T.A. playing Isaiah Kestrel, former captain of the Lady Faire
E.A. playing Alice Pettigrew
M.A. playing Captain (Scarred) Jack
L.B. playing Phelicity Gujon
Recap
Last time out the kids had lost their ship, lost the treasure, and
deposed their captain. They'd had to build themselves a new boat to
escape the once-cursed island.
Actual Play
This time out I decided that they'd forced by their dismal economic
situation into working for another pirate delivering smuggled goods,
and ran them through the Pirates of the Spanish Mainone-sheetSmuggler's Song.
They did pretty well, though they did end up running from the watch
several times. And they mostly got paid.
Amusingly, my sister was not happy when they told her they'd been
fighting in a bar, so I've promised to steer closer to a “G” rating
next time…
A well told fantasy story, both serious and humorous, with excellent
art and interesting characters, Bone starts small and builds up to
mythic. Well worth reading.
The usual GM in my adult group wasn't available this month (for very
good reasons), so I ran the “Dead Men Tell No Tales” one sheet for
Pinnacle Entertainment Group's Savage Worlds based game Pirates
of the Spanish Main for them. I had a lot of fun, and the group
seemed to enjoy it.
If you happen to be using Windows Emacs and CygwinPython there's
an annoying interaction where “M-x run-python” hangs. The easiest way
to fix it is to mount the directory where you have your emacs
installation into the Cygwin file name structure. For instance, I
have my emacs installation in C:\emacs\emacs-22.2, and in a
cygwin shell I did mount -b‘C:\emacs' /emacs, and now running the
Cygwin python works.
The emacs function run-python adds the emacs data-directory to
the PYTHONPATH in the emacs process-environment before running
python; unfortunately, since this is the MS Windows emacs, its
data-directory starts with a drive letter and a colon. When the
Cygwin python initializes sys.path it splits PYTHONPATH at the
colons, which means sys.path ends up with the drive letter as one
component (usually interpreted as a relative path) and everything
after the colon as another component. It that's a valid Cygwin
pathname for the Emacs data directory (which is what the above mount
command did), things work (accidentally).
It turns out that if you execute the command xterm-mouse-mode (or
evaluate (xterm-mouse-mode 1) in your initialization file) when
running Emacs under Screen it allows “non-modified single clicks” to
work. Normal mouse functionality is still available by holding the
Shift key while clicking. I use the PuTTY ssh client for remote
access to various servers, and this works well Emacs in Screen under
PuTTY, too.
I was very pleased to discover large parts of µstr compile and seem
to work under VMS v5.5-2 with GCC 2.7.1, which is almost the only
compiler available to me on that machine. The other is VAX BASIC,
which has adequate simple string handling, but lacks advanced string
handling and has only very painful facilities for dynamically
allocating complex data structures and working with them.
[2019-11-09: I was writing a program to get e-mails from VMS Mail
using the callable interface, then parse the body of the email into a
form that could be further processed by POISE DMS programs.]
Kull: Exile of Alantis, by Robert E. Howard, copyright 2006 Kull
Productions, LLC; illustrations copyright 2006 Justin Sweet; Del Rey
Books/The Random House Publishing Group/Random House, Inc.; first
printing; ISBN 0-345-49017-7.
Well worth reading, and not just as a precursor to Conan. The essay
“Atlantean Genesis” by Patrice Louinet, included in the book, argues
on p. 288 that with the three Kull tales that were published during
Howard's life, Howard had invented a new literary subgenre: “Heroic
Fantasy”, “Epic Fantasy”, or “Sword & Sorcery” by modernizing
fantasy through eliminating “…the chivalrous aspects, the flowery language,
and stilted personalities, writing violent tales in a realistic
style…” and that seems reasonable.
I finally got to finish the Pirates of the Spanish Main one-sheet
“Dead Men Tell No Tales” that I've been running for the
kids.
E.A. and L.B. were both here for this one, so the roster was:
T.A. playing Isaiah Kestrel, Captain of the Lady Faire
E.A. playing Alice Pettigrew
M.A. playing Scarred Jack
L.B. playing Phelicity Gujon
Because we've had to split the adventure up over three sessions, and
they'd finished the last one the skeletons, and I wanted a big start
to this session, I told the kids their PCs had been arguing about what
to do with the treasure and hanged lady for about an hour. They spent
a few minutes talking about it, and then I had them make Notice rolls
to avoid being surprised by the skeletons, reanimated after an hour.
They picked up a few wounds in the fight, but managed to finish the
skeletons off. T.A.'s bad luck with initiative cards and low rolls
continued, though not as badly as before.
They then tried to figure out how they could free themselves of the
curse and the skeletons, and decided the lady needed buried, which
they proceeded to do, right outside the mine entrance. I had them
make Strength roles to avoid becoming Fatigued, which a couple of the
characters failed. And that finished out another hour, and a few
minutes later the skeletons attacked again. M.A. failed Scarred
Jack's Notice roll, so he didn't get dealt in the round, and got hit
by the one of the skeletons. T.A. forgot to have Isaiah boast the
first round, and ended up owing me a bennie. Eventually they killed
the skeletons again, and decided, since the curse obviously hadn't
been lifted, that they needed to bury the hanged lady in a cemetery at
the church in town. Meanwhile, the weather was working up to a storm.
So, they dug the lady up, but in doing so T.A. and L.B. failed enough
Strength rolls to fall unconscious (remember that the curse has been
aging them rapidly), and they knew if they left the unconscious
characters there they would be killed when the skeletons reanimated,
so M.A. and E.A. had Jack and Alice pile the hanged lady's body on
Isaiah and dragged them to the town. Unfortunately, part way through
digging the new grave, E.A. failed Alice's Strength roll and fell
unconscious. Jack was able to get her most of the way out of the
grave, and finished burying the hanged lady with the six skeletons
only 20 yards away and the zombie pirate captain only 60 yards away.
(Apparently, the zombie pirate captain had been chasing them for days
across the bottom of the sea). Unfortunately for our heroes, the rest
of the crew, who'd been left on the sloop offshore, picked this moment
to come ashore. Upon seeing the sorry state of their captain and
officers (and failing their Spirit rolls, they were overcome by greed,
whacked Jack on the head with the shovels, stole the map from their
unconscious captain, and set off for the treasure.
The PCs awoke to a hurricane (which I'd earlier rolled using my
weather die from Flying Buffalo), and found shelter in the church
crypts. I actually wanted to end the adventure there, but the kids
insisted we continue.
After a few days the weather finally subsided and they immediately
headed back to the mine to look for the treasure. It was gone, except
for a bent half-farthing piece that had been overlooked in a crack in
the floor. At this point they were all suffering from Fatigue from
not eating or drinking for days, and so they went back to the town to
search for water. When T.A. failed a roll to avoid Fatigue, I ruled
he'd gone delirious, wandered out on the dock, and falling into the
water, to be washed out into the bay. L.B. had Phelicity swim out to
save him, but by the time she reached him T.A. had failed his swimming
roll and was drowning. Phelicity swam down and brought him to the
surface and back to shore, but he had died. Luckily, M.A. tried to
resuscitate, and failing the first roll spent a bennie (the last
bennie among the group) to reroll, and aced well enough to overcome
the –4 penalty from drowning and the –2 penalty from being untrained
in Healing, and saved Isaiah.
At this point I pointed out Isaiah's consistent bad luck, loosing the
treasure, loosing his ship, and Jack's comparative good luck, and like
proper little pirates they voted Isaiah out as captain and Jack in.
After that Jack climbed some palm trees and found some weird fruit so
they could eat. I decided that the island had no living creatures
at all, due to the curse, but that they could find enough edible
plants so they wouldn't starve for the weeks it would take while they
built a small boat (with both oars and a sail) from timber scavenged
from the houses in the village to take them off the island to begin
their search for their traitorous crew and their treasure.
And that's were we left them.
Since this actually ran pretty long, once all sessions were
considered, I gave them all 5 XP. Not wanting T.A. to be too
discouraged, I let him trade his “Captain” edge in for something else.
I didn't let him buy off his “Cocky” Hindrance, though.
Judging by everybody's reactions, I've got a Pirates of the Spanish
Main campaign to run now. I can already see how to work the
“Smuggler's Song” one-sheet in as the next adventure.
Reflections
Add Wound Penalties to Fatigue Penalties and things really start
getting grim fast.
About
Lacking Natural Simplicity is one, not particularly flattering,
definition of sophisticated.
This blog chronicles my journey through our at times too complicated
and sophisticated world.
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