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Well crap. My players, instead of being horrified at the keelhull, loved it, and now want to influence Scourge and Plugg. They've been whipped, beaten, etc., and they STILL want to befriend the two main baddies. One of my players got ticked that they just couldn't befriend these guys, saying it was a thinly veiled railroad instead of a sandbox, the inability to side with these two.
On a related note, if the players don't act out, and don't screw up, why would Scourge and Pluggs not like them? Especially if the players want to be their little cronies?
Did I miss something somewhere?
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There's always one...
Well strictly speaking there's no reason why you couldn't allow players to make influence rolls against Plugg & Scourge. Just remember these characters start at Hostile.
Thus the DC to influence Scourge would be 24.
The DC to influence Plugg would be 25.
Failing a check by 5 or more means that the character's attitude worsens by 1 step. Seeing as they are already hostile this means they find an excuse to punish the PCs, or bully them.
Assuming the PCs do manage to succeed in befriending Plugg & Scourge, neither of them are willing to give up Command of the Man's Promise.
Furthemore attempting to befriend Plugg & Scourge will likely start turning the likes of Sandara or Rosie, or other NPCs hostile towards the characters (nobody likes a kiss-ass).
So in the interest of a good sand box. Let them try, but let them know there's risks.
If you want them to turn on their "friends," have Scourge and Plugg steal some of the PCs' gear. I find that PCs tend to care way more about their stuff than about any mere *person*.
Have them set the players' at each others throats (for fun)... cut off his hair and grease him with the kitchen slosh... steal all his pants... but these hobnails in his boots... Group integrity might prevail
....or have them molest (yes, molest) one of the PCs. As indicated by Sandara.... Refusal... well, that could be construed as obstruction of the officer in charge ===> whipping time, or even worse, depending how "physical" the resistance was...
From groping to more intimate... ahem... encounters...
"Clothes off, I have to frisk you for hidden weaponry/the herring missing from the kitchen/whatever.... yes, bend over, this might take a while...."
Take it lying down ? I..... don't think so. Of course, even without going into too much detail, this could grow very unpleasant to the molested.
WARNING : This might be a slightly problematic, depending upon the maturity and fun factor of your group. Handle with care, or rather be certain about what your players accept at the table.
Yea. The game is very weighted towards the PCs hating Plugg/Scourge so much that they mutiny and take the ship. Adjusting so things are otherwise depends on the DM. The big problem is that even being buddies with them brings up the problem that the PCs won't be in charge of their own ship.
One way of handling that is running a second ship battle after the PCs get the ship squibbed and restocked with crew. Once they capture the ship, Plugg lets them crew it. 'Meet me back at Port Peril, I will have news for you.' says Plugg. Perhaps Plugg susses out Harrigan's plan for the invasion and doesn't like it, the PCs will be his backup when he makes his move.(An easy wya to let the PCs take the lead roles later. Harrigan kills PLugg and Scourge escapes with info)
One thing to keep in mind is that Scourge and Plugg feel threatened by the PCs, especially Scourge. You can let the PCs buddy up to them if they want, but have Scourge and Plugg strike out at them every time they succeed. Make it clear to the PCs that those two are afraid of them, and wait for the sparks to fly.
99% of people will hate scourge and plugg, and want them killed.
That said, this is the moment where you rise to true prowess as a GM! They want to be Plugg's men and make great pains to do so? ROLL WITH IT.
The only real issue is that you still kind of want the players to be in 'charge' of the ship. So Plugg needs to pass the reigns, or at least, make one of the PC's the first mate so they have a decent say in what goes on.
3 bucks if you rescript the mutiny battle to be Sandara and the good aligned pirates trying to kill Plugg and the PCs.
Bullies see appeasement as weakness, and will be driven to greater shows of power and greater acts of degradation.
I think my players plan on using Master Scourge and Mister Plugg in their crew after they kill them and raise their corpses as undead. While they hate Scourge and Plugg my group has a grudging respect for Captain Harrigan, they just think he's bad at managing underlings and training pirates.
Methinks their corpses will be well rotten before they get access to create undead or even animate dead. Also, I wonder how useful a zombified plugg will, be, mindless and everything
What has been seen, cannot be unseen...
My advice is, if they can befriend them (DC24/25 Diplomacy, plus other modifiers), instead of worrying about the Mutiny, they don't have to worry about that combat, and defeat it as a diplomatic encounter (award XP appropiately). Sandra may not like them afterwards, though.
When you leave the island, then you have Plugg and Scourge on their side instead of against them, which wouldn't really change the events post-crash (it was hinting that they were heading to the dock to retool their ship anyways). It might piss off the cap'n even more, which you could roll with!
Also remember that Plugg and Scourge are good friends of the cap'n and get circumstance modifiers for their Diplomacy DC.
well... for one, diplomacy takes one minute to even set up and basically, with Scourge and Plugg being hostile, plus cruel sadists and in charge, the characters are unlikely to even get more than a few rounds to talk to them,... making unfluencing rather difficult.
Try convincing that Marine Drill Sergeant who will shout you down and sends you off to scrape clean the inside of the bilge with your toothbrush.
Characters usually simply won't habe time to influence them, and the GM is free to re-adjust their attitude to the negative, explictitly mentioned in the rules
Besides they cannot tried to be influenced more than once per 24 hour period. And, Scourge and Plugg will consider themselves to be in charge, with all the liberties which this tactic affords them. Getting "the women", the loot, lazing off etc
Also, sending the "newbies" off to the island and getting rid off them that way only makes too much sense to Plugg and Scourge, since obviously the newcomers seems to be able to sweettalk their way into anything.. Much better to leave them stranded caring for the coconuts.
You can of course "try" to be friends with the monsters, but that doesn't make tjhem any less of a monster. They have expected sycophancy before and they will expect it from the characters, all benefits included.
My players took a different route, but Mr. Plugg is still around in my campaign.
Here's the story:
First night aboard the Man's Promise, the PCs ambush "Captain" Plugg and his crew as they meet in secret. They get Sandara to rally the crew (all but 4 of Plugg's crew where loyal to the PCs by now) on deck, outside the Captain's quarters.
Realizing they're completely screwed, Plugg and Scourge escape through the secret hatch to the mess, then through the belly of the ship. As the PCs figure out what's going on, several go through the secret door while the others go down through the main hatch. To create a diversion to allow himself to escape, Plugg back stabs Scourge and leaves him to die as he sneaks himself off the ship.
-Cut to the next session's opening "Vignette":
"As the sounds of fighting and yelling aboard The Man’s Promise from the mutineers fades into the night, all Mr. Plugg can hear over his own curses is the sound of the ocean waves against his small boat. As he’s sails through the hours his sailor’s sense tells him he is not alone on these waters, and with dawn comes the sight of a small island.
Surrounding the island as he approaches are hundreds of eerie skeletons tied up to posts in the water and hanging from the trees. Their bones are etched with runes that might terrify anyone to interpret them, but seeing no other choice, Plugg lands the lifeboat on the beach and drags it to the tree-line.
It’s there that he notices there is no sound of wildlife, but it’s too late, and before he can react he’s hit hard over the back of the head and knocked out cold..."
The PCs dominate across Bonewrack Isle, noticing all the right signs and using creative tactics to bypass what should be pretty lethal encounters. Plus the DM was rolling terrible that night. They capture Plugg when given the chance, but Plugg takes serious scar damage from a trip into the Whale's stomach. (They actually went after him when the Whale swallowed him.) After torturing him for information via Pinky finger loss, and still pretty near death from partial digestion, Plugg breaks into a quivering mess, his brain and mind terrorized into madness. Basically, he looks like Freddie Krueger and is even less sane at this point. Fortunately, he's tied down under constant watch.
...So Yeah, there Are ways to keep Plugg around, no many how many times I try to off him as a DM.
My players' characters hate Scourge but think they can still reach Plugg. They can't at this point, because Scourge has been poisoning him to them...but Plugg doesn't hate them as much as he might thanks to their efforts to influence him.
Scourge's main selling point now is that the PCs are dangerous because they have a "following" aboard ship...a group of crewmen who are more loyal to the PCs than to Scourge and Plugg. And, on a pirate ship, that's a dangerous situation so Plugg is going along with the move to get the PCs out of the way.
The kids are off to the island to meet the ghouls and grindylows but, as late as last session, they were still trying to score points with Plugg. They've got Slippery Syl keeping tabs on the officers and their secret meetings...and they've asked her to signal them before they get back to the ship with news of what's going on.
My intention is that, when they get back, Scourge/Plugg are going to simply try to send them on their way without killing them. I.e. their work on Plugg has made him unwilling to simply kill them so he's going to leave them on the island with a boat to make their way as best they can.
They'll have advance notice from SSL. I'm interested to see if they'll take the deal or decide to mutiny rather than spend some time marooned. I expect Scourge will try to make the deal go sour if he can. Maybe the PCs will spare Plugg and maroon *him* on the island instead...
M
These sort of threads are just awesome to read through. I'm clearly going to have to have a serious rethink about making NPCs more reprehensibly nasty...
There are some fantastic ideas here, bravo.
As an aside, I thought long and hard about the NPC quota in this adventure, and it's interesting to see how different groups handle the adventure. Perhaps less day to day tasks, more role-play next time. To be honest I was a little concerned that for those groups who like less role-playing there would not be enough dice rolling, hence the daily checks.
If I'm lucky enough to come back with another AP segment I'll have a play about with a few options for GMing these sort of things, although to be honest, you're all sorting it out brilliantly.
Huzzah!
Rich
Rich: The rolls were okay for my group for the first few days. They helped set the tone for what was going on. As soon as the players got into the swing of things I tapered them off...just having them make one roll a day. If they rolled very low or very high then we sort of looked into how that played out.
A player rolled a 1 while his PC was acting as runner so I decided he had knocked over a bucket of mopwater onto Plugg's boots while bringing a message and had to talk his way out of getting lashes...which he did by suggesting (and rolling a high Diplomacy) that he had noticed Plugg's boots were dirty and, lo, when he toweled them off they were indeed cleaner!
Another rolled a 20 while on lookout a few days into the voyage. I used the opportunity to say she had seen a Chelish merchant ship. Everyone was very excited to have found prey...but Harrigan declined to engage it, to the crew's dismay. Figured it was a good time to foreshadow his behind-the-scenes dealing.
On the much-maligned rum ration, I ruled that the cleric (Besmara) could purify it...but only if she could do it stealthily, something at which she wasn't very skilled. I had her roll, aided by any attempts to distract. It turned into a nightly game by the bard (and later Rosie on fiddle and Concho on comic relief) to distract the crew while the cleric blessed an ever-greater number of rum cups. There were some great stories/songs, usually relating to the day's events, as well as some close calls. Additionally, there was a 25% chance that Besmara wouldn't go along with it and decide not to help out...she being a fickle diety and rum being a proper pirate's drink.
Ship actions were only taken seriously for a couple of days. Afterward, PCs were doing things like "observing the officers" or "trying to figure out who's friends with whom". I tried to play these things by ear and give some useful information or bonuses to influence, etc.
Early on they keyed in on Aretta Bansion, with whom they had trouble the first day when they initially resisted. She was also in the gang that came to roust them on day two. They immediately started taking apart Aretta's cronies (Slippery Syl, Fipps Chumlett, Jaundiced Jape and some others) and bringing them over to their side. In the end, they had won all of these over and murdered friendless Aretta quietly and shoved her out of a breach in the hull they were repairing.
In the meantime, they did lots of Aretta-shaming: making fun of her during the evening's entertainment, casting sleep on her while she was on shift and then tattling, leading half-blind Owlbear into clocking her during the fight on the deck, etc. I almost felt sorry for her...even though I played her up as a real *($@.
During all of this they actually left several of the hostile/unfriendly crew to their own devices, or gave up on them after one failed attempt. They got most but figured that some were just too far gone, and weren't involved enough with Aretta to even bother with.
Anyway. IMHO you did a great job setting it up...but no one-size-fits-all garment will fit every group. It's up to individual GMs to tailor it to make it fun for his/her own players.
M
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Rich, my players had a blast playing it, almost exactly as-written. One of them told me it was the most fun he's ever had roleplaying. So thanks! :)
They did run into one problem later -- they hated Plugg and Scourge, but they were so afraid of them that they didn't think they could fight them. It was funny, but it caused some major problems for me.