Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Session Zero

This is for DMs only. There are SPOILERS for 5e Dungeons & Dragons Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

As a piece of housekeeping, most of my players are underage (they are my daughter and her friends), so I won’t be using their real names. I’ll just refer to them by their character names only. Let’s get started.

My very first suggestion for preparing for a session zero for Ghosts of Saltmarsh is to go to Sly Flourish’s website and download Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player’s Guide. Either update it as you see fit or send it out as is. This was great for getting started. I sent it to all the players beforehand so that they could think about what kind of character they wanted to build. Your players will ignore it at their own risk. I also told them to come up with at least two ideas.

For session zero, I had read through most of the book, printed out several copies of maps of Saltmarsh along with area descriptions, and had a notebook nearby to take notes about each of the characters. We sat around the table and I said that I could veto their character idea if it wouldn’t work in the campaign and their character must have one tie to another character. I then asked what their character ideas were. I had one player who had a very strong idea and they asked to go first. They pitched their character, a human former smuggler that had witnessed a miracle, and walked away from that life to become a paladin of Procan. Everyone liked the idea and the campaign had its first character. The rest of the players went one-by-one pitching their characters (I only said no to a Satyr).

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The characters that were made for the campaign were:

·         Amar: Human, paladin, and former smuggler

·         Tidal: Genasi (water), sorcerer, and current smuggler

·         Whisper: Genasi (air), druid, and fisherman

·         Mac: River gnome, bard, and shipwright

·         Wind: Tabaxi, rogue, and alchemist who had stolen a text and was on the run

Once they had all made their choices, they picked up their dice and rolled their stats. I had them do the version where they roll four d6s and drop the lowest die. Once they had all six scores, they could then place them wherever they wanted. I witnessed one of them roll an eighteen, which was pretty awesome.

Then the stories started. Amar had grown up poor in Saltmarsh, living with his mother and brother in Crabber’s Cove. To escape poverty, Amar had turned to crime and became an infamous smuggler after the Spirit of the Whale incident. Amar had been the one to smuggle the tabaxi, Wind, onto the ship he was on. I suggested that the ship be The Emperor of the Waves. As they crossed the Azure Sea, a storm-tossed the ship. Wind was swept overboard and Amar dove in to try and save him. Procan, the god of the sea, calmed the storm then created a wave that brought the two characters back onto the deck of the ship. That was the last time that Amar sailed the sea as a smuggler. He walked off that ship and went straight to the temple.

Wind went into hiding once they reached Saltmarsh. He went to work for an alchemist, who was a friend to his old mentor. The alchemist kept Wind hidden by casting Seeming on him daily to make him look human.

I suggested that the two players that were playing genasi be related. Here is where my knowledge of 5e failed me. In 2nd edition, genasi were the offspring of elemental beings and humanoids, I didn’t know that it had changed. I suggested that the two characters have different mothers and the same father. Right now, you all are saying, “That’s not how genasi work.” And you’d be right, but I didn’t know any better and that’s the route we took.

It might have not grown too much from there, but then Amar decided to roll on the This is Your Life tables in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Donivald was born. Who is Donivald? You may be asking. I’m glad you asked, Donivald became the face of all that is wrong in Saltmarsh. He was the father of Tidal, Whisper, and Amar (and Amar’s brother Remir). The characters would run into other children of Donivald during the campaign including the remains of a half-elf in Chapter 5: The Final Enemy and during the same adventure it was learned that the half-orc (who had joined the party after Chapter 4: Salvage Operation) Urgag was also a child of Donivald. The picture on p. 143 of GoS always drew my eye. In the long run, that was not who Donivald turned out to be but his ship was the Tammeraut.

To help spur ideas, the This is Your Life tables are a great resource to get inspiration. Don’t be shackled by the random dice rolls, but allow the story elements that work to blossom into story ideas.

Mac, the river gnome, had been working on the river from Saltmarsh to Burle. He had learned to be a shipwright, and when his brother’s family died, he had moved to Saltmarsh to ply trade and keep an eye on his brother’s adopted son, Whisper. Whisper was an air genasi and had been a fisherman until the cries of the fish had driven him from that trade. It was the awakening of his druidic powers that allowed him to speak to animals. He became an apprentice to Ferrin Kastilar in the Sea Grove of Obad-Hai.

Whisper’s half-sister, Tidal, had grown up in a mansion on the hill. She was raised by the help after her mother disappeared until the money ran out. Now the house is mostly empty of anything valuable and she shares the house with several squatters.

The whole session took up the time we had that night. Then the work began.

I went through the list of NPCs and decided who would be connected to which characters. I created a few of my own to add to the cast. I wrote a brief history of each character with story elements that they had come up with along with ideas that I had to tie them to the campaign.

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