Hey there, welcome back! So what we've got here is your typical blog post. *slaps roof* I can fit so much Exalted in this baby. (Look, I don't know the meme so I'm sure I'm mangling it, and I can only think up so many interesting things for these intros. Let's just get to it.)
(Oh, also, content warning for some gross corpses and some stuff involving illness and plagues. While there won't be any resemblance to real world events, I can understand how some people might be twitchy about that.)
The sun rises on the city of Smolder. The smoke has settled from the previous evening's battle, and proper cleanup efforts have begun. From dawn Bokano Spite-shell has been out and about, coordinating the island's defense with her crabfolk followers and reassuring the locals that after a few days things will calm down and be more or less back to normal. But a lot of people are nervous, not only because of the battle itself or even the collateral damage, but because it's a big adjustment to seeing beastfolk openly walking among them and knowing there are no less than four Lunar Exalted in the city. The Cinder Isles aren't exactly strict Immaculate Orthodox, but just because you're not burning witches doesn't mean you're going to quickly get used to seeing them zipping around on their brooms.
After some initial bellyaching about their injuries, Hǎifēng goes out to use their performance skills to try and lighten peoples' spirits -- after all, Smolder isn't entirely pirates, adventurers, and adventuring pirates. There are a lot of civilians in the city, many of whom have families. Shango helps out a bit with the early cleanup but also reaches out to some of the local merchants and businesspeople, aware that the vehement rejection and ban on Realm forces is going to affect relations with shippers and suppliers. Because of his business contacts he's able to make recommendations and referrals for alternate sources of goods and supplies -- especially those who'll be able to get everything ship-shape again (so to speak) following the Peleps blockade. Xương mostly focuses on cleanup and repair, particularly of the town square where some horrific sea monster apparently rampaged the previous evening.
When she finds an opportunity to address them all at once, Bokano reaches out to the trio and checks up on them. She makes sure they're okay (particularly regarding Hǎifēng's injuries, which are pretty minor), and they talk about the situation. I know at one point she apologizes for only getting directly involved towards the end, but coordinating the arrival of the crabfolk and summoning the Magma Kraken took time. (It just so happens that, conveniently, this let the characters have an awesome battle.)
At one point the subject of deathknight pirates (not just Grasping Fingers of Bone-White Coral) comes up and she mentions that she's going to have to do some work to make sure that people know the Heaven's Apathy Shrouds Us All and its captain are not allies of hers. Admittedly, I can't recall exactly why the subject was broached and my notes are a little spotty on the issue.[0] I'm pretty sure it was part of the larger subject of supernatural beings like the Exalts or the dead openly operating on a larger scale, because she talked about the Skullstone Archipelago to the north where they actually encourage people to move there with the pitch of 'if you're awesome enough, you'll get to join the ranks of the ghost aristocracy when you die.' Which, naturally, led to some discussion about Thorns, because you can't talk about the dead in Creation without setting aside a few minutes for the Mask of Winters.
Bokano also says that she expects that given a little bit of time, House Peleps will probably make an attempt to retake the island, sneaking in some strike team or something. But she's pretty confident she and her followers can fend them off at least once. She does say that she's going to reach out to other Lunars she knows in the region. She's not planning on expanding or anything, but she at least wants to establish some sort of alliance of defense. She suggests to the group that they should probably keep an eye out for an Infallible Messenger, just in case. Naturally, in case it needs to be said, they make sure to tell her that if they hear from her they'll come running ASAP.
She suggests that if they're going to continue on to Lathe, that maybe they take an alternate route. Normally it's a pretty straight shot from Talipan Island to Lathe, but that route is along the main shipping lanes. She's concerned that the shipping lanes are going to be a little dangerous, because either there are more Peleps ships out there tangentially-connected to Oneef's squadron and they're going to be a little aggressive, or the usual navy patrols are going to be absent and there will be more pirates out and about. Either way, she proposes a route that's a little more roundabout but will only add a couple of days to their journey.[1] They accept the suggestion without complaint, especially since it gives Hǎifēng a little extra time to heal up before they do anything else.
So a couple of hours and a cleaning up the city montage later (and yes, I did take a moment to sing the song), things are at a point where the group feels comfortable leaving the island. As they're getting ready to go, Tuyen approaches them. With everything the night before she either figured it was a bad time or it slipped her mind, I can't recall which, but she warns Shango that he should be careful if he winds up anyplace particularly populated. His family is still looking for him, and they've put out bounties for information or for his 'rescue.' They don't seem to know exactly what's happened to him (or if they do, they won't say it publicly), but they seem to think he's been kidnapped in some capacity.
She says that if she sees them again, she hopes it's not right before a huge battle. The theory is floated that she might be a trouble magnet, and she does seriously stop and consider the possibility, given the loss of most of her original crew that led to her allying with a necromancer in the first place. Which led to meeting the Lunars, getting beaten up, conscripted, and well you know the rest of the story from there.
But anyhow, with that out of the way, the Moonlight Maiden departs for Lathe, cutting through the Cinder Isles.[2] It's easy going, reasonable weather, etc. I probably could/should have come up with a little travelogue describing some sights like I did with the river journey back in An-Teng, but that ship has sailed, so to speak. But a few days pass, and everything's smooth...
But, as has become the running joke, my players' characters are protagonists and their lives are arbitrarily difficult. Which is why they find what appears to be a ship with fallen sails just sitting in the water. It's not a big ship, the sort that people would use for casual supply runs or some transport. It's not taking on water and there's no obvious damage. They decide to check it out. Shango offers to do the initial recon and takes on bird form to fly over. He finds a handful of corpses strewn about on the deck -- certainly not enough to reasonably manage a ship this size. He takes a closer look at a body that's at the wheel, and discovers that they've been dead a couple of days, apparently from stab wounds. They also show some signs of illness.
By all accounts, the ship's basically intact, but something left it without enough crew to manage it and the rigging just collapsed from the usual elements.
The wind shifts slightly and Shango smells something just awful coming from belowdecks. He goes to check, and it's not just the usual expected corpse-smell. It's definitely worse than that. There are bodies around, most of them with sheets on them. He pulls a sheet back to find someone who died in agony, covered in their own vomit. Obviously it's someone who died of either poison or illness, but he doesn't have the medical knowledge to even guess beyond that. He heads back up top to wave the others over and set up a gangplank so they can come aboard, as the Moonlight Maiden has already moved in closer. He fills the group in on what he's found, and suggests that Xương might have a better idea of what happened.
Xương gives everything a once-over. There are definite signs that some people stole a ship and fled some sort of chaos. There are signs of a fight on-board the ship, though odds are the bodies of the attackers went overboard. A flag on the ship, combined with the location, suggest its origin with a nearby coastal town called Sarahan with a nearby volcano. Nobody on board is wearing any sort of obvious uniform, though many of the bodies are wearing clothing with volcano iconography and those same bodies either wore or had on their person what appear to be talismans made of scorched bone.
Down below they find a log -- no recent entries, suggesting the 'sudden flight' theory, but one page has a crudely-drawn map and some travel time calculations, suggesting they were headed somewhere deeper into the southwest. There's also a drawing of a volcano, and a note that simply reads "If we don't make it, I'm sorry."
Xương now goes to address the corpses, and from the smell alone his medical training tells him that nausea and diarrhea were definitely among the symptoms. He sees jaundice and conjunctivitis, and some have rashes. It's hard to nail down exactly what killed them without a deeper examination requiring tools and chemicals he doesn't have on-hand, but hepatitis, malaria, typhoid, or leptospirosis are all viable suspects.[3] Either way, these people all died of a horrible illness. Many of them also have mild-ish burns on their bodies.
His best guess is that something made these people sick, and they tried to flee, and someone didn't want to let them go. He wants to hope that they were just trying to keep a disease from spreading, but either way the best thing to do is burn the ship. He heads back up top to reconnect with the others, and on the way smashes lanterns to spread the oil around. He warns them that it's a plague ship (and we get a 'moon's haunted' joke out of it) as he lights a match and tosses it down the stairs into the oil.
As they pull away in the Moonlight Maiden, Hǎifēng says they should go to Sarahan and check things out, since people might be in trouble. Xương isn't entirely crazy on the idea on account of, y'know, the possible plague, but Hǎifēng offers to buy the first round if/when they ever get to Lathe. (Which, thanks to this blog post, is now legally binding.)
Sarahan is some hours away but fortunately it's basically on their route anyways -- if they hadn't had the chance to stop and resupply in Smolder, this would have been a good spot to do it. From a distance it looks pretty normal -- there are people visibly out and about (though not a lot of them) with no piles of bodies or guys wandering around in long-beaked masks and cloaks. It appears to be the standard sort of farming or fishing village where the general store has the same five rag dolls and the same wood carvings of what might be a duck.[4] Nearby they can see the start of some farmland, and behind everything is the start of a jungle. Looming in the background, giving off a little bit of smoke, is the volcano Marabel, which hasn't erupted in some time but still rumbles and smokes every now and again -- the name means 'snoring demon' in a local Seatongue dialect.
The only thing that stands out is the conspicuous remains of a burned building -- likely the source of the burns found on the bodies on the ship. The group theorizes that whatever that building was (there isn't a conveniently-intact sign labeling it) could have been the source of an outbreak, in which case burning it might have been prudent. Before they pull into the dock, the Lunars lay out their basic objectives: Find out who was on the ship, what happened to that building, and what weirdness is surely lurking at the heart of those mysteries.
So they dock and the town, while full of living, breathing human worm babies, is still weirdly quiet. Like, they don't get the usual 'outsider' stares from the locals that they're used to. Hǎifēng turns on the charm (not Charms, not yet) and starts asking around, trying to pry some information out of the locals. In particular, they get out of Apatu, the woman who runs the general store, that the people on the ship were troublesome outsiders who burned the building down themselves and were driven out. It's an obvious lie, though, and clearly rehearsed. But Hǎifēng can also tell that she's protecting someone -- out of fear.
They proceed to crank up the menace using Predator-and-Prey Mirror, and that loosens her tongue a bit. She says that the people on the boat, the ones with the talismans and the volcano-themed clothing, were running a protection scheme to get more worshippers for their patron god and the people of the town drove them away. Then Hǎifēng asks what they were infected with, and the woman's eyes go wide. The monkey Lunar proceeds to point out that she doesn't want to provoke the ire of someone even worse than they are, and the woman admits that it's autumn fever (leptospirosis), but there's still more she's holding back. Hǎifēng then proceeds to frank up the intimidation factor, enough that her fear will persist long after the Charm wears off.
She then says that the volcano cultists were already there with their scheme, that they'd supplanted local worship of a regional volcano god named Magma Blossom for their own, named Blackened Bone Whispers.[5] And then another god named Vaihil (pronounced sort of like 'vile') showed up and, in exchange for worship, helped drive the volcano protection scheme cult off. Vaihil is originally from the mainland, and he's the one who made them sick.
Because he's a disease god. A literal god of autumn fever.
And we left off on that dramatic reveal.
[0]-- Something I should probably try to be better about is, when I anticipate a conversation with a NPC, at least coming up with a list of likely talking points ahead of time so I'm doing less scrambling to keep up on notes. I know some people who run games over voice chat just go ahead and record them so they can just take notes after the fact, but even if I felt entirely comfortable proposing such a thing I don't think my current voice chat setup be amenable.
[1]-- Conveniently, this lets me squeeze in another adventure between this one and the group's arrival in Lathe so I have more time to plan and to flesh out the city in my notes because we have very little material on it and I'm not sure how much is going to be in Across the Eight Directions. I'm actually a little nervous, because I'm concerned about doing a big detailed write-up only to have the book come out and do something much cooler and I'll have to go through and try to hybridize or reconcile my version with the official version.
[2]-- Which reminds me, at some point I need to put together a map showing where the characters have been so far. We're coming up on the 20th(!!!) session, that might be a good excuse for that. Not that I need an excuse; I'm just lazy.
[3]-- In case it needs to be said, in Creation these would all be known by different names, as Greek isn't a language that exists. Alternate names do exist in the real world and I am using those in-game; I'm just using the common name here for simplicity's sake.
[4]-- As much as I try to avoid Firefly references these days, I find that one to be pretty useful to go back to when describing the little spots between the big places on the map like Beacon, Hisir, and so forth.
[5]-- As I type this, I actually can't recall if I gave the god's name. I'm 95% sure I did, but I could be wrong. Either way, I'm giving it here, because it'll be easier to post it here and correct that with my players than leave that out and have to fix it later.
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