The party are passengers/supercargo on a small trading vessel, working their passage towards Comana City, land of opportunity. The ship's cargo at present consists mostly of bolts of silk and other textiles, and ingots of copper and bronze currently being used as ballast.
A black squall and storm lasting several days has blown out all the sails, broken away the mainmast and foremast, and eventually driven the ship before it before driving it across a reef to beach in a sheltered cove on a small uncharted island.
The island, once the storm passes and the sun reappears, proves to be volcanic. The volcano is active: there is smoke issuing from its caldera, and tremors of varying intensity occur several times a day.
The cove in which the ship is beached is fairly sheltered, with a coral sand beach and bushy trees coming down almost to the water's edge. Further inland is taller standing forest and bamboo, and vegetation extends right up almost to the mouth of the volcano.
The island is inhabited: drums are heard from time to time, though how far away is impossible to say with any certainty. The natives have not allowed themselves to be seen.
The ship is too damaged to be safely seaworthy, needing masts and yards, a new rudder, and a great gash in the timbers below from scraping across the reef will need to be mended before they can get under way again.
Sea water gushing in through the rent in the ship's bottom has spoiled much of the silk. How much of the cargo can be saved is a question for later.
The captain and mate disappeared during the squall, overboard presumably. The most senior crew member remaining is the carpenter, IOANNES.
One of the crew, CABASILAS, says that she saw a great black tentacle reach out of the sea and pluck them off the deck, but she is a notorious drunkard and her stories are generally taken with a grain of salt.
Since the landing, four members of the crew have died or disappeared. One was so badly injured during the storm that he died shortly after landing. Two went into the jungle, hunting for fresh meat, and were never seen again. Their trail disappears a little inside the tree-line. And one, spear-fishing in the cove, stumbled into a nest of falorials and died before she could be rescued.
The island is clearly not without its perils.
Apart from the carpenter and the party, there are only eight other crewmen remaining:
♂ ALKRITAS
STR 13, DEX 14, CON 16, INT 12, WIS 11, CHA 10;
Male ; Sailor,
5 HP; 6′2″, 181#, 25 years old
Ultra-civilized, Friendly
♀ BALSAMON
STR 13, DEX 11, CON 14, INT 9, WIS 8, CHA 14;
Female ; Sailor,
5 HP; 5′2″, 106#, 32 years old
Pessimistic, Grudge-holding
♀ CABASILAS
STR 16, DEX 13, CON 12, INT 16, WIS 10, CHA 11;
Female ;
Sailor, 5 HP; 5′7″, 107#, 37 years old
Drunkard, Fabulist
♂ DIOGENES
STR 14, DEX 13, CON 12, INT 15, WIS 16, CHA 17;
Male ; Sailor,
5 HP; 5′9″, 180#, 20 years old
Capricious, Careless
♂ EROTICUS
STR 11, DEX 12, CON 14, INT 7, WIS 8, CHA 15;
Male ; Sailor, 5
HP; 6′3″, 168#, 23 years old
Pessimistic, Naive
♂ FERRO
STR 15, DEX 11, CON 13, INT 8, WIS 17, CHA 11;
Male ; Sailor, 5
HP; 6′1″, 172#, 16 years old
Suspicious, Sober
♀ GORGO
STR 12, DEX 12, CON 11, INT 15, WIS 15, CHA 9;
Female ; Sailor,
5 HP; 5′11″, 138#, 30 years old
Friendly, Sober
♀ HEGEL
STR 15, DEX 14, CON 13, INT 12, WIS 14, CHA 12;
Female ;
Sailor, 5 HP; 6′4″, 125#, 19 years old
Curious, Sober
They are all reasonably skilled seafarers, but none of them have more than rudimentary navigational abilities. They do not know where they are. IOANNES has a little more navigation skill than they do, and he can probably make something of the captain's charts, given time and good guesswork.
Being basically useless for any of the skilled tasks of ship repair, the party are given the task of fetching timber.
The reef has been explored in the ship's jolly-boat, and a gap wide enough for the ship to pass through has been found and buoyed with old barrels. Once the ship is seaworthy again, they can get out to sea.
Kidnapped!
The crew have been stranded for a full week, with repairs having proceeded reasonably smoothly and now are almost complete, when the carpenter IOANNES disappears in the night. He suffers from night terrors, so when he called out in fright nobody much took any notice.
There is little sign of any struggle, but a GOOD perception roll reveals a small tufted blowgun dart lodged in the carpenter's sea-chest, and another ground into the sand near his bedding.
A successful tracking attempt reveals small humanoid footprints, only five or six inches long, like those of children. There would appear to have been perhaps six or eight individuals, and the trail leading off into the bush indicates that several of them were carrying a reasonably heavy load.
The trail leads through the jungle and up into the foothills of the volcano, to an ancient overgrown structure built into the hillside. There is a small clearing in front. Many of the surrounding trees are swathed in cobwebs, some of which are as thick and strong as fishing line.
The kidnappers are there, crouched in a semicircle in front of the entrance. They are tiny naked dark-skinned humanoids, only about 3' tall, but squat. They are swaying and chanting. When the party arrived, they scattered into the forest and disappeared.
IOANNES has been taken inside by the creature that lairs there. He has been bound in a silk cocoon, but has not yet been hoisted up into the web larder that comprises all of the first chamber. It is thoroughly choked with webs, in which are hanging the remains of many corpses of animals and humans. Almost all of the humans or of the same race as the kidnappers, but not all. They have all been drained of their innards.
The creature is a huge maggot-like centipede thing, 25' long, which can rear up to about 15' high and still move on its last few sets of legs. It can shoot webs from spinnerets along its belly, and it has a paralytic bite. An ovipositor at its rear can inject eggs into a victim; they will take about a week to hatch, whereupon the babies will suck all the remaining juices from their host. The babies partake of the nature of both the maggotipede and their host, and none are exactly identical.
If the party enter in force, the creature will retreat initially, in order to assess the situation. It can move through the webs unimpeded, but they will create a significant impediment to movement for anything else.
If set alight, the webs will burn sluggishly, and give off a choking, foul-smelling smoke. They are not particularly flammable.
Resolution:
The team, with the aid of the remaining crew, managed to kill the maggotipede and rescue Ioannes.
Three more of the crew died: one (Diogenes) was bitten and poisoned by a spider-like web dweller, one of the offspring of the maggotipede. There are hundreds of these little bastards scurrying about in the webs that choke the dungeon's rooms and passages.
Two more were eaten whole by the maggotipede in the final battle.
Ioannes, when examined out in the daylight, proved to have a suspicious abdominal wound, which was assumed to have been created by the creature's ovipositor. Which it was. A frankly stupendous piece of surgery by [Qarl's character], assisted by [Andrew's character] rid him of the egg-sac and saved his life.
Note: I will, hopefully, eventually learn the actual names of the PCs.
Potential Interesting Things
The whole complex was not examined, but the party did note a couple of things on their way in and out:
1) A crystal ball on a sculpted pearlescent metal stand, the whole standing on a low (8") dais in the middle of a moderate-sized chamber. One of the sailors, Alkritas, was entranced by it, but they snapped him out of it.
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2) A group of three obviously magical pictures or portals or something, in the room in which they fought the Boss Monster.
Standing next to them, it was noted that the air was perceptibly colder.
The team have decided, at this time, not to mess about with any of the potential loot, owing to the presence of the viciously poisonous little web-critters, of which there are hundreds, and also the natives of the island, whose god they had just killed.
The current plan is to get the ship seaworthy just as soon as possible, and to get afloat.
