Right now my brain is jetlagged between thinking it's 8 am and 2 pm, I haven't played RPGs in a month, and writing words is honey on a cold day, drip drip drip. But the more I stare at this screen, the faster the honey drips, so here goes.
I wrote an entry to the Appendix N jam 1 using the title i was given, "The Opal Griffon Rises!". Today I want to tell you about the Pirate Borg adventure that resulted, which I think kicks ass and was fun to playtest. It's free for the next month on my Itch page, and afterwards I don't plan to charge more than a cup of coffee for any adventure.
Landsharks, Ash, a sandy isle: a deadly one-shot for Pirate Borg.
The hardest part
By far the hardest part was deciding what the hell to do with the random title I was given. First off I petitioned to change Griffin to Griffon, because while there are many great spellings of griffon (e.g., gryphon), "griffin" is the only wrong one. It's a majestic animal darnit, not a hiker on the Appalachian Trail with smelly socks.
Second...well. Blank pages are hard. I had an idea for an adventure involving a pyramid scheme, but I couldn't make it fit the title in four pages--to much backstory was required. What was this rising opal Griffon? That's a verb and an adjective to explain, and I wanted an adventure that fit the name and didn't require a paragraph of backstory to torturously explain. I want plug and play.
The more backstory an adventure has, the less likely I am to run it, because who has time to explain to players how their current understanding of the world they are playing in is incomplete. I want to say, "Turns out there are magical monkey with guns in this world, just roll with it." not "In the beginning, the Monkey God screwed his sister by accident, causing the ice dragons to rise against the purple giants..." This preference comes from the fact that I am running a weekly sandbox campaign, where players can go anywhere and encounter modules I slot in, much like this game of UVG or this ultimate OSR map or this wavecrawl campaign.
Someone on Discord suggested something involving different factions of a city, because Griffon suggests heraldry and rising suggests victory. That was a good idea. But the Opal Griffon? That sounded like a ship name to me, and more, it sounded like a ship's figurehead. And rising? Whoa, I had just designed and run a pirate-themed 5e one-shot that involved rising...so yeah, there was something there I could use that was short enough to pack into a few pages. Sometimes, Rosebud is just a...well, from this point onward there are SPOILERS, so if you want your GM or Harbormaster to run the adventure for you, please stop reading.
What the adventure is (blood and death and treasure)
In this Pirate Borg adventure, you are going to investigate a missing ship, the Opal Griffon, and retrieve their smuggler's stash of Ash (magical cocaine) hidden on a island. You arrive, map in hand, facing one main beach and low red cliffs around the island, with a central copse of palm trees hiding the buried stash. You enter in to get the stash with your mules, and maybe on the way, if you are unlucky, encounter annoying sand lice that try to suck your blood and take an action to fling off. You arrive at the central palms, and encounter castaway kids and angry, perched gulls. The kids attempt to warn you about the gulls (and their addiction to Ash) and show you a way to avoid their attacks, but they haven't used language much lately and run away once you fling open the stash basement doors.
You find a terror-maddened smuggler down there, muttering about monsters, and, on a large fin of rock, a carved opaline griffon figure, the inspiration for the name of the ship. Once you emerge with Ash, the Ash-addicted gulls attack, trying to draw your blood. If your blood touches the sand, Landsharks come to feed. They can be outrun, but they are hard to outfight. If you run to the wet sand to the south to escape the landsharks, murderbees assault your mind to make a you a killer. If you flee to the swamp to the east for safety, red leeches attack those stuck in the quicksand. If your players are smart, they could bind their wounds and hide in the basement, or drop the heavy Ash and hide up in the trees while fending off angry gulls, or use some Ash to distract the gulls and distract the sharks by killing the mad smuggler, etc. You have infinite hard choices: this is a sandbox trap.
But if and when you make it back to their ship, watching pirates will spring an ambush, attempting to steal the Ash. And if the you don't boldly flee, and instead hide on the island or dither at the shore in battle, the resulting pirate cannonfire will wake up the island, a giant kaiju landshark named Mother, and cause a tsunami. That Opal Griffon was carved on her back, and it is RISING!
Adapting this adventure for other systems
Definitely--just swap out Monster stats and you are good to go. Everything is weak and annoying, doing minimal damage, except the landsharks (well, or if you get too close and get a murderbee swarm to the face). Landsharks need to be terrifying and, depending on how strong and combat oriented the system is, either slow or fast (slow for weak OSR characters, fast for 5e-style heroes). Level-wise, I would say you could dial the difficulty up or down easily by simply changing how challenging and speedy the landsharks are. Level 1 characters could face baby landsharks, and the adventure would be equally scary.
Ash is a Pirate Borg thing, and I think every setting needs magical cocaine, but if you disagree, just make it rum or whatever illegal edibles pirates are smuggling in your setting. Rum is sweet and easy for magical seagulls to get addicted to, but if you are running this for kids, you could make it a stash of magical salt--gathered from the beaches of this very island. Mother sweats when it gets hot, ya know?
A friend asked how I decided to make this Pirate Borg adventure. The answer is, it evolved. So here goes, my first design-process breakdown.
Designing the 5e adventure (version 1)
The original 5e adventure involved an abandoned rum stash an empty sandy isle--a hex in Secrets of the Black Crag, lifted in turn from Pirates of the Caribbean and other pirate stories. But by itself, a simple retrieval mission is boring--there's a reason Fetch is a game for dogs. So what if there was a complication, other pirates waiting to attack once the rum was liberated, who might maroon our heroic crew? Better. But wait, why would the pirates be waiting to attack, not just taking it themselves?
Well...there's scary monsters on the island? Yes! But I figured my crew would just run away if they immediately encountered terrifying monsters on the island right away--this is a money mission, not one they will care much about. They fight, they retreat immediately, either way boring. Even if I made the pirates attack them as they retreated, it would seem like a forced encounter, a railroad pre-planned by the GM. I needed a driver, something to force an interesting decision.
So...the monsters and pirates both wait to attack? The crew was asked to retrieve the rum, so I expect they will go in, put some of the rum on their ship, go back for a second load. Their CHOICE will be going back for seconds--that is the greed fear hook I planned. I know my players well enough to know they are fearless greedy gits, and that they will take the hook and regret it. Anything after that point, it's on them. And if they decided to only take half the rum and flee, then they could have a random pirate encounter and defend their take in a battle, good enough for a session.
So yes, after they choose to go go back for seconds, then I decided to have the monsters awake enough to strike. They will start to retreat to their ship, and then the pirates, fearing they will get away with the rum, come out of hiding behind a nearby islet, and fire upon them. They will be caught in a tactical bind with competing objectives at the water's edge, fighting on sea and land at the same time and faced with hard choices. Do they retreat to the ship, fighting off the pirates and abandoning the rum and mules? Do they fight off the monsters first, and risk being marooned?
It helped that my weekly crew had a favorite mule, so they would fight to defend it from the monsters, so there are stakes...and that led me to bulettes (landsharks), because what better monster to hide in a sandy island and want to eat horseflesh? But to maximize their panic, I didn't want to start with the big bulette right away or have it face them alone in a way that let them gang up on it. To follow the trajectory of fear as laid out by Ash Law:
Unease: I described the island as oddly silent and still, just sand plains and a central copse of palms.
Dread: How to make them uncertain about a certain attack? I could have shown them a bullette, but honestly 5e players love combat against solo foes. Best to have them face uncertain numbers of small bullettes--enter the dolphette from the Book of Extinction, a beastiary of endangered species (it is one of the few recent D&D purchases I have made and it is awesome--I will review it soon). They turned to fight, not knowing how bad it would be.
Terror: When the big bullette showed up and revealed its ability to attack and retreat underground without opportunity attacks (Bulette Landshark from Conflux Creatures), the players started to run (convincing 5 level 6 players run from 7 CR 2 dolphettes and a CR 6 Bulette Landshark is good GM fun). Enemies that can strafe them, disappear, and do massive damage tend to do the trick.
Horror: This was tricky to land, I had to get the timing just right to maximize tension. The arrival of the pirates to block their retreat would be scary, but the horror aspect needed more. Well, since I had big and little bulettes already, why not have the whole island be a titanic kaiju bulette? The scary foreshadowing would come when the island shook from pirate cannon fire, knocking them down if they didn't save, slowing their escape. I borrowed from Star Wars here, with the monstrous cave in the asteroid, but all i wanted to do was have them marooned on a marching kaiju or washed away by a tsunami as it rose.
So yeah, it being 5e, the session went really well and was combat-heavy, and they risked death to save their mule and take the pirate fleet for their own, so I can't complain. But were they afraid? Slightly, I think--but mostly just loving the different bulette sizes, the close calls, and the surprise attacks.
Designing the Pirate Borg adventure (version 2)
I picked Pirate Borg because this is a pirate adventure and a rules-light system is easier to stat out in four pages. On top of that, I wanted more atmosphere and less tactical positioning.
From the get-go, I knew there needed to be less combat: Pirate Borg characters are not meant to fight landsharks toe to toe, they are meant to run. That meant I needed to make the island more interactive and interesting to run around. Instead of combat, the landsharks would follow blood, and instead of me deciding when the landsharks struck, I created interactive, terrain-specific monsters (the addicted gulls, the murderbees, the sand lice) that drew blood and did very little damage. Combat as a literal fail state, because the landshark is coming once blood is on the sand.
To make the island more interesting, I created more terrain types as refuges to flee from landsharks. In addition to the underground smuggler's stash, which had thick wooden walls (with some gaps for lunging maws), I added the southwestern pools, the eastern swamp, and the wooded central ridge. Each of those refuges came with other problems (murderbees, leeches, sand lice, addicted gulls), but these were solvable if players were careful or paid attention (murderbees hum, quicksand can be spotted, and flying gulls attack sticks held over your head (true real life fact, from experience with a nesting gull colony).
The monster design was in two categories: nuisance monsters with learnable weaknesses or tells, and the big scary heavy, the landshark, which can only burst-run once and otherwise moves at a walking pace to up the terror. I kept the original island-size landshark, Mother, and added a tsunami table to liven up the original hurricane procedure from Secrets of the Black Crag. Finally, to make the island more interesting and survivable, I created NPCs to interact with and impart helpful clues on how to survive (the castaway kids, the mad smuggler).
From there, it was just a matter of explaining how the titular Opal Griffon related to landsharks. And there, well, I had inspiration. I started out with an old Amazing Tales cover (see below) and drew over it in Procreate to make the landshark (above). And somewhere in there, I made the landshark opalescent. Of course Mother would have thick back plates, to support all that sand and edible Mother-clay that feeds her babies. The whole ecosystem is dependent on her massive back. And if a set of smugglers, digging a stash basement through the sand, scratched her back plates and discovered an opal-like rock? Why, they would carve a griffon in their spare time, wouldn't they?
This is where I started: a lot of great advice from the Prismatic Wasteland and Explorers Design Discords made the cover happen
Mistakes made, lessons learned
Making this adventure taught me the very basics of layout and printing, all in about 72 hours. I used the excellent Explorers Design template to make it happen in that short time, and I still have a LOT to learn but I now feel like I have gained a zine-making superpower. Next time, I do not plan to wait that long to do layout, that was stupid. But I am glad I followed advice and wrote directly into layout, because limited space is the mother of creative writing and re-writing everything would have been a pain in the bum. In order, I first finished the cover, roughed out a map and layout in pencil on paper, drew the map in Procreate, and then started layout and adventure writing at the same time.
The zine feedback from other creators in the Appendix N Jam has been incredibly helpful and positive. It's great to know they like the adventure, but also that I mixed up two numbers (6s and 8s should swap), and the font size is too small. That last is because A) the Pirate Borg font (Blackbeard) is tiny and cramped by nature and B) I left too much empty space around my main text (a leftover of the template). So when the jam is over, I plan to update the font size to be readable on small screens. It prints fine, but I want to not make folks squint.
I have little idea, still, about how best to display a four-page zine on itch without simply giving it all away via high-resolution pictures. The blurry map below is my best compromise so far, but if you have advice, please leave them in the comments. And if you play the adventure, please let me know what you think on the Itch page!
Blurry version! I am not a trained artist, but this map was drawn by a half-literate, half-drunk pirate, so I think my style fits
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1 In case you are not familiar with the Appendix N jam, participants are given a random title that sounds like it could have come from the AD&D Appendix N collection (something old fantasy/sword-n-sorcery/scifi-ish) and a limit of four A5 pages (think a sheet of paper, front and back, folded) to create an RPG adventure. ↩
