GotWK Campaign Part 4: The Underground Steamboat of Death

This is an account of part 4 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.  

When last we left our heroes, they were hired by the dwarven trading concern House Dent to investigate the source of a mysterious glowing dye being traded by their rivals, House Fleckstone.  Their investigations had led them to an underground warehouse housing a secret lab, which in turn hid a secret passage deep below the mountain to a subterranean river and - of all things - a steamboat.  Back up at the warehouse, the party got into a firefight with two dwarven guards, quickly dispatching one of them.  The other, finally figuring out what was up, called out that he too was working for House Dent.  We now return you to the blogpost already in progress:

via Wikimedia

The dwarf said his name was Quentin Plumbum, and explained that he had been hired to infiltrate Fleckstone, but hadn't yet been able to get inside the secret lab.  Ash told them of the underground steamboat he and Gudguníis had discovered, and Quentin suggested hiding the party inside the food shipment bound for this mysterious outpost that both he and the party had heard mention of.  He would cover for them by explaining that subterranean raiders had attacked the warehouse, wounding him and killing his partner before retreating in the face of Quentin's fire.  The party agreed.  But before he would put them in the crates, he insisted on bringing in his employer - a businessman who had been hired by House Dent, and had in turn hired Quentin to do his dirty work.

Quentin burst into his hotel room, still bleeding, and explained the situation.  Theodore was up immediately.  Adventure - just what he had been waiting for!  He grabbed his "go bag", his twin .577 revolvers, and his trusty melee weapons: a whip and a trident.  In a flash, he and Quentin were back at the warehouse.  They hardly had time for introductions before being shoved unceremoniously into the shipping containers.  Heather pocketed a few potatoes for a later stew.  Rusty, meanwhile was really enjoying his time in a pickle barrel.  They waited a few uncomfortable hours before being picked up and loaded onto the boat.


Only Bjorn, who obsessively collected the pocket watches of fallen enemies, knew how long they stayed in those crates.  It was at least a day.  Just as the cramped adventurers were beginning to drift asleep, they were awakened by gunshots, screams, wet flopping sounds, and the occasional flash of light that could be seen even through the thin cracks of their wooden crates.  After waiting for the sounds of battle and/or massacre to die down, Bjorn punched his way out of his barrel, greatsword in hand.  Rusty, half-drowned in pickle brine, started to think that maybe his true calling was as a pickle.  Dawne, still in the middle of her magical transformation from 8-year-old to 22-year-old (see previous issues - ed.), opted to stay in her crate for the duration of her second puberty.

Weapons drawn, the party began to poke around the empty ship.  They discovered the dead dwarves first.  Then the frogs attacked.  Giant, semi-humanoid frogs with sharp teeth and blinding lights for eyes.  There were only a few left from the swarm that had attacked the boat, the rest of them having either jumped ship with a mouthful of dwarf or fell on deck with a bellyful of lead.  But the ones left were tough, and the party was fatigued from the experience of pretending to be bulk foodstuffs.  Bjorn, Theodore, and Rusty rushed out onto the main deck, greatsword, trident, and alchemical bombs gleaming in the blindheim's eye-lanterns.  Falco, meanwhile, got trapped in the engine room with a lone frog, which blinded him.  Heather moved all across the ship healing her friends and getting off the occasional pot-shot at a frog.  Bjorn disemboweled one blindheim while Theodore found his trident was practically made for stickin' frogs.  Face finished off her adversary with a double-20 critical, reducing it to a mere red streak on the wall.  Heather found Falco wounded in the engine room, carnivorous frog slavering over his unconscious body, and quickly revived him with her healing magics.  He quickly dispatched the creature with a blind shot to the face, then, with the excuse of his temporary blindness, "accidentally" felt Heather up.

Taking stock of the situation, the party set to work trying to keep the boat from crashing into a cave wall or getting sucked down the river.  Falco, vision restored, took the helm, and only scraped the hull against rock four or five times.  Bjorn took over in the engine room, shoveling way too much coal into the furnace until the boat was running red-hot and full-steam.  Heather and Rusty passed the time with a potion-brewing party.  Finally, they approached the mysterious outpost - a lone stone tower on a rocky shore, with a wooden dock sticking out into the river.  Coming into sight, they saw a party of dwarves and drow awaiting their arrival.  The cavedwellers, meanwhile, saw a battered steamboat barreling toward them haphazardly with none of the surviving dwarven crewmembers they were supposed to meet.

Falco turned the wheel hard, crashing the boat through the dock and ramming it into the stony shore.  Bjorn, with a rope tied around his waist, leapt off the deck and started cleaving into the drow with his mighty sword while the others opened fire from the railings.  The dwarves on shore turned out to be duergar, half of them suddenly doubling in size and the others turning invisible.  A drow noble on the tower cast sleep on the attackers, but only Falco succumbed to it.  Heather shook him awake and he, much to her medical concern, feigned blindness and felt her up again.  On shore, Bjorn clove a giant duergar in twain, only to be struck down by a second one.  The second drow noble up on the tower hefted a long rifle and fired a glowing orange bullet at the wheel of the riverboat.  It detonated on impact, destroying the paddlewheel, and the boat started to slip away in the stream.  That's when the invisible duergar struck, backstabbing Theodore, Falco, and Face.  The party fought back the evil dwarves while trying to grab the rope tied to Bjorn that was rapidly slipping away.  Rusty felled one duergar with his pickaxe and then grabbed the rope right as it was about to slip off the deck, wedging himself against some barrels and the railing as the unconscious Bjorn was dragged through the water behind the drifting boat.  Theodore rammed his trident into one of the duergar's throat and the shot the other off the ship with his massive revolver.

Heather and Rusty then hauled poor Bjorn out of the water and revived him with a potion.  Panicked, he immediately checked to make sure his beloved greatsword, Freya, was still with him.   Miraculously, she was.  Heather soothed his worried brow with a practiced hand.  "Hush.  Freya would never leave your side, and neither would your watches."

"True," he sighed, and drifted back to sleep as they all drifted downriver.

The journey downriver was a lot faster than the journey up, but it still took the better part of a day.  Dawne emerged from her crate, fully restored to her 22-year-old self and wearing assorted bits of clothing she had borrowed from the other party members.  At this point Falco stopped feigning blindness around Heather and started pursuing Dawne in earnest.

The party decided that their best bet was to steer the ship into the dock they had come from to keep from barreling past into unknown waters.  Dawne tried her hand at the tiller, only to snap the rudder off in her first attempt at steering.  Rudderless and powerless, the boat bashed itself against every rock-face imaginable.  As they shot past the dock where worried Fleckstone dwarves were standing with lanterns, Bjorn attempted to throw a grappling hook but missed by several yards.  With that, the boat full of panicked adventurers rushed on into dark waters, two bullseye lanterns casting the only light ahead of them.

The tired party decided to get some sleep while they can.  Dawne and Falco took first watch and, figuring that they couldn't do much without an engine or rudder, decided to put the time toward other leisure activities.  On second watch, Rusty spotted the ceiling of the tunnel lowering, and shouted a warning to the others just in time for them to clear the boat's upper deck.  They plunged down a steep incline and ram into a low-hanging shelf of rock, sheering the top deck off and showering them with flinders.

After a long stretch of more calm river, the glorified barge is jostled when a massive snapping turtle heaved itself up onto the front, sending waves of water across the deck.  Alarmed, the party opened fire.  The bloody turtle stomped down on the fore of the ship, pushing it slightly into the water and surfing the resultant wave forward toward Falco.  Its mighty jaws clamped down on the unarmored acrobat and knocked him out of the fight.  Dawne dispatched the wounded beast with a magic missile, but all the blood drew the attention of the more hideous cave-dwellers - five bony fingers supporting an umbrella-like leathery bat-wing, arranged radially around a slavering, betentacled, toothy maw with a long, probing tongue.  Clawbats.  Some of them went for the turtle carcass, but others swarmed the bleeding Falco and the other party members.  Magic and guns blaze through the darkness, cutting the disgusting creatures down as they lap and suck at the party.  The feeling of disgust persists after the last clawbat flops lifeless into the river.  But soon, they are heartened by the approach of light - their long journey through the darkness is over!

The ruined boat drifted out of the tunnel into a steep-walled canyon filled with hot air.  They must have travelled so far south that they ended up in the desert!  Soon the ship comes to rest lodged between two sandstone pillars right before a bend in the canyon.  A short distance ahead of them lies a beach of round river rocks.  Theodore scaled one of the pillars and saw a stairway and a switchback path carved into the cliff face.  The party crossed the beach toward it, but some of the rocks reared up on spindly legs, brandishing clacking claws - freshwater crabs!  Soon a wave of the things was surging toward them, the largest of them about the size of housecats.  The colony must subsist on the scraps and carcasses that float down from the subterranean river - but now they have a chance at fresh meat!  The adventurers run up the stairs, pursued by the largest crabs.  They are halted at a part of the path that has broken off and collapsed, leaving a ten foot gap.  Theodore climbs up to the next switchback and throws down a rope.  Bjorn starts helping boost the others up, but soon the hungry crabs are clamping onto his legs and trying to tear off hunks of flesh.  Theodore picks one off with his large-caliber pistol and Heather fells another with her hunting rifle.  Finally, Bjorn is able to climb the rope, Dawne clinging to his back.  He smashes the last crab on his leg against the wall, and the party continued up.

They soon reach the mouth of a cave, littered with shards of pottery but large enough to rest in.  Before them looms a circular stone door ringed with strange glyphs.  In its center, a carved skeletal figure hanging upside down over a river, its dark maw open wide, as if waiting to swallow something.

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Today I'm going to talk about stealing.  Every paladin knows that stealing is wrong.  But every rogue knows that stealing as actually a great way to get cool new stuff!  GMs tend to fall into the latter camp.

At a used book fair in York, I purchased an old copy of Allan Quatermain, the last book about the eponymous hero that you may know better from Alan Moore's awesome League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or the incredibly bad movie adaptation of it that convinced Sean Connery to retire from acting.  In the book, as Allan and his companions search for a legendary advanced civilization of white people in the heart of Africa (because racism), their dugout canoes are sucked into a subterranean river which they blindly hurtle through for days.  At the other end of it, they come out in a gloomy, echoey canyon and are attacked by giant man-eating crabs.

Keen-eyed readers might be noticing some similarities, and wondering if perhaps the author plagiarized me.  No, in fact, H. Rider Haggard died in 1925.  But when I read that part of the book, I filed it away in the part of my brain labeled "D&D ideas."

When I was working on this campaign, I thought it would be fun to have an underground steamboat ride, simply for the incongruity of it.  Combining the familiar with the fantastical is what Guns of the Western Kings is all about.  Naturally, I mixed this with the idea of a journey through a dark subterranean river with no control over the direction or speed of the boat, though the two journeys would be very different in all other respects.  After that, I couldn't help but throw in a fight with giant man-eating freshwater crabs!  Call it an homage.

I'm not saying your next campaign should be a quest to destroy a powerful magic ring in a volcano guarded by a million orcs and an evil immortal sorcerer.  Just, if something catches your fancy as you are reading a book, watching a movie, enjoying a comic, listening to a podcast, learning about history - whatever - file it away in your brain and try to creatively work some elements of it into your game.  It might be a character idea, a combat encounter, a puzzle, a dungeon element, a plot point, or any number of other things.  If it makes you happy and entertains your players, go for it!  After all, a GM is no paladin.

-your crabby d20 despot