Using U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh By Dave J Browne With Don Turnbull to Further Set Up An ACK's Rpg The Age of Pike, Shot & the Weird Campaign

 The other day we wrote about the Age of Pike, Shot, & the Weird on the blog here. Let's pick up for a moment with a thought that was rattling through my head today. We were using Adventurer, Conqueror, King's Guns of War for an OSR campaign set up.But where do we begin with the PC's at the beginning of their careers as adventurers?! Well that's easy really we begin with U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and there are several reasons for this. 

One the player's PC's are in the village of Saltmarsh but there's more to the Saltmarsh region then meets the eye. The village is the old capital of Saltmarsh that experienced a boom when the fishmonger's guild invested heavily in the region when the fishing industry took off. 
Because boom town style regions attract unsavory types pirates & raiders naturally drifted into the region and this is where the alchemist comes into play. He's not some prop used by the raiders of this area, no instead he's their undead leader. 

He's lead them back to his old village and has taken up his old mansion to use as a focus point for raids on the saltmarsh river & the coast. Any prisoners his gang takes in the raids get sold into slavery to the local represenatives of the Slavers.  And he's got a deal cooking with the local Deep Ones to take back Saltmarsh with his gang getting slaves, treasure, and the right to ply the waters. The Alchemist isn't counting on several factors.  The PC's get involved using the usual lead in with U1, but there's the extra bit of the cult of the Dagon that has been underminding Saltmarsh from within. 
Then there's the displacement of the local lizardmen & their allies who have had weapons being sold to them by the two timing pirates. Those black powder weapons are straight out of  Guns of War with the lizardmen actually being a relic of the long gone lizardmen empire in the area. 

Now between the end of the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh & the beginning of X1 The Isle of Dread. The player's PC's find out that the isle used to be seat of the lizardmen empire's capital in ages past. And this leads into the adventure arch that we talked about in the last blog entry. This set's up the island as being a part of some unknown continenant ripe for colonization. Or is it?! 

Why is X1 The Isle of Dread by Tom Moldvay & Dave Cook abandoned?! Could there be a hidden evil lurking below the surface of the waves of the island?! And this further leads deeper into I1: "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" (1981), which centered on a lost city in the jungle which is the tip of this undiscovered country!