Hello,
I want to start a one on one game with my son.
He wakes up on a beach pos­si­bly with other sur­vivors of a ship wreck. We are think­ing that he was shang­haied from some port into the crew.
He is on a trop­i­cal island (or there abouts) pos­si­bly of the Black King­doms coast if I use the REH set­ting, I have not looked at Xoth yet.
So he has to arrange food and shel­ter, swim to the wreck to sal­vage bits etc Pos­si­bly can­ni­bals later on. What sort of other preda­tor type animals/​monsters could there be, would packs of mon­keys be aggres­sive?
Any idea’s wel­come.
Thanks
Allan

I have been watch­ing a lot of Bear Grylls lately and can use some of his encoun­ters.
Generic dam­age for thirst and star­va­tion.
Cliff climb­ing to get bird eggs.
Spiky plants like net­tles.
I am using for inspi­ra­tion to Pathfinder adven­ture Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv, but with a lot less mon­sters etc. But I do want to intro­duce the vil­lian in the part one.
The adven­ture path does have Lizard­men which I like but I have not read very far into the series and not much point any­way as its Blade and not D&D.
Any­body who loves to make char­ac­ters it would be great to have some other stranded pas­sen­gers or crew with the player.

Allan

Use Xoth! Use Xoth! The Sil­ver Lotus Isles or an island off the Can­ni­bal Coast will fit your bill admirably. Read up on them (p200) and their peo­ples, the Daka and Iku­nas (p181) and you’re good to go.

I would play the pri­va­tions of being ship­wrecked mainly by ear, for flavour, and wouldn’t focus on them. The PCs are for­mi­da­ble and should be seen doing more for­mi­da­ble things than dig­ging the beach for water and shim­my­ing up trees for birds’ eggs.

Giant con­stric­tor snakes, salt water croc­o­diles, and car­niv­o­rous (giant) apes make for great beasts to fight. And of course the blood-​sucking giant slugs of the Sil­ver Lotus Isles. But I’d intro­duce human oppo­si­tion quite early on – with just hos­tile nature as oppo­si­tion, the PCs’ PAs might lie rather fal­low.

My advice would be to make the wrecked ship not any old ship. A pirate ship or a slaver ship make for more inter­est­ing sur­vivors, and for the pos­si­bil­ity to intro­duce other, hos­tile sur­vivors quite early on. The fact that the Sil­ver Lotus drug (p202) har­vested on the isles named after it is sor­cer­ous in nature does also sug­gest mak­ing the foundered ship some sor­cer­ous expe­di­tion. Also, a known for­ti­fied camp or at least reg­u­lar anchor­age of drug hunters makes for a good loca­tion for the ship­wrecks to want to reach. Or the sor­cer­ous expe­di­tion might have been look­ing for some rem­nant of Ancient Pta­haana on the Can­ni­bal Coast, or been return­ing from one from the Sunken Islands (see below)?

And maybe the ship wasn’t “just” wrecked by a storm? Maybe there was sor­cery involved? Or some cursed arti­fact still in the (trea­sured) pos­ses­sion of one sur­vivor? As the Can­ni­bal Coast was the refuge for the sur­viv­ing ancient Namthuans and their foul sor­cery (see p201, Pta­haana), maybe some arti­fact of theirs involved? Ancient Pta­haana is after all the sec­ond foundered sor­cer­ous cul­ture on Xoth after Elder Kuth, and the degen­er­ate wor­ship of its blood god Ia-​Azutlatl (p189) might make for a grisly scene.

In any case a good back­story to the ship­wreck, which is still being felt (through other sur­vivors or through the very thing that was being sought) and with the PCs’ PAs linked into it, strikes me indis­pens­able to make this really exciting.

Great ideas thank you very much, we really need a print forum but­ton.
I don’t have a com­puter at home so I have read and write from my phone
I wil def­i­nitely look into Xoth it sounds like it will work excel­lent
Is Blade the only/​best source of Xoth mate­r­ial

Allan

Allan wrote: Xoth is an orig­i­nal cre­ation of Morten Braden. It can beordered as a pdf from him.

How­ever, most of the pdf is about adapt­ing d20 play to S&S gam­ing, includ­ing a num­ber of dungeon-​crawly adven­tures. While this is good stuff, there is no need get­ting the pdf if you’re not inter­ested in it. With Morten’s per­mis­sion we have pulled the entire set­ting info from the main book and “Song of the Beast-​Gods” and actu­ally expanded it slightly in a place or two, with maybe a some­what dif­fer­ent spin here and there. So there’s no addi­tional pub­lished mate­r­ial any­where, save “Citadel beyond the North Wind”, which we ignore as it doesn’t con­cur with our vision of Tharag Thule.

Started tonight and we are on are way
He woke up on the beach, killed a crab that was start­ing to eat him
Got to the wreck of the ship, res­cued a sailor from the brig, looted as fast as they could and got back to shore
He got the cap­tains jour­nal (have to check the read-​write rules) and found the cook dead and shoved out of way, he only found him because of the ship wreck
Allan

Ques­tion;
Because of the mys­tery with the dead cook found in the ship and the cap­tain tak­ing the ship of course and run­ning her aground could a legit­i­mate pas­sion be, “find out about the mys­tery of the ship”.
This would be a player thing not a “real life” inter­est of a ship­wrecked sur­vivor.

Allan

Allan wrote: Any­thing can be made a PA pro­vided it is at all plau­si­ble that the PC would care about it at the time. The entire group, not just the ref­eree or the player him­self, are the judges of this plau­si­bil­ity.

If you would ask me to be that judge, I’d say yes, it can be turned into a PA. Sure, the PC will be pre­oc­cu­pied with sur­vivng and get­ting back to civ­i­liza­tion, but that doesn’t imo pre­clude him from hav­ing an inter­est in what actu­ally went on on the ship and why it was wrecked in the first place.

Did a bit more last night.
Jask the res­cued man who was in the brig and shanghied like the PC but only recently at the last port of call, coughed up some more info about the goings-​on, on the ship as peo­ple tended to ignore him locked up.
PC was then con­fronted by 3 sur­viv­ing sailors com­ing up to there camp, one with a past his­tory of bulling the PC.
Fight started as he would not hand over there camp, still ongo­ing. He rolled 19dice with a spear thrust to the chest got 7 suc­cesses but the vil­lian got 6 suc­cesses defend­ing with club, result­ing in the blow slid­ing of the mans leather jerkin. Then he changed to thrusts at the face, which was more suc­cess­ful.
Realised since after read­ing another post by Michael that I should have prob­a­bly put in a Ter­rain Mod for fight­ing over loose sand.

Allan

Allan wrote: Ter­rain Checks are meant to be played by ear by every group. There is no def­i­nite divide when a Ter­rain Check should become nec­es­sary; both the phys­i­cal nature of the ground (level or not, slip­pery or not, sloped or not) and how pre­dictable it is fig­ure in the assess­ment. Largely level ground obscured by high grass might for exam­ple war­rant a Check to avoid slip­ping on the occa­sional stone or a root.

But I would say that loose sand alone is, even though slightly heavy to tread, actu­ally pretty pre­dictable foot­ing that would not war­rant a Check.