Here is the fourth session write-up from our newest Savage Worlds Campaign; this one is from Rachel. The party is continuing their exploration and fight for survival and departure from the island of Carcerus, where they shipwrecked after being drugged and taken captive in the city of Porto and were being shipped to Freeport for sale as slaves.
There are spoilers below the break for N4: Treasure Hunt as it is the primary inspiration for the current situation that the PCs find themselves in. As usual, my GM comments are in [brackets and italics].
[When we last left the party, they had recently slain some pirates, better equipped themselves, and had made their way to the gully that led up to the entrance into the “palace” that Demenus had suggested they use. Rachel covers a bit of the prior session before jumping into the most recent one.]
After helping ourselves to the slain pirates’ clothes and gear, we made it to the gully near the palace. Niccolo changed himself into a muskrat (sending Demenos into more muttering about our slaying the demon worshipping shapechanger) and headed out of the gully to scout closer to the unbarred window. Niccolo scurried to the window and climbed up the wall to peer in the room, then made it back to gully without attracting the attention of the five skeletons hanging out along the wall past the window. While we were waiting for Niccolo to return, we asked Demenos a bit more about the necromancer and he told us that she is a young woman from the Southlands (Auster). After changing back into human form, Niccolo reported that the room was empty, that there were five orcs around the far corner of palace, and that there were six human sailor pirates behind a barricade around the other side of the building.
We debated the best way to approach the window without attracting attention from any of the three groups. We had trouble deciding, so Niccolo cast a spell to speak orcish and attempted to misdirect the skeletons by calling out to them to close their eyes and pick their noses. The skeletons were not too impressed as they did not comply or even look in our direction. (Unfortunately, Niccolo’s message to the skeletons prompted Demenos to begin picking his nose and wiping it on various party members.) Demenos stood up so he was fully visible, but the skeletons did not look at him either, so he crawled over to the window and climbed in. He stage whispered to the rest of us that “booger” was the password. The rest of us crept over to the window and climbed in without being spotted.
[Demenos has been alone on the island since he was a young boy so he never learned many of the niceties of society. Plus, the party is pretty sure that he’s a little bit crazy…might as well play up to that, right?]
Demenos wanted to go in the room he had stayed in, which he said was right next door to the room we had entered. Moe checked it out and reported that everything looked ransacked and tossed about. Demenos insisted on going in there to look for his book, which he described as big and containing stories about Himself. We headed into his room with him but were unable to find the book. Demenos said it must have been taken and he wants us to find it. Moe checked the other doors along this hall, all of which have small windows in the door with shutters and bars. The doors all have locks that were smashed.
We headed out the door from this wing into the next wing, which Demenos said was the king’s and queen’s wing. Moe checked the first door on the left, which had been a very nice sitting room but was ransacked and worn with age. I went into the room to look for the book but did not find it. There was a door at the side of the room, and I heard muttered voices behind the door. After motioning to Moe that I heard someone in there, Moe and Erica entered the room and I opened the door. There were three orcs with scimitars, who came out of the room to attack us, but Moe and I took them out pretty quickly.
While we were fighting the orcs, Demenos slipped away. Niccolo went into the hall but did not see him. Moe and I went into the room the orcs had been in and found that floorboards in the corner were pulled up. I looked to see if they found anything interesting and saw part of a crimson stick poking out under the floorboards. I pulled it out gently and showed it to the others. Niccolo determined that it is a wand that can detect magic [detect arcana].
[We’re still experimenting and deciding how we’re going to handle magic items in this campaign and how to determine what they do. We’ve all decided to take a page out of Hellfrost and do the whole spend a Benny to attune to a non-one use item. Doing so let’s the PC use the item as well as learn what it does but it also subjects them to any, um, less than beneficial effects the item may have. More on this as it becomes relevant.]
We found Demenos had gone back into the first wing to check out all the other rooms for his book but didn’t find it, so we headed back to the royals’ wing. We found the king’s rooms to all be ransacked—-the office was hacked up and ransacked the most. Niccolo had the crimson wand out and it pulled him towards a broken desktop. The desktop was a pretty large and deep piece of wood with no visible drawers or compartments. I felt around the desktop and found a couple of thin grooves that I probed a bit, triggering a panel to open. There was a case in there, containing a magical dagger and a magical flask filled with a bright blue liquid. I handed the flask to Niccolo while I opened myself to the magics of the dagger.
[Mick attuned the dagger. He has an instinctive understanding of what it does and Rachel knows what it does from a mechanical perspective. The rest of the party and the rest of the players do not know what it does as Mick has not shared that information and no one has really asked either.]
We continued checking out the rooms in the royals’ wing. There wasn’t much worth finding or taking, and we did not find Demenos’ book, but in a room that looked like it had belonged to a scribe I found a pretty trinket—-a gold signet ring with a dolphin leaping on it. Apparently it is not magical, since Niccolo’s new wand was not drawn to it, which made it all the easier for me to slip on my finger without anyone the wiser.
[Nasty thief…nasty thief…]
We headed back to the middle of the wings to go through the door to the other side of the palace. As we’re starting through the door, the door at the far end of the royals’ wing (that the orcs had been outside of) opened and we heard orcs entering. Moe, Demenos and I hurried through the door toward the other side of the palace, while Niccolo and Erica ducked into the king’s rooms. Demenos kept moving down the hall while Moe and I slipped into the first room on the hall and shut the door. Moe sheathed his knife with the Twelve’s light on it so we wouldn’t attract more attention.
[Yep, the party split up. Niccolo still had his speak language spell going so he could understand what the orcs were saying in the hallway. Comments were made that the orcs had not left all the doors in the wing open (the PCs had though). They had also spotted the light on Moe’s dagger as that trio had slipped into the side hallway. The orcs figured it was the pirates and went hunting.
About the same time, some pirates entered in from their side of the wing. The party was caught between two sets of likely foes. It was a pretty tense situation and everyone was waiting to be discovered and hoping that the sounds of fighting that they heard was not their missing companions being outnumbered and cut down. Todd made some comments about needing to get some blood pressure medicine…so clearly I was doing my job well.]
We heard a lot of action outside the room in the hallway-—humans came from one direction (they were talking but we could not understand what they were saying), and orcs came from the direction we had. There was a lot of fighting outside the room we were in—-I couldn’t wait to get in the middle of it and try out my new dagger, but Moe kept me from leaving the room. Eventually the fighting stopped, but Moe would not open the door until we heard Niccolo’s voice outside the door.
Niccolo had changed into a mouse and slipped by two surviving orcs, came down the hallway we were on all the way to the end. He saw pirate human and orc bodies in the hall. He turned back into a human and started whispering “Moe and Mick” into the doors along the hall as he headed back. When Niccolo made it to our door, Moe opened the door and we saw Niccolo and a couple orcs. Moe and I attacked the orcs. Finally! Although I missed the earlier battle, I did take out one of the orcs, but the other ran away, back down the hallway of the royals’ wing. He headed back to the door at the end, calling for more orcs.
[Todd used the wand to detect arcana to find Mick’s magic dagger. The wand led him to the door of the room that the pair was hiding. As he was doing this, Demenos snuck up behind him and touched him on the back (wiped a booger), Niccolo jumped and let out a little shout of surprise. This attracted the attention of the surviving orcs who came to investigate. After one was slain, the other fled while yelling for reinforcements.]
Niccolo retrieved Erica from the king’s chambers and they came toward the door to the other wings. Moe and I let them pass and we all headed to the other side with Demenos telling us to hurry and follow him. As we followed Demenos toward the hall to the left, Niccolo opened the door to the right (and presumably towards the pirates) and yelled “orcs are coming!” Demenos led us into a room with a bookshelf and had Niccolo hoist him up to push a button that was supposed to move the shelf and reveal a shaft to the catacombs. We heard the button click but nothing happens—-it appeared to be stuck. Niccolo and several of us used our cutlasses to try to move the bookshelf away from the wall.
We pushed over the shelf and saw a shaft with rungs in the wall leading down. Demenos started climbing down as we hear orcs outside the door. Erica and Niccolo headed down next, with Moe and I the last in the room in case we need to fight off orcs. [They were also trying to hold the door shut as the others went down the shaft.] Three orcs pushed their way into the room. I hit one, though not as hard as I would have liked, then I climbed most of the way down, with Moe close behind me. Demenos told us to hurry—-he wants to collapse the shaft so the orcs cannot follow and had his hand on a switch on the wall. He had better let Moe and me make it down, and we had better be able to get out of these catacombs in that boat he told us about…
[Demenos had gone down first. Niccolo shape-changed into a bat and flew down and Erica had climbed down. By the time Erica was down, Demenos had already disappeared into the darkness and had yelled that he was collapsing the shaft. Mick was half-way down at that point and Moe had just started climbing down as more orcs came rushing into the room and towards the shaft.
That, of course, is where we ended. Very little fighting on part of the players but lots of tension and exploration.]
