Adventure &2 – Rage from the Waves

by Nicole Massey
Freely distributed by & Magazine
AD&D
Levels 3-7

What horror from the depths is leaving ships adrift, cargo untouched, stealing the crews for some unspeakable purpose?

I haven’t read the adventure yet. I’d guess Sahuguin. Ok, I was wrong. It’s Sirens. And Psionics. Dirty hippy sirens with psionics. 2e nonsense. Err, i mean: This is a 2e style investigation of some ships that have disappeared. It ends up with something happening down in some siren caves. Hopefully it’s a slaughter-fest down there so I don’t have to listen to this bullshit hippy whale-friendly environmentalism message. Errr, I mean, it’s got a lot of extraneous detail in the descriptions and is PROBABLY meant to be a role-play heavy adventure.

There is some magic hippy land where elves, dwarves, humans, and halfling live in harmony. They live under streetlamps with continual light in them and with good and justly kings and wizard guilds that are not full of reprobates and blah blah blah blah blah. Look, I know some of you like this shit but I can’t for the life of me understand why. Anyway, in some bullshit land like this the king summons/bullies you to attend an audience. Some bullshit 6th level knight/fighter in full plate shows up and intimates that you need to come see the king, or else. Hey0Sir Dickcheese, how about asking nicely? Nah, it’s always gotta be veiled threats in these things and the players never to get to call their bluffs ’cause then the DM gets their underwear twisted and 31st level orphan protectors show up and blah blah blah blah blah Screw you Mr PC for not putting up with the DM’s version of a power fantasy. You know what happens when a fucking NPC tries to bully one of my characters because the DM is a tool? I shiv the fucker in the throat with my holy symbol and fuck the character and the campaign, I’ll make a new one. Uh, I shiv the NPC, not the DM. But I think the DM gets the message. Perhaps I should find a better way of communicating my displeasure with the railroading than shooting cops in the face with shotguns? Whoops, wrong campaign/game.

Anyway, Kingy wants you to go look in to why some ships have been found adrift with no sailors on them. Blah blah blah blah blah critical grin shipment blah blah blah blah blah famine down south blah blah blah blah blah. He’s offering the wonderful reward of 3000gp each. It’s not clear to me tat many people who write AD&D adventures have actually ever played the game. Do you know how much XP it takes to go from level 5 to 6? 3000gp isn’t going to be a drop in the bucket, and it probably doesn’t count for XP anyway. But, if we stab you in … nope nope. SUre, we’d like to play D&D tonight.

Off to the latest ship to investigate. There’s a halfling sheriff on board with his men who are in charge. There’s blood on the deck that somehow everyone knows looks like dolphin blood. [I thought dolphin blood looked like human blood looked like all mammal blood? Am I an idiot/wrong?] The party is given leave to investigate the ship, which actually means that the sheriff prevents them from searching most of the ship. WTF?! It turns out that the party can make a cursory inspection but can’t actually do anything like search a sea chest or something like that. Sheriffs already done that. He won’t let it be done again. Uh … I think there’s an NCAA game on. I hate basketball but it sounds like loads more fun than this. After all, we all know what’s going to happen if we put Mr Fussy-bottom in his place. The group manages to find a spear on deck and some of the crews sea chests say “Nantucket” on them. Why the chests stand out I don’t know. Actually, I do know. It’s a poorly written adventure and Nantucket is the next clue. The rooms on the ship are full of lengthy descriptions. None of them matter. NONE OF THEM MATTER. Four pages of ship room descriptions none of which matter. Blood, spear, Nantucket chests, dickhead Sheriff begging for an execution that can’t be delivered because this is 2e and he’s actually a level 999 protector of the realm wand best friends with Tiamat and Baphumet.

Transition to the two and half page description of the se sage shop. Two and a half pages of meaningless description. Anything you can learn about the spear is in a table in the appendix. The pages here are just a description of the shop and the asshole halfling owner. For the Nantucket clue the group has to go a sailors bar. One is provided. It’s another four pages. It’s only about half meaningless and useless drivel text description. The useful half is some local color and flavor tables about events in the bar, some crew information about the Nantucket, and a rumor table. A decent little bit of tables for spicing up a sailor bar. Not so bad and maybe even worth stealing for for own town. Ok, time for the party to go sign on to a ship, in secret, that the last remaining Nantucket crew are on. You see, it was a whaling ship and after taking a big Sei whale it caught fire in port. The crew went their ways. Most have disappeared on the disappeared ships. The rest are on one other ship about to leave port and looking for crew … ANother FAR too long meaningless description of a ship follows. With magic glow globes in the cabins … ug. There’s a decent little table for some encounters on the way. Ship attacked by sperm whale. Giant squid attack. Pirates. Shipwreck. Watching warships shell a town. Not so bad.

Either the crew, and party will be captured by the Sirens or they will find their caves on a nearby island. On the worlds most boring sea cave map the party will escape, negotiate, or hack their way through the sirens. My guess is die. There’s like 10 Sirens with psionics and they all have dominate, hypnosis, usually mass domination or something like that. Kudos for psionics. Ain’t no way the group is going to stand up to 10 mass dominates round after round. The dirty hippy sirens are pissed their Sei whale brother was killed. They are gonna sacrifice all of the Nantucket sailors (all of the sailors are still alive in the sea caves) and then do a mercy killing on the rest of the sailors. Uh huh. Dirty hippies indeed. Clearly there’s some sort of negotiated settlement that’s supposed to happen here. The sirens want the sailors killed or imprisoned for a long time. Uh huh. That’s gonna fucking happen. I’m sure that’s gonna work out real well for the king. What’s next, dyrads pissed about rat killings in town?

Treasure sucks and there’s not enough of it. If you hack your way through you might get a chest with 25k gp in it. THAT THE FUCKING ADVENTURE THEN SUGGESTS YOU LIMIT SO YOU DON”T FLOOD THE GAME WITH GOLD. How the fuck do you expect the group to level? 25k ain’t shit and you don’t even want to give THAT out?