Intro Story

Each of you, for your own individual reasons have seen the poster, hear the criers, and decided to strike out at the Condor’s call to forge a new life in the Domelands. Some sell all that they own, some had nothing to sell, but all find their way to the port town of Broadkeel seeking passage to the capital city of Lemia: Bornos.

Many a merchant vessel has decided to set aside trade for the time being and instead ferry adventurers, soldiers, farmers, and all those intent on new life or fast fortune to the grand city of Bornos. It is on just such a vessel, the Singing Bounty, that you find yourself along with 30 other hopefuls, and on a sunny morning the Bounty launches taking you all into an uncertain future rife with hope, fear, danger, and potential.

The captain, a swarthy dwarf named Ironcraw, calls out to his crew to cast lines and haul anchor. The sail, shining in the morning sun against a clear cloudless sky, hoists high and fills with the lusty breeze billowing out of the bay. You hear the creak of timber and rope and the Bounty adjusts to the sudden strain and then she almost leaps forward, kicking up spray over the rails which falls on your face like cool wet kisses. Across the waves you see the two other ships which are making the same journey alongside you keep pace with the gliding roll, angled wakes flowing behind as the trio of ships cut through the water.

As the day rolls by you interact with those around or not, as your nature and personality allows, but you come to have a grudging respect for Ironcraw’s crew – a salty collection of races and nationalities, raw and unrefined to be sure, but hard working, good natured, and for the most part moral and gods fearing.

As for your fellow passengers you find it harder to judge. A few claim to be farmers but clearly are not; others claim to be seasoned adventurers but your practiced eye tells you a shovel or reaping scythe fits better in their hands than a sword. Some keep to themselves, some seem desperate for conversation. Some are confident, some look terrified, and a few look bored. All are careful not to reveal everything in conversation or manner, holding secrets from strangers and new friends alike. But that’s hardly surprising, for aren’t you doing the same?

The days roll by like the waves underneath you, one much like the one before it. It is a fifteen week journey from Broadkeel to Bornos, but the steady wind and smooth sea has shortened the expected time to fourteen weeks which has all in good cheer. It is the beginning of the eighth week, the thirty sixth day at sea, when you come out on deck to see an odd sight. Where a bright rosy sunrise should be breaking over the waves instead you see a rusty red orange smear wiped over the eastern horizon. The crew stands still – the first time you have seen such a thing from the industrious and hardworking sailors. All heads are turned to the east save one. Old Jarl, as his fellow sailors call him, a grey haired leather skinned half-orc who seems wise with old lore stands looking north, one hand wrapped around his coarse beard under hard piercing eyes. Your ears pick up mutterings from the crew: “An ill omen.” “Out of the worst tales.” “Never have I seen a morning sky that bad.” Your eyes however are mesmerized by Old Jarl until you slowly turn to the north and seek out his focus.

It is not hard to find. On the northern horizon is a pitch black storm cloud, rolling and pulsating like boiling bile, illuminated in erratic flashes of unnatural indigo lightning. Aside from the color and activity something strikes you as profoundly odd about the stormfront. Turning back you see that Old Jarl is now looking at you and, noticing the uneasy puzzlement on you face, says with a grim expression, “It’s coming towards us. Against the wind.”

The breath holding stillness is suddenly shattered by Ironcraw’s rough barking voice, shouted out over his forked goatee. “To your tasks! We sail for speed! Passengers all below deck. Crew all hands ON deck. MOVE PEOPLE.” Immediately the ship becomes a flurry of activity. You hurriedly head below deck and into the cargo hold. Rough partitions were set up using pieces of old crates to create the illusion of privacy in the damp hold and you hurriedly make your way to your assigned “cabin.” As you do you hear the word being spread around by the other passengers. “Is something wrong?” “Why should I have to stay below?” “All this over a sunrise? They aren’t all pretty you know.” “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” “The ship is moving more, isn’t it?” That last comment give you pause – the ship is definitely rocking more than normal. A few people stumble around you. Determinedly and guided by a gut instinct, you enter into the small stall that has been your personal area since leaving Broadkeel. You weren’t able to bring much – the passage fee was almost everything you could scrape together – but you never would have left without… there. There it is. Your hand finds the sailcloth wrapped bundle that contains your prize possession. Quickly securing it to your person with some twine you join the other passengers in the central area of the cargo hold.

Time goes by, marked by nervous conversation and an increased violence in the ship’s movement. One passenger, a youthful swordsman whose normal bravado is now completely gone, looks around and asks, “How long has it been? Can it be night already? The porthole windows have gone dark.” Sure enough a quick glance confirms it – the sky is as dark as midnight. Darker; no stars reflect on glass or wave. A tall scholarly man in robes who has largely kept to himself pulls a gnomish timedisk out by a gold chain and tersely says, “It is but noon.” Just then a sailor stumbles down the stairs. “We need aid,” he breathlessly gasps. “Any man who is willing to pull an oar head to the benches. The wind, though strong, will not save us alone.” Every man and woman volunteers.

As it happens, there is not room for every man and woman on the rowing benches. You and the rest of the passengers are split up into three groups of ten. Forty men row at once – twenty passengers and twenty crew. Every hour ten of each cycle out to rest. You find yourself in the second group – the first batch to row a full two hours. Once your breath synchronizes with your rowing the steady beat of the bosun’s drum hypnotizes you after a time, so that the movement of the ship and the noise of straining lumber falls away into a no-time of drum beats, oar strokes, agonized muscles, and falling sweat.

You are startled when your relief, a young redheaded woman intent on owning her own farm, taps you on the shoulder. Dazedly you stand and move away from the bench. Reality drives the rower’s fog out of your mind with a gasp of breath. The first thing you notice is that the ship is violently heaving. The second is the distant roar of primal wind above. Exhaustedly you stumble up to the deck, determined to see the situation.

The movement of the ship is so violent that you have to climb up the stair to the deck using your hands as well as your feet. As you do, a sailor flies down past you screaming, “Pull in the oars! They’ll break and tear timber! Pull them in damn you!” Coming out on deck you see indigo lightning flash, hear a roar louder than anything you have ever experienced and are suddenly thrown through the air. You crash into the ship’s rail, desperately grabbing it as you do so. The roar is the wind, a constant force strong enough to tear cloth. Many sailors on deck are now shirtless. Rain cuts like thrown razors as it flies with the wind, and you are soaked to the bone in an instant. Scattered lanterns weakly cast globes of light onto the deck, flames fluttering even under glass shutters. Lightning flashes from somewhere every half second bathing the deck with an odd purple strobe effect, disjointed from random directions. Idly you think to yourself the staccato thunder claps barely make it through the intense roar of the wind, a though far too calm for the moment. The rail bucks and moves underneath you like a wild horse trying to throw its first rider, and once again you descend into a timeless mind frame – focused solely on hanging to the rail in the howling darkness. Every so often your feet are drenched. After the third drenching you realize it is not a wave soaking your feet, but that the ship is rolling so badly that your feet are dipping into the wild sea.

You have no idea how long you cling to that rail – feet dipping, lightning strobing, rain cutting, wind roaring – when almost suddenly the movement stops, and the ship lies still. Slowly, with limbs you have forgotten how to use, you clumsily climb off the rail and on to the deck. Sitting flat on your rear, you survey the scene. The ship is still and unmoving, a calm circle of sea in the center of the storm. The wind and its roar has stopped, and now you hear a constant crash of thunder and the lightning continues to strobe in the dark clouds above and around you. Every sailor you see has rope tied around him and to a piece of the ship; two lines providing two anchor points. The sail hangs in tatters from the yardarm, and several deck timbers are cracked and warped. Captain Ironcraw, lashed at the wheel next to the pilot, pulls out a long knife and cuts his anchor lines free. His voice, obviously screamed from the strain on his face but only cutting through the thunder like a whisper, calls out, “To arms!”

“Are we supposed to fight lightning and wind?” you think to yourself, when suddenly a black tower shoots out of the sea and falls across the deck, splintering the rails and deck and sending the mizzen mast flying. It is huge, dark, and rubbery. Circular growths, each as big as a man, cling to the deck, and boiled octopus in spiced broth – a port town delicacy - springs to mind. A sailor not far from you screams “KRAKEN!!” at the top of his lungs before you see what you now know is a gargantuan tentacle flex and with an earsplitting shatter tear the Singing Bounty in two. The deck slopes suddenly and you almost gently slide into the sea. Water and darkness enclose you like a blanket.

Thrashing in the water, you begin tearing off clothes, belt, boots, and gear as you struggle to break your head free of the surface. Everything comes loose except your pants, shirt, and the sailcloth bundle strapped to your back. You pause and consider dumping even that most prized object when something hard and wooden grazingly hits you in the head. Reflexively you grab ahold of it and recognize the shape of an oar, securely held at the other end. You use the oar to pull your head free of the water. At first all you can do is fill your lungs with air but hands grasp you by the arms and shoulders and haul you out of the water.

You find yourself in one of the ships dinghies alongside fourteen other people, including Old Jarl. The small boat rocks up and down over the ripples emanating from when the Singing Bounty went down. The storm continues to roar above and around you but your boat is within the area of calm sea that stopped your now sunken ship dead in its tracks. The lightning continues to flash repeatedly, showing you wreckage of the other companion ship now sunk as well (you later learn that the third ship was unable to race the storm wand was sunk earlier in the day). Four other dinghies are becalmed in the center of the unnatural storm, the closest a mere thirty yards away. And then, the Kraken surfaces. It resembles a dark black squid on a massive scale, and its great eye balefully stares about the scene with dark intelligence. The mouth, a foul yellow colored beak, opens wide and a tentacle grabs a dinghy and feeds it into the great maw, horridly barbed tongue thrashing wildly. Your boatmates frantically rush to put oars in the water, but Old Jarl quietly shakes his head – there is no out running this doom.

A second dinghy is grabbed – the one closest to you – and feasted on. Of the two other remaining one decides to try to run for it anyway and madly starts rowing in the opposite direction. A robed man with an impressive beard, one of your fellow passengers on the doomed voyage, stands up in the dinghy and faces the sea horror. The other dinghy, coming to the same conclusion Old Jarl did, sees it’s retinue dive over into the sea attempting to escape by abandoning ship. The Kraken rushes forward, whipping its long grotesque tongue back and forth through the water, spearing people on its cruel barbs. You and your companions watch, grimly waiting your turn.

Suddenly the standing man in the other remaining dinghy shoots out a green beam of light from his hand, which connects with the Kraken’s eye. The eye swells and explodes in a spray of jelly like gore, and the Kraken emits a high-pitched shriek. Its tentacles flail about, whipping the sea into a froth and sending your dinghy dancing among the dark waves. You see the other dinghy, where stood the beam emitting caster, fly to pieces as a tentacle lands a direct hit. After a moment of shrieking and thrashing the Kraken sinks below the surface and the sea grows calm. You wait for a tense couple of moments for the sea beast to reemerge, but instead the storm slows and begins to break up. Minutes later early stars beam down on you through a scattering of clouds and the sea returns to normal, such as it can be.

You drift for days, aimlessly bobbing over waves under an unrelenting sun. Two men die from their wounds. A third simply jumps overboard and disappears into the deep. Another goes mad and has to be killed by the rest of you for your collective safety. The dinghy had two small barrels of fresh water nailed to it, as well as a small box of sea biscuits as emergency provisions. You thank Ironcraw’s foresight and wish him home safely to whatever god he worships. His preparedness saves you and the others from having to make unsavory decisions for survival. Even still, not knowing how long you may be drifting, the group keeps strict rations on the food and water which keeps everyone alive but greatly weakened.

As men who may be doomed to die a slow death you begin swapping stories. Secrets are spilled (although perhaps not all of them) and after a few days you know your fellow boatmates better than anyone you have ever known in your life, and they you. A few you frankly don’t care for – such circumstances can bring out the worst in a good man, much less in one who is lacking – but most you form a deep brotherly bond with.

After two and a half weeks pass since the fateful encounter with the Kraken, Old Jarl mentions that he thinks you may be drifting into the Forbidden Isles, where the Wildmen dwell. Asking him to explain he tells this tale:

The Forbidden Isles are a dramatic name for a handful of small islands inhabited by the Wildmen. There’s nothing really special about the islands except that the Wildmen are incredibly xenophobic, to the point where they will slaughter other tribes on sight, much less strange folk who arrive by boat. Their shamans are not to be disregarded, and their warriors are hardy and skillful for all their lack of civilization, so everyone avoids them.

They’re hairy, almost like apes, and use weapons and tools made of bone and rock. The islands are volcanic, and are warmer than what you would expect to find this far north. They are lush and covered with vegetation. IF we can manage to avoid being killed by the locals, we may be able to rig up a boat that lets us properly navigate. Maybe even jury rig a sail. Normally I’d advise avoiding those islands like the plague, but given the circumstances…

Two more days of drifting and you see land on the horizon. It is not long before you are approaching a sandy beach, jutting out of dense jungle on a small island…