, dead creatures that bore the faces of the PCs clawed their way out of the puddles.
Seeing the situation falling out of control, and noting the massive emerald set at the center of the runic circle, Esgoman charged forward to knock him out. He landed a heart shove but the wizard simply pulled out a gun and shot him. Manqoba and the henchmen attacked the fearsome dead doppelgangers save for Albert, who charged forward to protect Esgorman. Injured but still standing, he dove to grab the emerald and then toward the exit as the arcanist began chanting. Albert saw his moment, grappled the Sea Speaker, and threw himself from atop the tower. A moment later the two revenants collapsed and when they looked down they could see two still bodies dozens of feet below.
When they hired Albert de Manc, I held back the other feature he'd been written to have m, which was that he was looking for a cause to die for. So it caught the players a little surprised when he sacrificed himself, but it seemed appropriate and I rolled a reaction check to see if he would. I should probably find more opportunities to characterize the henchmen next time so traits like this can be foreshadowed because the payoff would land much better.
The party descended the tower to where the bodies lay and immediately started rummaging through his pockets. They found a strange charm around his neck, a spellbook of verdigris plates, and an ornate cutlass. They held a funeral as best they could atop the windy spire for their longest-serving armed henchman, Albert de Manc. In the process, they came across some other long-dead person wearing a strange helmet, the latter of which they took with them.
The wizard was dead, but they looked around and the sea was still gone. Wondering if he had some water connection, they lugged the corpse back up to that mysteriously deep pool and dipped him in. No change was observed in the arcanist, but when enough of him was in the water, the water began to thump like a heartbeat. Puzzled, they decided to keep the corpse and so brought it back with them down the tower back to Hemmingway and Two-Toes.
The trip back to Coiner's Shelf was uneventful save for two items: first, they witnessed one of those bony zombies that they'd lured away from Our Virtuous Lady, completely pincushioned with arrows, stumbling aimlessly across the dunes. They avoided it and took a more northern tack toward that giant gash in the seabed. Still unsure of the wizard and his connection to the water, they pitched his body into the sea before returning home.
Statistics
Total Party Members: 8
Hexes Explored: 25
Caves Explored: 4
Dungeons Explored: 1
Players Participated: 8
Megafauna Captured: 2
Skirmishes Survived: 11
Foes Vanquished: 1 feral dog, 9 anglergoblins (3 this episode), 1 anglergoblin shaman, 1 albatross, 4 sea-plagued, 1 sea monk, 5 waterlogged revenants (2 this episode), the sea speaker
Treasure Obtained: 3746 previously + Heart of the Andrussian + Briny Helm of the Aqualung + Merfolk Coral Earing + Antideluvian Charm + Ornate Officers Cutlass + Verdigris Spellbook
Map
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| The map after episode 11, which finally covers the whole basin. |
Notes
Another map issue arose: the key referred to various rooms on a floor but which for some reason were drawn empty and with no indication on the map which was which. Easy enough to improvise but why not include numbers. I hadn't even yet mentioned that all the treasures in the tower were listed on a randomized table that I then went and distributed around the tower, some hidden and some not. Trivially fixable issues during production but why weren't they?
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| The map and key of the second floor. Is it still a key if the contents don't appear on the map? |
Agon himself had a strange mechanic. The PCs interacted with two of three memories, in the bottle and at the observatory. They'd avoided the first, obviously fearing a trap, and never returned to it. It had a small bit of history about Agon and the Leviathan and also contained a choice.
Each of the choices affected the state of Agon when they found him. Based on their decisions, he was tougher than he might have been: he came armed with pistols and he was accompanied by revenants. However, if they'd inadvertently made all three choices that armed him, they'd have come upon him having gotten everything he wanted, and yet the result was far, far from his desire. Crushed under the weight of his culpability in this disaster, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself.
The idea of this mechanic is actually pretty cool, my only issue with it is that I don't think the effects of the choices really follow from the choices made. I can see what they were going for, but it feels like there's a piece missing to make the consequences really land. The idea is probably worth reusing elsewhere.
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| The Agon mechanic. Also, it's apparent from clipping this that the third wave is not aligned with the two above. Editing smh. |
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