One of Freeport's most popular holidays is Swagfest, which celebrates the success of the infamous Great Raid conducted by the city's earliest Sea Lords. This year, Captain Lydon is sponsoring the festivities. While the PCs participate in various contests, they also have to deal with potentially deadly interruptions. Bibliographic note: "Holiday in the Sun" was originally written for v.3.0; this version can be found for free at at: http://freeronin.com/gr_files/focus05a.pdf The adventure was updated to the v.3.5 rules as part of The Freeport Trilogy: Five Year Anniversary Edition.
Freeport is a fantasy “free city” you can place in a fantastic setting. Its basic premise is a pirate city gone legit… at least on the surface. In truth, the pirate tradition is alive and well in Freeport, but camouflaged by a veneer of respectability. These days the city’s pirates are privateers, legalized pirates Freeport loans out to the highest bidder. You’ll learn more in the short history of the city that follows. This should help give you a taste of the flavor of Freeport before the adventure begins and the given background is all you need to run this adventure. It is an ideal starting place for a new campaign as the player characters find themselves stranded in Freeport after a deal goes sour. A seemingly simple job plunges them into the strange underside of the city, where they uncover secrets worth dying for. Death in Freeport is the first from the Freeport trilogy, together with Terror in Freeport and Madness in Freeport. Synopsis: Death in Freeport drops the player characters into the midst of political and magical intrigue, as the hidden Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign manipulates events to bring its dread god to the world. Freeport is still a bustling center of trade, but evil currents run beneath the surface. There are secrets here, and questions unanswered. The characters will undoubtedly learn there is more here than they expect in a simple seaport. The question is, will that knowledge kill them? As the adventure begins, the player characters (PCs) have just come to Freeport on a merchant ship. While on the docks, the PCs are attacked by a press gang, who mistake them for easy marks. The press gang is handily beaten off; since they are unused to real resistance. A bookish young man named Brother Egil then approaches the PCs. He says that he’s been looking for a group that can take of itself, and that he has a job for them if they are interested: finding a missing librarian. The missing man, Lucius, disappeared two days previously, and Egil is eager to find him. Egil gives the PCs some background on Lucius and his strange behavior. The PCs are then free to investigate: They are likely to visit Lucius’s home, the temple to the God of Knowledge, and an orc pirate ship. This should form a picture of Lucius as a man searching for his own past—who found something he wasn’t counting on. Following a trail of clues, the PCs learn about the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign. With a little luck, the PCs can trail the cultists back to their hideout, penetrate the lair, and discover secret tunnels underneath it. Deep underground they find degenerate serpent people, and eventually Lucius himself. The librarian has been tortured badly and will die without aid. The PCs also have to deal with the leader of the cult, a man they may recognize from the temple. When the cult priest is slain, they are in for an even bigger surprise. He was not human at all, but a serpent man in disguise. What this means for Freeport only the gods can say.
Madness in Freeport, the final part of the Freeport Trilogy, details the final confrontation between the PCs, the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign, and Sea Lord Milton Drac. In Part One, the Drac invites the PCs to the Grand Lighthouse Ball. Careful investigation can reveal the secret purpose of the lighthouse. In Parts Two and Three, the PCs must recover a powerful artifact to thwart the Brotherhood's plans. They must pass through an infamous pirate's hidden caves, then search a sunken temple of the serpent god Yig. In Part Four, the heroes must enter the Grand Lighthouse, AKA Milton's Folly, in a race against time to stop the Brotherhood's world-shaking master plan from coming to fruition. (Bibliographic note: This adventure was originally written for v.3.0, and later updated to the v.3.5 rules. The revised versions of Death, Terror, and Madness in Freeport were reprinted in an omnibus edition, along with two shorter filler adventures, as The Freeport Edition: Five Year Anniversary Edition.)
Dutch "Boss" Tillinghast, leader of the Sea Lord's Guard, is as corrupt as he is powerful. When his disloyal and understaffed Guard fail to capture a magic-using thief, Tillinghast turns to mercenaries--i.e., the PCs. "Thieves and Liars" is a short "interlude" adventure designed to be played between Terror in Freeport and Madness in Freeport.
This adventure can be used as stand-alone or continuing the arc started by Death in Freeport. Terror in Freeport leads the PCs deeper into the intrigue they began to glimpse in Death in Freeport. The investigation takes them from the corridors of power to the bowels of the underworld, with terrifying insights into who really controls the city. They discover that the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign has its claws in the town's power elite, but thanks to some clever camouflage by Sea Lord Drac. they may not find out just whom the serpents control until it's too late. As the adventure begins, the PCs are contacted once more by a very nervous Brother Egil. He tells them that while staying with Lucius one evening, he awoke to find a burglar in the roomstealing a scroll. Egil is certain that the Brotherhood have penetrated further into Freeport than anyone imagines. He wants the PCs to investigate Milos's other ties to the city and find out what's being done about the temple of the Unspeakable One. The PCs search the cultist's lodgings and discover it has been carefully gone over, and several possibly incriminating books are missing. But the burglars overlooked one thing: a Tome with a diagram of the Lighthouse of Drac sketched onto the back page, marked with the letter V. Upon leaving Milos's lodgings, the PCs come upon a gang of orcs beating up a hapless messenger. They lend a hand, only to discover they've been tricked - the messenger makes off with Milos's book! A chase through the back streets leads them to the boarded-up building the y discovered in Death What they find isn't encouraging. There is a guard posted out front, courtesy of "V"- -Verlaine. head of the Captains' Council. Meanwhile, down below, the cultists continue to have the run of the caverns-— in fact, they have been shipping their unholy relics to Verlaine's own home!