Freeport Campaign

The Four Gulls return Porttown’s missing children and gain a tiny bit of insight about Spike’s mother.

More flavor text to follow…

Spike learns more about his father’s history.

More flavor text to follow…

After several hours of negotiations aboard the Primrose, all of the captains and other surviving officers involved in the day’s battle reached an agreement regarding the status of the various crews and ships gathered on the same featureless spot of ocean. The Montaigne ambassador who had been sailing back from Freeport, along with his retinue, would remain Castillan prisoners of war. All captured officers on both sides would likewise remain prisoners, but captured crewmen stranded by the sinking of their vessels would be returned to their respective nations. The Crimson Fleet officers would remain prisoners of Montaigne, given their action against that nation’s ships, but Crimson Fleet sailors and prisoners would be escorted by the Four Gulls crews to the nearest port and given the choice whether to go ashore or remain in the employ of the Four Gulls captains.

With the negotiations concluded, Richard, Spike, Chow, and Balama pulled the Castille and Montaigne captains aside individually and discreetly to warn them about the Crimson Fleet, whose suspected involvement in sinister and dangerous cult-related schemes posed a direct threat to all of the nations in this region of the world. The captains responded with varying degrees of interest, skepticism, and trepidation, but most agreed to pass the information up the chain of command.

While the Montaigne and Castillan officers and prisoners and boarded their respective vessels, the Four Gulls captains and senior officers began interviewing the Crimson Fleet survivors, looking for potential crewmen or potential adversaries. Many of the crew described themselves as “loyal Garwater men” and opted to be put ashore at the next port, while several others seemed interested in joining up with the Four Gulls enterprise.

This series of interviews yielded a fair amount of information about the Armada’s remote operations. The two ships had split off from a larger task force that had been assigned to canvass this region of the world for new vessels, crew, and supplies and return them to the Armada. These two particular ships had successfully raided three Innismore fishing villages, shanghaied several new crewmen, and made off with holds full of timber, dirt to replenish Armada’s limited gardens, peat, food, and every book to be found in the villages.

Among the group of shanghaied sailors, Spike recognized a very familiar face – his brother, James Marlin, Jr. The older Marlin brother expressed a bit of surprise at the younger brother’s apparent good fortune in having become a captain, while Spike registered almost no surprise to see James mixed up with the Crimson Fleet, and missing an eye to boot. The two retired to Spike’s cabin to discuss the Marlin family’s current situation, which had been tense to the point of violence when Spike had left three years previous.

James reported that after the last fistfight between Spike and their drunken dad, and Spike’s subsequent departure, the old man had sunk even further into the bottle, railing against Spike, the town, Lord Cedrik, and any number of other perceived causes for his miserable lot in life and the family’s diminished (and still diminishing) fortunes. James had followed the old man’s example, and the family fishing boat went out less and less often. The family had sold off most of their possessions except the house by the time the elder Marlin completely gave up fishing about three or four months ago.

More flavor text to follow…

While sailing toward Avalon, the Primrose and the Sea Wind entered a large bank of fog in the cooler northern waters. When they emerged a few hours later, the lookouts on the two ships noted no fewer than nine ships arrayed to the north. It looked like two large Castillan ships were pursuing three smaller Montaigne vessels on an easterly course, while two large Montaigne ships sailed west to intercept. A pair of Crimson Fleet ships entered the fray from the north, and the Four Gulls captains decided to skirt clockwise around the furball.

The Crimson Fleet captains temporarily allied themselves with the outnumbered Castillans, and their combined force immobilized two of the three smaller Montaigne ships in short order. Even so, the Montaigne captains fought back, sending ballista bolts into the Crimson Fleet ships and eventually sinking both of them.

As the larger Montaigne ships approached, the Castillans warned them to back off, signaling that the Montaigne in their ships’ boats were prisoners of war and would be taken aboard the Castillan vessels as such. The massive Montaigne ships pulled alongside the Castillan ships and opened fire, while the Four Gulls crews quietly began assisting the Crimson Fleet survivors floating north of the main fight.

Even more quietly, Richard retired to his cabin. He used his magical bowl to summon a massive water elemental, which he tasked to suspend one of the sinking Crimson Fleet ships right around the layer of the ocean where the sunlight faded enough to obscure the vessel from any potential viewers floating on the surface.

While the Four Gulls/Crimson Fleet rescue operation was still underway, the opposing Castillan and Montaigne naval forces traded fire until Spike signaled an offer for the Four Gulls personnel to act as disinterested third-party hosts and negotiators to bring the situation to as equitable an end as possible. After quick discussions with their respective senior officers, all of the assembled captains agreed and checked their hostilities.

The group decided to head south, in order to clear the area between the junction and the waterfall before heading further into the complex. Chow took the lead again, and quickly reported hearing a pair of voices speaking the language of giants. He hid his lightstone and padded quietly into the larger chamber to the south, where he discovered a tall annis hag and well-armed troll sneaking in the direction of the party. As the rogue and Spike moved into the room, the hag filled the room with a cloud of fog to cover her and the troll’s movements. The party moved through the room in slow pursuit, encountering no resistance until Balama cast a preparatory spell, at which point a pair of previously-concealed wyvern tails whipped out of the southern wall to strike at her and Richard. They avoided the deleterious effects of the poison the tails ejected, but hurried along to get out of the trap’s reach.

As the group emerged from the southern exit, they discovered a second bridge across the chasm. Spike muttered in disgust about having missed seeing the bridge when the group had crossed over the chasm from the ogres’ barracks a few minutes earlier, but those thoughts slipped to the back of his mind when he spotted a large humanoid form on the southern end of the rock bridge. While he charged across the bridge, his peripheral vision caught the hag floating in the air to his left. He reported these enemy positions to the group telepathically and moved to engage the troll. Chow followed close behind him, while Richard and Balama discussed various methods for dispatching the hag, who had since summoned numerous mirror images to float in the air around her. Shrugging, Balama attempted to dispel magic in the area around the hag, hoping to remove either the creature’s mirror images or ability to fly. She was gratified at the expression on the hag’s face as she and her flickering sisters suddenly dropped into the darkness below and landed with a sickening crunch.

Meanwhile, Spike and Chow fared much worse at the southern end of the bridge. As Spike fought the troll and yelled to Balama and Richard for backup, an armored ogre ran up to join the fight. The new combatant, presumably the ogre chieftain Graf, howled in rage at the sight of the falling hag and chopped Chow almost in half with a series of vicious blows from an enormous falchion. Enraged, Spike finished off the troll, focused his attention on the ogre, and shouted again for backup. Before Richard could arrive to render aid, the ogre hacked Spike down as well.

The fallen ship captain barely had time to register the familiar shape of Mormekar, the Grim Boatman, before Harrimast followed through on the death pact Richard had brokered between Spike and the Pirate God, shunting Spike back to the land of the living almost at the very instant of his death. In the brief interval between death and renewed life, Spike swore he could hear Harrimast’s mocking laughter at the ironic fact that the very vitality Spike had given up as part of the pact would have been enough to keep him clinging to life after the ogre’s last strike. Spike vowed to himself never to forget that sound, and to have a long talk with Richard about its implications.

Fully healed by the discharged pact, Spike quickly defeated the ogre chieftain. Still angry, he hacked the troll a few more times and set a torch to the creature’s corpse to ensure that it stayed down. The remaining group peered with grim satisfaction into the chasm, where they saw eight balls of floating light sending bolt after bolt of electricity into the screaming hag.

Feeling safe for the moment, the group gathered their foes’ belongings and searched Chow’s possessions to locate his hidden cache of diamonds. In a now-familiar ritual, Richard arranged Chow’s body, sprinkled the diamond dust over his fallen compatriot, and entreated Harrimast to return the rogue to life. As the diamond dust absorbed into Chow’s skin, Spike and Balama reflected on the relative ease with which the spoils of their adventuring careers allowed them to circumvent the finality of death as faced by the vast majority of their fellow humans, and wondered how many lifetimes it would take a typical sailor aboard one of their ships to acquire the amount of wealth currently being consumed in this dank jungle cave. As Chow awakened, Spike thought of his mother.

Somewhat distracted, Richard, Spike, and Balama welcomed Chow back into their midst. While Richard and Chow rested, Spike and Balama packed up the magical gear from the ogre and the troll. After a while, the group headed south out of the chieftain’s quarters. They discovered that an illusionary wall masked an intersection with the passage leading from the waterfall into the first trapped chamber. Satisfied that they had cleared the southern portion of the complex, they headed back across the chasm and continued north.

The rough passageway descended slightly as it ran generally north, and the party soon found themselves standing at an opening into a large chamber of worked stone. Double doors across the chamber and carvings on the walls depicted a fearsome warlord of Chow’s ancestry wielding a cruel-looking sword against assembled divine and infernal foes.

Chow scouted the room, hugging the walls and watching the doors. He noticed several closed arrow slits on the north wall. As he reported this information over the group’s telepathic link, a disembodied arm appeared out of the north wall, striking the rogue and draining some of his recently restore life essence. Chow retreated back toward the rest of the group, followed closely by two ghostly figures that emerged fully from the northern wall on either side of the doors.

Richard called upon the divine power of Harrimast to help defend the party, and the specters fled back through the walls at the sight of the priest’s holy symbol. After a quick discussion, the group decided to press on while the specters were held at bay. Chow checked the doors for traps and, discovering none, picked the lock. The floor of the chamber beyond was laid out in an intricate zigzag pattern, and the walls featured more blocked arrow slits. Suspecting a trap, Chow tried to pick a safe path across the floor to the double doors in the north wall.

Beyond the doors, a hallway ran east and west. As the party headed west, a pair of spectral arms reached out of the wall to attack them, draining life force from them repeatedly. Frustrated, they used a quick combination of teleportative magics to rally on Richard and to move instantly from the tomb to Richard’s cabin aboard his ship, currently in the waters south of Avalon.

Catching their breath, the group discussed how to regain their lost vitality, and whether Kurgan’s Bane, the Black Blade of Aknar Ratalla, was worth the effort of retrieving it.