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| Spoiler ahead: the Big Nasty at the end of this story is a reskin of the Soulmonger from Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry. Dragon stats from Mage: Dark Ages by White Wolf, soundtrack by Two Steps from Hell. |
THE PLOT
My players voted to set one of our summer oneshots in my Maelstrom Islands piratecrawl region, so all I needed to do was pick one of the islands to focus on: Quellport, with its plague of Red Honey drugs sounded like a fine place to explore.
I added Skerples' Mehabara as a waypoint to stretch out the sea voyage a bit and give them a place to find information. The trip from the starting point of Ysland > Mehabara > Maelstrom will serve as a nice journey into the Mythic Underworld: things wil get increasingly stranger the further they go.
In line with point 1 of Game Prep (below), I decided not to fuck around with overly subtle plots here. Added the following ingredients and stirred vigorously:
- An honoured Viking Wolfchanger, who after a lone quest to end a drug plague came back befuddled and without his Wolf spirit.
- The vile drug Red Honey (from the pc game Sunless Sea), made by cunning vampires out of the souls of the innocent.
- A titanic soul-singing Sea Wyrm caught in / causing a leagues-wide maelstrom, whose slobber was being refined into said Red Honey.
A friend in need! Vampires! Drugs! A sea dragon! (Spoiler: they didn't even TRY the drugs.)
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| The Maelstrom Islands are where I keep all the really nasty stuff in my piratecrawl. |
PLAYER RESPONSES
Blanche Sidwell, bearshifter ridden by the spirit of her grandmother who saw her entire family burned by missionaries:
- Fun and exciting story. A system with many parts that hook together in obscure ways and only when playing does it start to show.
- The raven with persuasion 👏🏼
- The teaching moment about how not to wake up a were shark 🤭😬
Mugin Rafida, scoutin', lootin' ravenchanger with a spirit-gift of a silver tongue:
- Reynard's lie, the gift that keeps on giving.... 😋 Furthermore, of course, the mega funny "Are You Sleeping?"
- Our accidentally finely balanced party. (2 big berserkers & 2 small & sneaky guys) For me this whole system was new, but definitely delicious. Encore! To grandma!
- Not to mention the fact that we are playing Werewolf: the Dark Ages but the only werewolf is an NPC who lost his powers and should be killed off if he doesn't get them back.... ("Can I really not become a farmer!?" "NO!")
Gorm, sneaky, shadowy ratchanger with the same spirit-gift of a silver tongue that Mugin has:
- The waking up of the shark with the rite of silence was genius
- A oneshot game is a nice way to cut loose without too many long-term consequences 👍🏻
- Lovely powerfull combat😁
Fükka the wereshark, fully invested in using the Burrow gift to tunnel like a landshark:
- I loved EVERYTHING is this oneshot. From the introduction scene and meeting Snorri to the sea trip.
- From the werebear at the market and the herbalist to rescuing/kidnapping Joelle.
- Demolishing a galleon to make a point was a personal highlight.
- From dicking around in the mayor's office to the alarm clock joke.
- And the short but powerful combat in the monastery.
- I also loved how the party was put together for this oneshot. Raven and Rat talking the socks off everyone they meet. Bear and Shark leave a trail of destruction 😂
GAME PREP
Step 1: get in the right frame of mind
- Attain proper epic mood by splicing 2 Steps From Hell directly into cortex.
- Reread words of wisdom from the Jeff on How to Awesome Up Your Players. In short: start a little larger than life, escalate from there. Werewolf characters can shrug off cannon attacks and splinter ships' masts by throwing cannons through them, so revel in that and give them both mooks to mow down and Big Opponents to pit themselves against.
Step 2: summarize Werewolf: the Dark Ages ruleset
- This game is wordy. Only one other group member knows the lore about all the Garou tribes, breeds and auspices, so I stripped out that and the whole spirit world angle to get a streamlined system of totem warriors who can shift into animal form and use gifts from the spirits.
Step 3: create characters.
- Remember how I started this out by saying we'd be playing WEREWOLF? Naturally, the group asks if other shifters are also a possibility. And so I add Wererats, Wereravens, Werebears and Weresharks to my stripped-down system.
- In the end, none of the four players picks a werewolf. Luckily my plot wasn't dependent on that; they're a bunch of weirdo barbarians tasked with helping a fellow totem warrior.
RUNNING THE SESSION
Intro: love of faith?
No meeting in a tavern. I ask each player: love or faith? and run them through a mini-scene where they can introduce their character.
Love:
On the northern Ysland, werebear Blanche Sidwell and wereraven Mugin Rafida are clearing a road through a lavafield to win the hand of the lovely Frigga in marriage. They suspect foul play when all the workers except themselves fall sick due to poisoning. They scare them away using Reynard's Lie, a silver-tongue Gift which will see A LOT OF USE in this oneshot.
Faith:
In Smokehaven on Ysland, wererat Gorm Olsen and wereshark Fükka are looking on as a new christian church is erected on the island. Christian workers and an Asatru mob are facing off and stones are flying. Using that same silver-tongue gift, Gorm intimidates one of the workers' leaders to back. the fuck. off. Meanwhile, Fükka gets hit by stones thrown by a woman called Magritte. He takes narrative control, sets her up as a loveless fanatic and then uses the Burrow gift to go all landshark on the woman. The rest of the group don't miss a beat as they drop into the Jaws tune.
The Lost Wolf
Haggard Aedja the Crow summons the players to an ancient runestone overlooking Smokehaven and introduces them to morose wolfshifter Snorri Longtooth. He's "lost the wolf" (no more raging, shapeshifting and using spirit gifts) on a loner quest to find the source of the nasty drug Red Honey. Lead: his last known location before losing his memories was the Mehabara archipelago.
Quest: take Snorri to find his wolf spirit and bring him back with it - or not at all. "Life without your totem is not worth living", hints Aedja darkly as Snorri, sweat beading, asks if he really can't become a farmer.
I realized during the scene that I hadn't given Snorri a lot of lines yet - he was more of a will-drained McGuffin than an NPC, really. So decided to have him speak up and ask if he couldn't just retire. That brought out a darkly humorous side in Aedja, which I rolled with. Never doubt where your mad scrabbling for coherent dialogue takes you.
Captain Haakon (which sounds exactly like Captain Hook in Dutch...I wrote it down without saying it out loud) will get the players to the Merabaha in her drakkar, the Storm's Light; after that, they're on their own.
Shipping trip - that poor storm
I didn't have a lot planned for the trip from icy Ysland to the sunny Mehabara; luckily I didn't have to! Asked players to roll for weather, then for encounters on the way on this handy travel chart by Skerples. The result: a bad storm. The response: sharkshifter Fükka climbing into the mast and using a magic rite to browbeat the storm into blowing the Storm's Light to the Mehabara extra fast.
Skerples' Mehabara Islands (islands his, map mine)
Mehabara: wreck that market
As the drakkar sails into the tropical, fortified harbor Alamet of the nation of Tarracon, bearshifter Blanche spots a witch burning in progress. There's soldiers, a crowd, a crying young lady, priests, a pyre - and then very quickly there's a LOT of screaming as Blanche goes red-eyed, flashes back to her grandmother who was burned at the stake, and makes the world shrink as she grows into a 15 foot monster that proceeds to tear apart the market.
That Deranged Ancestor flaw sure sounded fun when the player bought it in character generation!
With a couple of musket bearing soldiers coming down from the fort, the group pick themselves and off the street and ask sort-of-witch Joëlle (cook's help, really) for info about illegal drugs. Well she sure as hell doesn't know, but one of these crazy fur-wearing barbarians just turned into a couple tons of bear and saved her from death by fire, plus this is a oneshot, so she points the lunies to Jimena the Herbalist and bargains for a spot on the boat.
Jimena, of course, is deeply paranoid, has a hair-trigger and a bound fire elemental, and is absolutely NO match for a rousing new round of Reynard's Lie by Gorm and Mugin. "Don't you remember you wanted to tell us everything?"
I should have turned every use of this gift into a drinking game. It's is an absolute gift (ahah) for the DM to spoonfeed info to the players or speed the plot along. And so, they handily discover that Red Honey is made on the isle of Quellport in the Maelstrom Islands, further west on the spice route.
Rite of the Questing Stone
Give them tools and see how they use those to fuck over the world is my DMing philosophy in a nutshell. Case in point: Fükka has chosen to invest heavily in the Rites background which gives him a lot of magic spells to play with. Like Rite of the Questing Stone, which he uses to confirm their heading.
When Fükka rolls six successes in a system that caps "absolute brilliant success" at five though, I decide to go a bit beyond what the spell calls for. His pendulum points straight to the Maelstrom Isles all right, but I feel that's not nearly enough.
And so Fükka drops like a stone, thrashing and foaming at the mouth on the deck for hours while his spirit flashes to the Maelstrom. There he senses an ancient, hungry power under the waves. He's a big boy wereshark, but this thing is vast and corrupt. And with that, Fükka wakes up again, bathing in sweat and getting a lot of scared looks from the crew.
Nothing like a bit of foreshadowing, right?
Negotiating passage
Captain Haakon (I suck at names) isn't too sure about sailing on to the Maelstrom. Snorri is game, but doesn't really remember a thing about the route and has no sway on board; it's all down to the captain and her crew, and they'd much rather head back to Ysland.
"There's big monsters in the sea - no wonder they use big ships over here like that galleon - look, they've got rows of rows of cannons and we've just got a ballista! Also, whirlpool over 30 miles wide."
"That scary galleon over there?", asks Fükka as he casually steps off the side, shifts into a 20 foot megalodon monster shark and pulverizes the magnificent ship's hull.
"Yeah, that one", concedes Haakon as some Reynard's Lying by Gorm and Mugin seals the deal: the captain and crew are either reassured or more scared of the players. Probably a mix, but: it's a oneshot! Gotta keep things going.
Dinner reservations
Sailing checks are disappointingly boring and the Storm's Light reaches the slowly counter-clockwising waters outside the Maelstrom Islands in a couple of weeks' sailing.
Fükka (as shark) and Mugin (as raven) scout ahead and find the biggest port on the isle of Quellport, conveniently also called Quellport. Rounding Quellport's southern tip, they spot a beautiful white-walled monastery on a high cliff and notice the water starting to flow faster. They're in the outer grasp of the Maelstrom now!
Quellport is a very Ranstead town, which means I get to break out slight German accents. The drakkar makes port and the party asks around for info: where can they get some Red Honey? The harbormaster has no idea but points them to the mayor's large and somber house on top of the hill.
Some more Reynard's Lie secures an appointment, and Mayor Stijn Gellink confides that he does remember a similar drakkar and viking berserker coming into port a half year ago. Snorri offered to track down the source of Red Honey, but wasn't seen since. If the party can put an end to the drug ring and its evil effects, the mayor will pay them a goodly sum. He's heard rumours of the Rose Garden Monastery being somehow involved, but honestly cannot imagine the Good Sisters being up to drug running.
Wake-up call
Can the party perhaps stay the night? Of course they can. It's at this point that Blanche tries out a little magic ritual she's learned: until she speaks, all sounds she makes is silenced - to be unleashed in one big cacophany of sound around her when the ritual breaks.
In the early morning she gets up, casts the rite and then spends a good 15 minutes stomping around, smashing pan lids together, rattling drawers and so on in absolute silence. She then whispers next to Fükkas ear: "you awake yet?"
Of course this leads to the entire room getting blasted awake, Fükka spectacularly failing (succeeding?) a Rage roll and turning into a half-man, half-shark abomination which rakes its inch-long claws through Blanche. Bleeding out (with 1 or 2 health levels to spare - low roll!) she manages: "worth it"!
Forget classic D&D Silence, this rite is the superior version.
Rose Garden
After recovering, the party scouts out the Rose Garden Monastery in animal shape and discovers that the place is a fortress with a lot of nightly activity. Burly, red-faced nuns with cudgels and swords keep watch as tired workers from the town come in to work in what sounds like an underground distillery. Once every few days, a small boat called La Balleine takes a prisoner out to sea and returns with barrels filled with some pinkish slime.
The best part? The abbess Sister Zaira and her confidante, the poet Isery, only come out at night. Blanche's deranged ancestor immediately recognizes one of them: that's the missionary who burned her whole family! And yes, the pair are deathly pale.
Fucking vampires, man.
Front Gate
A plan? Storm the place during the daytime, of course. Reynard's Lie opens the gate, then it's rage-out time as the party absolutely tears through about twenty burly nuns. Some of which pack quite a punch and move like the wind for a couple of second, until they burn out.
Ghouls (mortals who drink vamp blood and gain a couple of mild powers) are tough, but not Werewolf tough. Fükka tears into them, Gorm rat-teleports on top of the watchtower to strike the musket-wielding occupants with beautifully coordinated strikes, Blanche forgets to shapeshift and is struck down by a raging nun - only to pop up 15 feet tall and in a death rage which only subsides an hour after the fight.
From the cellar with its weird arcane distillery and two comfy coffins, a soothing voice with hypnotic suggestions swaft up. By sheer luck, the party manages to stave off vampiric Presence and Domination and not turn into hapless minions for the bloodsuckers! Gorm dives into the cellar and turns his claws into silver for extra rage and murder power, taking out the hypno-poet Isery. Fükka starts to demolish the roofs to let in the sunlight.
Vampiric speed keeps Sister Zaira out of claw's reach of Blanche for a few seconds, but once the raging bear manages lands the tiniest glancing blow, she can spend Rage to buy sickening amounts of extra damage (other shapeshifters can take extra actions per round; bears just hit like an artillery barrage). A vampire turns into a smear on the ground turns to ashes and this fight is over.
In notebooks scattered across the monastery, the party find evidence that the vampires were trading prisoners' souls to someone called Grandma who lives deep down in the Maelstrom. In return for regular souls, they received the raw pink slime they then purified into Red Honey.
I didn't narrate every blow in this fight; every player got in a couple of licks and was sort-of-attacked, then I sped up and went to the next highlight of the fight. It's a oneshot; got to keep things moving. And with my tendency to spin out scenes for extra roleplaying, we had to call it a night here! The party had found the source of Red Honey, but hadn't recovered Snorri's wolf-soul yet. And where was that pinkish slobber coming from that the vampires turned into Red Honey? We found out in part two of this oneshot.
Finale: in Grandmaw's House
A couple of days after session one, we all log in for the grand finale. I recap that there's a final mystery to be solved deep in the Maelstrom. The party inexplicably decides to take captain Lutèce of the prisoner/pink pre-honey-smuggling boat La Balleine instead of their own, sturdier Storm's Light.
Not that I minded!
Down the hatch
La Balleine is off (you guessed it, after some fast Reynard's Lying to convince the captain she's too stupid to ask questions and should just do what she's told. Six successes on the roll means the story really takes, and she's a bumbling fool for the rest of the trip.
I take them in a grand tour around the map while Fükka and Mugin decypher the strange navigational chart on board the ship. Isle de Carcosa with its forbidden inland city, Henderson Island and its many identical shipwrecks, fog-haunted Graben Island and its strange-eyed fishermen, icy Kerguelen and its basalt ruins, and then in, in, in past the horrible prison of Dreadhold, where the sea tilts down in a roar.
Blanche sends a Gift-spirit in the form of a crow ahead to scout and help out the navigators, and good that she does, because that nets them enough successes to spot the lonesome rock in the foaming whirlpool. Some hard rolls crash La Balleine on the relative quiet of the rounded rock wall's wake. Here they find a couple of small rock islands with the remains of a temple or shrine.
As the group explores, Mugin spots heaps of
treasure all around the site and all hear a faint singing, as of many voices
that are trying to come into harmony. Mugin awakens a golden cup with strange geometrical designs and spends some time talking to the ritual vessel of blood for Tlaloc of the Ice Knives, Aztec god of rain (and of course bloody sacrifices).
Mugin takes off and scouts from above in raven form, to see a titanic shape moving in the circle of the rock wall and reefs. It rises to the surface, growing, ghostly voices starting to chorus as the head of a sea dragon breaches the waters. Its head is yards across, its body vast beneath the waves, its maw slavers with pink slime and is filled with fangs, some of which made of ice and shivering with the song of all the souls this thing has fed upon.
Grandmaw demands her next offering of souls.
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| UNLEASH THE DRAGON! Terrain by Dwarven Forge, Terrible Sea Monster by the shop in the Albuquerque Natural History museum. |
It's improv time again: I hadn't prepped a voice for Grandmaw, but I do know what I based the monster on - the Soulmonger of the Fionavar Tapestry, who eats the souls of all the elves trying to sail beyond the world. And so in the spirit of the moment I hit on using a different voice for every new sentence. Old and gruff, light and imperious, sickly, arrogant, fearful - it's a chore, but it seems to have the intended effect at the table!
Of course the party isn't about to offer anyone else - not even the slaver-captain - to this creature of the depths. Gorm, in rat form, has uncovered symbols on the temple indicating that the monster is chained here, near the bottom of the Maelstrom. But its prison is slowly breaking and each soul eaten breaks the bindings just a bit further.
It's slaughtering time!
I play this battle blow-by-blow, have the Soulmonger sing its song and drain the willpower and rage of the shapeshifters, rip into their forms - almost kill one - but in the end the action economy dooms it: four shapeshifters unloading multiple actions a round blow through the beast's health at a frightening rate. Especially when Fükka goes blood-mad and tunnels into the things side just as Gorm slashes through its palate from inside the maw!
And so, after 45 minutes of rousing combat, Grandmaw sinks bleeding into the icy depths. She's not dead yet - as long as she has souls to digest, she will return, and she's got six of them lodged in the icy fangs in her mouth. Luckily Gorm twigs onto that and uses his last bit of air to shatter them all before he passes out. Blanche, along for the ride, then uses the last of her strength to get them up to the surface.
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| GET INSIDE ITS MAW! Gorm the wererat going for the teeth as Blanch the werebear hangs on for dear life |
Final plunge
The battle is over but the party is far from safe; they're still deep inside the Maelstrom behind a rock wall that starts to break apart before their eyes. I start pushing over the pieces that make up the rock wall to add to their sence urgency as Blanche, Gorm and a revitalised Snorri get on board La Balleine.
Mugin keeps track of what's really important and has been ferrying chests of gold and silver onto the ship as all this happens.
And the wereshark? He circles the corpse as he feels its dominion over this spirit-strong sea fade and I can feel the player wanting to claim the domain as his own. But he's needed aboard ship, because with crappy sailing and the increasingly dangerous waters the boat is almost breaking apart. Hope and spit keep the boat sort-of-together - until the second sailing botch of the evening rakes it across the rocks.
Gorm does what rats do, empties a barrel of gold and uses it to abandon ship.
Clever use of Fükka's rites turn La Balleine into a functional raft, but they've lost the capacity to steer. The group finally rolls well on their sailing check so I have them veer dangerously close to the very heart of the Maelstrom - giving them a hazy vision of a king on a throne writhing senselessly to the sound of pipers as a thousand-masked jester waves to the passing ship - and then catapult them past Gorm's floating barrel beyond space and time into the starless void.
Again, this was sheer improv. I had no real idea of what was at the bottom of the Maelstrom, and I think the spark of ideas went like: catapult orbit past a black hole - azathoth - court of the writhing king - nyarlatothep. Because adding Nyarlathotep to a world is always a good idea.
Wrap-up
I roll on a special table with all my piratecrawl regions to see where the five shifters end up after their voyage through the Warp; by an amazing stroke of luck they end up in the Mehabara where they began! (Could have stranded them in Chult or on the Isle of Dread - oh well.)
After months, they recover their drakkar Storm's Light from the Maelstrom Isles, where it has picked up Gorm the wererat from where he crashed on the doorstep of Dreadhold Prison.
The group is rich, has saved their wolfshifter friend and most importantly: slew vampires and an ancient Sea Wyrm. Time to call it a night - this was an awesome oneshot to play and I look forward to the next one!
