Drink Talk Roll Extended #26: What Killed Captain Alex?

Session Recap

This session picks up directly where the last one left off with the party finding members of the crew gathered around the corpse of Captain Alex. A quick look over tells them that he was stabbed in the back by someone. First Mate Ren proclaims himself the new captain and attempts to restore order and figure out who killed the old captain. The party determines that it would be helpful to see who on the ship is missing a knife. They find a few crewmates are missing their knives. For some reason, they also decide to implicate Amra in this as well.

To save his own skin, Amra channels divine power to cast zone of truth which prevents all of the crew members from lying to them. Amra’s initial attempts at narrowing down the suspects is a bit too complicated to work but with Sirocco’s help, he realizes that he just needs to ask a simple question: Did you kill Captain Alex? This narrows it down one person: Ron Freeflaw.

Interrogating Ron further, the party finds that he’s definitely been affected by whatever has been making everyone on the ship tense. He says he had been hearing voices in the back of his head which compelled him to sabotage the ship and the crew. It started small like asking him to sabotage some of the foods like spilling bags of grain which he claimed to resist but it escalated quickly to the point where he felt like he was barely able to control himself when he killed the captain.

This reminds Jedah of the tales of angered sea gods from the last session and that maybe this being could be placated by making an offering of treasure. With Captain Ren’s approval, the party moves the cargo deck to see what exactly the Din’eiddan nobles have brought in hopes that that might be a good offering. The nobles protest but when told that it might be that or their lives, they relent as long as other options are tried first.  

Cracking open the large crate, the party finds a giant bowl nearly as tall as Khorr and as wide as Amra. The bowl is made of solid gold and its outside is carved with the depictions of all five varieties of Goliath but all of them seem to be much larger than the ones the party has met. The nobles claim it was to be a gift to the Empress of Hozumi for the 10th Anniversary of her ascension to the position.

Khorr decides to make this the tribute to whatever sea creature is causing the ship’s problems and while this is going on, Sirocco is above deck looking for anything in the water when he spots multiple giant tentacles that all emerge from the water and begin attacking the ship. Genji appears from below deck to offer his service in defeating this creature. Sirocco tells him to go ahead while he just kind of chills on the deck and watches.  

Khorr first tries to appease the creature by throwing Alex’s corpse into the water but he hears the voice Ron described in the back of his head, “Dead men make terrible tribute.” Meanwhile, everyone else is in the cargo deck trying to carry the giant bowl out.  They rush out onto the deck and drop the bowl over. In the back of his head, Khorr hears the voice reneging on its promise to spare the ship. It surfaces at the bow of the ship and looks ready to break the ship in two.

Luckily for everyone, Genji was still on deck and had spent the time charging up his non-trademark-infringing-energy-beam-ha! When it hit the sea beast, the beam damaged it enough to send it retreating back into the sea. And with that, the day was saved and good weather returned to the seas.

In the days that followed, the ship got back on track towards the Rotti Islands, Jedah spent some time learning new recipes from the ship’s cook and Khorr discovered that a possible smuggler’s chest in the cargo hold. He tries to uncover any secret compartments it may hold but with the help of Jedah and Sirocco, they’re able to find one containing a vial of poison known as The Long Kiss Goodnight and a collection of documents pledging support for the Kishu Clan’s claim to the throne of Hozumi should the current empress “die under mysterious circumstances with no apparent heirs.” It clicks in Khorr’s head that “Stormbreaker” which he overheard in the last session refers to this plan. The party spent a lot of time discussing their stance on this assassination conspiracy and how they would deal with it.

But there was another problem on the horizon and I mean that literally. As the Rotti Islands came into sight, what they expected to be a tropical paradise in the early summer turned out to be more of a snow-covered winter wonderland. And that’s where the session ended.

Dealing with Disaster

I think it’s safe to say that this stream was at least lightly cursed. Manuel dropped out multiple times apparently due to his GPU overheating. I was apparently inaudible for 40 minutes and had to rerecord my audio in the edit process. I’m honestly surprise that no one else had any serious issues during the session.  

In the past, as soon as a serious issues like either of those popped up, I would have probably just frozen up and then, spent a decent amount of time spiraling while I looked for ways to fix it. I still do that sometimes if I feel a bit too much pressure on me or that something has gone horribly wrong. I think this time, there was enough of a cushion of the players’ ability to hear me and the fact that I could use their reactions and my memory to piece together enough of what I said to be able to rerecord afterwards. I did something similar not that long ago when my mic kept cutting off because of connection issues.  

Those things along with the fact that it might be our final main campaign stream for a month were the reasons why I didn’t just call the stream at the 40-minute mark. In the week since then, I’ve double checked all my sources especially after updating software that is directly accessed in OBS. I suggested a new budget GPU for Manuel that’s actually from this decade as well. It all seems to be working. Hopefully, we won’t have major issues *salutes Major Issues* next time.  

I think the first of these articles or maybe it was the article for the first official session of this campaign, I talked about having to deal when things start falling apart or going off the rails. It’s nice to see that after roughly a years’ worth of sessions, I’m applying that even outside of the D&D game.

Well, that’s it for this week. I’ll either see you in two weeks or some time next month. Whichever that is, until next time, keep on rolling.

-J.D.