Harpies! Three harpies are approaching the ship from the air. On deck, I see a few areas that are magically growing dark, and shout a warning. Fathom casts a fireball at two of the approaching harpies. One of them dodges, but the other one takes it in the face.
One of the dark areas on deck starts to coalesce. A hand forms out of the deck behind Gooseneck and tries to grab him. Another forms by Abran, another by the captain, and one by a couple of crew. Gooseneck is off guard but swings at the hand anyway and manages to hit it. The captain and one of the crew are grabbed, and so is Abran. Abran notices that while the hand grabbing him is doing a bit of damage, it also seems to be trying to draw magical energy from him.
The harpies close in and start to sing. It echoes in everyone’s heads, making it difficult to focus on what’s going on. Abran, CornCob, and Gooseneck shake it off, while the rest of us zone out.
CornCob shoots a bolt at one of the harpies and hits it. Abran uses Shocking Grasp to encourage the magical hand that’s grabbing him to let go. Pujol shakes off the harpy’s song. Gooseneck rages, and then hits the hand that’s grabbing him with his axe. He hits it, chopping off its fingers, and it disappears back into the deck. He moves toward the harpies.
The captain and twin who is grabbed by the hands are turning wood-ish where they are grabbed. Abran’s boot is changing, too.
One of the harpies rushes in at Gooseneck and slashes at him with its claws, hitting him. The other two harpies land on the deck. One attacks a crewman and kills him.
CornCob calls forth a spiritual weapon and has it attack the hand grabbing Abran. It does enough damage that the hand sinks back into the deck. CornCob moves toward the harpies after that.
Abran shoots the harpy that killed the crewman, twice.
Pujol moves to a central location on the deck, then plays a counter charm to the harpy’s song on his harp to try to help everyone who’s still enthralled to shake it off.
Gooseneck hits the harpy that’s attacking him with his axe. The captain attacks the hand that’s grabbing her, but the wood grain has crept half way up her thigh. The twin who’s been grabbed is wooden up to his waist, and sinking in to the deck.
Fathom shakes off the harpy’s song.
CornCob casts a spell at the harpy that’s attacking Gooseneck. He sends his spiritual weapon to attack the hand that’s grabbing the twin. It does enough damage to make it dissipate.
The harpy near Gooseneck goes to attack Morgot, the navigator. He takes a nasty gash. The other harpy attacks Gooseneck again, hits him. The third harpy goes after Pujol, and hits him twice.
Abran shoots the harpy that’s attacking Pujol, and it goes down. Pujol turns invisible. Gooseneck hits the harpy he’s been fighting a couple more times, but it’s still up. Fathom casts a new spell at the other harpy – it necrotizes some of the harpy’s flesh (gross), but isn’t enough to take it down. The captain takes down the claw that is still grabbing her.
The harpy that Fathom attacked goes at her. The navigator takes a swing at it as it goes. The harpy hits Fathom twice, but she kills it. Gooseneck also gets hit again by the harpy that he’s been fighting. CornCob finally takes it down with a combination of another spell and his spiritual weapon.
CornCob does a mass heal to heal up our people and those in the crew who were injured.
I search the harpies’ remains. CornCob thinks they are not normal harpies, while Pujol thinks they look like the harpies we fought before, just bigger and healthier. I find that each of the harpies were carrying a necklace with a baby bird claw. It’s not magical, but I think it they could have used it to summon the grasping hands. Fathom finds a ruby that might have been in each of their throats. One of them has a ruby, one has an onyx, and the third has nothing. There’s a thought that they might be control gems, like with the slaad, but there’s no magic in the gems. There’s nothing else unusual about the harpies. The gems are probably worth 200gp each.
We rest for a while. Cook runs up from below, chasing chickens. Gooseneck helps him round them up.
The dead crewman’s name is Terese. We’re starting to get short-handed.
The crew is starting to wonder what mishap is coming next. The hope the transit through the Dragon’s Teeth goes well. That sounds like it’ll totally go fine.
CornCob asks if the crew has come across the hands sprouting from the deck thing before. They say no. The captain says the spot where she was grabbed felt numb and a little itchy. She thinks it was related to the harpies, but there’s no proof. She asks CornCob if he knows of a spell that would do that kind of thing; he says no, and asks Fathom. Fathom thinks something like that would fall unto the transmutation school of magic.
In the morning, the crew buries Terese at sea.
Fathom asks Morgot about the Dragon’s Teeth, which don’t sound at all problematic. He says they are a natural feature – a gap between continents that is rocky and stormy. The stone is white-ish in color and sticks up from under the water, so it looks kinda tooth-like. CornCob wonders if anything lives on the rocks. More harpies live there! Yay. But apparently, they’re on the east side and we’re going west, so we shouldn’t be sailing close to where the harpies nest. Super reassuring, that. But regardless, we have to pass through the Dragon’s Teeth to get to the next port.
The crew tells us that sometimes they hunt boar on the far side, or scavenge at the Dragon’s Teeth.
Someone on deck shouts about something going on by the bow. We go to see what’s going on. There’s a figure there, a forest dryad with tropical foliage who is shimmering – it’s an apparition, not physically present.
Pujol speaks to it in Sylvan. She wants help. Pujol verifies that she’s a projection; she says she was casting around to find someone to ask for help, and was drawn to the wood of the ship.
Pujol calls the captain over and explains the situation to her. The captain wants to know where the dryad wants aid – the north side of the land mass we’re headed toward, near the Dragon’s Teeth.
Pujol asks what kind of aid she wants. She says she’s guarding ruins that are being overrun by creatures of great malevolence. He asks for a landmark by which we can recognize the place, and she says ‘the Great Tree’.
