The Keep on Yeoldelands – Session 89

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Expedition 53b

25 Apr 2024

• Blakath (Fighter 2)
• Konrad (Dwarf 4)
• Mandras (Dwarf 5)
• Simon (Elf 2)

The party fell into their marching order and crept deeper into the caves, past a table with a half eaten sandwich, and down some stairs. They came to a room lit with torchlit sconces, and a voice called from around a corner: “Careful, they know you’re here!”

Warily, the party edged into the room, and Konrad found the source of the voice: a snivelly fellow with pinched face stood at some bars, “Let me out of here. You and me, we’re on the same side, eh?” The cleric-turned-dwarf immediately slid the bolt and let the man out. Seeing that there was a row of doors with more caged faces visible, he started working along each one, until he and the party were interrupted by a massed cry, and a horde of more than twenty pirates poured into the room. The adventurers flung some spare weapons towards several of the prisoners and fought back.

Simon twice fired off his Sleep spell to severely reduce the numbers facing the party, but several of the pirates still proved more than a handful. Mandras and the retainer Hats were both forced back by a hooded executioner and an eye-patch leader respectively, and a bald pirate with supernaturally quick movements grievously wounded Konrad before the dwarf and Blakath were able to take him down.

Spitting blood, Konrad called for a truce. The pirate leader, Cabrilla, warily accepted, and negotiated a sale of the prisoners to the party (minus one who’d died in the fight). She revealed that the adventurers’ quarry, Gaspard du Nord, was indeed in the network of caves, though she forbade them from pushing through the pirates’ region and weakening their defences against him. Apparently he had gone weird after the magical Catastrophe a decade ago and was now part of some fish-related cult. Cabrilla and the rest of her crew were only here operating as a vantage point for a larger privateering organisation on behalf of a southern kingdom.

The adventurers departed. One of the rescued prisoners turned out to be a captured selkie who gladly returned to the sea. In thanks, she gave the adventurers a shell which could act as a beacon if they ever needed to get in contact with her again, and warned them of a dragon turtle in the vicinity around these caves. The snivelly man, after a Detect Evil spell revealed something decidedly off about him, confessed to being an outcast pirate himself, and happily agreed to disappear once the party returned to Vyones. A plumper prisoner turned out to be a merchant who was effusively grateful in words, but needed some stern encouragement to be more forthcoming with actual aid. Eventually he hosted them for a night in Vyones and paid back the 400 gold pieces they’d paid for his release.

Vyones was a city on a war footing, with refugees from far-off raided settlements suddenly taking up much of the accommodation and resources, forcing the prices up. Mindful that public displays of magic weren’t tolerated, the group of wounded dwarf adventurers sought out potential houses of healing as an opportunity to both recover and attempt to entice an underground cleric into Staff-of-Healing-wielding service on adventures, but came up short with the latter. Simon, meanwhile, roped Blakath into bodyguard duty as he trawled the seedier parts of town for potential magical items. One particularly dubious merchant offered him a scroll for two thousand gold pieces; without the ability to read another’s arcane writing, though, it was currently useless, so he put a down payment on the scroll and collected what materials he could to start researching Read Magic.

GM Notes

• The lack of a cleric makes a mighty difference to how adventurers treat the aftermath of a tough fight. Losing both clerics to Malachie meant the party not only lost their healing spell casters but also any use of their Staff of Healing from the Caves of Chaos. That, combined with the anti-magic policies of the region, could force some new strategies upon the adventurers.
• I’m glad I’d converted all the stat blocks from the module I’m using into OSE ahead of time, not just because the AD&D-based human opponents were much more powerful than their BX equivalents (especially with multiple attacks; even one of them having two attacks after knocking back a Potion of Speed absolutely wrecked Konrad), but it meant I had all of the different info in one place, rather than having to dart through all the various room descriptions to find the which of the six different stat blocks I needed each turn. Kept the feeling of overwhelm just about at bay.