Thirty-Eighth Session (14 page pdf) – “Return to Bloodcove” – The party takes their new friend, loot, psychological disorders, and parasites back to the newly squibbed ship – where their newest crewman awaits them! More refitting is necessary to build in the Shory hover-platform, so it’s off to Bloodcove for debauchery galore.
They get back to Rickety’s Squibs and good ol’ Rickety has refitted their ship, and now gets to add in a Shory hover-platform!
The big news is that Samaritha, Serpent’s wife, has given birth! “A perfectly normal, live human birth,” all the crew members are happy to repeat verbatim. Really he’s a serpentfolk that hatched from an egg, but Samaritha is happy to mind-control people into believing differently. They name him Jormun, son of Ref (Serpent’s real name is Ref Jorenson).
A technique I like to use with this group of “bad guy” pirates is that when something that would be horror movie fodder if aimed at them – like everyone parroting the same stock phrase about something clearly indicating there’s mental influence at play – when they’re the ones “in on it” and it’s to their benefit, they are really tickled pink. It reinforces that they’re “bad guys” even if they’re not really being that bad, it gives them a sense of power, and it reassures them that all these NPCs (family, friends, crew) they accumulate aren’t just a DM trick to give them vulnerabilities.
This then segues into technique two – adding realism to the game world and having things happen when they are not around. They have lost a couple crew members, including one who just got drunk and drowned in a ditch. When they leave a pirate crew on leave in a settlement for a while, especially one made of some fundamentally different subgroups, shit happens. I always make a random table and then roll for every single crew member. Roughly, 1 means something permanently bad happens, 20 means something really permanently good happens, and proportionately inbetween, and I’ll slap together a mini-chart for each option.
I’ll customize it to the place they left them. Rickety’s Squibs and Bloodcove:
- 1: Something really bad. Roll 1d4:
- 1: Death by misadventure
- 2: Death by murder
- 1: crew member
- 2: monster
- 3-4: random NPC
- 3: Permanent injury
- 4: Something else appropriate
- 2: Something bad. Roll 1d6:
- 1: Equipment loss
- 2: Abducted
- 3: Lost
- 4: Arrested
- 5: Wanted by the authorities
- 6: Made an enemy
- 3-5: General bad times, -1 morale
- 6-15: Another day in the life
- 16-19: General good times, +1 morale
- 20: Something really good. Roll 1d4: (l run out of good ideas a lot faster than bad ones)
- 1: Item
- 2: Money
- 3: Intel
- 4: Friend
So they have a couple deaths by misadventure, one abduction, one permanent injury, one equipment loss, an arrest, an enemy, and so on. I’m always surprised how loyal the PCs are to their pirate crew; at some point you’d think they’d just say “fuck that guy let’s leave” but it inevitably turns into a whole game session of them helping clean up after their crew. Which results in high crew numbers and morale, so there’s utility to it as well!
Though sometimes they cut bait on one of these mini-plots, like they almost go infiltrate an Eyes Wide Shut type rich people sex club but they smell a rat and walk away forever.
Random generation is leavened with real ongoing plots like the pregnancy and Flavia’s extracurricular habits. But then some randomness helps add texture to these, too – like Serpent botching four consecutive Charisma rolls with his wife; clearly his going off gallavanting while she’s hatching an egg didn’t go down real well.
This is one of my key DM cycles for a long running campaign. Use randomness to spice things up, it turns into people/plots/things the PCs get interested in, so substitute those into later random rolls when they are appropriate, and also give them all a life of their own that keeps the PCs realistically engaged.