Shimmernight: Session One

I’m going to be blogging about the current game I’m running, called The Shimmernight Sea. It is a nautical / pirate open-ended seabox.

When I started planning this game, I knew that I wanted to try and avoid the pitfalls and dangers of the elusive “ship” game, where the characters start with a vessel that can sail them to far and distant lands. Dwiz has done the work of highlighting the typical snags in his blog post so I won’t reiterate all of them here.

Nautical campaigns take the issues of a sandbox and multiply them. With a sandbox on foot, if characters want to ignore the hooks and just venture off, that’s more or less fine. They can’t get too far without some faster method of travel. Yeah, they can ignore the hooks in this town and hoof it to the next one, but larger threats might encompass both settlements, so it’s not a huge problem.

When the characters have a ship or some other way to cover vast distances fast, they can flee most hooks and problems without too much trouble. The sand(sea)box needs to be fleshed out and ready for them showing up just about anywhere.

The other issue isn’t specific to just nautical campaigns, but all sandboxes at the start. If you tell the players you’re running a freeform sandbox where they can do anything, plop them down, and say “so, what do you want to do?” you’ll often be met with blank stares and stone cold silence. A starting sandbox is a blank slate, and unless you take some work to integrate the characters into it, it’s likely that even a goal-oriented player is going to struggle. Paradoxically, I find that the more you ‘leash’ the characters in the world, the harder the players will work to free themselves of their bonds. Without any reins to tug at or bits to chomp at, it’s easy to sort of meander aimlessly, waiting for the GM to deliver the adventure of the week to you.

My solution to this problem in Shimmernight is as follows: build the sandbox, populate it roughly, and then lay down tracks for what I’ll call a half-railroad. The characters will begin the game indebted to a patron, who offers them a ship on certain conditions, with the opportunity to fully own the ship after a certain time. With this method, a few runs around the “track” will help solidify the world in the player’s minds, learn of the factions and characters in it, and allow them to begin generating their own goals once the sandbox “opens up” to them.

It’s not a true railroad because while their course is set, what they do and how they achieve their objectives is very open-ended. They’ll have essentially free reign on everything but the path they take from Point A → Point B → Point C, etc. In this aspect, the railroad concept is much more akin to an actual railroad and not so much the “theory” of an RPG railroad. Except instead of a train, they’re on a ship. Simple stuff.

Now, let’s move on to the actual session recap.

Play Report

We begin in Port Darling, the western most port city in the Shimmernight Sea, on the final day of the moonrise. Shafts of iridescent light, not unlike the aurora borealis, stream down from the sky, evoking an eerie atmosphere of magic and power. Liquid metal rains from these lightfalls, somehow remaining on the surface until after the full moon. The massive, glowing moon takes to the sky in full splendor once a month, plunging the Shimmernight Sea into darkness for three full days before retreating. This celestial phenomenon is known as moonrise.

The moonrise is a time of danger, so most sailors hunker down in ports and celebrate with debauchery to blow off steam. Our heroes have come to Port Darling (under control by the Dreylish empire) for a very specific reason: all of them, for one reason or another, are penniless, prospectless, and maidenless. They’ve each received a letter of invitation, promising to fix two of those problems, so here they are. The characters, as we come to meet them are:

• Ellipides, a noble tiefling mage come to learn the secrets of the Kouroi, the ancient civilization of the last epoch.
• Ishilda, a mountain-born human berserker on the run after taking bloody revenge on a Dreylish liar.
• Lenky: A stoat-folk pirate, looking for love in the strangest place (specifically he has fallen in love with a ghost and thusly abandoned his old crew).
• Luc d’Lamare: On the run for stealing a relic from the Alloyed church, and hoping to acquire more in an attempt to reach divinity.
• Ratboy: a cutthroat rat-folk from the port of Rukaru, worshiping a shadowy entity he calls “goatgirl.”
• Solenne: A bird-folk career soldier who deserted the Dreylish military after becoming disillusioned with how the “Dreylish ideals” were being deployed.

Each character arrives at the manor house the letter instructed, ready to meet their mysterious benefactor: Mama Honeytongue. She’s a medusa (this world is high fantasy, so medusas can just be… hanging out in civilization) and has a job offer for them. She has recently come in to the possession of a ship and wishes these fine folks to operate it for her. She introduces another medusa, a man named Denerus, who seems to be a pirate and knowledgeable sailor. Even though some of the crew are new to the sea, Denerus will act as a sort of liaison between the scoundrels and the crew of this ship.

The stipulations are quite simple. If the group agrees on them, they’ll be granted The Last Chance and outfitted with some cargo, some coin, and a crew that Denerus has put together. The conditions are as follows:

• Sail a circuit, hitting each major port in the Shimmernight Sea. From Port Darling → Fort Deauvilly → Port Roost → Viarosa → Rukaru → Sorrowtown → Crescent → Port Darling.
• Upon their return to Port Darling, they will present Mama Honeytongue with a chest containing three thousand gold coins.
• They will be given a purse of one hundred gold and a small shipment of cargo to begin their journey.
• Mama Honeytongue doesn’t care how they get the gold, whether through speculative trading, piracy, or contracting themselves out as adventurers. All that matters is that she is presented with three thousand gold at the end of the circuit.
• If they perform this circuit three times, The Last Chance is theirs to keep, and the deal with Mama Honeytongue can be renegotiated to something much more favorable for them.

Without any other prospects, the group was eager enough to take Mama’s offer. They did have some questions, like what would happen if they returned to Port Darling without the gold. Mama Honeytongue simply assured them that such a situation would never happen, because they all appear to be competent and skilled. She knows that they’ll return with the gold.¹

They headed out for the night, with some questions, some answers, and some new prospects on the horizon. Inside of Mama Honeytongue’s manor, at one end of the foyer, they saw a large set of iron doors, shackled shut with iron chains and covered in glowing runes. It seems that there’s a part of the manor that Mama Honeytongue doesn’t want anyone getting in to… or out of?

Denerus instructed the group to meet up at a specific landmark the next day, but everyone except Lenky decided that they’d rather just party and get wasted with the medusa-man than find their own lodgings². Lenky slept next to the landmark, a small fountain on an unassuming street in Port Darling.

The group woke up hungover and trekked out towards the landmark to pick up Lenky. It was at the fountain that they learned that Denerus was a bit of a notoriously wanted pirate in Port Darling, as somehow the Dreysal Yellowjackets acting as law enforcement for the port had set up a sting operation.³ Solenne recognized the leader of this “ambush”, an Dreylish orc mage named Pendrick Pellwater that had served under her at one point in the past. Talk turned to violence, as it often does, and the group discovered that Pendrick had only brought the freshest recruits to the fight and they were able to defeat them.

Eager to get out of Port Darling after killing some of the local Yellowjackets, the group hightailed it to the docks, where they could gain access to The Last Chance and hit the high seas.

Find the index of all Shimmernight posts here.

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1. It could be read that this was a bit of a threat, but in Mama’s fashion, it was delivered coated in honey.↩︎

2. Technically Denerus is a gorgon, but this is a sort of “vampires are called draculas” kind of deal.↩︎

3. Interestingly, if Lenky hadn’t slept at the fountain, this entire encounter would have been avoided, which I didn’t see coming!↩︎

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