Games We Play

(The following journal is from the viewpoint of Foley, a halfling thief, some years later.)

Hmm? Oh, all right. Give a man his happy memories for a moment, wont you?

In the Moonshaes we stopped at Kings Bay, the capital city in the central isle. It seemed off to me that a rag-tag boat of ruffians and us was to land at the port in the Moonshaes with the most rules against living in the alternative lifestyle. To wit, us, boys and girls. The rental sailors stayed well away from the docks. I had heard there was a halfling quarter and went to check it out. Unfortunately it was depressingly filled with the folk who make happy farmers, tinkers and tradesmen. Still, they had some pretty good ale.

It was near the middle of the night on our second night away from port when Sully heard a voice in the darkness. Now, Sully was just as theatric as any boasting half-orc, and this is how the conversation he relayed to us later sounded.

There was a voice in the darkness that called, “Stand and deliver!” This is the kind of thing an amateur says because when you’re on the ocean, there’s nothing to stand on. See, its supposed to mean “get off your horse, carriage or whatever and give me all your loot”. So that some imbecile said it on the high seas, well, we were all smarter after a few months of pirate slavery.

Sully, or so he says, called out with, “Who called?” to which he was replied, “Your nemesis.” Sully then, it is said, yelled back, “Long list.” See, this is orc humor. The implication is that Sully has too many enemies to count but this very well could be any number above five and likely includes his own horse.

Actually Im being unfair. Whatever house of whatever god he was raised at got him to think. He tended to think always about cutting into things, but at least he was thinking about interesting ways to do it.

The mysterious voice in the darkness announced itself as the “Bone Baron” and ordered us to slow. This was the option instead of putting all our valuables in a rowboat and lowering it down. In retrospect we should have admitted that we had no such thing on board, but then how would we bolster our scurvy sea-dog credibility?

Sully then ordered the sailors increase speed, so faster we went. Sully had also sent someone to wake the rest of us up, possibly thinking that the more people there were the less of a chance he would be hit. This is a good strategy.

It was about this time that we all discussed things quickly and remembered that the “Bone Baron” was a long-dead but powerful sea captain. Very long dead. Rule number two for establishing yourself is to not hide behind the name of someone you’re not. Not only do you look even more like an amateur but eventually someone will take offense.

What we forgot was that we were amateurs, too. I, at least, remembered this about the time the ballista hit the deck. It missed nearly everyone, but the tip was a small barrel until it hit, when it became fragments and not a small amount of oil that burst immediately into flame. We got desperate and started firing into the distance, where we thought the voice of the so-called Bone Baron to be.

Dane hit the mark not once, but twice. The jaunty rebuffs from the Baron were strained, but his lingo was good. “You cannot kill what does not live!” It turns out that you can kill what doesn’t live, anyway.

By the time we got some light on the pirates deck — the other pirates deck, anyway, the pirates that weren’t us — another ballista shot tore our mainsail to ribbons. We could at least see bone. There was bone rowing the ship, bone working the ballista, bone in the form of skeletons, the aforementioned skeletons that, while dead, could indeed be quite killed.

Thanks to the vengeance of Colwyns god, the skeletons manning the ballista were urged to flee, and flee they did right into the sea, proving you didn’t have to kill the dead. We, at least, would not lose more than a sail and half our deck. At least now I knew why we were carrying a barrel of sand.

To put out the fire. You smother it. Good gods, hasn’t anyone taught you how to deal with fire? What will you do if you have to come down a chimney? “Don’t?” Very good, Toral, I’ll have a special assignment for you later.

I finally saw the Bone Baron cowering behind a low wall, though by the number of arrows around him you would guess he’d been in clear view since he started talking. That he could be seen just meant he was more of a target. Eventually, through the mortal mans own magics, he turned into a seal and slipped into the sea, leaving his bone crew rowing without a captain. We had won; the ship was ours.

Such as it was. The boat was on fire because the skeletons, and we did take care of a few skeletons, tended to explode into flame when shattered much like the ballista that hit our deck. How convenient, a crew and a siege weapon. We had to get there before the ship went down, and getting there meant possibly upsetting the skeleton crew.

The solution of jumping was Sully’s first and probably only idea. Problem was, he missed. Wearing the armor he was, he started to rapidly sink. We got a rope for Dane to hold onto (the elf shied away from armor, as magi usually do) and he dove in afterwards.

Nosmo too dove in, though I think he was trying to reach the other boat, and also disappeared beneath the waves though eventually he returned and climbed the ladder that hung down the side of the ship and was back on deck by the time Dane and Sully resurfaced. Eventually after all this tomfoolery, which you will notice I was having no part of, Nosmo simply swam to the other ship and the rest of us roped it and pulled it over.

The skeletons did not respond without their master and were easy to push overboard.

Out of the whole embarrassing ordeal we ended up with some ballista bolts, including a few of those that exploded quite nicely, and the spell book of the false Baron. No actual gold or booty, as it were. We could not even salvage the ship, though we did move far enough away that it did not catch us on fire.

Much of the next day was in repairing the mainsail and making our way to the last, westernmost port in the Moonshaes, a dirty, nervous little port on the isle of Flamsterd. The port was so small and uninteresting that I cant remember the name. One of the largest attractions, however, was a shrine to Umberlee, the cruel goddess of the sea. Everyone pitched in something of value, though in the case of the crew they seemed to have more of value than us. It is always good to try to get on the good side of an angry goddess.

When we left, we left the rest of civilization behind and headed toward truly lawless waters. There was supposed to be an elvish land out here somewhere, but thankfully we didn’t run into it. Instead, with the knowledge of Rokellen and Nosmo, the notes left by our original captors and an expensive nautical device helped keep us on course to Gull Rocks, the drop-off point of the orc-and-human pirates that roamed these waters.

There were a lot of gulls when we finally saw the island, and one rock sticking up as a hill in the middle, but the same can be said for nearly every bit of land in the ocean. It was a small island, little more than the hill and a dock and a worn-down fort at the top.

From our vantage point we came up with a quick plan: We, those who were suicidal enough to want to come here, would row ashore and do some basic reconnaissance. Every night a few hours after sunset, our ship would come near the back side of the keep and pick us up, if we were indeed there. This would go on for a week or thereabouts before the captain would cut his losses and return to Baldur’s Gate. But as his cut was up to us, he was being very helpful in helping us come up with this plan. I don’t know how he thought about working for novices, but he was being patient about it.

We landed the rowboat near the back of the island slightly after sunset, giving us some light to explore by. The island itself was flatter than I could tell from at sea and had more grass and trees (though everyone else called them shrubs) than most small ocean islands. It also had, around the fortress, a shallow but murky moat, easy to jump and near impossible to drown in.

At one corner of the keep was a common grave area, no doubt to have some place to raise undead from. At another was built an extended structure that came out almost to the moat and had a door of its own. We might make our way over here, but we wanted to see the gated door first. Dane leapt across the easy reach, long elf legs carrying him across only to slip on the far side and land in the murk with a loud splat.

Whatever it was that stuck its head out of the door in the corner shed soon lost its head from a sudden magical blast from Nosmo, but this only brought out more. Orcs, two then three. I was not going to risk the jump so I rounded the keep to make sure others weren’t coming out the front. Sully leapt the moat to engage them, but he tripped on a root and landed head-first and went limp. This moat even I could cross with a running start, and did. Dane, already covered in the slimy water, pulled out the half-orc. Unfortunately the brigands were armed with pikes and could easily reach across the moat, though before I knew it Nosmo was on the other side with them. Perhaps he jumped without knowing they were there.

It looked, for a moment, bleak. Nosmo, with little proper training to fight, was cornered, Sully was unconscious and Colwyn was trying desperately to wind up his crossbow. But with luck and skill, not to mention a number of arrows, rocks and magic, we killed them quicker than they could react. Nosmo was rather shaken, but not a scratch on him.

Sully did lose his sword, Susan, for a moment and dove back into the murk to fetch it. Thus dirty, he simply walked the rest of the way across the moat. The rest of us jumped.

So we ended up in this room, like a gardening shed with shovels and backhoes and some stone-working tools and the walls covered in nearly every kind of god and goddess holy symbol that at least I knew. I didn’t have much solid trust in gods back in those days, but even I was impressed by the collection. None of them were worth prying off the walls. I don’t know anywhere I’d rather hide against undead, though, and the thought was shared among us as we faced the doors that lead deeper into the keep.