Ship of Horror

[Teravala]

I really like some aspects of this adventure, but to be honest neither me nor my group were terribly interested in the naval combat portions of it. I'm incredibly down for some spooks on the high seas, but as you pointed out already, that's not really what this is. I think there was definitely some missed opportunities there. After reading some of the responses to this topic I'm definitely going to spending some time reading the nocturnal sea gazetteer, but while looking over all the Hexad adventures, this one was my least favorite, and to be honest I was thinking of completely scrapping it and rewriting that line of the Hexad to break up the monotony of the adventure sets a little bit. (Like, 3/6 of the adventures are all about undead, and to be frank I think we can do better than that) but I think there is definitely potential in the bones of this one. Would be truly interested to see any tweaks or flow changes people made to it.

[Isolde]

There is some player "indigestion" effect when an adventure is naval, a myriad times worse when its aerial (that is an impossibility), that is hard to handle.

The water creates problems in their minds and frustration. We can drown, we can fall in the sea and lose our items and many other things great and small.

[Teravala]

There is some player "indigestion" effect when an adventure is naval, a myriad times worse when its aerial (that is an impossibility), that is hard to handle.

The water creates problems in their minds and frustration. We can drown, we can fall in the sea and lose our items and many other things great and small.

Agreed, there is something inherently scary about being surrounded by water in every direction, especially if there is no land in sight or, better yet, a misty border a hundred feet out, so that land could be right outside the field of vision, or miles away. I think I would re-write this to try to minimize the undead aspect for my game, as we are doing all the Hexad adventures, and to be honest the undead villain arc gets played out A LOT across them. I was thinking of utilizing merfolk instead, but have them be extremely alien in nature, and perhaps even in communication and thought processing. (I have a whole head cannon about merfolk in the nocturnal sea that communicate via empathic telepathy and bioluminescence. With an entire subaquatic domain viva R'lyeh (Lovecraft) venerating Old God style entities. I cannot stress enough that this adventure, on it's own, is perfectly fine with some effort put in to make it flow smoother, but that in the context of the other Hexad adventures, it feels repetitive and unoriginal. "ok guys, once again, it's a necromancer and hordes of undead, because you can't escape that trope in this adventure set, even on the high seas."

[Isolde]

The island could simply be an Innsmouth of sorts.

[Teravala]

Exactly. You can even keep the body snatching family. Just change their goals. Rather than a necromancer overlord, they are stealing bodies to use as raw materials for new, horrendous life to sprout from. Or they use the bodies as incubators for their offspring, who in turn take on physical traits of the deceased, with each new generation becoming slightly more passable as human until they have a generation of infiltrator style sleeper agents, ready to spread across the dread realms. Instantly you have some body horror, uncanny valley, and an easily recurring group that can pop up virtually anywhere, as they would no longer be chained to the sea.

[Teravala]

They could even function similarly to the yuan TI, with tiers of more human looking variants, vs decidedly more fishlike, more powerful ones.

[Teravala]

I also had considered pulling some temporal shenanigans and having the lines "The lifeless child of stern mother found
Heralds a time, night of evil unbound" referring to "S" and her lost child. One of my players is going to be playing a dread necromancer in the upcoming campaign, and there is a creature called a slaymate that I think makes a lot of thematic sense for her daughter, rather than being a ghoul. https://realmshelps.net/monsters/block/Slaymate (sorry, not super savvy with computers and I don't know how to make the link into a single word.) I realize S didn't begin her survey of the core until 756, but I think it could be acceptable to move that timetable back a bit, and have Azalin have multiple pokers in the fire as it were, rather than moving from one plot to another in sequential order. Yes, he was already manipulating a group of heroes into fulfilling Hyskosa's prophecy, but why could he not have also begun searching for the gentleman caller's children, under the guide of wanting more information about the core, and after the Conjunction, expanded her mission to include documenting the changes to the realm in the wake of the conjunction. I giggle a bit when I think of S, 5 years into her mission, having to start over again because of the Conjunction, and how irate she would be that her meticulously gathered knowledge and research materials are now rendered useless and she has to start over from scratch.