Where our heroes travel back in time to 1991 when TSR was frantically trying to get all grimdark on our asses to compete with Vampire: The Masquerade.
As Jon has done several times before, our heroes find themselves stuck in an old school D&D module from the past. This time around they unwittingly join the crew of The Ship of Horror.
I think there was some kind of nostalgia here for you?
Very much so. The first major campaign I ran was a 2nd edition Ravenloft game, and its 4th chapter was the Ship of Horror. Took most of highschool, started with 2 players and grew to 4. There were 6 adventures, from level 1 to 13 or so. If for some inexplicable reason you could survive the end of Ship of Horror, that is.
An adventure starring Jaxxo the Lizardfolk Monk, Jim Clocks the Half-Aquatic Elf Rogue, Brubax the Goliath Barbarian, Tidus the Triton Cleric and L’Eau D’ur the Genasi Warlock.
I’m in black and Jon (the DM) is in blue.
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Point of order, in my brief little dive into the history of this module I found that it was written by Anne K. Brown. A few things here. One, big props to her for being a lady in what was certainly a male dominated industry in the late 80s and early 90s and going from Assistant Editor of Dragon Magazine to designing modules in like a couple of months. Two, she was apparently a big fan of Greyhawk but wrote for Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance so that is cool. In fact, Ship of Horror was the first module supporting Ravenloft which I am assuming is kind of a big deal and shows that the company had a lot of faith in her. Three, she had a bit of a renaissance in the 2000s as an author of non-fiction aimed at middle-school aged kids. Wait, what? That’s right, you can read Anne K. Brown’s take on the lives of Katy Perry, Gwen Stefani, Roger Federer or her takes on “Staying Safe Online” and “Migraines”. Weird.
Now that the history lesson is out of the way, let’s get started. We actually took two sessions to get through this little adventure, but I seriously took like 20 little pages of notes. That said, we’re going to be skipping through some of the narrative and just focusing only on the best bits. You’ll thank me later.
Dealing with Those Githyanki
The session started off with us onboard The Clepsydra, the fast little sloop owned by Jim Clocks. We were on our way to a treasure island, which in fact will be our next adventure. While stopped at a port city, the Ne’er Do Well Cads are pulled away from the important business of drinking by the sounds of a ruckus in the town square.
If you’ve been keeping tabs on our little foray into Spelljammer, you might remember that in the very first adventure we kind of happened upon a +3 Vorpal Sword that has since been wielded by our Cleric, Tidus. Small problem: the sword belonged to someone called The Lich Queen and every so often we are kind of ambushed by Red Dragons and Githyanki. I think this session marked the third such encounter.
But anyways it wasn’t an encounter, Tidus just gave the Githyanki back the +3 Vorpal Sword without a fight. Womp womp.
Almost certainly the first time in the history of DnD that someone gave back a silver sword. Color me a little disappointed. See, yeah, red dragon/githyanki wizard battle in populated area is no good, innocent bystanders and all. But I wanted that stolen silver sword to connect Tidus’ divine destiny into having to go to war with the Githyanki. Womp womp indeed. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
