Aboard the Maiden’s Tear…Literally

The Savage Worlds Freeport campaign started last night. I’ll post the campaign log once the volunteer player, Rachel, writes it this week. In the meantime, I wanted to share some photos of the session’s setup and centerpiece…The Maiden from WorldWorks Games. Some of the other models in the pictures are from the WWG’s Skull Cove set. In the end, I had to kind of rush things and skipped some of the finer elements (like edging) but it was still great fun to have an actual ship to use.

Jamie had no idea that I’d be using the WWG model in the game when he chose the Maiden’s Tear for the name of the ship that Pta was serving on…just a bit of coincidence.

Without much further verbage, here’s the pictures. Oh, you can click on each picture for a larger version.

Here’s a few pictures of the Maiden’s Tear (with various crew members on deck) before any of the players showed up. I put down a blue bath towel just to give a hint of water under the ship.

Suddenly a beast arises from the depths and the ship is attacked by Colm, the legendary Sea Cat.

Since I was already taking pictures, here’s a pic of the GM side of the table. The blue and white poker chips are the Hellfrost bennies and we’re using them for the game. The gold coins on the left I got off of eBay and I use them for GM bennies. All the colored disks are the Alea Tools magnets and they’ve worked great for showing Shaken, Wounds, and the like (I blame, er, thank Brian at Secret Headquarters for getting me hooked on them). The sort of index card looking things are a stack of my 4″x5″ monster/NPC cards. I’ve been slowly creating them and keeping them in a large index card box. If I need a baddie, I just grab one out of the box. For this session, that is the ONLY paperwork I had and most of that stack were the captain and crew of the Maiden’s Tear which I gave to the players to play when a combat started. Oh, and, of course, the deck of cards for initiative and markers for the battlemat.

Here is the ship, broken down to the different levels, during play. One night, en route to Freeport, the ship came under attack from some bloated and water-logged zombies. Each was missing their left arm. Those left arms were also crawling around the ship and throttling crew and PCs. The paper models are from One Monk Miniatures. They don’t have a pirate zombie set yet, so I used their pirate skeleton set. I created the Creeping Claws by just cutting the arms off of a ghoul from an undead set that OMM produced.

The first picture is the initial attack. Most of the crew was asleep or already throttled and all but one of the PCs were sleeping. Sorry for the blurry picture.

Here is a close-up of the battle on the forecastle deck as Gills and Tory try to keep Allara (a non-combatant NPC) safe.

Here are two views of the battle going on in the hold. It was primarily the remaining (and now awake) crew against a couple of the creeping claws. At that point in the fight, both of the creeping claws were Shaken (note the gray disk under the claws).

During the fight, one of the creeping claws was turned into a flaming creeping claw by a Firebolt from Zahndethus and it fell through an opening in the deck. Unfortunately, it landed on some flammables and the flames eventually found the powder kegs. Everyone was too busy fighting the seemingly never-ending zombies and claws to notice (everyone–crew, captain, and PCs–failed every Notice roll related to this). The ship went boom and the PCs, being Wild Cards and all, were thrown into the water but survived…except Thomas Dorr (who was being played by Pat, an out-of-town visiting player) who was Incapacitated by the blast. A very fortunate Spirit roll for the group (I used it to represent luck) indicated that the ship’s longboat was also thrown clear. The PCs made it to the longboat along with Allara (good thing Gills lived up to his nickname). Here is a picture of most of the PCs in the longboat as they started to search for other survivors. A couple of other bodies were spotted and Gills was about to dive in and swim to their rescue but I plopped down some fins (from WWG’s Skull Cove set) and they decided to row the boat in the appropriate direction instead.

The party pulled in the body of Thomas Dorr (he may still live) as well as finding Jimmy slumped across a door. Todd, who plays Jimmy, had to miss the first session. Jimmy was found floating on a door in a previous shipwreck the Maiden’s Tear came across and was below decks in a small closet/infirmary when the ship went boom. He was thrown clear and landed on yet another door. For some reason, the party decided to just tie a rope to the door and drag it and Jimmy behind the longboat instead of pulling him into the longboat…it was getting crowded after all.

The next night, still in the longboat, one of the PCs had a dream of cultists chanting something like “Cthulhu fhtagn” (there had been some running jokes about Cthulhu prior to the game) and he woke up to find a tentacle rising out of the water. Here’s a pic of it (again from WWG’s Skull Cove set) and, unfortunately for the door-surfing Jimmy, a close-up pic of the situation.

That’ll teach Todd to go to a family reunion instead of the first session of the campaign. 😈

Hope you enjoyed the little–okay, long–pictorial of the props we used in our last session.