Under the Sea: Part II
Hello everyone. This week's Grave Plots is a continuation of last week's. You might want to read up if you missed it.
Mostly Aquatic Games
Mostly aquatic games have the PCs spending most of their time in and around the water. They should already be comfortable going underwater, and every member of the group should have some kind of way to meaningfully interact during underwater encounters. If your group is not currently set up to do those things and you want to run a mostly aquatic game, don’t fret – it’s just time to make some basic changes to get the PCs into a position where they can spend a lot of time dealing with aquatic problems. As a good way to go about this, set them on adventures that involve a lot of sea travel, perhaps spending a good deal of time adventuring in an isolated chain of islands, where travel by boat is commonplace and the community is constantly threatened by raids from aquatic and amphibious monsters. Creatures like kuo-toa, bogarts, and my personal all-time favorite, the bullywog (go, AD&D, go!), favor hit-and-run raids (or they should, anyhow, since their land-based enemies have difficulty following them underwater). This requires that adventurers in the region be capable of dealing with aquatic threats, and raid-thwarting and the like is good way to familiarize your players with underwater problems. The following entry, “The Scourge of the Sea,” provides several hooks for just such a series of short adventures designed to open a whole new world of undersea adventure.
The Scourge of the Sea
Here are some short, quick, loosely related little hooks to get you started on your way to a great campaign that takes place in a mostly aquatic setting.
Shipwrecked: While on trip to a distant land far across one of your world’s oceans or seas, a terrible storm wracks the PCs’ ship, destroying it in the night. As the PCs are flung about in the surf, clinging desperately to boards and barrels, they have to fight off sharks or other sea monsters (DM’s choice) using only what’s on hand for weapons. Following the desperate struggle, the PCs wash up on the shore of a large, unfamiliar island. At the island local villagers nurse them back to health and provide a chance for the PCs to get back on their feet until they can afford passage off the island. You should feel free to inject your own flavor here, what the islanders are like, what kind of culture they have, what services are available, etc. You can also insert another plot hook at this point: perhaps there are ruins on the island that are just begging to be explored, or maybe the PCs are the only ones capable of doing a variety of simple odd jobs about town.
Raiders from the Sea: While staying on one of a number of unfamiliar islands, the town which has taken them in is suddenly beset by a number of aquatic creatures bent on taking the town resources at spear point. Whether the PCs have found work as guards, or feel that they should take part in the town’s defense as a way to repay them for their kindness (threaten the lives of evil or selfish PCs and they should jump right in, too), the PCs confront the monsters and drive them back to the sea. The town chief, mayor, or village elder, impressed with the PCs’ fighting skills, offers to pay the PCs handsomely to chase the creatures back to their undersea cave and deal with the problem once and for all. He even properly equips them for the journey, providing them with the equipment or spells to allow them to breathe underwater. Once the PCs accept, they find themselves in an underwater slugging match with the denizens of the deep. Remember to add XP or increase challenge rating (as appropriate to your game) to compensate for the added challenge of being underwater.
Trade Routes: Having become established heroes in an island community, the PCs are sought out to be guards on merchant ships bringing goods from one island to another. The gig pays enough to get the PCs out of the island chain if they so desire, but there’s one small problem: every time they board a ship, they are accosted by undersea raiders and other monsters who both attack the ship’s crew and try to sink the vessel from below, requiring the PCs to be on their guard both above and below water. As time goes on the raids become more and more organized, with no clear reason. Feel free to decide on something to account for this, possibly an alliance of intelligent monsters, or some kind of leader creature like an aboleth or kraken.
The Scourge of the Sea: During the time the PCs were traveling aboard merchant vessels, a number of strange things have been happening. Random peasant folk declare in loud voices that “His return is near,” with no memory for the incident, and just as the PCs are completing their last job a cyclopean stone temple rises from the sea and casts lighting from its peak. The bolt strikes the heavens and causes perpetual storms in the region making sea travel nearly impossible, and it becomes clear that the PCs aren’t really doing anything else until the temple is dealt with. The entrance and first half of the temple are submerged, so the PCs will need to bring their A-game for underwater adventure before they can reach the temple’s peak (or if you want them going the other way they enter from the top and must descend later) and dealing with whatever the threat was. Ok, so now build a dungeon, pick a bad guy (complete with motivations and a badass motif), and decide on an end-game. And there you go – the day is won, and you and your players should be walking away with a good understanding of underwater game play so that you can comfortably continue to move forward with a mostly aquatic game.