I wrote this over the course of about two days after several months of putting it off. I guarantee I forgot some major and quite funny details, but such is life. Each paragraph corresponds to one session that I have notes for, with a couple of other paragraphs that either cover multiple sessions without notes, or which correspond to a session that I know happened, but have no record of.
The previous year was one of great change in Beggar's Hole. Starting the day that Johnny Boats washed up on shore, and Lilith wandered into town completely unrelated. That night, the two fought off an attack by a group of Kuo Toa, confusing Ukhov who thought the fishmen were mere legends. The next morning, the duo investigated an abandoned farm, theorizing that the resident Sholokhov family had been taken by the small, bug-eyed fish men.
Later that night, another attack party appeared, this time composed of both Kuo Toa and Sahuagin. Johnny and Lilith beat them off again, and found a perfectly sphere stone that the fish had been trying to steal from Ukhov's shed. Ukhov couldn't explain the stone, so the group pocketed it to figure out later.
The next morning, as the carnage and dead fish men were being cleaned up, Trixie arrived in Beggar's Hole. The now trio set a trap for a new group of fish people, expected to appear on this, the last night of the full moon. The trap worked, though this fight was more hard-fought as the fish brought along a spellcaster who sent tendrils of fear crawling up people's anuses to scare them. The party was given gold by Ukhov to thank them, and they then killed a docking trade captain to steal his longship. Adam Hanson rolled two natural 1s in a row during this session, as well as rolling the sequence "4, 4, 5, 5, 4, 4". As the fight was winding down, the party spotted three black-sailed ships at the horizon, as well as some islands with black ruins on top of them, and a strange area of perturbed water nearby.
With their new longship in hand, the party set out to explore the abandoned islands, finding black ruins made from the same oily stone as the sphere they recovered at Ukhov's. The party ventured into the most intact ruin. Checking down a well, the party found a Basilisk which they just sort of ignored, climbing back up the well to check a different room in the complex. There, they met the Baron Aquor, engaged in a series of shenanigans with him, chose not to kill him beause he was goofy, then tricked him down a well to kill the Basilisk and impress his father, the Duke Trenton. The party freed the Sholokhov family, and stole a stash of loot before withdrawing from the ruins and returning to Beggar's Hole.
Back at Beggar's Hole, a man named Tommy Heals washed ashore, while Johnny sent word to his former coworker Bargus Shmargus for help examining the strange stone the party recovered from Ukhov's shack.
The party returned to the Breakwater Ruins, exploring it more thoroughly and discovering a sea-elf named Vavan, as well as a grate covering a downward spiraling staircase.
Moving down the staircase, the party found an even older set of ruins. They explored one branching path which contained a strange room with a button in its center, holes in that button's pedestal, and a good amount of water. Inside the laboratory that this puzzle concealed, Johnny Boats found some fun loot, before returning to the room with the staircase. The group then investigated a different path, finding a horde of skeletons seemingly under the Deep One's control in a burial chamber decorated with mosaics that had a decidedly kraken-like motif.
After defeating the skeletons, the group pushed on, finding a chamber with a strange book, The Tome of The Deep One, which they recovered and returned to Beggar's Hole. They couldn't make sense of the strange symbols within the book. Ukhov revealed several (seemingly) small-scale problems in the area, but in a true testament to my oversight, these three small problems would end up taking about as much attention as The Deep One to deal with. The problems were The Sea Lord Jaerelyx and his activities in the region, a lost Dwarven trade caravan, and an abandoned gold mine in the region with some Kobolds in it. That night, when everyone went to sleep, they had spooky dreams about The Deep One offering them power, which they all turned down with varying degrees of malice towards him. For now (foreshadowing).
The party handled two of those three problems in the following days. I think. The notes here become very sporadic, and I definitely took zero notes for at least one session. From my memory, they went hunting with a goliath to kill a mammoth, and also helped those dwarves, saving the sword lesbians Viola and Lisa.
The next definitive notes follow the party hunting down and killing a Wyvern, then going on a misadventure into the swamp to save a group of traveling minstrels. In the swamp, a few groupies died and the party discovered a strange secluded grove of trees where the roving band had been taken as prisoners. Luckily(?) the party freed them and set them back on their path Northward.
I once again may have missed notes for a session, because somewhere in here is when Ethyl Worthers joins the party, becoming a notable character shortly after when the group descends to Riftside. They found a ghost named Elisae whose betrothed Jemphrey had allegedly cheated on her with "that whore Analise". She was defeated, and her spirit stored in a ring of jumping that Johnny Boats carried. The party then continued on, tracking down a base of Kuo Toa and Sahuagin, which turned out to be the base of Aquor. Though Lilith tried to kill him, she failed and the party was welcomed as friends, going on to enjoy a mixer with Aquor's Sahuagin bretheren. They ended up killing one of them named Moore who had a LOT of issues regarding inferiority and jealousy of Aquor, even though Aquor would NEVER be a part of the drama.
Aquor brought Lilith a charcuterie board (because he hear she was taking Moore's death poorly), and with some new information in hand, the party set out to the secret entrance to the city's engineering/force magic nexus (this had definitely been established as a thing, but who knows what notes I was taking that day). Also, Vavan definitely indirectly killed everyone in this city, but he personally doesn't follow that line of logic. The party then visited the nexus, discovering a viewport that showed the Deep One, and a big gun pointed at him. Unknown to anyone else, Ethyl accepted a deal offered to her by the Deep One here, something no one else really thought to fill her in on.
The party then freed a group of slaves from a dig site, and Ethyl noticed a cool plant shop. Inside, they met a sentient plant (the remnants of an elf who died here 3,000 years ago). Biggum, as he was called, had a cutting/clone of him taken, offered up some cool pots to Ethyl, and then was happy once the party slaid him and allowed his spirit (or at least this version of it? Who knows?) to rest. The group then led the slaves all the way back to Beggar's Hole. Ethyl discovered where the oily black stone was being kept, which by this point the group had learned was a control-stone that might allow The Deep One to be freed. My capitalization of the "T" in The Deep One is really inconsistent, but I don't care enough to fix that. That night, Aquor appeared at Trixies window, warning her that The Deep One had struck a deal with Ethyl. No one knew he was secretly a good guy, but the signs were all there, I swear it.
I know what you're thinking, dear reader. Surely, this is all building to either an internal confrontation within the party, or an external confrontation with The Deep One. You'd be wrong. The party decided to chase after Jaerelyx, and set out for an island that he lived on. They had definitely had one encounter with him previously, so I'm definitely missing several big sessions worth of notes that I didn't take. Notably, in that encounter, Johnny Boats slaughtered "The Boss", his former boss, by dragging him underwater and punching the air out of his lungs. They landed on an island inhabited by Jaerelyx's followers, and prepared to storm the walls of a fortress there.
The party assaulted the outpost, killing many defenders before finding a secret path that let them out right behind the fort's highest ranking officer. They killed that guy with very little effort, taking the remaining 31 men as members of Johnny's crew, plus one more who lived a short time before he was murdered for being creepy about "booby statues". With a month of downtime, the party repaired their ships, Johnny reorganized his burgeoning shipbound enterprise, and something critical happened with Ethyl. Before that, however, Trixie decided to leave the party and continue on her loner path, evading the celestial forces that are likely hoping to capture her. Ethyl decided to sneak up to Lilith's room, in hopes of securing the oily stone for The Deep One. Unknown to Ethyl, the whole rest of the party knew of her treachery, and a trap had been laid. Ethyl took several precautions, but none were able to detect or defuse the deadly Wyvern Dirty Bomb that Lilith had equipped a homunculus servant with. Thinking that a magical trap had been disarmed, Ethyl entered the room, only to be blown the fuck up by the servant, left unconscious and dying. The rest of the party heard this and rushed back to their house, finding an unconscious Ethyl and Lilith's room completely detonated. Johnny and Lilith dragged her body out to the pier, and Johnny did "The People's Elbow" from atop a ship's mast to finally kill the old woman. Trixie witnessed this all through a divine vision, as well as Ethyl's broken body washing up on the overgrown shores of Riftside, awaiting an unknown fate.
After Ethyl's death and Trixie's disappearance, two new faces appeared in Beggar's Hole. One was Elvira Jinx, a Hexblood from the Feywild. The other was Laura Babbage, an anti-piracy activist who had deep concerns about environmentalism. They both joined up with Johnny and Lilith, and set out to kill Jaerelyx. The party rescued Corbo Greenbriar from a sinking ship, then continued on to find Jaerelyx's base of operations. This base, a flooded dwarven city, ended up being the site of several overlapping events: a ship-to-ship battle between Johnny's fleet and Jaerelyx's, tense negotiations between Jaerelyx and Laura, and eventually a "battle" (more accurately a slaughter) with Jaerelyx involving the whole party.
Johnny Boats took over the rest of Jaerelyx's organization (and took the now thoroughly defeated pirate under his wing), and left the party. By pure coincidence, this mute kid named Salt showed up at the same time, joining the party. For those keeping track, this made a party that was 3/4 completely uninvolved with the actual substance of The Deep One as a plot device, as the party turned its attention to killing the kraken. To be fair, Salt was intimately involved with The Deep One in his backstory, but still, a strange situation. The party went back to Riftside, freed Aquor from imprisonment by some of his minions, then went down to fight The Deep One. Also there was a snake man named Judas here, I kinda forgot about him but that means the party was either 4/5 or 3/5 uninvolved with The Deep One, depending on how you count. During the fight, the party came face to face with a resurrected/zombie Ethyl, Moore (Aquor's biggest hater/journal guy), The Boss, and Oleg, a random crewmember who fell overboard during a storm a while back. The party defeated these ghouls, and was able to activate the Big Gun that killed the kraken, bringing an end to his reign and also, mostly because it was a funny bit, allowing Salt to speak again.
The party escorted Aquor back to his men, who were sad that their coup was now over. Arriving back in Beggar's Hole, the group met Bea, a blue plasmoid here from the Dwarven Holds on a "diplomatic vacation". Lilith stayed home to work on properly incorporating the adventuring party as the new leaders of Beggar's Hole (after Ukhov gifted the party the right to become its leaders), and the party (with Bea) set out into the swamp to see what was what. In the swamp, the party returned to the place where the minstrels were captured, meeting Nelus, a druid who told a story about how his "sweet baby girl named Nora" was taken by hags. The party also met a kindly elder druid named Nana Cinder.
The party then went on to visit Baba Svetya, the ancient hag who ruled over her fellows within the Great Swamp. I'll be honest, there aren't many notes for these sessions. I think we completely skipped over that the lizard femboys exist, which I think probably happened here. Anyway, the party fought some evil hags who were kidnapping babies, and in the process discovered that Elvira was probably Nelus's "sweet baby girl named Nora", something that was never addressed. Also, there's definitely a wise frog that exists in here at some point.
This is the end of my notes, and I think probably the end of the campaign for that year. The party had resolved most of the problems facing Beggar's Hole (including a brief detour to absolutely slaughter a group of Kobolds after they got back from the swamp). Baba Svetya and Nana Cinder are the same person, which I apparently never explicitly wrote down in my notes, but it's true. There are countless details that I've either left out or forgotten, but the bottom line is that the party killed a kraken, defeated a pirate, and made allies in the swamp all while becoming immensely rich in their own rights. Now that things have settled down in Beggar's Hole, one can only assume that some combination of these adventurers and their eclectic allies are going to find trouble in the future.
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