Ghosts of Saltmarsh (#14) - Day 22 - onboard the Soul of the Winter

We managed to get another Ghosts of Saltmarsh D&D 5e RPG session in again on our regular-ish Thursday evening slot. Most of the players made it, so we carried on from where we left off. 

Here is the party list for reference (we are all currently at 4th level)...

Dharion - half-elf ranger

Drakkon - half-orc fighter (player not present, so we re-wrote the start of the encounter a little)

Druss - dragonborn barbarian

Gladreth - human wizard

Korum - human cleric

Navda - human rogue

...

Late at night of Day 22 - onboard the Soul of the Winter

Druss rapidly pulled himself back into the cabin to avoid being seen by the encroaching sahuagin warriors, and let Gladreth and I know what was happening. Navda, however, as he was unable to hear Druss's whispered warning, what with him being in another cabin, decided to investigate the noises himself.

Soul of the Winter - Sahuagin arrival

As I had slept without my armour on, I decided that I would try to quietly don my mail before the sahuagin investigated our cabin. This would have been a great ploy if it hadn't been for the fact that several of the sea devils decided to invade our cabins via the port holes (this meant that my, and other characters who usually wore armour, ACs were temporarily lowered).

Gladreth and I just about managed to deal with the sahuagin that entered our room via the port hole and the one that was outside too, but Drakkon got bottled up in the corridor outside his cabin by several in the round atrium. Gladreth went to help him whilst I milled around wondering what I could do to help out as there was no room to join the melee.

Meanwhile, from their description of what happened after the combat had finished, Navda and Dharion got bogged down in a melee with a magic wielding sahuagin matriarch who came through their cabin's port hole, and many more warriors that had come down the stairs.

The combat in Navda and Dharion's cabin was a tight run thing, what with about five sahuagin including the witch, attacking them. Navda managed to get out of the room and scream for my help, whilst poor Dharion was left in a pool of blood after being stabbed with a trident that took him close to death (he failed 2 Death Saves before Navda could stabilise him and I could get there to Heal him).

As I was making my way to aid Dharion, I heard the combat from my rear come to a halt as both Gladreth and Druss were injured and hit the deck. Torn between the urgency of saving Dharion and the risk to Gladreth and Druss, I decided that I had just enough time to get both actions completed if I hurried on with my original intentions.

Luckily, we were saved by the winding of a mournful sounding sea-horn. The remaining sahuagin warriors heard the sound and began to slink off as they disengaged from the combat.

After making sure that everyone was stable, we began to explore the rest of the ship to see how the crew had fared with this attack. We met with Captain Woolgar on the upper deck, who told us that he had lost five of his crew members but was heartened by the fact that we had survived and had taken care of eight of the raiders including the magic wielding witch, although her body had disappeared from the cabin in which she was killed when we began to collect the dead for disposal.

Soul of the Winter - Sahuagin departure

The DM mentioned at the end of the session that this should have been a short encounter that we should have easily ended in a few rounds. What with our extremely poor dice rolls and bad tactics, we made a right hash of it. Hopefully, we have got all the bad rolls out of the way so that the main encounter of this part of the adventure runs a little more smoothly.

As a result, this is a very short write-up of the encounter - it was basically a combat that the DM decided to cut short (as our session had run out of time) to save our blushes.