The Next Morning

The DM: There are clouds that roll in the evening of May 29th and at midnight it starts to spatter rain. By three in the morning there is a steady light rain falling, but as you're all used to Norwegian weather, even being stuck in a tent is still tolerable. Even through the night, the temperature is merely cool, so no one is freezing — it's just wet. It is still raining when the sun rises, though all you see is diffused light, as the sky is dark grey throughout. There's not much wind, no more than a light air. We start the running with the rain stiffening a little, but not so much that pools are forming on the ground.

Vafrandir and Willa each gain a hit point. Vafrandir should roll a d20; his wisdom is effectively 3, so he has a 3 in 20 chance of waking up. I roll a 15 for Willa, so she is still unconscious. Actions?

Vafrandir: I roll an 18.

The DM: you'll be able to make another check after Pandred gives you a drink from her bottle.

Embla Strand Welp, we should have someone here to watch over Vaf and Willa. Might Marcule do that while Pandred and I search the ship?

The DM: You can have Oddsdrakken do that as well.

Pandred: Giving the salve to Willa. I roll a 1. Willa, you up?

Pandred: Vafrandir, my rationale is that Willa is unleveled, and therefore can only go as low as -4. She gets more stats from her hp right now, and closer to activity.

The DM: you mean a drink from the bottle? Please don't refer to the bottle as a "salve." That just confuses things. Yes, that wakes her up. Assuming you want to know what happened, she explains that her and Fjall saw the flag, investigated, found the bag and Fjall opened it.

Pandred: Sorry, the bottle was explained to me as "dispensing a salve" per day. I assumed it was some ever-full unguent, not a potion.

The DM: It does dispense a salve; but for sanity's sake in a text-format, please include the word "bottle" in the description, as in, "I give a salve from the bottle" or "I let her drink from my salve bottle" — simply because we're stuck in this turn-based communication process.

Embla Strand I return to the ship.

Pandred: I will join her. Willa and Odds will remain with Vafrandir.

The DM: Very well. To make a long story short at this point, this isn't a lengthy dungeon that needs clearing out. The spider appears to have eaten everything in the ship that may have been alive. There are some thirty skeletons throughout the ship, most of them located in the spider's lair, which is the transformed mess-and-crew sleeping areas. Hacking your way through the webs, you find access to the captain's cabin and the stores. The ship is leaking water from the rain, but it seems to run in rivulets across the floor and drain out again. In the captain's cabin, there's an iron coffer containing 472 g.p., 93 s.p. and 14 c.p. The clothes, drapery, small bed and chair, along with a desktop, have all suffered water damage, as the window access to the outside is broken.

The DM: The stores are mostly dry, but there are mice turds everywhere so that there is a danger of disease from eating any of the 30 bags of oats, the rotten salt-pork and anything else in a sack. There are, however, ten sealed clay jars with about 5 lbs. of lutefisk, an airtight barrel of wine and 3 sealed barrels of beer; each barrel contains about 63 gallons of the liquid.

Embla Strand I haul the clay jars, wine, and barrels back to our campsite. The money is a welcome sight.

Embla Strand Do we want to try to find the person to whom the title belongs? That could be rather lucrative, albeit take us far from our newly-purchased home. Would it be possible to figure out in roughly which direction the ship was traveling?

Pandred: This is probably a stupid question, but would any amount of the ship itself be salvagable? Some quantity of lumber or other bits and bobbins that would still be usable? I don't particularly want to abandon our hexploration for a trip to Denmark...or Scotland for that matter, but I am interested in the title owner as well.

The DM: Computer technical problems, I've been offline about an hour. Embla, while each jar of lutefisk weighs about half a pound, the barrels weigh somewhere about 550 lbs. each. There's no real way to tell which direction the ship was travelling. Most of the wood of the ship would be salvageable to some degree, though it wouldn't be cheap to haul back to a town and the return would be minimal. If something were built right here out of the wood that would be the best use for it.

The DM: Allow me to point out that since the land grant was for a parcel of land near Bergen, and Bergen being about 80-100 miles north of here, that might be a place to start.

Embla Strand We could build this into a hunter's lodge of sorts to support more exploration here. Or we could head to Bergen. Thoughts?

Pandred: Bergen is a market town, I'm 99% sure. However, the transport cost would likely eat a significant portion of our new gains. With that in mind I think we should keep going with our exploration, and the hunter's lodge idea is to my mind fantastic. I like the idea of a big boat-shaped hideaway for our expedition. If we find another haul of similar size, or get lucky and turn out a bigger dungeon then we can afford a trip to Bergen.

Pandred: Alexis, if we were to return this haul to Treborg, would wheeling Vafrandir back on the cart interrupt his rest enough to deny him rest gains?

The DM: The beer is worth 32 g.p. for 63 gallons; the wine is worth 894 g.p. Each barrel is worth 15 g.p., so each beer barrel is 47 g.p. and the wine barrel is worth 909. The lutefisk hasn't been priced on my system yet; let's call it 5 g.p. per jar. You can't divide experience for single items, so you have to name someone as the plunderer of the wine barrel and the other items for the sake of x.p. Divide up the g.p. for experience as well.

The DM: Answering Pandred's question: that's right, he can't rest in a cart. You'd need to create some kind of tackle to get barrels into a cart, which Embla's logistics ought to allow. Call it a day to build the frame and three hours to wedge the barrels out and load them, once the cart is present. Is it? I thought you were walking without the cart. Shouldn't change your travel times if I'm in error about that.

The DM: by the time you get the ship checked out, the sun is past the zenith; the rain has slackened a bit but it still goes on.

Pandred: I'm doing math now, but I wanted to say before someone else did it that I fully intend to give Vafrandir the wine. If he's got a 10% bonus to XP as I assume he does, that puts him just shy of the 2k experience needed to level, which the remainder will almost certainly tick over. I assume there are no objections to this?