1st Adventure 3 - Campaign Diary: Archipelago Adventures - Pt. 40

Well, this is only a week late, who knew that procastinating could take up so much time?

Lost several thousand characters for this article… sigh. DAMN YOU SQUARESPACE!

Here is the PDF of the 1st adventure

The adventure

As mentioned above, I lost several thousand characters for this post. It was beautiful, it talked about this adventure and the changes as well as what the 2nd adventure would look like. And now, it is gone and there is no way for me to get it back… sigh. Frankly, I don’t remember half of what I wrote, but I’m confident it was pure genius and was hilarious. I didn’t get a chance to reread it and fix my grammar/spelling, but I’m sure it was fantastic.

But… let’s try this again and maybe squarespace won’t lost my entire post and I’ll be smart enough to make a few extra copies like I do for my monday articles.

Page 1

So, this week I have polished up the Adventure 1 and have dropped it into GM Binder to give it a real nice polish. I’ve skipped the precursor stuff with Captain Malosi as I just wanted to focus on this section of the adventure, in the future when everything is ready, I’ll be writing the story elements that tie everything into each other and make the adventures flow nicely together. Right now, just focused on the maps, combats and story beats.

Page 2

This polished material now includes information about the cave, how deep the water is, how tall are the ceilings and gives specific information about finding secret doors, how to sneak up on the different encounters as well as treasure information and I feel is a much better thing to read than me just throwing up words onto the page and hoping my ideas make sense.

Page 3

I’m not going to spend too much time going over this as we went over it in a lot of detail last week, instead I’m going to talk about a few things I didn’t include in this adventure.

At the very end of the adventure, the party is going to return to Captain Malosi and turn in what they know and get their reward, and then they are going to get about a week of exploring the city, causing fights in the local bars and spending time buying and selling equipment. This is a nice time for the DM to start introducing RP at the table, though if the table isn’t really into that, the DM can just handwave the week and tell the table they had a great time. That’s a table to table thing, and we can leave that open for the DM to determine what to do, but we will be providing information about specific sites in the city for the DM to get inspiration from and to help them breath life into this city.

Page 4

Instead, we are going to focus on what the next adventure for this party of misfits will be about. We need to keep the momentum going as players are very excited about their characters, about the game and doing new things while a game is still new. You can keep that excitement going throughout the course of an adventure, but it is difficult to keep them excited for what comes next if they start losing interest in what’s going on. To keep the ball going and the momentum of excitement for what comes next, the party is going to be approached by a Professor Atamai (which is Samoan for smart).

Created using Dungeon Painter’s Studio

This professor is an archeologist and has secured funding to investigate some old ruins on an island a few days away. He needs protection and after, either hearing of their exploits around town or getting recommended by Captain Malosi, will approach the party and ask them to join him. Assuming your party takes the bait, they will step foot on a ship and sail over to the next island. This is a great time for them to stretch their sailing muscles, they can help on the ropes, they can navigate or hang out in the kitchen all day and prepare food. This gives the party a chance to try out sailing, but the ship isn’t going to crash into a rock if they mess up a roll, there will be senior officers on board who can provide advantage and guidance when it comes to sailing the ship.

On the ship

While the party is on the ship, we can include some sort of encounter. This could be anything from mephits or sharks or goblins. I’m thinking that maybe they come across a capsized keelboat with a lone goblin sitting on top of the ‘bottom’ of the upside down ship, excited to see someone else on the ocean. If the party decides to pick them up, the goblin can explain that it was just out fishing when its boat flipped over. This isn’t a very believable story, as a keelhaul is way too big of a ship to be used solely for fishing or be piloted by a lone goblin. In fact, the goblin had committed mutiny against their hobgoblin overlords and this goblin is the only survivor…. after pushing the other goblins into the water to feed the shark that was circling the capsized ship.

This goblin could prove helpful to the party… or jsut a be a general nuisance, but its for the party to decide and makes the table interact with each other about what to do with a goblin.

Upon arrival

Once the party finally lands on the island, they can help set up a small outpost on the beaches, and then follow Professor Atamai into the forest. After a day or two of traveling the island, they come across the ruins! These ruins are currently part of the territory of grungs, lizardfolk and maybe even a few yuan-ti. The party will have to pick sides in the conflict, either helping out a specific group, uniting two groups against the other or by destroying all three. It’s their choice, and there will be plenty of opportunities for them to interact with each side and come up with their own ideas. Once they secure the ruins, Professor Atamai can begin archeologing and after a day or so find a hidden tomb. Upon opening the tomb, the party can go murderhobo on some undead, loot the place and find some sweet magic items.

At this point, Professor Atamai can return back to the university to let them know what he has found and to request a larger team to accompany him. Which would then drag our party back to U’amea and to the real catalyst of the story, the siege conducted by the hobgoblins and how they must travel into the archipelago to find the missing townsfolk and find the hobgoblin leaders and put an end to these raids.

Wrapping Up

If all goes well, this post should actually save and I won’t lose a bunch of work…. hopefully. Sadly, this does mean that you get a stripped down version of my ideas as I work through them and I have learned a valuable lesson of making sure squarespace is working right when you use it… and save often. ALWAYS BE SAVING!!!!!

Next week, not yet sure on what we will be working on. We could begin work on the next beginning adventure, or jump to creating more islands or work on the end goal story. The adventure is our painting, and we can paint where we want too! Even if its outside the lines.