Shipwreck start: A game that starts with the PCs washing ashore with only the clothes on their back and one or two essential items each. While there are other versions, such as waking up naked on a slab in the morge, I will of course focus on the game mechanics. I will allow them to hold on to a holy symbol, thieves tools, a traveling spell book, or a light weapon. Everything else can be found on the beach. Some things will be in a crate, a barrel, or on a corpse. In any case, I will use a battle mat, figures, and a deck of cards. Any time a character beats DC10 for a search, they draw a line through a square with a wet erase marker and draw a card. A merchant and a cleric NPC will show up and trade them things for anything they don't want. Mostly cure light potions, holy water, cheap weapons, hemp rope, ect. Hemp rope is made of the stems and is not for smoking. All 'trades' are in the NPC's favor moneywise. It's for the Rise of the Runelords, and I'm looking for questions and suggestions.
I hear Serpent's Skull is supposed to start with a ship wreck as well. Your idea sounds interesting, though the searching square by square seems a little mundane when characters regularly "take 20 to search massive rooms."
Unless your group really digs maps and square by square searches, instead why not make up a percentage chart, 100 (or less) Things Found On A Beach, and for every 10 or multiple of 10 on a Perception check, the player gets a roll on chart. Each player could get X rolls per workday (or hour) of salvage, -1 roll for each extra time period they spend searching. Then I'd let them deal with whatever they find until they reach civilization or emissaries of it. Seems like comparable work but would be more fun for me at least.
Actually, since the take 20 takes longer, they could opt for that or search 3 areas. For the other thing, the beach is directly west of Sandpoint so if you go directly toward civilization, you will run out of beach faster. You could use a table, and in either case research a beach after each storm or whatever. I got some display cards from work they were throwing out, that were printed with seed info on only one side. The items, are mostly only worthwhile to first level characters. Many items are unique and are removed from the pack. The tiny idol that boosts summon monster once has a squidlike head, wings, and is crouching. Sound familiar?
To do that with a table, you would have to list once only items. Soon you would have a plethora of tables. The master table with categories like weapons, potions, and once only items. All the tables they lead to. Seperate damage tables. A corpse cause of death and a decomposure table. I find cards easier.
What is to keep then on the beach? Aside from finding random trinkets.
I don't have the cards with me, but I think I included a scroll of protection from evil in a crate. If a fighter finds that he should pobably trade it to someone who has read magic and found the hide shirt or a large weapon. A few scavenging goblins that show up after a certain period are a good idea, especially if one PC found the crossbow and another found the bolts.
The NPC cleric is going to join them in searching the beach (None of the PCs are going cleric) while the merchant will maybe be persuaded to give them something if they clean up the beach (There is a lot of driftwood, wreckage, and such). I think I will include a chest with a poison needle trap, full of bottles of rum. :) Weak poison of course.
How about monkeys or apes instead of goblins? Or Monkey-Goblins!
And sharks in the water, drawn by the blood of the dead and drowned.
I find repetitive Perception checks to search for things dull. Instead, use the Perception checks to gauge degrees of success. The higher the roll, the more the PC finds, but everyone finds something. Include those items that you want the PCs to definitely have, and then toss in other things that the PCs might or might not be able to use depending how creative they are, et cetera.
Thus, for me, the thing to start with would be what is already there to be found. Then set an appropriate DC. Anyone who blows the DC finds only 1d2 items. Those who meet the DC find 1d3 items, while those who best the DC in increasing increments of 5 find 1d3+[number of increments of 5] items.
This way, everyone gets to contribute, and everything you think the PCs need for the adventure gets found.
My current campaign began in much the same way. The party awoke on a beach in the evening. Their ship had been attacked by pirates and wrecked on the rocks. The beach was littered with items that could float. From this they could scrounge weapons and supplies. Typical weapons were staves, bows, belaying pins, nets.. etc..
A short ways away (within hearing distance) were the pirate having a beach party and dividing up their spoils. If the party is patient near dawn the pirates hastily load their long boats and flee the beach. One boat is slower to load then the rest giving the party the opportunity to reclaim some loot.
Though in typical PC fashion it didn't go as planned.. 3 decided to make an issue of it at night against 30 pirates... i don't know why.. the other 2 hid in the near by woods and rescued the other 3 fools the next morning who were buried up to their necks in the sand.. admiring the encroaching tide.
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If you want to avoid them "taking 20," have them wake up at low tide. Then they have a certain amount of time to make checks before the tide comes in and washes everything out to sea...
I would also throw in a small encounter here. Bandits, looters, goblins, whatever floats your boat. Keep the ECL small, just enough to provide a little bloodshed and danger.
In fact...I'm stealing this for my next campaign.
You know what, I'm adding set encounters.
A ways away from sight of sandpoint, there are some goblins (0 level) trying to dig out the chest. A perception check crit. means the character sees them. A perception check 10 or better just means they find something. A check 19 or better means they find what they want, no magic(beyond a healing potion). Less than 10, some wreckage they can throw on the pile or build a raft. Note that some townsfolk will come and buy the firewood for their hearths with food, items, ect. That might discourage taking 20. Down past the tide line they can dig for clams. :)
I will include a part of a wreck offshore just to reward swimmers. Party size -1 skeletons.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Yeah...Serpent's Skull opens with a shipwreck and, from what I witnessed, was pretty f!!@ing awesome.The best part was being eaten by cannibals!!! I swear vengeance on you Grandmother Stink-EYE!!! And your little monkey to!
We were doomed from the moment the bat spirit started f*%+ing with us.
...we never got around to asking James what that was, did we?
I really wanted that monkey. If we had won, I would've called dibs.
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Don't just handwave the shipwreck. Play the shipwreck out as your initial encounter. Give the ship an appropriate amount of HP. Now play up your storm:
Set up an encounter in an extreme thunderstorm.
Every round everyone makes a DC 5 acrobatics check or the slippery, moving deck knocks them prone. Watch deadliest catch. That's what your players are dealing with in terms of boat being tossed about.
First thing that goes wrong: Lightning bolt to the ship's primary mast. It topples over and is dragging the ship down with its rigging. The players must cut the rigging free (by slicing the 10 ropes that bind it(or using escape artist to untie knots and free each rope), and using strength checks to push the mast over the side. Each rope attaches at a different point on the boat, forcing players to move over crates and other hazards on the boats surface.
The main mast dumps the ship's lookout into the ocean when it falls over. If the players rescue him they get better chances at finding useful items washed ashore.
Each round the main mast isn't freed the ship takes 5% of its hp in damage. At 50% damage the cargo hold is breached and cargo starts falling out of the ship.
Additionally, you're following the coast and the coastline is ROCKY. Someone has to get up onto the rigging on another mast and spot for the captain so they can navigate the rocks. Every 1d4 rounds a rock will come up dead ahead, 6 rounds of travel out. A DC 20 perception check spots the rock. Perception checks are made each round by the lookout. The DC decreases by 3 each round. The ship can avoid them if they are spotted at least 3 rounds out. At 2 rounds out, the captain grazes the rock and does 2% damage to the ship. At 1 round out, the damage increases to 5%. If the player fails his final perception check the rock appears out of the backside of a wave and the captain nearly capsizes the boat in emergency evasive maneuvers, dealing 10% damage to the boat and requiring a DC 10 acrobatics check to not fall prone and slide 5 ft toward the side dipping lowest. (GM's call)
The guy on the rigging also has to deal with effectively being on a lightning rod, especially if he has metal on him. Make him dodge a few 1d3 damage lightning bolts with reflex saves for half, and each one makes holding onto that rigging slightly more difficult, requiring a DC 10+2 for each lightning bolt that has damaged the rigging.
Once the ropes are clear and a few rocks have passed (basically as soon as it gets repetitive) the encounter ends with the players getting capsized by a massive wave.
Add up the amount of damage dealt to the ship. Figure out a table beforehand of what gear you want to give them access to on the beach. Figure out what is absolutely necessary, and what would be nice. For each 10% of HP remaining to the players open up new options (Starting with simple weapons and light armor and ending with masterwork exotic weapons, medium armor, and alchemical supplies if they aced the entire encounter!)
I ran it.
It was pretty rocking.
I didn't want to start with the actual wreck because you can't break the module in a flashback.
Anyways, They notice the goblins digging out the chest as soon as they cleared the deck of cards I created.
The dwarven rogue was very happy with the chest of rum.
The figurehead once carved by Stoat got them dirty looks from the townsfolk. When a character asked about it, and the towny related the unpleasentness, all agreed it should go on the bonfire during the next days festival. It made the perfect forshadowing omen.
The Dwarf Rogue regretted turning the goblin scavengers over to the watch when he heard the hunter might have paid for their ears. She had the stabilizing touch, so the three defeated made it to trial. One managed to run away.
Most of the weird items were sold in the market place. There was a lavender glass eye that I comicly had the one guy who collected strange things exclaim, "I don't have a lavender one." I think when the father gets attacked in part 2, he will survive and get fitted with that very glass eye. :)
All in all a fun introduction.
Creative Director
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The tricky thing about shipwrecks being an adventure start is that if you run them out and the PCs stop the shipwreck from happening, then you don't get to run the shipwrecked adventure.
For "Souls for Smuggler's Shiv," the shipwreck does start before the campaign begins. My theory–since the game hasn't actually started yet, you have a lot more leeway in railroading the PCs by having the setup be "you're shipwrecked... now SURVIVE!" "Souls for Smuggler's Shiv" does just that; it starts the PCs out right after the shipwreck but then lets them handle how they get rescued on their own.
And as for the strange bat spirit... I can't say for now in public, but he's pretty tough. Tougher than anything else you guys fought in the game! I don't wanna say out loud here on the boards what he was, but we're only a few months away from the book being out...
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The tricky thing about shipwrecks being an adventure start is that if you run them out and the PCs stop the shipwreck from happening, then you don't get to run the shipwrecked adventure.
Depending on how the shipwreck is set up you can almost always ensure that the ship does in fact wreck. Cinematic wave crash, a wall of rocks appearing from the mist, etc. can all provide an unavoidable stop to the encounter.
Will the players become upset that they were railroaded into a shipwreck? That depends on your players. Generally it's a matter of presentation, and really making sure you frame the "win condition" for the encounter well. There's no enemy to kill here, but instead an objective: survive as long as possible. If you start the encounter out with an extremely damaging event for a ship the players often realize that the ship is likely going down. A ship can only take so much damage, so eventually a storm that's likely to wreck a vessel will win. Especially if players start a campaign at level 1 where casters cannot simply wave their hands to save the day.
Keeping the railroad from being demoralizing to your players requires GM interaction and communication, as always. Getting to the end of the shipwreck encounter ensures the crew can swim to shore, have time to load into lifeboats, or something similar. So long as the players see some kind of positive outcome to their efforts they can take comfort in that result.
Interestingly a prologue of that sort is exactly what I'm starting up just now in PbP here on the boards. We'll see how it goes.
One of my homebrew campaigns started with a shipwreck. The characters were prisoners in an orcish slave ship, that crashed on the rocks during a powerful unnatural lightning storm. As the characters crawled onto the beach, they saw (during the frequent flashes of lightning) hulking aquatic zombies pulling orcs and prisoners back into the water with rusty hooks. I made it clear that in their current unarmed, and unarmored state that they were no match for the zombies, and that they needed shelter from the storm. There were some small, shallow caves nearby. The next morning, the storm and zombies were gone, but various stragglers roamed up and down the beach, and the players equipment (and other treasure) was on the wreck of the ship, not far off the beach. First however they would have to use clubs and improvised weapons to handle the orcs on the beach, and RoUS swarming the ship.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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OH! Also! It was a BLAST getting to run Smuggler's Shiv at Paizocon. You guys were great! Sorry about all the spike traps and the eurypterids and the cannibals! (not really!)
Likewise - it was a lot of fun. Plus, I like having the bragging rights of a character getting killed and being eaten by cannibals.
Basically, I told the players, one was being attacked by pirates, but all saw this huge wave, with a face, and then they woke up on the beach. The one playing the Dwarf wanted to keep their armor, so when the cleric found her he was amazed that someone wearing armor actually survived being shipwrecked. I have to remember to play that up in the future.
I had Nobby foot(a boy with horrendous club feet because of birth defects) offer them pendants with a G on them for clearing the beach. Basically they can go to any home in Sandpoint to get free room and board. The happy go lucky Half Orc employs mutant children. It's too bad the characters did not ask about Nobby foot's name. I would have delighted in describing the poor kid's heavily wrapped, club shaped feet. Surgery could fix that, but there seems to be no surgeon in the town. So far they haven't caught on to all the omens I've been throwing at them. What book does Pathfinder introduce ninjas in?
That sounds like a LARP you would have at a convention.
The wood pendant takes care of food.
You would have to dig in the sand fot clams and such, and that would be survival.
The campaign died from loss of players. Everybody moved or got jobs that conflicted with times we could play at game stores.
I'm going to restart the game where I live.
I did something similar a few years back, but without the beach merchant. The player's could scavenge for stuff on the beach (I made a percentile chart with relatively low DC's, but a good chance for random encounters [island natives/beasts, surviving pirates/greedy crewmates, etc.]) &/or they could swim out and scavenge the shipwreck for better stuff (different chart with higher DC's but lower chance for random encounters[sharks, sahugin, surviving pirates, etc])
Eventually, they found their gear, amongst other stuff, and escaped the island back to civilization and the actual adventure.