In the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes pull those oars—pull until you crack your spines! Pull and start your eyes out, my darlings! We're on a shakedown cruise!
The System: Knave 2e
The Setting: The Bottled Sea
The Crew
- Danny Milke, WWII sailor with a baseball bat
- Heloise Cobblebury, 1885 librarian/folklorist/spy
- Jacqueline "Jack" Faircroft, 1960's archealogist, searching after an ancestor's legend
- Rem the Custodian, elemental servitor of the Bottled Sea itself
- Jerimiah "Buck" Buckthorpe, Bounty Hunter from the Wild West
Okay, Ready? Let's go!
Session 1
Introductory Exhortation (to be read with stentorian gusto):
Heave ho, me knaves! The compass spins. The stars, they ain't the same.
A wine-dark maze where land should be, the board for Neptune's game.
Down in the deeps strange treasures gleam, from futures yet t’be
While whispers on the salt spray stream of pasts we cannot see.
With wit and grit and song and sword we'll navigate the way—
Find the crack, a passage back to homes from which we strayed.
Heave ho, me knaves! Then turn the ship! This luckless tide we'll flee!
Tho’ in the night, a sad-sweet song calls from the Bottled Sea.
We established the crew's ship, The Last Chance, a single-masted wherry lashed together from rubbish and refuse. Good for fishing and light transportation, equipped with a small cabin in the fore with just enough space for four or five people to sleep and a small pot-bellied stove. Cargo has to be stored out on the open deck. In mechanical terms, it looks like this:
- Speed: Average.
- Price: Cheap.
- Crew: 4 People.
- Power Source: Wind or Oar
- Cargo: 6 Salvage.
I let the crew pick one upgrade, and they chose Sturdy, giving it the equivalent of 8 Cargo for determining damage. Heloise Cobblebury was named Captain, although it is expected that this position will rotate among the crew. The Captain gets final say in where the ship goes, and rolls initiative for the team.
Everyone rolled to see how they could contribute to keeping the ship and its crew alive through the storm. Knave 2e, like Knave and Maze Rats before it, considers rolling the dice to be a fail state. The assumption is that you should have planned well enough that the dice weren't necessary, or at least that you've arranged for such advantageous circumstances that you've earned some significant bonuses. Short of that, the default DC for (probably unmodified) d20 roll in Knave 2e is 16, or a 20% chance of success. In the past, I've been very sympatico with this philosophy. But I also have to admit that rolling dice is fun, and I'm not always in the mood to be stingy with them. So I'm keeping an eye on how this plays, and I may adjust the default DC down in later sessions.
Anyway, of the five players, there was one success. They made it to see the next dawn, but their lines were tangled, their hull was swamped, and they had lost whatever meager trade goods they might have had. Worse, they were lost and vast blue sea.
Because nearly everything on the Bottle Sea floats, big weather literally rearranges the map. This is a known risk and, in the wake of such an event, any ships that can find each other lash themselves to one another to form a flotilla. People engage in trade and make a meal together, and piece together whatever scraps of information they might have about the current state of the world.
 |
| The beginning of a map! |
The crew of the Last Chance heard a horn signaling exactly such a flotilla, and sailed on over. There were three other ships:
- The Jackfruit. A merchant vessel run by Quentin Prescott (a Collector interested in botany, bookbinding, and currently trying to assemble a census of the Bottled Sea) and Plinth (a sentient slab of marble with rudimentary arms and legs; more loyal than smart).
- The Something Nasty In The Woodshed. A fishing dory captained by Cryptic Paora and her crew of dark mutterers. They have fish to trade, but insist it's "very poor, nearly foul, will probably kill you."
- The Pig & Flea. A sailboat captained by Elvina Hallowsuckle and a crew of Shepherds. They are as light and airy as Paora's crew is dour. They have a cargo of woolen garments.
Fish is fried, herbs are cut, and jugs of fermented sheep's milk are produced and everyone gets down to the vital business of sharing gossip. The crew of the Last Chance tells about the loss of the Dainty Biscuit and their near-miss with the Great Cephalopod, which impresses the others (and sends Quentin to go cross out a lot of names in his census).
Cryptic Paora shared that the weather cult, the Rainmakers, had announced a storm the previous morning, but no one had expected it to be of such a magnitude. She also related that an aggressive new ship was in the waters, attacking anyone it came across and plundering weapons, magic, and technology. She described it as a low ship with little more than its cabin rising above the waves, and possessing a weapon that struck from under the water. Danny, WWII sailor, surmised this this must be the U-boat that had sunk his ship right before he was pulled into the Bottled Sea.
The Shepherds had heard of Buck Buckthorpe's quarry, the Wild West fugitive Webster Tidecliff. Tidecliff had been picked up by a Shepherd boat the previous week. He'd killed the crew, stolen the boat, a sheep-napped the precious animals onboard. The Shepherds have put a 500 coin bounty on Tidecliff's head, dead or alive but prefer he be returned in sufficient condition that the Shepherds might extract a little rough justice from him.
There was a little trading, the most significant of which was Heloise buying a small pouch of vegetable seeds from Quentin. He didn't, however, have any dirt to spare.
New Short-term Goal: find soil
The Last Chancers also learned that to the Northwest of their current position, the fisherfolk had seen great heaps of crabs and, in the distance, a lofty contraption. But when it came time to sail, they instead steered West, the direction of the U-Boat sightings.
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| The map begins to fill out. |
The found a floating junk heap, the sort of place where their wherry had probably been cobbled together from parts. The junkers were eager to trade whatever they had for engine parts, and upon learning the Last Chancers had none, made a poor show of hiding their interest in assailing the crew and taking their boat.
Sailing on, they found a bloodsport arena, the Killer's Quay. It was mostly empty, after the storm scattering everything, but its staff were still eager to put on a show, and even more eager to convince the crew to partake in the show. Danny agreed, looking for an opportunity to swing his bat. First they watched a match between Grockle "the Man-Gorilla!" and Glorble "with a belly full of eels and a mind full of glass!" Then it was Danny's turn. He told the announcer he was "the Iowa Smasher," and climbed down into the arena.
"We've a fine little divertment for you, lazies and ganders! Oh, the claret's gonna run!" crowed the announcer, "Huxley the Gullible versus the Eyeball Smasher!"
Danny was met by a thin man with a bushy mustache and a shark-tooth machete. "Th-they told me you were really quite a terrible man," said Huxley as he closed in on Danny. The fight was brief, and brutal, and Danny won:
- Glory (at least in the eyes of the dozen or so scattered onlookers)
- 10 pepper seedlings
- a jar of dirt
Heloise won 30 coins for betting on Danny, and Jack lost 5 betting against him.
But most importantly, they had met a short-term goal! They found soil they could plant their seeds in! I promise that those were the actual awards listed in the campaign materials, and I was not trying to create a gardening side-quest. But now that the forces of emergent narrative have conspired to create one, who am I to say no to an extended gardening mini-game? I'll suggest to the crew that they may have a new medium-term goal: to establish a productive garden patch aboard the Last Chance.
It was getting late, so the crew headed back to the Last Chance, preferring to sleep adrift on the open sea than spend too much time with bloodsport enthusiasts.
XP
3 hexes explored: 600
1 short-term goal: 250
850/5 = 170 each
Ideally, I'd like to see them getting about twice that much XP per session, but things will probably pick up as they get the hang of coming up with goals and then paying them off.
Notes
All in all, I thought it was a pretty good first session. I definitely need to build my improv muscles and refine my systems to support a seat-of-the-pants style of play (I feel a little sheephish that, needing to pop out two gladiator names, I came up with Grockle and Glorble). But we got some role-play in, a smidge of combat, explored a hex, and laid down some news and rumors to inspire future play.
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