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.
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