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7th Sea #3 Frogman Partytime
Oct. 30th, 2012 08:57 amShort & Sweet as I am pressed for time and still have to prepare for tomorrow.
At the end of the previous session the heavily injured Rene was being carted back to the beach by the other members of the team just as the heroes stumbled into the midst of what proved to be a tragic and unfortunate scene. On the left there were island-madmen capering about a tall burning effigy – a wicker man, to the right? The hammer-handed pickled men – washed ashore – it seemed, and skulking in the tall grass.
Kamal – startled by the pickled men, immediately took the form of an owl and vanished into the night. Rene, reclining on a stretcher was abandoned to the mud while Esteban and Niklas prepared themselves for a fight. Meanwhile, Gunnar, the ghost-eyed Prussian found himself caught in a burning cage. The Eisen nobleman had spent days in and out of consciousness barely remembering his abduction from the beach by a tribe of island madmen. Somewhere along the way they had ensconced him in their wicker-man. Regaining consciousness, he burst out of the cage and leapt into the midst of the melee.
The madmen were treated to savage blows with shark-toothed swords and the hammering death of the pickled men – who were in turn attracted like moths to the fire of the wicker man. Flaring and bursting and burning to ash, the pickled men shambled in the blood and flames while the reassembled party of heroes returned to the beach.
On the beach matters were not much improved. A thicket of lances had been planted in the sand with a walked-out-message left in the beach. “Gut Gluck!” Stephan’s missive – as his home on the remote spit of beach was now separated by a kilometer of high tide from the rest of the island. Standing through the night, the heroes were constantly harassed by an armada of crabs, scuttling and crackling over one another in a night-long crustacean orgy. The palm sized decapods found their way into everything, scuttling all over poor Rene, who was down with wounds, and tangling themselves in Niklas’ long hair and beard. Watches were maintained as the men slept, standing, back to back – for in the wood beyond there were flashes of light and shouts and laughter and screams all loud enough to challenge the endless noise of the surf and the terrible scuttling of the beach full of crabs.
By morning’s first light a wedge of shore was revealed, allowing the heroes passage to the house of Stephan – where he fed them crab and fish and the last of his rainwater. Stephan fell to consulting with Gunnar and Esteban, producing some old plans for a ship he once built, claiming that he could build it again, better yet, and they could all leave the island together, in time. If only they had time, but the rainwater had run out!
Niklas, though, was canny in the face of disaster and taking his runes in hand bellowed out to the frolicsome sea, calling upon it to give forth clouds and rain – which the obliging sea did – enough to fill the barrels and save the day many days over.
Having decided to follow through, build a ship and escape the island, the others set about felling trees and sawing lumber – all aided by Stephan’s many tools and expert instruction. But boring of this tedium, Niklas, Esteban and Gunnar set out for the interior of the island with a will to explore and to potentially gather the least effected of its madmen.
The lower portions of the island were tamed, by then, owing to the immensity of blood already spilled. The madmen remaining were all of the easygoing, mystified and wide-eyed type. Ready to obey, fearful of invisible fantasies. The three boldest heroes chose to venture up the mountain’s flank and find a way to the last of the beaches that seemed likely to yield any salvage. Inaccessible from the other shores, the beach could only possibly be approached (if it could be approached at all) from the rocky mountain that dominated the island.
Of course the bare rock was more and less than it seemed. Up close they could tell that the rock was skeletal, missing whole sections, hollow, and honeycombed with holes. This, they deduced was owing to explosions from the caverns within – for as they approached they were assailed by the heady stink of naptha and pitch. Within the mountain it seemed were lakes and ponds of kerosene, lit by fiery belches of the earth’s burning gasses.
Negotiating the tunnel proved to be trivially easy for the fleet footed Esteban and the brawny Niklas and Gunnar & in the bargain they stumbled across a cache of strange materials – alien fabrics and bizarrely constructed tools and sundries. These durable, glasslike objects proved immune to shattering, lightweight and effective – and all of the heroes could sense these items value in the construction of a ship.
On the other side of the tunnel they found a path winding up the conical flanks of the mountain. To the left, ivy, hanging in great swathes to their right, rocks and the challenging surf below. Before them? Horror.
What appeared to be scare-crows fashioned from human bones were positioned up the mountain path, barring it. The scarecrows were assembled into an X shape, arms and legs spread in equal lengths and angles- but the arms and legs were made of bones in a pattern bearing no resemblance to human physiology. One of the scarecrows was made only of hand bones, one of skulls, one seemed furred and was made of gathered bunches of ribs. All of these were coated and held together by a shiny, thick material, a veneer or paint, two centimeters thick and clear as water. Pausing only a moment to ponder these horrible objects – the heroes were attacked!
From the mountain’s higher reaches came, flopping and jumping down the path, stumbling over one another in their hurry to meet the heroes – a gang of man-sized frogs. These frogs all walked on their hind legs, gamboling absurdly, falling all over each other. Their forelimbs seemingly atrophied, they consisted of tiny pointed fingers jabbing out of their torsos. Comical.
A second gang of the same creatures burst from the ivy, attacking the heroes from behind. Still absurd the heroes were uncertain what to make of the creatures – until they started their attack. Each of the gangs of frog-men let out croaking yelps, loud, deafening belches, stinking of bile. And from their fleshy gaping maws their prehensile tongues darted with preposterous speed. The tongues lashed Niklas – leaving slime-spattered welts with their fist-like ends. The tongues! The tongues! The three dashing stalwarts were assaulted in an unceasing barrage of punching, darting tongues. As they did their best, faring well enough, the battle was joined by two titans of the breed – spotted and speckled, their forelimbs resembled a treebranch covered in spines – a bony, hideous bloom, and their tongues! Their Tongues! Each studded at the end with finger-protrusions, each gasping as a hand grasps whenever it found purchase on one of the heroes. Gunner, invincibly strode the field, slaughtering, Niklas, in a fight for his life whirled and battered with an axe in either hand while Cunning Esteban leapt acrobatically from the mountainside to rain knifey-doom upon the beasts, driving them down off of the mountain into the crashing, deadly surf.
Following the path, thereafter, the 3 discovered a place where the path diverged. The stream, laced with whatever subtle poison that stole the minds of the islanders poured down from the mountaintop arcing and spraying into a clear, deep pool that lie upon a table of flaking, layered slate. Here the path continued up the mountainside and another led down – to the sheltered, secluded beach. Deeming their mission to be one, mainly of salvage and feeling too uncertain without their friends, the 3 chose to find their way down to the beach to plunder the salvage left by the capricious sea – waiting for help before daring the mountain’s peak and the horror of the frog-men.
At the end of the previous session the heavily injured Rene was being carted back to the beach by the other members of the team just as the heroes stumbled into the midst of what proved to be a tragic and unfortunate scene. On the left there were island-madmen capering about a tall burning effigy – a wicker man, to the right? The hammer-handed pickled men – washed ashore – it seemed, and skulking in the tall grass.
Kamal – startled by the pickled men, immediately took the form of an owl and vanished into the night. Rene, reclining on a stretcher was abandoned to the mud while Esteban and Niklas prepared themselves for a fight. Meanwhile, Gunnar, the ghost-eyed Prussian found himself caught in a burning cage. The Eisen nobleman had spent days in and out of consciousness barely remembering his abduction from the beach by a tribe of island madmen. Somewhere along the way they had ensconced him in their wicker-man. Regaining consciousness, he burst out of the cage and leapt into the midst of the melee.
The madmen were treated to savage blows with shark-toothed swords and the hammering death of the pickled men – who were in turn attracted like moths to the fire of the wicker man. Flaring and bursting and burning to ash, the pickled men shambled in the blood and flames while the reassembled party of heroes returned to the beach.
On the beach matters were not much improved. A thicket of lances had been planted in the sand with a walked-out-message left in the beach. “Gut Gluck!” Stephan’s missive – as his home on the remote spit of beach was now separated by a kilometer of high tide from the rest of the island. Standing through the night, the heroes were constantly harassed by an armada of crabs, scuttling and crackling over one another in a night-long crustacean orgy. The palm sized decapods found their way into everything, scuttling all over poor Rene, who was down with wounds, and tangling themselves in Niklas’ long hair and beard. Watches were maintained as the men slept, standing, back to back – for in the wood beyond there were flashes of light and shouts and laughter and screams all loud enough to challenge the endless noise of the surf and the terrible scuttling of the beach full of crabs.
By morning’s first light a wedge of shore was revealed, allowing the heroes passage to the house of Stephan – where he fed them crab and fish and the last of his rainwater. Stephan fell to consulting with Gunnar and Esteban, producing some old plans for a ship he once built, claiming that he could build it again, better yet, and they could all leave the island together, in time. If only they had time, but the rainwater had run out!
Niklas, though, was canny in the face of disaster and taking his runes in hand bellowed out to the frolicsome sea, calling upon it to give forth clouds and rain – which the obliging sea did – enough to fill the barrels and save the day many days over.
Having decided to follow through, build a ship and escape the island, the others set about felling trees and sawing lumber – all aided by Stephan’s many tools and expert instruction. But boring of this tedium, Niklas, Esteban and Gunnar set out for the interior of the island with a will to explore and to potentially gather the least effected of its madmen.
The lower portions of the island were tamed, by then, owing to the immensity of blood already spilled. The madmen remaining were all of the easygoing, mystified and wide-eyed type. Ready to obey, fearful of invisible fantasies. The three boldest heroes chose to venture up the mountain’s flank and find a way to the last of the beaches that seemed likely to yield any salvage. Inaccessible from the other shores, the beach could only possibly be approached (if it could be approached at all) from the rocky mountain that dominated the island.
Of course the bare rock was more and less than it seemed. Up close they could tell that the rock was skeletal, missing whole sections, hollow, and honeycombed with holes. This, they deduced was owing to explosions from the caverns within – for as they approached they were assailed by the heady stink of naptha and pitch. Within the mountain it seemed were lakes and ponds of kerosene, lit by fiery belches of the earth’s burning gasses.
Negotiating the tunnel proved to be trivially easy for the fleet footed Esteban and the brawny Niklas and Gunnar & in the bargain they stumbled across a cache of strange materials – alien fabrics and bizarrely constructed tools and sundries. These durable, glasslike objects proved immune to shattering, lightweight and effective – and all of the heroes could sense these items value in the construction of a ship.
On the other side of the tunnel they found a path winding up the conical flanks of the mountain. To the left, ivy, hanging in great swathes to their right, rocks and the challenging surf below. Before them? Horror.
What appeared to be scare-crows fashioned from human bones were positioned up the mountain path, barring it. The scarecrows were assembled into an X shape, arms and legs spread in equal lengths and angles- but the arms and legs were made of bones in a pattern bearing no resemblance to human physiology. One of the scarecrows was made only of hand bones, one of skulls, one seemed furred and was made of gathered bunches of ribs. All of these were coated and held together by a shiny, thick material, a veneer or paint, two centimeters thick and clear as water. Pausing only a moment to ponder these horrible objects – the heroes were attacked!
From the mountain’s higher reaches came, flopping and jumping down the path, stumbling over one another in their hurry to meet the heroes – a gang of man-sized frogs. These frogs all walked on their hind legs, gamboling absurdly, falling all over each other. Their forelimbs seemingly atrophied, they consisted of tiny pointed fingers jabbing out of their torsos. Comical.
A second gang of the same creatures burst from the ivy, attacking the heroes from behind. Still absurd the heroes were uncertain what to make of the creatures – until they started their attack. Each of the gangs of frog-men let out croaking yelps, loud, deafening belches, stinking of bile. And from their fleshy gaping maws their prehensile tongues darted with preposterous speed. The tongues lashed Niklas – leaving slime-spattered welts with their fist-like ends. The tongues! The tongues! The three dashing stalwarts were assaulted in an unceasing barrage of punching, darting tongues. As they did their best, faring well enough, the battle was joined by two titans of the breed – spotted and speckled, their forelimbs resembled a treebranch covered in spines – a bony, hideous bloom, and their tongues! Their Tongues! Each studded at the end with finger-protrusions, each gasping as a hand grasps whenever it found purchase on one of the heroes. Gunner, invincibly strode the field, slaughtering, Niklas, in a fight for his life whirled and battered with an axe in either hand while Cunning Esteban leapt acrobatically from the mountainside to rain knifey-doom upon the beasts, driving them down off of the mountain into the crashing, deadly surf.
Following the path, thereafter, the 3 discovered a place where the path diverged. The stream, laced with whatever subtle poison that stole the minds of the islanders poured down from the mountaintop arcing and spraying into a clear, deep pool that lie upon a table of flaking, layered slate. Here the path continued up the mountainside and another led down – to the sheltered, secluded beach. Deeming their mission to be one, mainly of salvage and feeling too uncertain without their friends, the 3 chose to find their way down to the beach to plunder the salvage left by the capricious sea – waiting for help before daring the mountain’s peak and the horror of the frog-men.
