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HEY SAILOR, GOT PROTECTION?

06/21/2008

Recap time!  As usual, seems the later in the evening it is, the less detail I have.  (Starts off "This is how many people we encountered of each kind" and ends with "we do stuff".)

This game: Armored Fish, Lightning Chicken, Chaos Urchins, Hitchcockian Birds, Volcano Elf (Mark)

Maukeegan island is under attack as we arrive.  It is under seige by giant fish, whom it turns out when a couple break off and come our direction, are armored!  Yup.  Metal scaled fish.  Might have made nice armor out of these guys.  But none of us really wanted to tangle with them.  By "None of us", I'm referring to the two of us who were present (Turtle & Spider).

As you recall, a skiff came out to meet us, occupied by a woman who was half-orca/half-human.  We pulled her on board while she implores us to turn tail.  Something we agreed to do.

My plan:  Row out to head off the fish before it's too close to our ship, using a dingy that I've improvised to be used by one man.  There, I intend to wound the fish in such a way as to make it think twice about pursuing (I figure a shot to the eye would do it).  I give my speech and prepare to set out when the captain decides sending a dingy out alone might just draw it's attention away.  I shrug and let him do his thing.

Figuring it might be a small delay, the captain makes a gazillion successes on his roll (and he's mortal!) and the fish swallows the ship.  But in it's furious leap and subsequent plunge, it causes two huge waves that hit our ships.  Four men are swept over, but El Tortuga fishes them ouf of the water and I row them back to the ship.

Only loss:  One dingy.

Suddenly we have company, of a decidedly less violent sort.  The following flotilla comes out to meet us:

We talk with them and discover a few things.  First, consider Maukeegan island a loss.  These are it's last refugees.  Second, we're crazy people for being at sea without "protection".  Ships that travel the hazardous, somewhat chaos-touched wyld seas, are protected by enchantments.  We have no such thing, which leaves us vulnerable.

The merchant ship is empty of cargo.  Seems they had just unloaded in port when the craziness happened.  So he's at sea without profit.  This makes our captains suspicious that if push-came-to-shove, he'd probably take what he could and run away.

Fortunately for us, he's not outwardly violent.  Shellhead makes friends with the crew, oozing charisma all over them.  In fact, they let him tour the merchant ship.  He discovers not only their magical protections, but that they have a mounted weapon which could probably trash our small fleet if we came to a fight.

The new plan is to head for the Merchant ship's homeland.  When we get to treachours wyld areas, the Sea Mist will take on excess people from the fishing ships to keep them safe.  We, of course, are practically on our own.

So the mini-armada heads west.  We do pretty well until we hit the first area of wyld.  Then, during the night, we are attacked by a golden hawk.  Said hawk can fly miles in just a second.  So it does strafing runs on the PCs (Primarily Truthspinner and Jade Tiger).  Truthspinner, noted for his perceptive abilities, proceeds to blow half a dozen perception rolls.  (Well, no botches, but a guy with up to 10D of perception should not be rolling 1 success.)  The fight is on.  The hawk manages to nearly sever JadeTiger's head!  Good thing he went to beastform on the exact same segment that the hawk attacked.  So he regenerates.  We finally do some damage to it when Truthspinner manages to make his perception roll and catch the hawk with his chain, whereupon Lyta (the orca woman) smacks it with anything handy.  It gets away again, but we finish it off on the next run, when it's snagged and then Lyta pulverizes it with a brutal hit that sends gold feathers up in a clowd.  Lightning Chicken is dead.

Seems the feathers are real gold.  I save a few before they "wyld away".  But they aren't valuable here.  You see, our currency is pretty useless.  We'll have to rely on barter.

Shortly, the ships that were under attack begin to fall apart.  Seems the animal's high-speed move-throughs trashed our rigging.  Two ships are down!  In the Wyld!

We convince the lead ship to keep stay one day, but they won't stay longer, feeling it's unfair to everyone else (including the fishing ships) to stay longer.  During that one night, Truthspinner manages to repair one ship with a very solid crafts roll.  (Even had a little time left over.)  The foreman on the other ship was the legendary hero buddy of Jade Tiger, who managed only one success on the roll.  After a discussion of the best way to handle this situation, Truthspinner takes his argument directly to the Lord Protector and tells him that while breaking up the fleet seems like a bad thing, in this case he will remain behind to protect the ship, get it up and running, and then catch up with the fleet outside the wyld.

The plan becomes that Truthspinner stays behind to oversee repairs, Jade Tiger remains to help surveil the ship and to do some heavy lifting, and a skeleton crew remains to help pilot the ship.  My design plans call for a spiderweb-like rigging that should give the ship a unique look.

We do the repairs, which take three days, then head out.  Problem is, during this time we cross over a bed of chaos urchins which proceed to hurl spins up through the hull and at us on deck.  Sadly, Four men are killed.  A few more are injured.  Truthspinner takes command from the captain and pilots the ship out of harm's way, then apologizes to the captain for overstepping.  He didn't seem to mind (at least Mark didn't say anything about him being offended).

In safe seas, we meet up and head to land.

We are met by a flotilla of ships from short who welcome us and set up a feast.  I mention to Jade Tiger that this is the first time no one has tried to kill us.  Then during the feast, some of us go unconscious.  Well, most if not all of us.  Only Leonardo's legendary Tortoise constitution manages to overcome the poison.  He confronts them and even goes crinos on them to scare them into telling what's going on.  After reviving his team mates, he manges to get from the villagers that we were to be sacrificed to the god of the volcano.

Seems his heralds are coming.  The "thousand wings".  It's a flock of chaotic birds that will blow thorugh the central gate and rip up the town.  We move there and perform some mass combat.  Some fires are set up to funnel the forces even smaller.  Jade Tiger (JT) is making the war rolls.  We are a small unit.  Our sorcerer/ranged attacker is Stings-in-shadows (SiS).  Our general attack force and stamina are handled by Shelled Tortoisian Death (STD).  The war wages against the larger bird air force.  As we shrug off damage with efficiency, the birds slowly get whittled down.  Even when enveloped, we have little trouble.

When the birds are dead, the people cheer and kill off any extra birds.  They still fear the volcano god.  We head out to sea, 70 miles, after making a bargain that when we are done with this task, they will enchant our ships for protection at sea.

The four of us get near the island, in animal form, and do combat with sahaugin.  Our superior speed allows many of us to perform swim-by-stabbings, but some of them slower fish, who only know how to engage foes, get cut up.  Fortunately, STD is pretty resistant to them. They start holding action to attack us on the swim-by, and cut up a few of us.  But eventually the Man-Turtle, Sailfish, Leopardshark/Dolphin, and Mako manage to overcome the bad guys.  Then they make the mistake of trying to recover nearby on the ship.  For that is in the range of the volcano god's explosive fury.  He sends up a cloud and rains down lava on us.  We have to flee.  The only serious injury is to Lyta, who still gets away.

We send her back to our fleet and rest on shore before going back to engage.  Our time resting provides the volcano god time to make some remodeling changes; Primarily, he's tilted the volcano to aim like a cannon at the nearby civilization.  So we get a move on and come to him through an underwater entrance.  This time we arrive as sahaugin.  While we can't "wyld hunt" these guys, it was discovered that their eyes, besides being a delicacy, allow one to transform into sahaugin.

He mouths off to us about the usual villainous stuff.  Seems he's a Rakshasa-type (elf) who has no problem ignoring the effects of magma.  We have to make environmental resistance rolls for the boiling water, and then for the ground when he later changes it to lava.  For you see, he doesn't handle getting injured too well.  He also didn't like our weapons so he de-magicked them with a Disjunct power.  So we do this fight in a slightly more arduous manner, without SiS's ninjatu and TS's unbreakable web (chain).  The deathblow is dealt and then we leave.  We get a big magma sword.  The islanders are safe.

Our ships are being enchanted.  We're taking a well-earned rest on shore.  Next up:  Go back and change the notations on the Plinth so that the people coming through the entrance to this world don't head to the wrong place (Read: The island eaten away by fish).

We also have a "Pearl Steel Trident" salvaged from the sahugin.  But everyone uses Martial Arts rather than Melee, so it' goes to Lyta, the Orca-girl.  (Darfolin, I believe is the race of the Orca girl; I forget the name of the race of the baboon people.)

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