The Jolly Rogers set off to explore "off map," beyond the borders of currently played territory. We had a displaced nobleman that we aimed to help regain his seat in far off Sunndi along for the ride with the understanding that we'd take whatever adventure cropped up during the journey. We almost made it out of the harbor at Gradsul before the first diversion hit.
Lord Willers was assembling and transporting a large body of troops south to some place called Dawn's Cove, apparently the holding of The Holy Rollers, and was hiring every ship he could find. Well, we had ships and he was paying well so sign us up. Two weeks later and a tall stack of gold richer, we'd delivered a frankly terrifying force to some tight assed paladin and continued on our way.
Smooth sailing (and motoring) to the east brought us to a farming town. We kept the fleet under The Shadow's veil of fog and I sailed my galley The Trident into port to get the local news, of which there was little. Back to the waves where we picked up a message in a bottle that spoke of an adventuring party marooned on a volcanic island to the south. We had a general idea of what island it spoke of but we were close to the next port along the coast so we'd stop in there first.
Gryrax of Ulek was a mixed dwarf and human town, administered by dwarves and bustling. We were able to locate a community map of sorts, a general posting at the dockmaster's office that confirmed our suspicions about the bottled message. No other rumors or hooks jumped out at us so we set out to rescue The Mintiest Juleps, or their treasure, or both.
We landed our two longships on the black sand beach of the island and probed the jungle ahead, turning up a Julep's corpse. We were then accosted by a demon of sorts, who had apparently killed the adventurers but then had a pang of conscience and let the last one wander the island, mad and wounded, until he starved to death. It had heard of Dr. Phil and wanted to make contact to talk through its feelings or something. It offered a big bag of loot, likely the Juleps' stuff, for transport to Phil's island. We happened to like loot and knew where Phil was so it was a win/win.
We dropped it off on Phil's island, got our payment, and sailed back to the volcanic island to search it over for anything else of note. We fought some beetles, avoided a gorgon and some spiders, and left with a little more loot. It was getting late in the session so we decided to dock at Gryrax and count money. Unfortunately we were hawked down by a ghost ship crewed by draugr. We were unable to outrun them so had to fight.
The Shadow engaged the other ship by ramming it amidship and Farland and I held the deck crossing against the wave of undead. Meanwhile, Morgan compelled the Shadow to strike at the enemy's commanders with its living rigging, removing the captain and navigator from play and allowing her to exert her will over the remaining leaderless undead. She took control of a large portion of the enemy and with their help we were able to capture the ghost ship. All of this was made possible by her weird connection to The Shadow.
We retained the ghost ship and crew as an ace in the hole, resolved to keep it veiled near The Shadow since the ship itself acted as a sinkhole of evil. Can't really pull up to the docks like that. We finally made it back to port and ended the session much richer than before.
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