Ghosts of Saltmarsh - The Sea Ghost (Day 5)

After completing the first adventure in the campaign, we decided to rest up, regroup and run around the town completing various chores. Again, I cannot remember the exact order of what we did, but this is the general gist, most likely with bits missed out, encounters in the wrong order, and so on...

 

Day 5 - Next morning we returned to Saltmarsh in the row boat with all the casks and barrels and reported into the harbour master. We requested an audience with the Council and told the lady councillor about our findings and the truth of the hauntings of the mansion; a magician used a number of light and sound magic tricks to scare the locals into thinking the mansion was haunted so thereby allowing an arms smuggling ring to operate from the house and coves beneath, unimpeded by the forces of law enforcement and away from the prying eyes of the locals.

After a little more rest and recuperation, we paid a visit to a lady with some arcane knowledge, and she was able to tell us, for a fee, what many of the magically imbued items we picked up were. We also had plenty of rare books that we were able to get valued for later sale.

That evening, in agreement with the town council, we headed back to the cove below the mansion with the fully laden row boat (but the weapons in the barrels had been replaced with old bits of ironwork and stones to make up the weight) in order to make contact with the smugglers' ship.

It was around midnight when we espied the first flash from a lantern out at sea. We were unsure how to progress, then we received another single flash. Throwing caution to the wind, we used the sigils from the code sheet we had found in the haunted mansion to respond to the ship's signals. Once we had completed the four sets of coded light flashes, we rowed out to the ship that we would later come to know as The Sea Ghost.

Free map from Reddit

We hove-to alongside the smugglers' vessel and started to help the crew on board to unload the caskets and barrels from the jolly boat. Whilst the crew were busy doing that we managed to quickly board the vessel and take up a position in case we were set upon. Although, at first the crew were wary of us, we assured them that we were new at this game, and they relaxed a little, but not enough to fully trust us.

In danger of being found out if we put a foot wrong we asked the deck hand if we could go grab some grub and grog before we came back to help them with stacking the cargo below decks. We made a note of their numbers on deck, in the crow's nest and below decks and surmised that there must still be a captain and maybe a few other crewmen that we had not seen yet. We headed into the galley as an excuse to explore the ship further (we were tasked with finding the captain's papers and any manifest or details of where the cargo is headed for).

We jammed the doors as we passed through them one by one to stop us being pursued and eventually entered a room containing three lizardfolk asleep on hammocks. We only wanted to question them but things got a little dangerous when one of them leaped down from his hammock. He was quickly dispatched, as was a second one who came to his aid. The third one we managed to tie up without too much fuss, and it was then that we found out that the first lizardman just wanted to go for a pee-pee as he was nervous. We questioned the third lizardman a little more and found out that they were just passengers and that the arms were to be shipped to the lizardmen's lair in order to fight their oppressors.

Leaving the lizardman tied up and gagged, we returned to the deck to see how we could find the captain's cabin and purloin the manifests. We managed to surreptitiously manoeuvre into good fighting positions and then set about slaying the crew as quickly as we could.

The melee that ensued was swift and bloody. My healing abilities were certainly called into use on several occasions as my companions and I took damage from the defending crew. Just as we were getting the upper hand, the crew from the crow's nest and the captain and his two main henchmen joined the fight. This caused us more consternation as we thought that the fight could run away from us, especially as the aftcastle began to fog up and magical rays began to emanate from the upper deck causing us harm.

I decided to try to take out the magic wielder that I surmised was on the upper deck of the aftcastle whilst my valiant comrades fought the captain and his remaining crew. I managed to corner the magician in the mist but he escaped by assuming my guise. This confused my fellow adventurers until "I" started to attack them and turned into the wizard beneath the illusion.

Bolstered by the death of the magician, we renewed our efforts and finally managed to overcome the captain and his crew. Breathing a sigh of relief and calling upon Pelor to soothe my companions' ills we thought we could take a breather, but no such luck. The deck hands in the lower cargo deck were still alive and now there was the smell of smoke coming from below.

Thinking it was the remaining crew that had set the fire, we negotiated with them to leave the hold. We put them into the ship's jolly boat (not the one we arrived on) with a few days' provisions and three barrels of the goods stored below deck on pain of never setting foot on the boat again.

The fire was quickly found and put out without too much damage (just a table that a spilled lantern had fallen over onto), and a recce of the rest of The Sea Ghost had us find a few treasures and what we had come to find - the captain's charts, manifests and other documents. We gathered these up as well as some of the captain's belongings and set about securing the rest of the ship.

Once the ship had been secured, we split the party; half of us (me, Navda the rogue and Gladreth the wizard) returned to Saltmarsh in order too inform the council of what we had found and that we claimed salvage on The Sea Ghost as it was taken in a fair fight, whilst the other half stood guard and tallied the cargo. We reported all of what we had achieved to the councillor we had been liaising with previously and handed over the documents we were sent to recover.

Those of us in the town returned to The Sea Ghost with a complement of sailors and the ship was sailed back into the harbour. The town council and guard clambered aboard to inspect what we had found. As a large proportion of the cargo held the King's seal we were reminded that we could not claim salvage on that as it was crown property. We were also told we could not claim the ship. We were put out by this as we had risked our lives on this venture and it would have been nice to have had a base we could return to and move around in if so required. However, the council were generous and we were richly rewarded for our efforts.

Ghosts of Saltmarsh - The Haunted Mansion (Day 4)

The last blog post was the point at which I stopped taking any notes and just immersed myself in the adventure. The following entries are from memory, so apologies if anything is missed, is out of sequence or just plain doesn't make any sense.

All images for the Saltmarsh campaign will either be from the adventure module (gathered from online sources, and not intending to breach any copyright - used only for purposes of telling our story) or pictures taken by the players.

Day 4 - Saltmarsh, upon arrival, was such an assault on the senses; the towering masts of the ships, the scents of the sea and fish, the sounds of the gulls crying, and the bustle of the docks with its incumbent traders and seafarers. This overwhelmed the party a little, but after a quick visit to the authorities to register our arrival, we sought refuge in a local hostelry to both regain our land legs and fill our bellies with ale, rum and good food.

We got talking to a variety of patrons who mentioned rumours of a dwarf miners conspiracy, a haunted mansion and various other, not so exciting subjects. Whilst others were involved in conspiracies, I managed to talk to someone who was willing to pay us hard cash (20 gold coins) to investigate the ghostly goings on at a haunted mansion a few hours' walk up the coast. The previous party he had hired had not returned with any clues; in fact all he got for his troubles was the loss of 30 gold coins - he offered us 20 gold coins as that was all he had left - half now and the rest on our return.

I told the rest of the party about this and they agreed that we should pay a visit the haunted mansion and explore it for any clues as to what was going on up there. We grabbed our kit and set off straight way.

The walk along the coastal path was uneventful, as was the meander around the walled enclosure to the mansion. We discovered a number of fresh footprints that wandered around the grounds and a rather ominous looking rose bush that was in full bloom whilst everything else was dried out and colourless.

After checking out the grounds we decided to enter the mansion through the front door; it seemed as good a place to enter the building as any other. We filed in one-at-a-time and explored the hallway beyond the door. When the front door closed there was hideous peal of laughter that seemed to emanate from the door itself. This sent a shiver up my spine if I am honest, but upon chatting to the rest of the party it was agreed that this was some kind of warding glyph meant to scare off intruders; it nearly worked on me.

We searched through maybe half of the rooms on the ground floor, disturbing and being attacked by a variety of vermin before deciding to head up the stairs to see what the rooms up there contained. We found a few items of interest and a dead body or two (we removed a plain copper wedding band from one) but it was relatively quiet.

The upper floor also proved to be relatively sparse in clues and detail, but we did pick up a set of manifests and a paper with a series of dots and dashes that seemed to point towards being responses to another sequence of prompts - a form of coded response using lanterns to a ship out at sea we assumed. So, with a few clues in hand, we headed back downstairs to complete our tour of the ground floor. We released from captivity, and were able to reunite a young lady with the ring of her husband, and set her upon her way back to Saltmarsh.

A little more exploring took us down into a basement area carved out of the bedrock, where we started to encounter the reasons for the ghostly goings on at the mansion. One barracks style room behind a hidden door revealed a small gang of ruffians who put up a stern fight when we entered their lair, not to mention an encounter with stiffer opposition behind another secret door in the form of a number of skeletons. These all provided the party with a hard couple of fights, but the hardest was when we explored the underground complex further.

Proceeding down some stone steps behind another secret doorway, we encountered a number of large patches of an acidic green slime that damaged some of our accoutrements, not to mention causing some nasty burns to our hands and feet. However, with a little ingenuity, we overcame the problem by holding mattresses from the barracks room above our heads whilst we progressed through that cavern.

Our cries of alarm at being burned must have alerted the rest of the smuggling ring as we were attacked in the next small cavern and fought a running battle to the next chamber where a handy wizardly chap accompanied by two hobgoblins and several more ruffians took us to the limit of our prowess. But, we overcame them and victory was ours.

The last cavern we came to contained a lot of casks and caskets as well as a small boat pulled up onto the shingle within a cove that opened at the base of the cliff upon which the mansion is situated.

We rested up for the night but took some time to look in a number of the barrels and boxes; they all seemed to contain a cache of reasonable quality weapons covered with some quality silks. Something is going down here and we need to find out what and report our findings back to the Saltmarsh town council.

Ghosts of Saltmarsh - Day 1

Last weekend, whilst playing in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure, I tried to write up some notes on what was happening as we went along, but after a short while I had become so engrossed in the narrative that the note taking fell by the wayside. So, what I will do here is write a summary of the goings on from my character's perspective as a kind of diary entry...

 

Day 1 - We were awoken to the sound of loud bangs and explosions - the town appeared to be under attack from a pirate vessel anchored just outside the harbour. We grabbed what we could of our belongings and ran into the street to see what was going on. The town was ablaze with flames from the exploding ordnance that was being shot from the marauding vessel. One explosion threw us off of our feet and down into a fissure. Luckily, no-one was hurt as we slid 80 or 90 feet down into the depths of the earth. The falling scree and rocks from above made going back out that way impossible, not that we wanted to return to the chaos of the streets above.

We briefly examined our surroundings and noticed that, other than the rockfall blocking our way out, we were in a dusty, crafted corridor; smooth masonry walls and ceiling, with a flagstoned floor. We espied a room in the shadows at the end of the corridor, so we approached it with trepidation in our hearts. As the light in the underground realm began to fail, I cast Light upon my trusty mace and the party members who didn't have dark vision lit a couple of torches that were in sconces on the walls just inside the room to aid in their seeing.

At one end of the the room were four stone blocks that we soon ascertained needed to be used to open the large door exiting the chamber. Four of us stood upon the blocks in order to open, and keep open, the door, whilst two of our party passed through the door to find the levers that would lock the door open. We joined our companions in a room with a fountain containing stagnant water.

We explored the room but didn't really find anything except for a few coins that appeared to have been thrown into the fountain as tokens to be taken in payment for wishes. I walked up one of the exiting corridors only to find myself fall through a trap door into an oubliette type space several feet deep. A series of bars closed across the top of the opening I had fallen through and it began to fill with water drained from the fountain in the room. I began to panic at being in an enclosed space slowly filling with water and all of my companion's efforts to wrench the bars open came to naught. Luckily for me they valued my life as much as I do and searched about for a release mechanism.

The lever that reset the trap was found in the room at the end of the corridor I was exploring. Unfortunately, over the years a family of giant spiders had moved into the room and had to be dispatched before the lever could be pulled to release me.

There was nothing else of interest in that room, so we headed back to the fountain room in order to find a way out of our predicament. Navda, our wily rogue, managed to find a door that was hidden from view whilst the rest of us searched in vain for another way out. He fiddled with the door's release mechanism and the hidden door opened into a very dusty, but also very full library which our resident barbarian (who cannot read by-the-by) took a great interest in. The library opened onto another short corridor with a big door at the end and a side corridor that begged to be explored.

We decided to explore the corridor first, which opened up into a room full of very thick webs. Again, we were ambushed by giant spiders that included maybe a matriarch as one of them was huge. We managed to overcome the arachnids with a few minor injuries and upon searching the room found out not only how the beasts got into their underground lair (via a very narrow, but very high chimney which we would not climb even if we could) but also a few items that might be of use to us later.

The big door at the end of the other corridor now beckoned us towards it, so we headed that way and with a bit of effort got it open. The room beyond was full of all sorts of arcane bric-a-brac and a huge magical portal in front of which was a half-consumed corpse; well it was after one of the fighters put a sword into it. We notice that the dead person was reading from a tome about how to use the portal but we didn't get time to read it before several piles of junk rose up in the shape of the shambling dead. We struggled to defeat these lumbering beings as they absorbed every blow we threw at them, but things turned for the worse when a large floating eye with four tentacles appeared through the shimmering portal. It rapidly incapacitated two of our party before Druss, our dragonborn barbarian, literally split it in twain with a mighty cleave. The undying were soon put to rest again after the death of the floating eye.

The portal and any wish to stay put in that room for any time longer than necessary meant we were able to find our way out along a maze of winding tunnels onto a headland a short way from the town. From this vantage point we were able to flag down a ship escaping from the chaos at the harbour, and for a small fee book a passage to the town of Saltmarsh a few days' sail away.

D&D 5e gaming weekend - Ghosts of Saltmarsh

The weekend just gone (25th/26th January) saw me take part in a new campaign with a new group of players in the world of D&D 5th edition. This is the first D&D gaming I have taken part in for several years; since I moved from Kent to Hertfordshire.

The DM ran the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure...

This appears to be a 5e update of the original U1 to U4 series of TSR UK's designed adventure modules for AD&D 1st Edition (the version on which I really cut my D&D gaming teeth - the version I played for years on end and re-booted with a campaign a few years ago that I wrote up on this blog)...

 

 

I never actually played this series of modules back in the day, so it was a lovely surprise to get invited to play in the latest 5e version. It is one that I always liked the sound of and always wanted to play but my peers and I never got around to it - most of our gaming was home brew, but we did run the Hommlett series, Against the Giants, the Underdark continuation against the Drow, and the finale against Lolth the Demon Spider Queen. There were also a few other official modules that I cannot remember the names of now and the many one-off adventures that appeared in White Dwarf and Imagine magazines back in the day.

This weekend's gaming saw our party of six adventurers (plus a DM) start off at 1st level and end up, after two major scenarios, at 3rd level. The characters were as follows...

Dharion - half-elf ranger

Drakkon - half-orc fighter

Druss - dragonborn barbarian

Gladreth - human wizard

Korum - human cleric

Navda - human rogue

We had a couple of hairy moments throughout the adventure, one where we could have had a TPK, but we managed to pull together and get through them. The party mix and dynamic was excellent, so we not only played well together but also the mix of character types worked very well: two front row fighters, a rogue, wizard and cleric in the second row, with a ranger bringing up the rear and supplying long-range fire-power. Well, that was the plan but it turned out quite differently in the end much to our amusement - whoever heard of a mage and cleric leading combat? We had to run many encounters that way as our fighter couldn't roll above an 8 all weekend!

I will try to write up what I remember of the weekend's adventuring in a future post, but the over-arching feelings I had of the gaming weekend itself was one of great fun, great camaraderie and lots of laughs.

Lone Wolf : Flight from the Dark (2nd attempt)

A belated Happy New Year everyone!

As I was away on holiday over the New Year, I aimed to get in some well-earned rest and recuperation. I took plenty of reading material along with me on my Kindle, as well as a last minute addition of the first Lone Wolf adventure book - I was hoping to re-run the adventure with a better outcome than last time.

I read the rules again to refamiliarise myself with the game and rolled up a fresh character as the previous one died - I won't do this in future; I will just start the adventure again from the beginning and reset the character to its starting stats for the beginning of that particular adventure book.

I didn't take a snap shot of the character sheet at the start of the adventure as I just wrote it in a notebook, but I updated a new copy of the sheet with the stats at the end of the adventure when I got home...

I won't go into too many details here in case others wish to run through the adventure and don't want any spoilers. That said, I played it stealthily sometimes and bravely at others; I rescued a few people, got hoodwinked upon my travels, hid a few times, picked up a couple of useful items, lost my backpack and all its contents, and fought a number of adversaries along the way. It took me a good couple of hours to complete the book (including the rules re-read and character creation), helped by me actually having some time to myself for once, with no interruptions: I felt it was time well spent.

The first run through when I first got the books a year or so back was a bit of a let down as I felt I was a little railroaded towards the end, but this time I had choices and was able to capitalise on them. Flipping through the book whilst playing, I felt I missed out on a lot of other choices and paths, so I think there would be at least a couple more unique play-throughs available.