I. Adventure
Update
While on the Inert
Emir, Miles and Poco choose not to side with either the Candle-Wizard
First Mate Yijun or the Pirate Captain Zuzanna, and thus are forced
to man a ship on their own without any knowledge of sailing. A
violent storm closes in. Understanding their fate, they fire up a
distress flare for the Perennial Dandy’s attention. It works, and
the Dandy turns around, only to engulfed by the storm.
The party washes up
on the shore of a deserted island, losing a large part of their
inventory. Fortunately, the Merchant Prince Desideratus (Dez) is
present, and leads them to a camp of useless sailors. The sailors
won’t take any orders from somebody without a captain’s hat, but
the players find one and put them to work.
II. O Captain! My
Captain!
Every week the party
was able to give orders to the sailors.
HUNTING
Find lots of food,
but danger of being hurt.
SCAVENGING
Finding a small
amount of food but virtually no danger.
EXPLORING
Find items,
locations, or even food on the island.
BUILDING
Work on building the
rafts so they could get off the island.
Each sailor was
secretly ranked 1-5 in each category, and at the end of each week an
X-in-6 roll was made to see if they succeeded at their task. Each
success in building moved up progress on the rafts by a single point,
and 20 were needed to get off the island. If somebody succeeded at
exploring, I rolled on the following table.
Exploration
Success Chart:
1. Item
2. Food
3. Lee's Hut
4. Super
Capacitor
5. Item and roll
again
6. Food and roll
again
Lee’s Hut was the
home of a martial arts master that lived on the back of a large
turtle. The party brought him some accordions that he wanted, and he
taught them some special techniques. The Super Capacitor is one of
the expedition sites from Oddvent Oddpendium. I had another table of
items, and it was even possible to find real proper treasure.
In retrospect, I
really bonered up the hunting/scavenging rules and nobody got hurt.
If I were to do it again, I’d have a default 1 in 6 chance of
something bad happening at the camp. Then, if somebody failed at
hunting there would be a chance that they were seriously injured. I
would also probably have included a way for people to get better at
their tasks. At the time, the only way to improve somebody’s
chances was to give them an item. For example, hunters were given
rifles and explorers were given whips.
They spent 3 months
on the island and at least one person was bludgeoned to death with a
rock.
III. The Price is
Right
Without any sort of
appraisal ability, I never know how the party is meant to interpret
the value of whatever treasure they find. I guess this isn’t a
problem specifically with ItO, since a lot of other games don’t
have rules for this either.
Do I just tell them
how much it’s worth? Can they make some sort of roll? At the
moment, the party happens to be friends with a merchant who can give
them ballpark figures. I’m wondering how other handle this sort of
thing though. Any input is welcome.
If you feel naughty, describe the treasure to the PCs but don't tell them how much it's worth until they find some kind of expert that can tell them that. Of course, if one of the PCs is a jeweler or something, they probably can figure out how much an emerald is worth. Experts may or may not be trustworthy, and probably aren't the same persons who will exchange treasures for gold (so there's also the part where, once you know how much treasure is worth, you need to actually find a buyer and negotiate with them).
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