The heroes start the session meeting Kharmir Hellstone, a dwarven merchant traveling with his 2 warforced tripulation and 6 guards who invites the party to have a tea. The party agrees.

Once abord, Ike feels a part of his nearby, it’s Kharmir’s wooden leg, bought in Zoqoi from Master Po, a trader ex-craftsman. Ike attempts to buy it but the trader asks 500gp for it. The heroes haggle and eventually get Ike the wooden leg in exchange of 50gp, a beautifully crafted replacement wooden leg that Brand built with Ike’s help from the remnants of the dead warforced on their ship, three blue crystal pieces from their ship, which the merchant believes to be gems, and a false translation from a notebook that Kharmir found in floating debris a few weeks ago. A 40yo bottle of vintage King Smorthar Rum that the heroes took from the loot they stole from the warforged sweeneted the deal.

Before leaving, Kharmir warns them aobut the dragon turtle that roams these waters and gives them the tip to always travel those waters with another boat, one slower than yours.

Ike asks Brand to create two stils out of the two pieces of wood that the party had recovered so far and Brand is happy to take on the task. Three days later, Ike, clumsily initially,

After the encounter, the heroes continue traveling and arrive in Brasswake. Ike buys a harpoon. He intends to kill the dragon turtle and make turtle soup.

Back on the boat, the heroes continue traveling South. A day after leaving, they come across a small boat of drow refugees. The heroes help them, but as soon as the refugees start climbing aboard, the dragon turtle arrives. The turtle quickly approaches and thumps the boat, but it fails to capsize it.

Immediately, Lyra transforms into a giant octopus, jumps into the water, approaches the gargantuan dragon turtle and ejects ink obscuring the whole area where the dragon turtle. Meanwhile, the party tells Paquito to switch on their ship’s arcane engine, turn around to bring the refugees to Brasswake, with the refugees’ boat secured to their ship. The party leaves the area and, after a minute, cover 500m and then switch the arcane engine off and continue sailing at their usual speed. Then the drow present themselves: they are fleeing the carnage that an order of paladings devotees of Pelor, The Light of Pelor, are causing on the shadowfell, where the knights have taken to chase and kill some aberrations. The fight against the monsters was making life for these drow too hard, and they escaped to the material plane and are now heading to the Ice Kingdoms where they plan to find a nice underground cave for themselves and be left alone. The drow ask the heroes for one of their boats because they don’t really need so much boat for so few people and, the drow are 40 people vs the party’s 10. The heroes notice a veiled threat there and Nemo casts invisibility on himself and then goes spy on the drow who start whispering among themselves. Luckily for the party, Nemo understand it and discovers that the drow are about to murder the heroes and get their boats. Meanwhile, Brand sneakily loosens the rope that tied the refugees’ bote to the heroes galleon.

Suddenly, several drow cast Darkness covering the whole ship. Combat ensues, but the drow start falling into the water thanks to Brand’s rope loosening. Ike climbs the mast, above the cloud of darkness and acts as coordinator while Nemo, Lyra, Soto and Brand all attack the handful of drow that had gotten aboard before combat erupted. In a few rounds the refugees boat is left behind and the drow abord the boats are either dead, knocked unconscious or in the water. Ike, pissed off for being thanked that way for being good casts fireball and instantly incinerates the thirty five drows on the boat. < ABSOLUTELY CREATE AN IMAGE FOR THIS >

Then Ike, not wanting to feel anything close to guilt, puts the unconscious drow that was still alive on a wooden plank and the party leaves him floating to distract the dragon turtle.

The heroes then turn around again and take a wide long arc to avoid the turtle and spend the following 20 days at sea arriving at Embermouth. (When I publish this, don’t say they arrive at Embermouth because we will do the “Fast forward” scenes.)

Reflection:

• master the basics: I didn’t create optimal conditions for sleep and my mind was very tired. That caused me to underprepare and not be bright during the session which meant we spent way too long on an encounter that didn’t move any plots and my attitude wasn’t great.
• create a minimal time-tracking system to make sure the adventure moves fw and catch issues like “we spent 3h on a rnd enc that didn’t move the needle”
• didn’t sketch out anything about the guards, missed opportunity, just 1 sentence would’ve been enough (simple)
• create a new mini for Ike with stilts
• print aerial view of Embermouth
• create and print aerial view of Oakcrest
• create and print aerial view of Brasswake
• try the two new microphones to record sessions
• the math for how fast the ship travels should have been ready
• create several backstories I can have ready for NPCs
  • have a way of easily triggering NPC backstory creation (including image generation)
• create / review anki cards for difficulty level to not handwave so much
• I need more general facts / tidbits (octopus ejects ink from its ass?)
• print bases for gargantuan size, I don’t have the right ones.
• create missing AoE transparent templates