Riverboat Gambler - Session 1

Five adventurers gathered on the deck of the timberclad gunboat Last Round as it sailed up the Hog delta and into the mouth of the river proper.

• Aphono, Elf
• Datura, Elf
• Jack Fatherd, Coureur des bois
• Roddy Applecreek, Mad bomber
• Zigar Kneecapper, Reformed thug

Their mission: to hunt down and kill the criminal mastermind Aldrich Deathsbane, human king of Giants, and claim the bounty on his hide. With them, a crew of nineteen Halflings and a single human. Survivors from Roddy's village or the surrounding farms destroyed by the Giants during the Marriage of the Giantess Morwenna. They brought muskets, magic spells, a pair of swivel guns and a cannon mounted to a rotating turret. They sailed under steam, powered by a slime that heated water poured into a boiler. 

The land around the river was cut with wadis and arroyos, channels where the river once flowed. A caravan of wild camels came to the shore to drink, drawing curious Halflings. Distant mountains gleamed marble-white to the southwest. The chaotic terrain gave way to flat plains and an oasis where the adventurers watched a crimson death worm ambush a wallowing wildebeest, then fall beneath the hooves and horns of its fellow ungulates. Most life on the Plain was concentrated around the river and after the wildebeest came herd of elephants. The Hobbits were astonished. Some pointed their guns, afraid that they might shoot fire from their trunks or launch their tusks like flying spears. Jack reassured them. Elephants were herbivores, gentle and even kind unless roused to a killing frenzy by a threat to the herd.

 

The elephants thought the boat was another elephant. The calves trumpeted and the adults flicked their ears in a futile attempt at communication.

 

By Night Zigar handed out pipes blazoned with the Iron Cup logo. The adventurers smoked with the Halflings and watched the undead swarm at the riverbank. They could not enter the swift flowing water or be destroyed but they spoke, some even in a language the adventurers could understand. They repeated themselves endlessly. The crew lit fires with mirrors that cast light across the water.

   

At dawn they came across an artificial island, detached from the riverbank by a canal. It was fortified but the camp behind the earthworks was deserted and there were giant bootprints all over. There were signs of a struggle but no bodies save for a few defleshed and gnawed bones.

 

A Bullywug rose out of the water when he saw the Iron Cup logo on Zigar's purple plate armor. He was part of the engineering crew that came out to cut channels in the riverbank. The undead couldn't cross the flowing water so the artificial islands could be used for villages or forts or whatever. But a bunch of Giants, Ogres and a man with a bronze arm killed and ate everyone, except one man they burned alive. He and the other bullywugs hid under the water until they left. Jack offered them a ride to the Potion Addict outlet up the river and the frog-people clung to the back of the boat.

 

The sun rose high but the cool air from the river protected the Gamblers from the worst of the heat. To the south was an old playa. The dry lakebed extended far to the south and over the horizon was a thin wisp of dark smoke. The Bullywugs told them there was an oil derrick down there. Necromancers loved oil because it was made from prehistoric liquid corpses. It could be used as programmable matter, though he had no idea what that was. Because of that it was valuable, enough to brave the Plain.

 

The Gamblers decided to follow the strange square footsteps leading toward the oilfield. The Giants hadn't come this way but the roughnecks might know more about the Plain. Or have treasure to steal. 

 

If they waited it would be dark before they reached the camp, so the Gamblers set out while the sun was still high. The air was so hot it burned their lungs and they needed a lot more water than they expected. By twilight a group of Ankhegs found them. The arthropods were lured by the sound of their feet but the adventurers spotted them before they drew close. Roddy lured them onto a mine he planted, scaring off the beast with a near fatal wound. The other four leaped out of the earth and attacked. Aphono and Datura sought shelter on a rock formation and fired away while the others hacked at the biggest monster with hand weapons. The adventurers almost went down amid the acid spit and snapping jaws. Jack and Datura's divine protection stopped a rout and when the combined weight of their attacks killed the largest monster, the other sandcrawlers dragged its carcass beneath the earth to feed.

 

The edge of the playa led up to a broken expanse of sand and shale. The sun went down and the Gamblers watched a large Ghoul pack chase a lounge of white lizards across the Plain. Up ahead the flare tower of the oil rig illuminated the perimeter wall of stacked drystone and the camp inside. The oil workers left a funnel shaped gap in the wall and a stone golem stood in the narrow gap, clubbing a horde of zombies as they shuffled into the gap one at a time. Jack, Zigar and Roddy scaled the wall by stealth to see what was going on inside.

 

Within the perimeter were assorted Gnolls, humans, Hogmen, a couple Dwarves and a handful of Pech. the hyenas must have had their noses clogged with burnt petrochemicals, they couldn't smell the adventurers. The Gamblers scouted the camp for stuff to steal but realized it was a dead end. The barrels of crude oil were valuable but there was no way to get them out of the camp or back to the ship without alerting the roughnecks. They didn't have any treasure to steal either, if they were wealthy they wouldn't be out here. All their money was in their equipment and the resources they dug out of the earth. So they climbed back over the wall and, with the other Gamblers, cried out to the oil workers as though they had just arrived. 

 

A Pech mounted the wall and told them to hurry inside. He lifted a little hand and the stones of the wall to admit them, then closed behind. He would give them shelter but wouldn't share any delicious oil. The boss only let the rock people have one keg and that had to last them the entire operation. The boss came out of the big tent, a one legged dwarf in a pink nightshirt accompanied by a human warrior in hastily donned half-plate.

Planomap the foreman knew nothing about Aldrich the human king of Giants. He sure as hell hadn't wandered out into the desert to the oil rig. He was probably on the river somewhere. He showed the Gamblers on the map were all the settlements on the river Hog were, from the Potion Addict fort all the way up to the Grange Bank a couple days upriver. He enumerated all the hazards of desert and river travel, including the Blue Dragon seen flying over the Plain. His bodyguard placed a warning hand on his shoulder to stop him divulging any trade secrets to the Iron Cup goon Zigar. He let the Gamblers sleep in the perimeter and they departed at dawn the next day. They departed at dawn.

 

The Plain was lit red when the Gamblers crossed the playa in reverse and spotted a pair of Trolls on the rock where they had sheltered from the giant bugs. Datura ran ahead with her Boots of Speed and confirmed that the pair were festooned with loot. They pursued her as she ran back to the party. The group opened up with muskets, slings, javelins and arrows and felled one of the Trolls before it reached them. Jack leaped forward and pinned it to the earth with his spear, drawing a furious assault from the survivor. The remaining adventurers made quick work of the second one and Roddy burned them both with alchemical fire after divesting them of their treasure before they could regenerate. It was a foolhardy assault, two against five on a featureless landscape under fire from ranged weapons. Perhaps the sun had baked their brains.

Roddy was comfortable thanks to his ring of fire resistance but the rest of the Gamblers were miserable after the sun came up and grateful to reach the shore and the anchored Last Round. The Halfing crew reported that a stone temple had sailed up the river past them, pulled by swimming stone women and crewed by bronze men. It didn't attack them and they didn't pursue it. Later that day a tribe of mantis men came to gaze at them from the riverbank, the leader covered with colored bits of cloth and glass.