Mortaine’s Blog

Last night, I ran my D&D game, Tabula Rasa. Oh, it was schweet. I have 4 players in my game. Two of them are a mother-daughter team (the daughter just turned 14). The premise of the game is that they all woke up with no memory of who they had been.

Last week, I called everyone except the 14 year old (her character’s name is Orva), and told them my plan for the game. Basically, Orva is having a nightmare, and everyone in the game was part of her nightmare for just the one night. So Fred (her RL mom), Kemen, and Aloysius were all dream representations of themselves.

Now, this is a nightmare, but it’s a nightmare with a basis in truth. The premise of the nightmare is that Orva recently took control of the ship they were travelling on (the captain and 1/3 of the crew had died– she has the most experience at sea). The adventure started with a little bit of a problem– the ship kept turning southward. Unfortunately, Orva couldn’t get any leads as to why (Kemen was actually sabotaging the ship), so they ended up becalmed in the doldrums after raiding a small death-cult tribe on an island.

Where the crew began to plot mutiny.

Just as Orva suspected the very worst, she heard some sort of singing– no, chanting– in the very depths of her ship. She, Fred, and Aloysius went to investigate– and interrupted an unholy ritual in which Kemen was the key player!

They subdued Kemen (!!!) and defeated the other cultists, but of course the damage has been done. One of their own party is a cultist! Shock! Horror!

But that is not the worst of it. During the day, they spot another ship approaching. An abandoned ship, moving silently through the stilled waters. They go aboard to investigate.

This is where we put on the eerie music, of course. The ship, totally abandoned, is all silent except the creaking of the wooden hull in the water. Tattered sails are all that remain on the masts, which are bleached white from age and sun.

Below the deck, all of the lower decks and holds are also bleached white, though, which does not bode well for our heroes.

Orva finds a series of journals in the first mate’s cabin, which also has a holy symbol of her god (she’s a paladin) on the wall– it’s been defiled by a pentagram, though.

After noticing that the cargo hold also has that bleached look to it, she goes back on deck to read the journals. What she reads is chilling.

It’s an account of another ship, perhaps this very same one, in which the first mate is very concerned for her crew. A few days before, she had raided a savage tribe of death cultists, razing their temple and destroying their leaders. Unfortunately, during the raid her Captain was killed. She tells of how the ship became becalmed in the doldrums, and how she suspects that something unwholesome, some intelligence, has crept on board. She plans to investigate that night. That’s the last entry in the journal.

The journals are all written in Orva’s handwriting.

Orva and her two remaining companions go back to the cargo hold, deciding that they must find out what happened, if only so they know if this person is just a ghost from the past or what.

Orva finds a trapdoor in the floor of the cargo hold. She opens it, but unnatural darkness fills the space beneath. She goes down into the bottom hold, where the bilge should be, but isn’t, and steps on an ancient and unholy sigil (for a copy, see my userpic).

And all hell breaks loose. The room lights up. Twenty sailors– not dead, but not truly alive, and an illithid (mind-flayer) are in this lower hold. They tear the party to pieces. Well, them and the gargantuan shapeshifter that had taken over the ship’s structure (the white decks everywhere). The shapeshifter easily grabs and holds them in place, while the mindflayers does what mindflayers do– he performed hideous acts of psychic brutality on them.

For Orva, he accused her of being a horrible, hypocritical creature, filled with her own self-righteousness even as she slew countless innocent creatures because they worshipped the wrong god. He also snapped her connection to her deity, which alone could have driven her mad. In fact, it was an act of tremendous will not to have her mind driven out of her.

Her companions fared not so well. Fred did not hold up well to the mental blast that was used on her– she went forward to the illithid peacefully and had her brain sucked out and eaten.

Aloysius met a different fate. The illithid planted a suggestion of various opponents and companions that didn’t actually exist. As his confusion mounted, he drew his pistol and started firing at whomever he perceived as a threat– even though no one was there. He winged Orva in the shoulder.

And poor Orva! Her connection to her deity gone, she fought a brief, losing battle against the sailors, the mindflayer, and the shapeshifter. But there was no hope, and she was expelled through the hull of the ship as the shapeshifter rejected her and the various bits of jetsam that had once been the ship she was on.

As she drowns, she catches a glimpse of the ship’s hull, and the name of the vessel– The Eleanor (in waking-world Orva has a tattoo of this name on her arm).

I had the player close her eyes while I told about her drowning, the way the light and sound drift away, the letting go of everything, the floating. How a distant scream no longer seems to matter anymore….

And then, when it was all quiet, I held up a sign and motioned for the other 3 players to say it on the count of three.

One….
Two…..
Three….

ORVA, WAKE UP!

And the player opened her eyes with a look of total shock, jumped a bit, and said “Uuuuuuh!” She kind of looked around at us, grinning these total shit-eating grins at her expression, and it slowly dawned on her what had happened. I storytold quickly that they’re three weeks out, on the ship, the Captain is fine, there was no illness, and that they’re all still passengers on the Red Sparrow.

It was priceless. I then told her to write everything down, because she wouldn’t be able to get prompted later– if she forgot, then she would just forget. I even made her copy out the sigil. It took her a little over an hour to write it all down. It would have taken less time if she hadn’t kept stopping to stick her tongue out at me.
I paced time a little strangely last night– some parts went too fast, others too slow, but overall we ended on time (I storytold two major scenes, but in a way that made them just as “real,” I hope). Overall, it was very successful. It’s not something I could do again, at least with this group, and it would take a very special group of players to repeat the same kind of experience (the players I had for my Al-Qadim game, including would have been able to do it, no problem).