Camella Ann background & 10/14/11 recap

The second thing the young Changeling did when she got back to the ship was rope off a 2'x6' area of the wall of the Captain's office, smiling with a pensive joy. The first thing she did was to very carefully pin up the "Wanted" poster she stole from the last planet they visited about her & her friends (& ship). She loves seeing her name in print. "Any publicity is good publicity" she thought. Between the theatre, the arena, and now this, she wondered how many people knew her name? As much as she loves her dear Captain and wants to free him though, they now have the Drudge and maps to their homelands, and for the first time in 12 years was thinking of her freedom.

Freedom and revenge... It's almost frightening how quickly that it all poured back from the repressed memories of so long ago. Orphaned at birth by her birthparents, her adoptive parents were Human and couldn't shift nor tell her anything about her kind. Best she could discover was they were an extremely secretive race hidden among the various other race's cities.

Her adoptive parents were travelling performers for a small but talented troupe of artists and could teach her everything about theatre, from acting and ballet to singing and orchestra. Add in her racial abilities and natural passion, by age 14 when her parents died fighting off bandits, she was quite the talented bard.

She then travelled to the largest most well known performance troupe posing as a 26 year old Human girl, a ballet dancer. After only 2 years on the chorus line she landed the prima ballerina spot in the season opening performance, and fans were a buzz to see her dance the lead. Then, the week before opening day she woke up on the gladiator slave ship, the Drudge, betrayed by one of the other dancers... probably her understudy, but not sure.

After admiring her roped off 'wanted' poster, Camella Ann starts pouring through the Captain's journals they just found, looking for any clues of other storage vaults of treasure (& passwords, codes) to keep her crew happy, as well as information on all the surviving gladiators' homeland information, especially looking for any information on the backstabbing bitch who sold her into slavery to dance her lead. It's been 12 years since then and she has almost been a slave longer than she's known freedom. Coincidentally, today is her 28th birthday, the age she pretended to be all those years ago when she was an innocent little girl, before she ever gave a thought to gladiator arena battles and didn't know of spaceships.

She did come to enjoy parts of her life & especially the battles though... the chaos and precision of it all, the familiar cheers from the crowd, the adrenalin rush of the danger, and the freedom to dance and play while helping her crew to victory gave her a lot of the pleasures she loved from the theatre. She's sure her betrayer thought the frail 'Human' girl would never survive a gladiator pit, but she instead grew powerful and developed some very powerful friends as the Captain's moll. More than just friends, for a special form of bond develops when you're fighting life or death with the same people for years. And good thing too, the last few battles had nothing to do with a cheering crowd and would have been fatal for most company.

Just recently they battled Warforged soldiers fleeing capture (when the Captain & Xera were taken). Thankfully the Captain had the foresight & magic to give the crew a crystal ball, or they'd never have had the advanced warning to get away with only that battle. The mighty Tordek and the wicked Crystalla easily hacked them into scrap, containing them the whole battle, protecting the ship and their ranged artillery companions, as they all were trained by one of the realms most respected gladiator trainers, their Capt Krav McGraw.

The only things that could catch the Drudge's escape were a few space Hummingbird speeders, but they each had monsterous Beholders in toe! The clever Archimedes shined here, launching attacks from 150' away. Up in the Crow's nest, Camella Ann was too vulnerable to the flying speedsters and took several hits. "I like the battles best when I'm helping, but not in them", she groaned. "Not the Beholder, attack the speedsters bringing the OTHER Beholders!", she added louder, as her crew was about to take on the monstrous eye. Switching their attacks, they kept the boarding party from 4 to 'just' the one Beholder and his deadly aimed pilot sniper.

The eye hovered, frustrating Crystalla's wicked blade. Tordek's mighty axe flew from his hand when it could, but the eye also cloaked itself invisible from view as well. Camella Ann was able to pull it down once for the crew to hack down, but it quickly teleported. With three of his Beholder companions unable to board though, the Drudge crew prevailed with much healing magic to spare between Archimedes & Camella Ann.

At the vault, the Changeling shifted to Captain McGraw and posed as him and his crew to go in and clean out the vault. The ruse worked and made it past the guards without incident. Once alone in the vault though, even the clever Archimedes makes mistakes, and slightly erred on solving the puzzle to the treasure. They were rewarded instead with multiple Dragons and Medusas, enraged for being trapped in stasis and attacking. Archimedes and Camella Ann were hit with the Medusa's special poison that magically grew in potency. Camella Ann recovered faster but definitely hurt both. The foresighted Githyanki drank a magical regeneration potion well in advance though, so was prepared for the magical poison.

The mighty Tordek stalwartly bottlenecked most of the beasts at their cage door, with only a couple slowly breaking past, but Crystalla was all but kept from the battle. The Changeling regretted not using her powerfully cast magic on one of Teldark's mighty blows, but instead used it to free Crystalla and unleash her terrible blade, which turned out to be the best move, for after so long out of the battle, her sword thirsted for blood and quickly cut many deep slices into monster flesh, bringing the battle to a decisive victory.

The 2 women in the party each had magical bags of holding and each fit an entire large crate's worth of contents into each. The other 2 crates the men carried out in wheel barrels while the Changeling shifted into the Captain once again to pass the guards on exit. They made off with a king's ransom in treasure. The Changeling's share alone came to 25k worth of residuum, and she still had the Captain's old long sword. She goes through his dresser and pulls a common outfit of his, dons a sheath the way he used to wear it, and shifts into the Captain with his well known blade visible on her hip. She laughs hardily with all of the Captain's mannerisms when she finally reads information about her home planet and abduction. "Payback's a bitch... with a space ship full of well trained & well armed gladiators at her side..."

What are the dimensions & flying rules on the Spelljammer, the Drudge? Specifically, Camella Ann wants to upgrade the railing all around the ship to solid gold, as well as the Captain's wheel, so how many gold peices would that take? After we do that, how much would a lavish feast & rechristening ceremony cost? The Drudge is fitting name for enslaved crew, but Camella Ann wants to call her the Payback ('cuz Payback's a bitch!)

Does the added weight affect speed or performance? If not she wants the Payback to become a rogue pirate ship and with each haul upgrade something else to solid gold until it's solid throughout, and all the while make the ship (and her new Captain) infamous throughout the realms.

I left the ship at Stu's, so he'll have to measure it. Since he's a buyer I'll let him calculate how much gold it would cost for the work you want done. If you want solid gold it will weigh the ship down in space and in the sea. If its just painted over the wood there is no major effects.

Okay, I didn't know the rules if it was only cargo weight or not. Then I just want a solid gold captain's wheel and gold plating on the railing (& eventualy all surfaces save windows & sails, etc.) Someone ballpark for me how many peices of gold that would come to please. Camella Ann wants the ship to become very well known. Also, are there any magical upgrades to speed that's not already being utilized? She likes being chased, but also doesn't really want to be caught...

Also, do we still need the Endurance Mountain tribal feat? Since we're renegades now & not gladiators anymore, seems like we'd be able to switch? If so, Camella Ann is retraining it for Versatile Expertise...

The outter perimeter of the ship is about 5'7" or 67" or 335 scale feet. There is an additional 2'5" of upper deck perimeter that is very prominent and although not truly outter perimeter, Camella Ann would likely insist that it be treated also; resulting in a grand total of 96" or 480 scale feet. I'm going to round this up to 500 scale feet. Assuming a railing of approximately 1.5" in diameter, that means that for each foot of railing, you would need 60 sq inches of area covered with gold leaf or 30,000 sq inches or 2,500 sq feet of gold leaf.

One ounce of gold can be beaten into an incredible 300 square feet (Wikipedia) of gold leaf. As such, you'd need only 8.3 ounces of gold for the actual material. In other words, as 1 GP in D&D is suppose to represent one third of an ounce of gold (PHB pg 212), you'd need only 25 Gold Pieces for the material. As far as the labor to complete the job, well, I propose that it would take about a man day to remove and replace each 10 feet of rail (about a foot an hour). This factors in the smith's time to beat the leaf and coat the new rail. Thus, we're talking about 50 man days of labor. I'm also going to take the position that for a semi-skilled laborer, you'll be paying about 5 GP a day in 4.0 (common meal worth about 2 SP, one night in an inn worth 5 SP and a good horse worth say 100 GP). So, for labor you might pay 250 GP or with labor and material 275 GP.

Now, if you're thinking of making the rail solid gold, an actual Gold coin is a tiny bit more than 3/32" of an inch thick and a bit more than 1" in diameter. Thus if you made the rail smaller in diameter you'ld need 10 coins per inch or 3.3 ounces if one coin is a third of an ounce (that's about 40 ounces per foot of rail). For 500 feet of perimeter, that's 20,000 ounces of gold or 60,000 GP in material to do the rail in solid gold. Now that's actually only about 1,250 lbs of gold, less than the weight 7 good sized men. As such, the weight really shouldn't be a factor for a ship like the drudge with a carrying capacity over 100 tons.

As far as making the wheel out of solid gold, well, assuming a 5' tall, wheel with six spokes, thats about 15' of 1.5" diameter material or at 80 ounces per foot (bigger diameter than the rail) 1,200 ounces or 75 lbs of gold or 3,600 GP in material. Adding in labor to craft the wheel and some technical design modifications to supporting infrastructure to allow for the massively increased weight of the wheel could put the price at around 4,000 GP total.

Okay, this is way too close to what I actually do every day at work - figuring out how much stuff should cost. I think Brad owes me for 1 hour of labor at the rate my company charges it's customers for my services.

Thanks, that's cool. Plating goes a lot farther than I thought. Camella Ann will commision the entire ship's wood & metal surfaces be plated in gold, except for the Captain's wheel, which she'll have done in solid gold. Good thing we just got a nice cash payday! 4,275gp subtracted.

She'll also ask Archimedes what it would take to mount ship cannons (or ballistas, whatever's best) on some sort of a pivot to be hidden below deck normally. Something that a 5 person NPC crew can operate & fire.

Camella Ann will also ask Trina and anyone else who knows about possible upgrades to the ship's speed and performance.

4,275 gets you gold plating on the rails that outline the ship and a solid gold wheel; not plating on every surface of the ship! We have cannons? Cool! (If we really do) I mean, like, I can make gunpowder or something very close to it. Well, for a ship of our tonnage, if you allow for the additional desk surface it would take to have the cannons on a pivot or hoist, that's that much less space you have for additional guns. Ordinarily, the gun decks would have "gun ports" or doors which are opened when the guns are "run out" just before they are fired. If your gun port doors are well made, then can appear to be part of the side of the ship. This is how you may disguise the fact that you are an armed ship and not give up needed gun deck space. If the top deck is indeed used as a "light" gun deck, I mean, like, what's the harm? Anything we run into is going to expect the ship to have some armament. For weight and balance, the lighter guns were always topside, this is where you had your bow chasers and stern chasers. The really big guns were on the lower decks.

Upgrades? A greek fire nozzle would be neat; secret cargo compartments; a bow harpoon in case we ever have to catch something big; treating the wood with mink oil so that it is more water proof but also fire resistant; as good a crew as you can afford or find; lots of crossbows (rifled muskets would be better), as many of my fire bombs as you can pay me to make. I'm sure if I thought about it for more than a minute or two, I could come up with a much bigger list.

The "...or ballistas or whatever" I thought would have given away that I didn't know what the highest tech was. Anyway, the plating is cheap enough to be able to do the whole ship, I think. As long as the whole thing (including the 4,275gp) is under 9,500gp, we're good. Including what I want to get after next adventure at 14th, that's how much I have left over after a couple more bags and last adventure's haul. And as long as they're trained in the proper skill and do good work, I'll give top priority to the crew & only farm out off ship what work we have to.

Ross, what does Capt McGraw's longsword do?