Curse of the Crimson Throne Recap # 18 [RPG]

 [15 Desnus, 4708 A.R.]

Rain clouds fill the skies above the troubled city of Korvosa as Ralph, Yraelzin, and Goldcape spend the day running errands and preparing for the evening’s fancy masquerade party at Carowyn Manor.  Goldcape checks on Rodolfo and is heartened to see that the old toymaker is recuperating.  Yraelzin’s faith in Razmir and efforts to attract converts seem to be rewarded when he adds a new spell to his repertoire—remove disease.  Ralph visits the pentagram-shaped Temple of Asmodeus in search of a wand of infernal healing, but discovers the plague has caused a run on everything related to magical healing—even those requiring devil blood!  But a contact leads him to one of the city’s many black market entrepreneurs: a student of the Acadamae who has taken the dreadful risk of stealing from the school’s storerooms and selling the fruits of his criminal labor.  The prices are high, but Ralph ends up finding what he’s looking for.

At dusk, the scattered members of the group assemble.  Ralph helps everyone with their costumes, taking extra effort to fine-tune everyone’s garb so they appear to be of upper-class status.  Goldcape will go as The Harrower (completely disguising her vanaran heritage), The Reckoner is going as himself, Yraelzin insists on going as a pirate bandit from Osirion, and even Rocky gets to join in the fun.  Goldcape planned to leave her roc companion behind, but Ralph expects trouble, and wants the team to be fully prepared. 

Carowyn Manor proves to be a stately, gabled estate along Shoreline Way that includes a limestone manor house, a servant’s residence, and a meticulously manicured garden—complete with a gazebo and pond.  Every element is as fine as the nouveau riche can afford, and the party’s guests have come similarly well-dressed to match in garish outfits and elaborate masks of all shapes and sizes.  The proffered invitation obtained from Jolistina’s bolt hole and Ralph’s skilled costuming is enough to get the group in the front door. 

Mercival Jeggare is an ancestor of the famed Montlarion Jeggare,
and is also related to noted Pathfinder Society agent Count Varian Jeggare.

The wealthy, aristrocratic, and/or famous guests enjoy the party in grand style, with little thought to the disease they believe only affects those living in squalor.  Splitting up to look for anything suspicious or any word of Rolth Lamm, members of the group make idle chit-chat with a variety of partygoers.  Goldcape realises Maximos Flavicos, leader of Longtail’s performing troupe, is at the party, but her disguise holds up and Maximos has no idea he’s speaking to the city’s only vanaran.  Ralph speaks to Ausio Carowyn (host of the party), and also notices that Amin Jalento—the bearded youth he helped save from a mob in the early days of the unrest—is present as well.  Mercival Jeggare, the learned curator of the Jeggare Museum and chief consultant for the University of Korvosa’s Jeggare Library, is overhead speaking about a new order of books on arcane and esoteric subjects requested directly by Queen Ileosa herself.  Ralph subtly makes a reference to Rolth Lamm, and it seems like Mercival knows something—but he immediately changes the subject.

It seems like the night will slide into the tedious mingling favoured by the idle rich, but at least one guest has a hunch that the group does not really belong at the party.  Darvayne Gios Amprei, Korvosa’s snooty ambassador from Cheliax, loves nothing more than to prove his wit and status by embarrassing those of a perceived lower station.  He rounds on the group, loudly mocking everything from their accents to their footwear to the way they eat hors d’ouvres.  Sniggering can be heard from the crowd, as all ears and eyes turn to the ensuing confrontation that promises someone being laughed out of the party.  But although a verbal duel isn’t what they were expecting, and they no longer possess the letters obtained from Eel’s End implicating the ambassador in immorality, the Harrowed Heroes rise to the challenge.  Ralph makes cutting remarks about the ambassador’s devil-worshipping heritage, Goldcape has Rocky do charming stunts, and Yraelzin is unmatchable when it comes to pompous oratory.  Amprei fights back with every tool of his manipulative trade, but eventually finds himself outmatched and forced to stride away, humiliated.

The rest of the party is uneventful, though Ralph gathers more background on Mercival Jeggare and learns that an entertainer named Ruan Mirukova (a Varisian prodigy) never showed up as planned.  Having obtained some interesting new leads, members of the group agree that the next day they’ll follow up on an earlier one by investigating the submerged wreckage of the purported plague ship!

[16 Desnus, 4708 A.R.]

The next day, Goldcape visits Sgt. Clenkins at Citadel Volshyanek and receives a warm welcome.  When asked, Clenkins says all he knows about the sunken ship was that it went down somewhere near North Bridge.  He’s able to direct Goldcape to one of the trebuchet crews stationed on the Wall of Eodred, and a helpful member of the Korvosan Guard is able to narrow the area further.  The guard says that efforts to send a salvage team below have been hampered by the river’s depth in that area (80 feet), the difficulty in suitably outfitting a dive team with water breathing and anti-plague magic, and the presence of a jigsaw shark.  By flying on Rocky’s back, Goldcape is able to skim right over the surface of the Jeggare River and she sees, despite its muddy currents, the wreckage of a ship.  It looks to be a merchant ship from Nidal and is very similar to the one that brought her and Longtail over from Casmaron.  But the vessel has hit the river’s bottom on its side and cracked in two from a rocky outcropping.

After Ralph and Yraelzin are notified, the group prepare for a dangerous dive.  Ralph purchases short swords that will be much easier to wield underwater than his battle maul, special weighted harnesses are obtained, and a gnome fisherman is persuaded to (for a reasonable fee) take the unusual trio out on the river in his small boat.  After securing the harness chains to the boat and swallowing the magical potions obtained from the Temple of Abadar, the Harrowed Heroes dive into the river.  The waters are tolerably warm and visibility, aided by magical light spell, isn’t bad.  The wondrous ability to breathe water lessens the group’s anxiety as they descend deeper and deeper.  Goldcape’s inherent talent for natural magic allows her to see trails of multiple aquatic creatures in the area—small eels, a shark, and some sort of humanoid.

The group aim their descent to the aft portion of the fire- and trebuchet- damaged vessel, landing near the captain’s cabin.  The door is swollen shut, forcing The Reckoner to laboriously hack it open.  Inside, amidst the tattered sheets of a canopied bed, the body of a drowned man can be seen floating in the murky water.  The corpse is dressed in simple black robes and wears an amulet depicting a skull shaped like a housefly.  The Reckoner notices a wound on the man’s head that matches a patch of skin and hair on the edge of a nearby footlocker.  When Goldcape opens the footlocker, she sees that its seals have remained intact, and the contents—coins, a robe with the same housefly-skull symbol, and a heavy book bound in darkwood—are unharmed.  The Reckoner motions for Goldcape to open the book, but she shakes her head, suspecting its pages would be ruined.

Swimming out of the cabin, the group move amidships and open one of the hatches in the now-canted deck. Wooden boxes and crates—all surprisingly completely empty—float in the water, but it’s the small jigsaw shark that catches the intrepid explorers’ attention!  Curiously, instead of attacking, the shark swims over to a door in the wall and butts its head against it multiple times!  The Reckoner and Goldcape swim over and, in their first taste of the awkwardness of underwater combat, manage to subdue the shark.

Now, eighty feet underwater in the rotting hulk of a suspected plague ship, questions abound.  Where’s the crew and passengers?  Why is there no cargo? And who—or what—was the shark trying to signal?

GM's Commentary

I was glad to see the PCs make use of Korvosa's black market.  Before the campaign, I had developed a rules sub-system (drawn from one of the hardcover books or Player Companions) about the risks and opportunities of engaging with it.  The black market only matters, of course, because the settlement rules limit what PCs can purchase.  I really like how these limits contract and expand in the AP (even down to the availability of healing items here in Chapter 2), which really adds to the flavour of the campaign instead of a "anyone can buy anything they can afford at anytime" thing.

The players were expecting a big fight at Carowyn Manor, but what they didn't know was that by killing Jolistina early, they stopped the "zombie apocalypse" that would have happened during the party.  I mostly improvised the party, drawing on the rich collection of NPCs the campaign makes available, and I used the Social Combat card deck for the confrontation with Amprei.  It was fun and worked really well to bring out some good role-playing.

The PCs prepared extensively for the exploration of the sunken ship, not knowing that there's really only a couple of battles down there.  I had also prepped cheat sheets to explain underwater combat, and I think it went relatively smoothly (3D combat will also be a bit tricky), with the fact that they could fight on the bottom of the river making it easier.