Shimmernight: Session Three

The crew arrives in Fort Deauvilly. They meet a half-giant seer and take on jobs. Ratboy communes with a mysterious entity.

Play Report

The crew of the Last Chance arrived in Fort Deauvilly, ready to get to work and make some gold. Valnés has staked her claim upon the city—an old Kouroi settlement built along multiple elevations up the coast. The Alloyed Church is most prominent here, vowing neutrality but not quite delivering on that promise. The city is governed by the Order of Balance and Law: specifically a council of merchant-princes and oligarchs at the head of that particular order.

The city is built and protected by an ancient structure called the lock steps: a series of concentric half-circles in the Deauvilly Bay. Typically, ships stay on the bottom or second lock, though certain events or situations might permit access to the uppermost lock. The Kou-locks can be raised and lowered over the course of a day, or even faster (and dangerously) during an emergency.

After arriving, the crew got their bearings and began to investigate the markets for potential speculative trades. With some ideas in mind, they split up inside the port and began pursing their own objectives. Solenne and Ishilda stayed with the crew of the Last Chance, carousing with them, raising spirits and morale. Lenky and Ratboy started sniffing around the city for any leads on work, Denerus began to make some trades in the market, and Luc went to pray at the Alloyed Church. That left Ellipides to get bogged down with paperwork: the Valnés Order of Customs and Ports required detailed logs from those docking in the city, and incomplete or inaccurate logging would result in a 10% tax on all gold in the hold.

Ratboy and Lenky came back with what they’d found:

• A half-giant seer named Môr-Tûnari is offering one last chance to visit him before he ventures out for a month long sabbatical. Further digging by Lenky kept turning up the same story: this would be everyone’s last chance for awhile. Are those specific words coincidence? Fate? Is Môr-Tûnari waiting specifically for the scoundrels to call upon him?
• The Valnés Order of Enforcement is looking to hire some outsiders for a dangerous job. Allegedly, this is a rather common occurrence with the enforcers when they have unorthodox work to be done. Always better to get someone else’s hands dirty instead of your own. Lieutenant Ravette would be their point of contact.

The crew opted to pursue both leads, starting with Môr-Tûnari. His residence was a leaning tower-house of stone and ship timber. Inside, star-charts of unfamiliar constellations lined the walls, and everything seemed chaotic and uneven—the floor, the stairs, and even the doorways. The half-giant lumbered downstairs to meet them, speaking cryptically and laughing too long and too loudly. He offered to do a Reading for them if they would do a favor for him. A local group of cultists had taken up in a nearby derelict pump-house, and he wanted them gone. For the good of the neighborhood and all that.

The next day, at a small coffeeshop, Lt. Ravette informed the crew she wanted a team to assault the lair of a group of cultists at a pump-house and retrieve an artifact they had with them, called the umbral compass. By chance, it seemed that both leads led to the same job. Ravette promised them 500 gold for the return of the Kouroi artifact.

The group they’re preparing to assault is the Cult of the Shadowed Sun. Here’s what my player-facing world document said about them:

Operating from the depths of Fort Deauvilly’s underbelly, these fanatics preach their doctrine during the sunless days of the moonrise. They proclaim the coming of the True Gods, beings not in our own image like the Alloys, but rather forces of pure elemental change that cannot be denied. They are dangerous and outlawed by Fort Deauvilly’s Order of Balance and Law.

The last thing that we ended the session with was Ratboy’s possible warlock-style patron—Goatgirl—contacting him. She made an offer of 1000 gold for the umbral compass, which would mean backing out of the deal with the enforcers.

Thoughts and Lessons

This session introduced the “port sheet” to the players. It feels a bit like a flowchart mixed with downtime actions. I’ll write more about it in a full blog post, but here’s the summary:

1. The crew first finds out how the market ebbs and flows, using the Just-In-Time economics subsystem I haven’t written about yet
2. They then decide on what lodging they’ll use while in port, and receive the applicable benefits
3. They decide if they need additional healing. If they do, they pay for it
4. They do any personal shopping (just look at the book and spend gold)
5. They choose port actions

There are a mixture of universal port actions (that you can take in any port) and more specific ones. Deauvilly has three specific ones:

• Pray at the Alloyed Church (gain a divine boon)
• Do paperwork (otherwise, pay 10% of your gold in taxes)
• Party during the festivals (Deauvilly has an almost endless stream of religious festivals, so it’s basically carousing+)

For the most part, this sheet went over well. Players could divide up and have their characters pursue what they wanted as they saw fit. It was a bit slow to get everyone up to speed, and I mostly blame that on my GMing that night. Usually, I consider myself a pretty good teacher of RPGs, but I had a bit of a headache this session and was suffering from the infamous low sleep debuff, so everything went a bit rougher than it usually would have. The biggest hiccup was the market mini-game, which took us way too long to get through. Thankfully, I’m writing this recap after we’ve gone through it again, and I can attest that the second time was much smoother and without any speedbumps (good or bad ones). So, while we had a relatively uneventful session, I think the problems with it were external rather than internal.

Next time, we’ll see the crew launch their assault of the Cultists of the Shadowed Sun!

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