You have no idea how many times I've started this one and got nowhere, and it comes to something, I reckon, when you end up writing about things like this literally weeks after they've happened... This will be the last one on Smuggler's Shiv, as the adventure ended here and as Viggy, the Games Master, is committed to games for the rest of the year, it is unlikely we'll hear from Raziel and his friends before then, if at all.
So, we ended the last week having killed all the cannibals and learned that the Serpentine Demon we were supposed to be hunting had headed to the Red Mountain on the South East side of the island. We went there to discover a cleft in the rock that forms a way down through a succession of ladders to the ocean below. After not-so-easily dispatching a winged assailant (like a dimorphodon but a little bit bigger,) we examined and used the clearly magical collection of rocks (thanks to Gorman for verifying that for us.) This managed to drain the ocean to the point where it showed a couple of closed doors...
There was also a ship on there where we found a mad fungus-based critter who believed himself to be the captain of said ship. Through his incoherent mutterings we discovered that our quarry had indeed gone in through the doors, and we followed... we eventually ended up in a large room with a walkway running across it at an angle, on which were three skeletons firing arrows on to us. I had the idea of using my rope to climb the walkway and take the skeletons out from there. Bronn the Dwarf had the far better idea of using the grappling hook to pull the skeletons down to us; it worked almost every time and the skeletons took damage each time. We won the fight with out too much difficulty, and moved on...
Walking through a veritable maze of tunnels we ended up in a room which featured four pillars and a pool of blood, with a door at the other end. Before we had time to figure out what to do, the door slammed and a pendulum swung down, hitting Gorman and only just missing killing him. Raziel used his knowlege of dungeons to guess that the answer lies in the button on the four pillars; we each pressed one and stopped the swing of the pendulum. Gorman had time to heal himself...
We ended up in a cathederal where our serpentine quarry was there, inspecting the room. She was surrounded by three skeletons, and on seeing us told us she had found something beyond our imagination and attacked. She put up an impressive fight, but with Traugan turning one of her own skeletons on her and the rest of us beating the living daylights out of her, she never stood a chance. It transpired that she thinks she's found instructions on how to get to a lost city, an empire that's been missing for generations. Our party was well aware that the Pathfinder's society would pay large amounts of money for this information...
After this, there wasn't much to tell. We repaired the lighthouse, rounded up our survivors and finished up on the place we were bound for in the first place (Raziel neither knows nor cares what this place is; his only ambition through all of this was of getting out of the Shackles...)
So, how about that for my first adventure? Quite entertaining actually, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a bit of a shame that the format of the adventure doesn't necessarily sit well with a 'club' environment; the idea of a sandbox adventure is for the characters to explore, examine what they find, make use of it, scurry about the place and maybe come across some red herrings that are nonetheless fun to explore. Viggy tried to do it like this for the first couple of sessions, but after a while it became apparent that there wasn't going to be time, and he had to bend it slightly so that we got the main points of the adventure done by the time the 8-week rotation finished. That being said, it was a great adventure to be part of, and it got the best ending I could have foreseen...
What of my character? I evisioned Raziel as somebody who is handy in a fight but prefers not to; a con man with a conscience of robbing the rich and giving to the poor. His only motivation, really, was to avoid trouble, and yes, getting off that Hell-hole of an island was a good step in to doing that, but had the rest of the characters not volunteered to take out the Demon, he may not necessarily have gone all the way to do that. He would have done as much as was necessary to rebuild the lighthouse and escape Smuggler's Shiv, but he wouldn't necessarily have gone hunting for Demons. If they think there's something to be gained from this island let them get on with it! However, now that he has information that the Pathfinder's Society might be interested in, he may or may not choose to exploit it. For now, he's glad to be safely away.
There's a continuation in this. Whether or not Raziel will play a part in it I don't know, owing to the fact that there's a very real possibility that I'll be moving away from the area in the not-too-distant future, and if that proves to be the case then I won't be involved with the Role Play society anymore, which will be a shame. However, if I am...
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