Horror at sea

[wolfgang_fener]

My PCs and all the surrounding area have just been trapped in Ravenloft.

They are already searching the Sword of the Dale and should follow in this adapted version of the well known trilogy. Of course they may as well forget about that mission and investigate right away what's happening to their land and find out faster than expected that "Daggerdale" is now a large island in the sea of sorrows.

Of course Daggerdale was nowhere near the sea while in FR so there is no boat availlable right now but I expect them to explore the new area to find out what this is all about.

I will need a Ravenloft module taking place at sea. I guess I'll have to design that one from scratch (I do have ample experience at that but not in RL). Unfortunately it is not like ten years ago while I was in college, I really don't have the time anymore to fully write a whole module.

My question is do you have any suggestion of any published material I could use in part or as a whole for a RL adventure at sea. My 5 PCs /NPcs are level 3-5 right now but would be near level 7 if they finish the sword trilogy first.

I expect some kind of ghost ship story with maybe a visit to some strange island before eventually reach the Core.

If I start from scratch, I may place a lighthouse on a small island a few miles away from the new Daggerdale island. That would lure them at sea to investigate the light spot they can see far away at sea at night. I have no idea how they will manage to find/build a boat bigger than a small river barge but that is their problem. At worse, a boat could come to them to investigate the new island, it could very well be a gost ship.

Anyway the first step could be to manage to reach the island with the lighthouse and survive whatever horor could be placed there. The players should be able to learn about the lighthouse story, how, when and why it was built and so on. It would be easy to imagine the place to be haunted...or maybe the lighthouse itself is a ghostly manifestation in itself or maybe it is like an unreacheable will o'wisp luring sailors to their death... Not sure yet. Some pirate action could be fun too, maybe they would have to collaborate with some horribly nasty pirates to get passage to the main land...

Anyway, I already know from experience that it is difficult to role play a long trip at sea. I will need a whole bag of tricks to keep this interesting and terrifiing. Any ideas are welcome.

[Joël of the FoS]

Ship of Horrors is perhaps a good choice.

It starts with a ghost ship, then a creepy island. It's quite unjoyable until the end.

So you'd like to cut the end, which is a cheesy dungeon crawl against a 20th noname necromancer. Insert your own ideas here instead

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Or the Lighthouse calls for Monette (werebat) (see Darklords). Are they switched from one Lighthouse in Fr to this one in RL?

Monette is a one shot darklord anyway So it's not too bad if the PCs blast him.


Joël

[wolfgang_fener]

The lighthouse just happen to be there on a small rocky island in the sea of sorrow not to far away from where the new "daggerdale" island domain appears. It was already in RL before, probably built after too many ships drifted too far away from the coast of Dementlieu and got lost and sank after hitting the rocky outcrops in this foggy area.

The lighthouse island will be about 30 miles away from my daggerdale island (the lighthouse is flashing a specially designed continual light spell through the usual lighthouse turning lens from atop a very high tower so it can be seen from that distance on a clear night.

What horror will be found on the lighthouse island remain to be designed. I dont`want to write everything down right now because I still have the sword of the dales trilogy to run and I don`t want my mind to be focussed to far away from the actual module I`m Dming (otherwise I would have the tendency to rush things to bring my players asap to this point).

Maybe I`ll let my players figure out how to reach the lighthouse, only to be trapped there for a while. Then the ship from Ship of Horror will be seen and I`ll let them travel with the hauted ship for a while until they reach the core, using whatever I like from this module.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

There's also Niether Man Nor Beast which starts out on a ship, but it goes into a vastly different horror direction than ghost ships and the like. Bleak House starts at see too, but may be too "big" and too Ravenloft continuity entangled for your purposes. But they are both options...

Off the top of my head, there's also Andre de Sang from Children of the Night: Werebeasts, and Myxitizajal from CoTN: vampires. Again, both different types of horror....

[Brother of Mankind]

Also Auden Beck also from CoTN: vampires. There was a QTR (#8 IIRC) that dealt with horror on the water.

And they can always try to sail to the nightmare lands!

[wolfgang_fener]

I'm reading Ship of Horror right now.

There's lots of good material in there but obviously it needs many modifications.

That one really had me laughing :

Jacob’s body was dropped off the ship within view of Todstein, approximately 200 yards off shore. His body is in 100 feet of water. The bottom is rocky; for every five rounds a PC walks on the ocean bottom, he must roll a successful Dexterity check or suffer 1d4 points of damage from losing his footing on the rocks.

Whoever wrote that module probably never been underwater ! Even on dry land, don't loose your footing guys are you could die !