The Derelict

Session ii · aboard the Surety · the crawl

The Boarding

Boarding is a ladder of salt-crusted battens — easy hands-free, a DC 10 Strength (Athletics) check for anyone climbing with a burden. Deal gull-sign from the Lore Locker to any nature-wise PC now: gulls fear nothing dead. Only things that aren't finished.

The ship as dungeon. Five zones, and the party picks its order after the deck: berths and cabin aft, hold and bilge below. The deck lists gently; call for checks only when someone runs, fights, or carries — DC 10 Dexterity (Acrobatics), prone on a fail. The Gleaners' skiff is tied off the starboard quarter, in plain sight — the party knows early that someone got here first.

Zone 1 — The Weather Deck — Easy–Medium, ≈600 XP adj.

The rigging is webbed from the tops to the rail — sheet on sheet of grey silk, drum-tight where lines should hang slack. Two Shroudweavers nest aloft: spiders the size of dogs, come up out of the water-dark for the quiet. They drop on whoever lingers under the mainmast.

• Terrain. Web-choked rigging is difficult terrain aloft; the deck itself is clear. Cut or burned webbing brings tackle down — anyone under a worked-on section makes a DC 12 Dexterity save or takes 3 (1d6) bludgeoning from falling blocks.
• Tactics. They web the biggest threat and bite whatever's wrapped. They will not pursue below decks — the below decks has an owner, and they know it.
• Tell. Wound in the webs: gull bones, fish bones — and no human ones. Whatever emptied this ship, the spiders arrived after, and even they don't go below.

Zone 2 — The Forecastle & Berths — Medium–Hard, ≈1200 XP adj.

Below the foredeck, the crew's world: hammocks, sea chests, a mess table with plates still on it. The meals are half-eaten. The hammocks are torn — upward, a detail worth letting someone notice and nobody explain. Two lore drops live here: the untaken åsan (a tin of passage-buns in a sea chest, whole, unoffered — no one gave these dead their rite) and, on the mess table, a half-finished letter that stops at “the lights of home are”.

And the crew is not all gone. Three Drowned Deckhands — hands the thing at the reef did not finish — keep to the dark forward of the mess, where the light from the hatch doesn't reach. They do not want to be aboard. They are not able to leave.

• Approach. They don't rush the light. They wait for someone to come into the dark, or for dusk. A party that listens at the forecastle door hears them first: wet cloth, and a sound that used to be a work-song.
• Tactics. Latch and paralyze, drag toward the dark. Sunlight down a hatch is a wall to them — a clever party can fight this at the doorway and should be rewarded for it.
• Mercy. A PC who has the åsan in hand can try the rite here — this is not the full laying-to-rest (that debt is at the reef), but a DC 12 Religion check with the passage-bun offered makes one deckhand stop fighting and stand down, staring at it. Let the table sit with what that means.

Zone 3 — The Hold — Hard if it goes wrong, ≈1500 XP adj. · talkable

Lantern light and low voices: the Gleaners are mid-strip — three Wrack-Pickers crating cargo under the direction of Vasso Krell, tidepriest, who hears the party coming and does not reach for a weapon. He offers the Open Hand instead, correctly, and waits to see if they know what to do with it.

• The parley. Krell's position is theological and negotiable: the sea took this ship, so her goods are the sea's leavings, and gleaning them is a rite, not a theft. He'll split the hold, share what he knows, or simply leave with what's crated — what he will not do is fight for cargo. His crew takes their cue from him. Full voice, wants, and secrets on his page; the Krell's arithmetic lore drop lives in this conversation, and it's the best breadcrumb in the module.
• The fight, if it comes. The party draws first, or demands the crated goods and the skiff. Krell casts from the companionway stairs; the Wrack-Pickers know the hold's footing better than the party does. He surrenders at half his crew down — the sea doesn't ask him to die for crates.
• What the hold says. However it resolves: the cargo is ordinary — cloth, arak, copperware. A DC 12 Intelligence (Investigation) check, or Krell simply saying so, establishes there's less of it than a ship this size should carry. Remember that when the manifest surfaces in the cabin.

Zone 4 — The Master's Cabin

Aft, behind a door that was barred from the inside and now stands broken outward. Chart table, brass instruments furred green, the captain's locker — and bolted beneath the berth, the strongbox, Dohr's seal in blue wax over the hasp, untouched. The Gleaners left it: “Sealed Sai weight is a House quarrel,” Krell says, “and I glean from the sea, not from Houses.”

• The captain's log (Lore Locker) sits open on the table, a steady hand right up to the last entry:

• The true manifest lies in the chart drawer — the manifest discrepancy drop. Anyone who compares it against what the hold holds (or heard Krell's count) and knows Dohr filed a loss claim can do the arithmetic: a third more tonnage on paper than the Surety ever carried. The box the party was hired to bring home unopened is the box that proves it. What they do with that is theirs.
• The captain's locker: a cap of water breathing, bone-dry in oilcloth — mercy or joke, the table decides — and unlogged sundries worth ~80 gp to a discreet buyer.
• The box itself is two stone of iron-strapped oak. Opening it is a DC 15 Dexterity (thieves' tools) check or a broken seal and an axe — but that's a choice with Dohr's fee attached, and it plays better ashore in session iii.

Zone 5 — The Bilge

Down past the hold, ankle-deep in dark water that moves when the ship doesn't. This is where the keel-marks drop lives, and it's the module's cold spot — send lanterns down with whoever goes.

• The scars. Gouges rake the keelson stem to stern — parallel, deep, spaced like fingers. A DC 13 Wisdom (Survival) or any sailor: these came from below, from one creature, and the ship survived it. Nothing that leaves marks like this loses a ship it wants.
• The older marks. Under the gouges, cut with care long before them: small, deliberate sigils in the wood, low where no crew would look. A DC 13 Intelligence (Religion) check, or Krell (who goes very quiet), names them: Jatu's. Someone marked this ship for the sea before the sea ever touched her. Do not explain who. That answer belongs to the campaign, not the module.
• The breach. Aft, a staved section patched from outside with weed and silt — as if something closed the wound to keep its prize afloat. Water seeps. The Surety floats because she was kept.

The Curtain

End the session here — box found, light going, hull knocked. If Krell is alive and aboard, give him the last line: he looks at the flat water, and for the first time all day the tidepriest looks like a man who has misread a contract. Session iii opens in the same breath.

Pacing — the three-hour shape

• Roughly: boarding + deck ~40 min · berths ~40 min · hold ~45 min (talky) or ~30 (bloody) · cabin + bilge ~40 min · curtain ~5 min.
• Running long? Collapse the Shroudweavers into a hazard (webbed rigging, DC 12 Dexterity to cross, restrained on a fail) and let the deckhands be heard but avoided — they'll matter again in session iii.
• Running short? Play every zone slow, give Krell the full theology, and let the party debate the manifest on-screen.
• The one thing: the box is found and the hull knocks. Everything else can flex.

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