A Pirate's Life in a Sundered World: Episode 102

Cast

• Amy "Albatross" Bolkey (1st-level female human pirate)
• Tibbs (male human first mate corpse)
• Celeste (female human helmsman)
• Crucible (kytheran engineer)
• Gol (kobold deckhand)
• Kolod (dwarf cook)

The Black Devil arrived at the line coordinates that Lipless had provided. They shut down the collider, silently and slowly drifting about, using the silvery clouds to conceal themselves while they kept an eye out for their target. Unfortunately their target had taken similar precautions, and by the time Celeste spotted it, it was quite a ways away.

The ship was black, possibly wood or metal, likely both. The sails were also black, and pulsed with faint red patterns as they caught astral winds. Beyond that they could not make out any more details—namely how many people and cannons were on deck—and since at its distance a surprise attack was virtually impossible Amy opted for the next best thing: an overwhelmingly aggressive offense.

She went to the bombard and had Crucible gun the engine. As they rocketed towards the ship she fired off a few rounds. Both shots struck port-side, and as the ship slowly spun and tilted off course she could see that the impact had the added benefit of dislodging some of the crew. Assuming they survived they would be able to orient themselves and drift back, but by then Amy had hoped to take out the rest and even the odds.

As the Black Devil pulled alongside Amy and Tibbs leaped over, leaving Celeste in charge of the bombard and Gol at the wheel. They were met by a trio of cambions—heads crested with horns and hands wreathed in flame—who hurled searing missiles of fire at them as they soared through the air. One of them managed to graze Amy who, with a quick, fierce thought managed to shift her trajectory and collide with her attacker. They both went down, but Amy managed to roll with the impact and come up with her blunderbuss blazing.

Thankfully literally fighting fire with fire seemed to work just fine on them.

While Tibbs and Amy fought Celeste periodically pummeled the cambion ship with their bombard, obliterating reinforcements and "disabling" weapons with each shot.

This...turned out to be a double-edged sword.

On one hand it prevented them from getting overwhelmed by the enemy. On the other hand neither Amy nor Tibbs were immune to the ship's abrupt and violent convulsions: at one point Amy lost her sword and blunderbuss while trying to stop one of the conjurers, so she tried ramming her with one of the cannons, and when a loose cannon proved too unwieldy she resorted to grenades.

The grenades ultimately did the trick, but unfortunately Tibbs was part of the, uh, collateral damage.

Hopefully whatever was still intact on the ship would be worth it.

Behind the Scenes

Looks like Melissa will get to take the Recruit move for a spin! Well, assuming she makes it back to Driftwood: there was a lot of misses on her part (which is why I kind of summarize the action: it was really chaotic and we both forgot most of the fine details). I tried to soften the impact by having her lose weapons and choose between helping Tibbs or getting hurt, but in the end he still ended up getting killed (I let her choose between him or her taking the damage) and she limped away from the confrontation with all of one hit point.

At least on the plus side she gets to level up, right?

We finally got to see some more of the pirate in action, namely the starting move Fight Like a Pirate, which lets her survey her surroundings and potentially use them to her advantage (hence why she used the cannon as a weapon). Since Sundered World is filled with islands I am sure she will get a lot of mileage out of Treasure Map.

As mentioned in the previous session report Melissa and I were trying to find a simple, effective way of handling ships blasting the crap out of each other. For this episode we tried using the "Dungeon Planet plus one" approach for ships, by which I mean statting them out as if they were monsters, and things went pretty smooth (though we will probably lump ammo and fuel into a universal "supply").

I am going to include a section on building your own ship, similar to making your own monsters. Engines will be handled with tags (like Unstable Engine for the collider), and as with my playbooks I am also going to provide some elaboration for dealing with vehicles, ideas for miss results, custom moves, and the rest so you have a "fictional foundation" to work off of, instead of just having to puzzle it out yourself.

Join the Sundered World Community!

As I mentioned before, we have a Sundered World community up and running. Go, join, check out the content, and let me know what you like and hate: I want this thing to be as best as it can before I try charging money for it!