Navigation 2 / Campaign Diary: Archipelago Adventures - Pt. 15

Last week we finished up our island of Munta, and we are now going to journey on to our next island!

Now… how does that all work again? It’s been about 10 weeks since we did our first navigation check to locate Munta and I don’t blame you (or me) for forgetting. What will happen is our Navigator will spend a day on our island and they will watch the seas, currents, stars, birds and what not to determine where the next island is. As a reminder, I am basing a lot of this off of Polynesian Navigation, though I am removing the main component of time. It took them hundreds of years to settle the Polynesian islands… and we have a few hours around a kitchen table to do it.

Navigation Check

It’s the time we have all been waiting for, we killed off the goblin threat and the faerie dragons helped load up our ship with ‘resources’ and we are ready to get going. During that day of loading and prepping our ship, the Navigator waded into the waters and began studying currents, the stars/sun, birds and maybe even a little bit of magical mumbo jumbo, has determined the location of our next island! Unfortunately, my dice gave me a 1 for their Navigation check… it’s going great!

I’ll give them a +5 to the check for a total of a 6 for their Navigation check… which means that its likely that the next island will be pretty far away based off of our Island Coordinates chart. So, based off of a Navigation of 6, we will roll a d100 on the first tier. The first tier has a far greater chance of finding islands that are further away, with the last tier having a far greater chance of finding islands that are very close.

Going to the WotC dice roller, and hitting the d100 button… and it’s an 81. Well…. that sucks for us. Our navigation check fails and our poor Navigator wastes a day. That’s fine, though it gives the rest of the party another day off to lounge on the beaches and work on their tan.

So we spend another day and the Navigator rolls… a 9! +5 gives us a 14, and gets us to the 3rd tier! Those islands are ever closer now! Now, the DM will roll a d100, and I get a: 43. That means our future island is S-d7, E-d7 away, not too shabby. As a reminder about the odd numbered die:

When the DM rolls for the Island Coordinates, the dice called for are odd numbered for the roll (i.e. d3). This means that the DM will roll a die that is one number higher than the odd numbered die (d3 + 1 = d4). On the result of the highest number, in this case a 4, that means that you will travel 0 days in that direction.

Example: N-d3, E-d3 -> I will roll 2d4. The first d4 will be for the number of days traveling to the North, the second d4 will be for the number of days traveling to the East. I roll a 4 and 2. This means I will travel 0 days to the North, because it is the highest result on a d4, and I will travel 2 days to the East to find the next island.

Let’s go ahead and roll our S-d7 and E-d7:
S-d7: 7
E-d7: 5
And let’s pull this up on our map…

Oh, getting close to some other islands that are discovered… that’s pretty neat. Now, at this part, our players will go ahead and plan out what hexes they want to travel across to reach their new island. I am going to opt for the shortest amount of travel time, though a safer, and easier path to navigate, would be to head directly South from Munta and stick to the Discovered Hexes as they have a lower Navigation check (DC 10 vs DC 15) and are less likely to have encounters (on a roll of 18 or higher vs on a roll of 16 or higher).

Based off of our numbering, on Day 9 our players will arrive at this new island… or at least, if everything goes well! But first, the DM has something they have to figure out first. The weather.

If you recall our weather chart from before, we went through and prerolled our weather for an entire month, so we can just grab from what we need.

Let’s go ahead and say that our party starts sailing on the 8th of the month where there is some inclement weather, and according to our chart, that means our vision is lightly obscured. So, anyway out on the ocean has a better chance of sneaking up on us as we have disadvantage on Perception checks, not too bad as we can still travel at a normal pace!

And now, we need to roll for encounters for the day! Since we are going through Undiscovered Hexes, our chances of a random encounter is 16 or higher on a d20, which is slightly higher than on a Discovered Hex, an 18 or higher. I’ll use the dice roller and I got: 15, 8, and 16. Almost escaped our first day at sea with no encounters! But that’s fine, I’m sure that the party will be ready for a few more shenanigans!

With our 1 encounter for the day, let’s go ahead and determine when it will happen, this requires a d6 to determine what time of day it occurs:

Roll / Time Result / Abstract Result
1 / 1am - 4am / Night, Moon is out, Darkness
2 / 5am - 8am / Early Morning, sun begins to rise, Dim Light
3 / 9am - 12pm / Late Morning, sun is fully up, Bright Light
4 / 1pm - 4pm / Afternoon, sun is fully up, Bright Light
5 / 5pm - 8pm / Early Evening, sun begins to set, Dim Light
6 / 9pm - 12am / Late Evening, Moon is out, Darkness

Well, I got a 1 on the die. And that is going to be a bit of a problem… I’m assuming our players didn’t leave the island until the morning, but we can just reroll that. We are the DM anyways, we can stop such silly things from occurring… and I got a 6, so that night our party gets attacked by something! This means we will roll on our Encounters chart and throw it at our party! Now, the final bit we need to do is have our Navigator roll their Navigation check and see if they made any progress for the day. If they pass their check, they’ll move onto the the Hex marked “1” on the map above, if they fail… well…

But this brings us to our next point, they are moving off of a Discovered Hex, our island Munta into an Undiscovered Hex. What is the DC? Because they are moving on to an Undiscovered Hex it should be DC 15 for the Navigation check BUT! because they are leaving an island, it should be a lot easier for them to head off in the right direction as they have the island to help guide them, so this will lower the DC to 10. After this first check, the DC will go back to DC 15 because they are in Undiscovered Hexes.

Now, let’s go ahead and have them roll and we will add a +5 to their result. 11! With our +5, we have a 16 and that more than enough beats the DC and we are good to go! We shove off the island in the right direction and we are well on our way to the next one! Let’s go ahead and condense all this down into an easy paragraph to review:

Day 1

Weather: Inclement Weather (8th of the Month)
# of Encounters: 15, 8, 16
(16) Encounter Time: (6) / 9pm - 12am / Late Evening, Moon is out, Darkness
Encounter: 62 on the Encounter Chart (TBD)
Navigation DC: 10 (Leaving an Island) [Got a 16]

Not a bad day! We got going in the right direction, and even have an encounter at the end of the day when everyone is asleep… perfect! And we will go ahead and do another day:

Day 2

Weather: Inclement Weather (9th of the Month)
# of Encounters: 10, 14, 6
Encounter: None
Navigation DC: 15 (Undiscovered Hex) [Rolled a 16, total 21]

Nice and easy day with no encounters and a good Navigation check! Still poor visibility, but the rest of the week is pretty good for sailing!

Day 3

Weather: Favorable Winds (10th of the Month)
# of Encounters: 7, 5, 18
(18) Encounter Time: (3) / 9am - 12pm / Late Morning, sun is fully up, Bright Light
Encounter: 42 on the Encounter Chart (TBD)
Navigation DC: 15 (Undiscovered Hex) [Rolled a 6, total 11]

Oh no… we got an 11 on our Navigation check… it’s ok though, I wanted us to eventually fail a Navigation check to get to our next article… a relook at our getting lost rules!

After we reach our 2nd island, we are going to rewind everything and go back to the story of this adventure. We have a lot of mechanics down and I think it’ll be about time to figure out how the story is going to work for all of this! In the mean time, let’s look at an another encounter.

Kraken

Massive tentacles reach up out of the waters and the sailors on the ship begin praying to their deities. A kraken has appeared beneath the ship.

1. The Kraken’s voice echoes through the heads of all on board, pay tribute or see your ship sent to the bottom of the ocean. The kraken, Lignak the Colossal, demands gold, treasure or anything of value that the party may have, and will slam it’s tentacles into the ship if the party fails to meet it’s standards. It requires 1d4 x 25 gp worth of treausre, but can be persuaded with a DC 14 Deception/Persuasion check that the party has no more to give it. The characters must then toss the treasure into the ocean. If they refuse to do so, or argue too much with Lignak, it will slam the ship with it’s tentacles causing 3d6 + 10 damage to the hull of the ship. If Lignak sinks the ship, it will see the ship as proper tribute and allow the characters to escape on their rowboats.
2. The rising tentacles slam into the ship and deal 3d6 + 10 damage and the voice of the Kraken rattles through everyone’s mind. The party has impeded on the home of Krakrak the Titan and it has angered him. There are 1d4 tentacles that are on the ship, and each have an AC 18 with 30 Hit Points. Once those hit points are reduced, Krakrak pulls them back into the water. On it’s turn in combat, Krakrak will use it’s tentacles to crush the ship, Krakrak has a +17 to hit and deals 3d6 + 10 bludgeoning damage to the hull of the ship. Once all tentacles are gone, Krakrak the Titan appears to leave the ship alone.
3. The tentacles waver threateningly over the top of the ship and the voice of Lignak, the kraken, enters the mind of everyone on board. Lignak has awakened after many years of sleep and demands books, information and even journals to be dropped into the ocean. So long as 1d4 books are dropped into the ocean, Lignak will be happy and will allow the ship to leave. If the party refuses, Lignak will slam into the ship causing everyone on the top deck to make a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw or find themselves in the ocean where 1d4 sharks are eagerly waiting for them. Lignak then swims off to find another vessel.
4. The tentacles slam into the water, and all those on the top deck of the ship can see them tightening around some sort of massive shell in the ocean waters. They then pull this giant shell up out of the ocean waters and a dragon turtle can be seen being slowly strangled by the tentacles. The ship must make a DC 13 Dexterity saving throw or be tossed in the waves and take 4d10 blugeoning damage to the hull of the ship. The fighting kraken and dragon turtle quickly shift beneath the waves, and in the inky darkness you can see something massive pulling the dragon turtle ever downward into darkness.