Chapter 4 - Session 9

The Great Escape

Events and Actions

Approaching the river gate they remembered from five years before, the party found it transformed: a new wall now ran the full width of the river valley, manned and lit with torches, clearly built to keep people from leaving rather than to keep anyone out. A low watchtower stood where the wall met the desert's edge, manned by a single guard and equipped with a Greek fire thrower to cover the approach. Cosimo judged a static illusion useless against a physical wall and gate — and doubly risky out in the open desert, where the constant drift of tumbleweed and heat shimmer would make anything frozen in place stand out. Noddy briefly weighed charming the tower's lone guard to sleep so the party could slip past below him, but the party held back rather than risk him being punished for dozing on watch, and confusing him instead was floated as a gentler option; in the end they settled on the simplest plan, skirting around through the desert, and kept Noddy's tricks in reserve only for the case that a guard at the gate itself actually challenged them. Noddy sent his seagull familiar, Pocket, up to scout, confirming the wall ran only to the edge of the river valley and stopped short of the open desert beyond.

Wrapped in cloth taken from the Stone Men raiders, the party pushed out into the dunes, wary enough of the giant scorpions rumored to hunt there that Riu deliberately altered his gait and dragged his feet rather than risk his usual footsteps giving him away. The going was brutal, sand shifting underfoot with every step, and once they had gone only a short distance the town and its wall vanished entirely behind them, leaving nothing but featureless dunes in every direction, disorienting in the same way as open sea. Noddy's uncanny sense of direction carried them east and then back north, and after a few hours of marching they returned to the edge of the river valley, shook the sand from their gear, and pressed on toward the coast. Along the way, Mani brooded aloud over being branded a heretic for a mission he had volunteered for out of loyalty to the Navy — recalling how he'd joined up to make something of himself after a difficult upbringing, only to survive the Maelstrom crossing and the giant spider queen and be rewarded with a heretic's brand — and began embracing a harder, more villainous edge to his personality, while the party debated wages owed, personal valuables carried, and how best to disguise themselves for what was to come. They also weighed what to do about a mounted messenger, should one overtake them on the road to the delta, and settled on a simple answer: pull him off his horse before he could report them.

By the early hours of the morning, they reached a rise overlooking a river delta supply depot that barely resembled the place they remembered — the water sat higher now, and the ground was crowded with new construction. What they saw was a spread of palm trees, twisting tidal channels, catwalks, an empty gallows, a warehouse under construction, and a canvas-covered tent. The largest vessel moored at the jetty was a single-masted cutter-like boat with someone visibly asleep aboard under a canvas cover, alongside a smaller pinnace for ferrying people and a wide, slow cargo boat built for hauling rather than speed. Further out to sea, a spyglass and a string of excellent sailing rolls from Werner identified six larger ships riding at anchor — two frigates, two brigs, a sloop, and a cutter — with the two brigs tentatively identified from later evidence as the merchant ships First Light and The Bull. Werner judged that fully crewing any of the bigger ships took far more hands than the party had, likely thirty to thirty-five for the sloop or cutter and somewhat fewer for the slower, less heavily worked brigs, and that only the small boat at the jetty was realistically within their reach.

With too few hands to simply seize a ship, Mani proposed forging a letter of authority and bluffing their way aboard, backed up by Noddy's charm if anyone balked, framing the whole scheme around a new personal motto extolling the virtue of audacity. He also settled on a stock threat to keep any commandeered crew compliant once they were underway: asking them, early and often, how long they thought they could tread water. Alternatives were floated and set aside for use only if things went loud: swimming out with Noddy's seagull setting small fires as a diversion, one of Cosimo's illusions to draw attention elsewhere, or conjuring a thick fog to cover a quiet escape. The party agreed that if the bluff collapsed, they would fall back to the small boat or simply run north along the beach.

Before committing, they weighed where to go once free. Noddy could sense a totem to the west worth investigating, and pirates were floated as a possible haven, but the party leaned toward sailing north around the island to the shipyard the Stone Men used, marked on their old map, rather than risk the Maelstrom crossing again in an unfamiliar boat. Noddy also offered a slower alternative — using his shapeshifting magic to study and impersonate a ranking Northern officer — but it demanded a full day he judged they couldn't spare, so the party pressed ahead with the forged-letter plan instead, agreeing to scout the warehouse first before committing to anything.

To gather intelligence first, Knick Nab and Noddy stealthed to the blind side of the warehouse and climbed its rough stone wall using Knick Nab's silk rope, discovering the roof was little more than woven reeds over a few support beams, with a canvas-covered vent hole in the middle for ventilation. Crossing it proved awkward: Knick Nab put a foot straight through the reeds and had to widen the hole to drop himself inside, while Noddy, unable to walk the beams safely, ended up levitating flat on his stomach and hauling himself across hand over hand. The noise nearly gave them away — a guard below asked "what's around back?" before being waved off by his partner — but both got inside undetected. There, Knick Nab found the warehouse full of food stores and barrels of wine and rum, and a small office stacked with logbooks; the most recent volumes recorded only imports of food and shipbuilding materials, nothing about arms or gunpowder, and named two ships, the First Light and The Bull, as recent deliveries. Digging back through older volumes turned up nothing but more of the same — months of imports and no record of anything ever going out — though the stacks of rum barrels throughout the warehouse were noted as flammable enough to serve as a diversion later if needed. His climb back out went less smoothly than his climb in — an attempt to leap for the roof's edge ended with him crashing into a barrel of cymbals below before he simply used the rope Noddy dropped for him.

With the ledgers checked, the party split into three groups and moved on the depot. Mani left his Navy uniform behind to pose as a plain sailor instead, reasoning that real Marines would ask too many questions of one of their own, and the party trimmed down what they carried rather than risk unusual gear giving the lie to their story. Thus disguised as "Corporal Hicks," Mani and Riu, the latter carrying the forged letter, approached the two guards at the warehouse front with a story of a shipwrecked crew returning to their ship; Noddy stood ready to charm the guards if the story faltered. Riu had spent the earlier hours crafting the forgery from a genuine document Major Hubert had given them in Port Zylos, rewriting its contents in the name of Admiral Codemar — reasoning that five years' silence gave Hubert's superior ample time for a promotion nobody at this outpost would know about — and carefully transferring the original letter's wax seal onto the new page, with Werner's help lending the whole effort administrative polish. The forged letter, and Mani's forceful bluster, carried the bluff completely: the guard, Apon, could read it himself — surprising the party — and deferred entirely to their word, organizing men to move supplies once pressed further.

Meanwhile, Knick Nab slipped past the tent holding around two dozen chained Islanders and Stone Men — some recognizable as villagers from the settlement they'd visited before — confirming they were shackled together in pairs rather than individually, and paused to look in on a badly beaten man locked in a gibbet nearby, held in place by a simple padlock on the cage's base; the party resolved to spring him during their escape, with Noddy's door-opening magic marked as the likely means. At the same time, Werner led Cosimo, Batu Batu, Leela, and Salter to a trio of trees a short distance away, each scored with the three slashes of the Triad and arranged in a triangle. Probing the sand with a rifle ramrod, Werner struck something solid a few inches down and began digging, uncovering the buried lid of what looked like a vault door and, beneath it, all six of the party's own footlockers, one bearing Knick Nab's name and the Triad's mark. The party scratched the names off the lockers before hauling them out, wary of being caught with six lockers belonging to known heretics.

With the guards thoroughly convinced, the enslaved Islanders and Stone Men were roused from the tent and put to work carrying barrels of water, rum, salt pork, and ships' biscuit down to the jetty, while the party's footlockers went aboard as well. Mani quietly asked Batu Batu to find out whether any of the other enslaved Islanders had experience at sea, in case extra hands were needed to help crew the boat. Werner made a point of telling Batu Batu he was a free man, though the declaration only confused him further given the ongoing loyalties at play. The session ended on a cliffhanger as the sergeant asleep aboard the boat stirred awake and began questioning the commotion around him.

NPCs & Creatures

Northern Marines: Guards at the supply depot, including one named Apon, who — unusually — could read, and after examining the party's forged letter deferred to it and helped organize the loading of supplies. His unnamed partner could not read.
Enslaved Islanders and Stone Men: A group of approximately two dozen prisoners — some recognizable as villagers from the Isle of Sands settlement, others Stone Men — shackled together in pairs by the ankle, held in a tent and forced to load supplies for the party.
Man in Gibbet: An unidentified, non-Islander prisoner being publicly punished in a cage secured by a simple padlock. He was alive but in very poor condition; Knick Nab looked in on him while passing.
Northern Sergeant: An NCO who was sleeping aboard the boat at the jetty and was roused by the party's activities at the end of the session.
Salter, Batu Batu, and Leela: Assisted Werner and Cosimo in excavating the buried footlockers from beneath the three marked trees.

Locations

River Delta Supply Depot (Isle of Sands): A makeshift port and warehouse area established by the Northern forces at the mouth of the river, featuring palm trees, tidal channels, catwalks, an empty gallows, a warehouse under construction, and a tent holding enslaved prisoners. Little of it matched the party's memory of the spot from years before; the water now sits higher and the site has been built up considerably. It serves as a logistics hub for the ships anchored offshore, worked by a single cutter-like boat, a pinnace, and a wide cargo boat moored at its jetty.
River Gate Wall: The fortification blocking the river valley leading out of the Isle of Sands town, now rebuilt to span the entire valley from edge to edge, guarded and torch-lit, with a low watchtower — armed with a Greek fire thrower — at the point where it meets the desert. It stops short of the open desert itself.

Conflicts

The session's primary conflict was a high-stakes social encounter, as the party bluffed their way past Northern guards to commandeer a boat and essential supplies for their escape.
Knick Nab and Noddy's rooftop infiltration of the warehouse nearly ended in disaster twice — a foot punched through the flimsy reed roof, and a guard below almost noticed the noise before being waved off by his partner.
The bluff nearly slipped when Mani and Riu described their ship to the warehouse guards as "shipwrecked" — the same story Knick Nab was, coincidentally, spinning to the guards over by the tent at that very moment, despite the two groups having had no chance to coordinate. Pressed on how they could have known to keep their story consistent with Knick Nab's, Riu covered the gap by claiming unusually sharp hearing, backed by a strong roll, and the guards let it pass.

Learnings and Discussions

The party's personal footlockers had been mysteriously transported from the Amada and buried beneath a triangle of trees on the island, each marked with the sign of The Triad, suggesting the secret society is tracking and aiding them.
The party identified a Northern fleet of six ships offshore: two frigates, two brigs, a sloop, and a cutter. Logs found in the supply warehouse indicated recent deliveries from two merchant ships named the First Light and The Bull, which the party presumed were the two brigs; the ledgers otherwise recorded only food stores and shipbuilding materials, with no mention of arms or gunpowder. The names, captains, and purposes of the other vessels were unknown.
The Marines guarding the depot seemed to know little about the fleet itself — not the captains' names, nor whether the crews were still aboard after weeks at anchor — suggesting the depot's garrison operates largely in the dark about naval movements beyond their own resupply duties.
Werner estimated that fully crewing the sloop or cutter would take roughly thirty to thirty-five hands, with the brigs requiring somewhat fewer — far more than the party's nine could manage, ruling out an outright seizure of any of the larger ships.
The party discussed the status of their Islander companions, Batu Batu and Leela, concluding that while they could not officially be freed without causing confusion, they should be treated as free people.

Items Gained

The party recovered their six personal footlockers, buried beneath the three marked trees; their contents were not inspected before departure.
Riu forged a letter of authority in the name of Admiral Codemar, transferring the original wax seal from Major Hubert's letter onto the new document.
The party began loading a boat with several barrels of water, salt pork, biscuits, and rum.

Items Lost

Nothing of note was lost.