Thursday, May 3, 2012

Pirates, Pirates, Pirates

I haven't been keeping up play reports for my campaign which is probably okay since most people seem to dislike that sort of stuff.  But I miss it as a personal history of my Friday nights.  My players have dwindled to two couples and random noobies.  A few sessions ago the party went back to the Animal Island they'd been adventuring on and found a secret pirate port.  They robbed it.

So last session I rolled to see if the pirates had returned to discover the theft (they hadn't).  Then I decided we better get prepared for pirates anyway and had the players roll on the hireling traits table to see what the three most famous pirates around were like.  We ended up with Il Castrato (teenager with birthmark on nose lack of appetite for sex), Campanillo (powerfully strong local from Nidus with belled legs), and Suicide Jack (dermal decorations on his legs, stupid but cruel).

While shopping in Nidus the party encountered a giant egg with ex-pirates paying people to defecate around it (to keep it warm).  This amused us because it was one that the veteran players remembered fondly from many sessions ago.  The party talked a bit with the pirates and found they belonged to a fourth un-named pirate crew but they had words of dire warning about Suicide Jack.

The party was contacted by one of the big Animal Arena players in Nidus, Hamdan al Fahd.  He's an up-and-comer, kind of sleezy.  There was a party on his black barge.  Drugs were present.  The mage of the group is now addicted to something called "chill".  Earlier in the session the player whose character is permanently very attracted to the opposite sex said "what if you could get addicted to a person?" So I made these mysterious blue folks that didn't speak, one male one female, be at the party leading various partiers below decks.  She is now addicted.

Hamdan heard the party could get animals and he wants one.  What does he want (roll on chart) a moose, hah.  The mage in trying to negotiate (with his 8 char) says "Big-ass, dog-headed panda . . . we can pull that off."  At least I think that's when he said it I wrote it down as amusing to me.  Another note I wrote down was from him list of material components he's gathered: "creepy midget monk honey."  That's entertainment.

So, the mage finally allowed the character with the highest Chr to negotiate and they got a crappy barge-like ship to bring their moose home on.  In talking with the crew I had one of them roll traits for the captain and . . . he's missing feet, so he must have been a pirate too.  And his captain must have been Suicide Jack, thus the missing feet (don't remember if I rolled that or ruled it as being an interesting coincidence).

Tomorrow they plan to head East, even though they don't know where the Animal Island actually is.  God help them.

Oh, yes it was the mage player's birthday so I let him choose between two magic items the pink marble token or the fingerbone necklace.  He chose the latter.

6 comments:

  1. Well, I like session reports, especially when you describe your heuristics, on-the-fly rulings, and just give the flavor of other DM's camapigns. Using the hirelings trait table to make up pirates--nice idea!

    The only kind of session reports I don't like are blow-by-blow transcripts (although another blog does some partial transcripts of table talk which I like too).

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  2. Play reports = good, as far as I'm concerned.

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  3. I certainly enjoy reading recaps of games. And I concur with Mikemonaco, the best part is reading about on-the-fly rulings, and other stuff which other GMs or players could use in their own campaigns.

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  4. I enjoy your play reports. These, and others', are both entertaining and useful to me as a DM. So, don't stop. Also, any campaign that has pirates in it has to be an awesome one.

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  5. Thanks, all. Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, I'm realizing my analysis of these sessions is important for my learning too. There were some interesting things going on too.

    The whole barge party was something I cooked up. Not just as an adventure hook, but to raise some difficulties for my 2 players that had used bargain versions of resurrection (they have flaws now related to attraction and gender). Only one showed to play but it did cause her some problems and led to her becoming addicted.

    And the whole idea of a person that could be addictive was her idea which I thought was cool and . . . you know hoisted her and that petard.

    Yeah, Courtney did the transcript. Was cool. I actually do some close transcriptions of conversations for my work so I should do something similar some time.

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  6. I also like session reports like yours. The only ones I find tedious are the ones written in narrative style.

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