Beneath the Missing Sea Episode 4

  

People with Barrels

Episode 4, featuring travel with a new companion and including further exploration of the seabed, people with various barrels, and a prophecy.

Played September 15, 2023

Beneath the Missing Sea Episode 3

 

Crabcakes

Episode 3, where the party finally got around to exploring the missing sea, made a new friend, and then sold him for stew.

Played September 1, 2023

Beneath the Missing Sea Episode 2

Barricades and Boiled Dog

Episode 2, in which the party returns to Brost to deal with the most pressing issue facing its former residents: that they might ever run out of beer. Their first real fight ensues.

Played August 25, 2023

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

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.

Warlock! Character Generator

Warlock! is an interesting little game from Greg Saunders of Fire Ruby Designs that has been made explicitly to do what Warhammer Fantasy roleplaying does but without the headache that is officially-published Warhammer Fantasy rpgs. I'll be running it for the first time shortly and so to continue practicing coding as well as to make it easier for my distant players to have access to the bountiful character creation tables, I've built a bunch of generators here. This includes content from the Core book, Earn Your Crust (mostly additional careers), Compendium I and Compendium II. 

Obviously go by the books, they're nice and come in an ideal form factor, but even without them or with a different game many of these tables would be useful. Also be sure to check out their very active Fire Ruby discord if you want to learn about the game, there are a lot of great people on there.

Creating a character only requires rolling (what I've called) Essential Characteristics, rolling a few d6s to see which Careers you have available to pick from, and assigning skills. 

All skills start at a value of 4 and players can immediately choose ten of the them to set equal to 5 and ten others to set equal to 6. If they'd like these choices to be random as well, they can roll a Background. They then distribute 10 points among the skills their chosen career provides, up to the career maximum.

Talents are an optional feature from one of the Compendiums that seems neat. Same with the Pluck characteristic. 

Every other generator is just personalization and entirely optional.

Raven Queen's Psychopomp

 The Lady of the Dead hasn't always been. It is said that she was once a mortal woman who, in a time of war between the gods, saw an opportunity to seize their power for her own. She attracted a boundless multitude of zealots to Her cult of ascendence who willingly gave their lives to her arrogance. But this seed of hubris blossomed in turn among her cultists as each sought too to gain divinity. This corruption spoiled her plots, destroying her and banishing her followers from the face of the world. Truly it is folly to try to be as the gods.

Yet that was not her only story. Another story tells of her time in the Underworld. It tells of her fading memories and power evaporating in those abyssal depths and her desperate struggle to be what she was destined. Her fight caught the attention of the Lord of the Dead who admired her spark in that most gray of places. So he watched her and slowly came to admire her before eventually making her into his queen. He had thought to make her a plaything. But her will was the mightier. Through some lingering magic, through the strength of her rebuilt identity, through incredible pride of his own, she wrenched his mantle away. The Lord of the Dead was now the Lady of the Dead. Some fires are so bright they burn even the gods.

Written for OSE/LotFP because I've previously contended that the most interesting parts of 5e are the subclasses and that the more interesting among them (sans base class) could make something cool. This is from the Warlocks and Wizards Unearthed Arcana. Also, I don't like the default cleric and I wanted to see if I could cover the same ground more evocatively.

by Jeff Simpson