Third Session (7 page pdf) – “Drinking, Whoring, Gambling, and Brawling” – Our crew is in the mood for some shore leave. They meet a quartet of hookers that they take a shine to and gamble with. Then they go fight at a fight club. Good clean fun!
Port Shaw is a city of 20,000 people. Sindawe is originally from this area but it’s pretty different from when he left as a youth. Whaling and overfishing and plantations have driven off much of the wildlife. Native practices are considered an entertaining diversion in the city, and something to be whipped out in the plantations. It has four proper districts – Tide, Bawd, Silk, and Jade, plus the plantations and outskirts. In the words of the city’s stat block, Here’s a little interlude that sums the place up pretty well:
- Silk: Home to Port Shaw’s artisans and artists.
- Jade: The lair of Port Shaw’s wealthiest upper crust.
- Bawd: Entertainments abound–narcotics, gambling, prostitution, pugilism and more.
- Tide: The mercantile heart of Port Shaw encompassing trade, fishing and whaling.
- Plantation: Slave estates growing pineapples, taro, sugar cane and mangos.
- Outskirts: Tulita ghetto struggling against disease, famine and aggressive predators.
They got into town and went right into wandering around to fight weresharks, and they want a break. Now it’s time for a slice of life on the mean streets of Port Shaw’s Bawd district. I had a boy (Tanga) offer himself as a guide, it’s helpful to the PCs but also for me to plausibly infodump about local places and practices.
He leads them deeper into the district, past ale houses, houses of ill repute, drug dens, apartments, nice walled compounds, and the general chaos of its denizens going about their business. Dragoons keep the peace by watching and doing little, including a halfling robbing an elder gnome openly on the street. Sindawe intervenes by kicking the halfling robber away. Olgum the gnome leaves with his wallet intact. He sobs and clings to Wogan a moment; the group invites him to lunch with them later. He begs off given a prior engagement, and scuttles off with Wogan’s coin-purse (unbeknownst to them).
They wanted to go to a random inn to eat, so I used this random inn generator to create one on the fly, the Cursed Spear. Then, I can’t even remember what I was using for random encounter tables, might have been “Lawless Port City” from d20PFSRD (576 pages and no random encounter tables for Port Shaw, boo), but they ran across four local hookers in robes and togas, and for some reason they really took to them! Even though none of them had prurient interest, because Sindawe knows Mama Watanna is a jealous loa-lover, Serpent knows his wife Samaritha is a jealous serpentfolk wizard-lover, and Wogan knows his god is jealous of his weiner (or whatever Gozreh’s motivation is).
I pulled up this random brothel generator to generate them but I lost the initial pdf – my notes simply record quick descriptions and who they were hitting up. “Molly (Wogan, impressive, nice, varisian neck tattoo, hood piercing, knows business guy), Ophelia (Sindawe, clean, dragon face tattoo, potter’s apprentice), Feather (Serpent, greedy, dextrous, tiny, long hair, hottest), Joy (30, left out, matching Molly tattoo).”
The PCs and prostitutes (P&P, the exciting new OSR variant) hit it off and gamble, drink, and chat the afternoon away. In a followthrough from the previous quote…
Wogan discovers all his money is missing when the call to ante up comes and has to borrow money to get started. Molly asks him if “He’d like to make 14 gold the hard way,” which he declines to the amusement of the other pirates.
Sometimes, players are really in the mood to role-play and the GM is firing on all cylinders role-playing as well, and you get magic moments that end up being more lasting than the actual locations/NPCs in the source material and session prep. Eventually the PCs leave to go to the Broken Skull and get back on plotline, but expect to see the girls again soon! Spoiler alert, they become long term NPCs.
At the Broken Skull, they discover that Sindawe’s long-lost brother Ochiba (well… technically Sindawe is the long-lost one, since he’s from here and went up north to whitey-land for a decade or so) is currently the champion of the bare knuckle brawler fights the place features. They bet on the fights and Sindawe signs up to fight as well!