Game 5 was the only game of the campaign with all six players - Derek, Jeff, Keith, Kelly, Ray, and Steve. After this game, Jeff and Ray left the campaign, while Derek, Keith, Kelly, and Steve stayed on until the campaign's end.
In a previous game, Krill wasn't sure how much the captured ship Durst would ultimately sell for, and offered each character 60 gold pieces up front to buy out their 1/333 share of the Durst sale price. Mikal accepted the 60 gold pieces, but the other characters held out for their share of the sale price.
The last game ended with the party barely beating the old wolf Muninn. Now coming out of the tower, the party went back to the shore and boarded the Hedgepeth unmolested.
The Hedgepeth then turned from privateering to its original mission.
With Greencake in hand, Krill and Burns want to turn to the original goal of the expedition, finding the lost explorer Ammiral. So, the Hedgepeth and Durst will continue north into the arctic proper. Burns tells you that as the climate gets more inhuman, routine and military tradition will keep the men functioning and not despairing.
So, if everyone is on board, the Hedgepeth and the Durst sail out of Lake Annika and past Portsmouth without any problems, then north along the coast of the bay. The ships sail for about a week. On the coast on the right, the ship passes a few destroyed settlements. You can occasionally see downtrodden or soulless-looking individuals scavenging on the shore or in the settlements. On the left, the ship starts passing increasing amounts of drift ice, until after a few days it also starts to encounter large ice floes slowly floating south. Some of the floes are very large - up to a few mile squares. The sun is still up all the time, which many of the sailors never get used to.
The Hedgepeth sailed north for a few days, until:
You're sleeping one night when you hear the lookout ringing his bell and calling out. When you come to the deck, you see that there's a settlement to the east, with a high tower near the water. There's a fire burning in the top of the tower - maybe it's a lighthouse, but that's slightly weird because the sun is up. But that's not the reason the lookout called out. In the distance to the west, there's a large ice floe floating south, and there seems to be a wrecked ship in the middle of it with a few people near it. Burns says it was probably caught and crushed when two floes merged into one. From the ship's silhouette, he says it could be Ammiral's ship, the Dowager.
To get closer, you'd have to get out of the Hedgepeth and go out there on foot. So, Burns suggests that the captains and the six characters go out there.
When they go closer, you can see that it is the Dowager and that the ship has indeed been crushed by the ice. There's a little camp near the crushed ship, with a fire and some ad hoc shelters around it: rough shacks made from the ship's planks, some tunnels going into the snow to shelters underneath, and some overturned lifeboats.
There's also a man there who introduces himself as the first mate Tiller. He eyes the characters with suspicion, like he's not sure they're real or whether they might attack him. Disturbingly, there are also some incoherent wrecked men here. There's a man crawling around the periphery of the camp on his hands and knees seemingly looking for something. There's a man who's hands have apparently been lost to frostbite, with a spoon tied around one of this stumps. There's another guy working a big hand crank that doesn't seem to be cranking anything. They all have full matted beards, uncut hair, and layers of ragged clothes. They're very thin like they've been starving for a long time.
When you talk to Tiller, he asks you if you have any food? If you ask him about Ammiral, Tiller says the Dowager sailed almost up to Highpyre before it was crushed by the ice, and then Ammiral got out with a sled and some dogs and headed up to Highpyre on his own. They haven't seen him since.
They ask about food again. Without looking at the characters, looking at the ground instead, Tiller says all they've had to eat is what they've been able to fish out of the bay through the ice. They almost caught a seal once. Once near starvation they fished a...biomass out of the ice and they couldn't recognize what part of the...biomass was supposed to be the head or tail or what. It had flippers or maybe not, it was hard to tell. They had to eat it anyway, though.
Looking out at the Dowager, it seems that its cannons are gone? If the characters ask, the sailors just look at the ground, the don't want to say anything. If the characters press, the characters say that demons stole the cannons, okay? The demons killed Blum and Duncan, and they buried the remains on the other side of the ship from the camp.
Looking back over their shoulders, the characters notice that you can see the lighthouse and settlement on the shore from here pretty clearly. Why didn't they get in the lifeboats and head back to lighthouse? They don't want to say.
If the characters look behind the Dowager, they'll find the ad hoc graves of Deptford, Fearing, Blum, and Duncan, who the survivors cannibalized.
After a little more discussion, the overturned boats flipped over violently and Dowager survivors who had been hiding under them attacked the party. The attackers were:
Each had the additional powers:
The party defeated the ambushers. They brought the surviving Dowager crew on board the Hedgepeth, putting them in ad hoc prison cells for the safety of both crews. As treasure, the party found some mundane items on the Dowager and in the survivors' camp, which came to about 10 gold pieces per character.
They also found some special items.
The Hedgepeth continued north towards Highpyre. With the Dowager incident fresh in everyone's minds, and some of the mad survivors imprisoned on board, the ship seemed to move through the icy wasteland under a surreal shadow.
That night, the crew slept as usual in their hammocks on the cannon deck. They were rudely awakened by horrified screaming in the captains' cabin next door, which Burns and Krill shared. As they swung their legs over their hammocks to investigate, Burns burst out of the cabin, with the wild look of an animal in his eyes.
For a few moments Burns was uncommunicative, but as the crew gathered around him, he gathered his wits. He said that he had been sleeping in his bed when he happened to awaken and see Krill standing over him, waving his hands and murmuring an incantation. He insisted that Burns was a witch and that the crew hang him. Soon after, Krill also came out of the cabin, stunned and confused, and unable to respond to Burns's accusation.
Murmurs from the crew seemed equally divided between Burns and Krill. The party wanted to join whichever side would have the numbers, but neither side dominated. Kasskar argued for Burns, and the party sided with him. When asked later why he sided with the accuser, Kasskar argued that Krill had been more cruel to them, for example, wanting to whip or hang Mikal.
But the crew as a whole sided with Burns and Krill equally. Unable to avoid a fight, Krill rallied his men, raising his knife over his head and screaming shrilly. In the ensuing fight, Krill, Fishkin, Landis, Pembec, and Wineheart died.
The characters went to second level after this game.
