The Isle of Dread

At this rate it will work north past you and be gone inside a few minutes. Hippolyta has a bow and a clear line at a hundred and forty yards, which is long for a short bow — that is long range, so minus two to hit — and Bobile has spells he has not spent.

Or you let it fish. It has not looked at you once. Which is it?

Pulling back. I got ahead of you — I asked who would ask Pestle about the map, then took a course change as your turn, sailed two days, rolled up a creature and asked you a second question, and your answer to the first one arrived after I had already moved the board twice. That is on me and I have written it down.

From here I hold one open question at a time. If you send me a rules question or an aside while something is pending, I answer it and leave the world exactly where it stands rather than filling the gap with plot.

So, the board as it actually stands, and one question only. The map is settled — Pestle took it and is drawing. Nobody has done anything about the thing over the water, and it is still fishing off the cliff about a hundred and forty yards out, unaware of you, working its way north and gone in a few minutes if left alone.

That is the only thing on the table. Shoot it, spell it, or let it fish?

You

We're going to try to not let it capture us, And sale in a way we don't think it's going while keeping vigilant

You put the helm over and open the distance, standing further off the cliffs than Pestle would like for sounding work, and everyone who is not doing a job watches it instead.

It never looks up. It quarters north along the rock face, drops at the water twice more, misses twice more, and by the time the sun is properly up it is a speck and then it is nothing. No pursuit, because there was never any interest. It genuinely did not know you were there.

No experience for that, by the same rule as the merchantman — nothing was slain, outsmarted, captured or scared off. You were careful and careful is free. What you did get is knowledge: something that shape lives on these cliffs, it hunts by day, it flies well, and there is at least one of them on the east coast.

Pestle notes the position on the new chart without being asked. A small mark, and beside it in tiny letters: BIRD-THING, EAST CLIFFS, DAY.

That is the encounter closed. You are coasting north with the chart underway. How long do you want to keep sailing before you look for somewhere to put in — and are you putting in at all on this east side, or reading the whole coast from the water first?

You

We're circling the whole goddamn Island

[dice] Day 24 — weather 2d6 = 7 steady · encounter 1d6 = 6 · Ocean 1d8 = 8 swimmer, 1d12 = 7

[dice] Type 1d6 = 3 · number appearing 3d6 = 8 · distance 4d6 = 17 (170 yd) · surprise none · reaction 2d6 = 12

Day 24, the first proper day of the circuit, and the water goes busy off the port side.

Sharks. Eight of them, eight feet or so apiece, brown-backed, working in a loose shoal about a hundred and seventy yards out and then a great deal closer than that within the hour. Every sailor aboard knows exactly what they are; no mystery here.

They are not interested in you. That is a real roll, not me being nice — twelve on the reaction. They pace the hull, roll an eye up at the rail, and go back to whatever they were doing.

Two things worth having. First, nobody goes in that water for any reason now, and a man overboard is a different kind of problem than it was yesterday. They smell blood at three hundred feet and they do not check morale once they do.

Second, eight of them together off a cliff coast means something down there is feeding them. Pestle marks it without comment and keeps sounding.

Press on with the circuit, or is anyone doing anything about them?

You

I want us to yell out in common something friendly. One of my guys said something friendly. Maybe wench ,,,

Agra leans over the rail and hails eight bull sharks in Common, politely.

They are animals. They do not answer, they do not slow down, and one of them rolls a flat black eye at the noise and goes back to swimming. Nothing gained, nothing lost, nothing revealed.

<think>they hail everything. they hailed me. it is why i am still holding this ship instead of a writ.</think>Do you know, you people do that with everything. It is going to get you killed or it is going to make you rich and I genuinely cannot tell which.

For what it is worth, it is the same instinct that got you a captain instead of a fight on that gangplank. Keep it.

[dice] Circuit — day 25: 2d6=9, check 2 · day 26: 2d6=6, check 1 · day 27: 2d6=7, check 5 · day 28: 2d6=12 STORM

Three quiet days of good work. The sharks lose interest by the second. Pestle sounds and draws and eats standing up, and the east coast goes onto the new sheet a league at a time — cliffs, then a long shallow bight with a black sand beach nobody has any reason to stop at, then cliffs again. No smoke. No boats. Nothing looks back.

Then the fourth morning the barometer in Pestle's face drops before the sky does.

No. No, no. Look north.

[thunder] It comes up out of the north like a wall being pushed across the water, the colour of a bruise, and it is moving considerably faster than you are. Twelve on the weather. That is the module's own word for it and the word is storm.

You are a sixty-foot ship with eight passengers and no cargo, close inshore on an uncharted rock coast that has never been sounded by anyone living except the man currently drawing it.

Three choices and I want them now. We run before it south and lose four days of coast. We claw out west into open water and take it on the beam, which is safer for the hull and worse for everyone's stomach and we will not see land for two days. Or we find something to get behind, right now, on a coast I have charted precisely eleven leagues of.

Which?

You

Let's make landfall I guess

[dice] Making the bight: 2d6 [5,6] = 11 — well made · touching bottom on the way in: 1d6 = 3, clean, no hull damage

And here is where three days of tedious survey work pays for itself. You are not looking for shelter on an unknown coast. You already drew one. The long shallow bight with the black sand beach, two days back south, sounded and marked on Pestle's sheet in his own hand.

He puts her about and runs for it with the storm coming up behind and he does not need to guess at the depth once, because he wrote the numbers down himself. Eleven on the handling. She goes in clean, touches nothing, and the anchor bites in four fathoms of black sand with the headland taking the worst of the north wind off her.

[thunder] Then it arrives properly and it is loud and it goes on for a long time.

So: you are anchored. Not wrecked, not damaged, not lost. First landfall on the Isle of Dread, on the east coast, in a bay nobody has ever named, with a black sand beach a hundred yards off the bow and dark jungle standing above it in the rain.

[wave] Nothing has come out of that treeline. Nothing has moved on that beach. It is early afternoon and the light is filthy.

Do you go ashore, or do you sit it out aboard?

You

So this is Ogdens Bay ? I've never been. What do you think of the weather Mr. Pistol? Shall we wait it out or make landfall

He looks up from the sheet when somebody calls it Ogden's Bay, and for a second he cannot work out whether he is being mocked. Then he sees that he is not.

<think>do not take it. do not take it. it is the first thing anyone has offered me in three years and if i take it i will have named a bay after the wrong pestle.</think>No. No — thank you, genuinely, but no. Put it down as Tuesday's Bight.

He writes it while he says it, small, in the margin above the soundings. Tuesday's Bight. The first named place on a chart of an island that has never had one.

Now. The weather. You are asking a man with a lead line whether to put a small boat through that surf onto a strange beach in the dark half of the afternoon, and the answer is no, and I would say no if you were paying me double.

She is anchored, she is holding, the headland is doing its job. We sit. In the morning it will have blown itself out and you can land dry, in daylight, with somebody watching from the deck. Nothing on that beach is going anywhere.

That is his professional view and he is almost certainly right. He is also not your captain in the sense of giving orders about what you do — he is the man who holds the boat. Wait for morning, or go now?

You

( give me some more imgs please ). I had no intention of going at night or afternoon or whatever,,,, I'm trying to ask him whether we should just wait through this storm and see how long it takes or whether it's worthwhile once the storm passes. We still go on landfall when it's still somewhat stormy etc. Like show me what the next couple days look like and how pestels suggests we go about it next 3 days

Tuesday's Bight. Anchored, holding, four fathoms of black sand.

Understood, and that was me misreading you — you were asking for his operational plan, not whether to row through surf in the dark. Here it is, and he gives it properly, because this is the part of the job he is actually good at.

Tonight we sit. She is holding and the headland is earning its keep. Nobody does anything clever in the dark.

Tomorrow the wind drops before the water does — it always does, and people drown learning it. Expect a heavy swell on that beach all day even under a clear sky. You can land tomorrow if you insist and you will do it soaked, with the boat broaching, and you will be no use for an hour afterwards.

The day after is your day. Swell down, light good, and here is the thing nobody thinks of: a beach after a storm is worth twice a beach before one. Two days of that sea will have thrown up onto that sand every single thing it has been hiding along this coast. If there is anything to find on the east shore, it will be lying on that black sand the morning after, for free.

The east shore as charted so far. Eleven leagues of this, and no way up it.

After that we finish the circuit north, and I will want four clear days for the top of the island because that is the part nobody has ever drawn and I am not rushing it.

One thing you should hear from me and not find out. Rain is water. We have been at sea twenty-eight days and the casks are down. Tomorrow, swell or no swell, somebody rigs canvas and we catch every drop of this. That is not optional and it costs you nothing.

So his three days: sit tonight, catch water tomorrow through the rough, land properly the morning after onto a beach that a two-day storm has just emptied its pockets onto, then north to finish the chart.

That is his advice, not an order. Take it as offered, or tell me how you want to vary it.