Drink Talk Roll Extended #25: Bungled Cruise

Session Recap

icking up right where we left off last session, the party was about to get on Captain Iskandar “Alex” Sunwolf’s Leaping Lemure when they encountered an old man begging to get on the boat. They would later learn that his name is Genji and that he is attempting to return home to the Rotti Islands. They had encountered him before when he asked them for directions to the Crane Monastery and Amra sent him to Meridan instead. To make up for that, the party named him their fifth member filling the vacancy that had opened up when Talliyah left. 

Aboard the Leaping Lemure, the party was introduced to Captain Alex’s first mate Renard, a tall Half-Orc man whose tough exterior hides a gentle soul and navigator Wax, a Half-Elf woman with a penchant for burning the candle at both ends whose nickname got more meaningful after she accidentally set her hair on fire.  

Amra and Jedah felt at home as they were put to work to keep costs down. Meanwhile, Sirocco was doing his best to make new friends and new types of alcohol and Khorr went snooping around for any interesting information. After the ship let on some noble looking types in the port of Din’eidda, he found a few retainers on the top deck and heard a few interesting words from them involving some kind of intrigue involving “Stormbreaker.”  

With a successful history check, Khorr was able to gleam that the phrase may refer to the first empress of Hozumi who was giving the nickname Stormbreaker for leading her people across the Sea of Storms to settle on the islands, the weapon that she supposedly used to defeat the Storm King or any of the many things built in her honor including the lighthouse that leads ships to safety in the capital’s harbor. With all of that, he decided that this information was probably for later and decided to leave it on the backburner.

After a few more days, the ship started coming across strange weather phenomena. The wind died suddenly stranding them in the middle of nowhere and that was followed by a sudden storm a few days later. Finally, the ship was attacked by a trio of water elementals including one powered by a scalding magic core.  

It was a tough fight because the elementals came from both sides and the cramped deck made the party vulnerable to area of effect attacks. Khorr nearly fell but thanks to Sirocco’s Peace cleric abilities, Amra was able to take the attack for him and finish off the scalding elemental in a battle of flame vs water.  

But even with the monsters defeated, the ship was still abuzz with rumors that they had drawn the ire of some god or monster of the sea. Tensions kept rising over the days as it even seemed to spread to members of the party. The second day after the attack, Jedah was the only member of the party who hadn’t succumbed to this unhealthy mindset. He asked the captain about the situation and even suggested a solution of making a sacrifice using knowledge he had picked up from other sailors. Captain Alex listened and asked the Din’eiddan nobles about possibly throwing out some valuables they had thrown over to appease whatever force was causing this streak of bad fortunes. These talks didn’t go well. Listening in, Jedah heard some cursing including a few new words he had yet to hear in his career as a sailor and what may have been a thrown chair.  

The next day, all of the party was able to shake off whatever had been affecting the crew and passengers to have a clear head. Sadly, it was too late to be of much use as when they came out onto the main deck, they found a crowd gathered around and in the center, laid Captain Alex with a knife in his back.  And that’s where our session ended.

Faking It Up

I think I’ve talked before either in this column or maybe on stream about how even with all the preparation I did for this campaign, including writing roughly 40 pages of world info for players to use for themselves and even more for my knowledge, I still find myself making up new parts of the game as I go on.  

This goes beyond things like names for characters and shops into bigger pieces of lore that I had never thought before. For example, from this week’s episode, “Stormbreaker” had been just a throwaway phrase I had come up with on the fly when I first ran this campaign. Even going into this one, I hadn’t really incorporated it into the lore and history of the world the way I did this time around. Now, it’s become more directly intertwined with the history of Hozumi and plot developments that won’t become apparent until much later on.  

The whole idea of the School of Continued Progress running experiments to find psychic children and making clones of Robin was also a complete ad lib on my part that just kept snowballing until it became its own subplot of the campaign. This ad lib then ended up tying itself into a new player character’s backstory and that’s how Dr. Nathaniel Skye was born.  

In my other game, which actually should be wrapping up the day this article comes out, beyond the basic outline of the plot, I was just continuously making up new elements of the world and worldbuilding as I went along and then figuring out how they fit into what I had done earlier afterwards.

I introduced an old lady with a sister that the sorcerer kindly decided to deliver a letter to which led to creating another sister which eventually revealed that they were a coven of Hags in service to a vampire family I had already established and looking to find the coffin of the lord of the family that had been buried in the ocean. They did this by killing an NPC from a completely different side plot when he was mounting a salvage mission for a failed test flight.  He had brought them is to work as guards which they completely failed at but it did lead to one of the best scenes of the sorcerer using the Ring of Gravity Lashing to steal the MacGuffin and then water ski away without any skis. Those Hags then came back again as the kindly grandmothers of another NPC involved in a completely different subplot surrounding shards of Mechanus that had wound up on the Material Plane.

Side Note: Their “grandson” was originally named Viktor after the League of Legends champion as a humanoid who believed “metal was perfection” and wanted to use the Mechanus metal to become part machine himself. That was all before the sorcerer pointed out that he was clearly a Doctor Doom (Victor von Doom) expy with all the metal armor and the cloak he was wearing. I might have mentioned that in to them in passing but that was just a one-off comment that completely changed how I perceived a relatively minor character.

Well, that’s it for this week. I don’t know if there was much of a point to this. Maybe as much a point as there is in anything I do in D&D but I at least hope this gave you a little more of an idea into how to make things work even if you’re just faking it the entire time.  

Until next time, keep on rolling.

-J.D.