Vinnie Vice | Adventures Ahoy

Main article on Vinnie
Table of Contents

History

Early Adventure

In this lifetime, Vinnie the wizard found himself on a ship guarding a holy artifact being moved across the Ashes Archipelago. Unfortunately, the ship came under attack by pirates that were taking no quarter. He survived by showing himself into a chest and rolling his makeshift vessel into the sea. Vinnie floated for days until he was fished out by Captain Reynolds and joined the crew of the Venture. His stay on the ship was brief, seeing as it was attacked and shot down by the Argus Pirates shortly thereafter.
Now stuck on a jungle island with the rest of the crew, the group stumbled through the jungle on their way to the crash site. Vinnie's conjuration magic allowed him to make several muskets that he used to hunt game animals and feed the group. They also helped for self-defense when the group was attacked by the Sea Devils' scimitar-wielding monkeys. Vinnie largely stayed in the background when the party met civilians who'd been attacked by pirates on the island, explored the crash site, and reunited with Captain Reynolds. 
After the Captain sent them back to help the civilians, Vinnie decided to hang back and help Reynolds build rafts to get off the island. This lasted until the Captain mentioned the upcoming Dwarftoberfest. Suddenly realizing he could make it if he left now, Vinnie started swimming out to sea and kept going long after Captain Reynolds lost sight of him.

Return to the Crew

At some point during Dwarftoberfest, he met Mac Lendon and the two became fast friends before deciding to travel around and locate the Venture's crew. This wound up happening by chance when the Venture II arrived to deliver supplies in Hopewell Harbor while Vinnie was in the town guard's drunk tank.
He and Mac hopped on the Venture II unnoticed and without announcing themselves. Several days later while Althea was practicing the flute, the crew noticed drunken sing-a-longs coming from the hold. Vinnie had evidently been practicing his magic during his absence from the crew, showing a greater proficiency than before when the ship was attacked by Captain Xendros.
He used a spell of necromancy to summon a ghost that engaged the pirates and put an end to Captain Xendros moments before the Sea Devil could end Althea's life. Unfortunately for him, this did not go unnoticed by N28.
N28 talked to Vinnie privately the next day, demanding that he renounce his use of necromancy due to her church's creed against the undead. She offered to compensate him for his efforts and warned him that other Necrobanes would be less friendly with their demands if he didn't stop now.
She also informed him of the dangerous forces that controlled necromancy and would often exert influence over its practitioners, citing Orcus, Vecna, and Atropus as examples. With some grumbling, Vinnie agreed to her terms, ripping out the page of his spellbook and burning it. He promptly added the spell back to his book the moment she was out of the room.

"Why Do Things Keep Trying to Eat People?"

The Venture II sailed east to make a delivery of dwarven mead to a local festival with Gibby in charge of keeping Vinnie and Mac away from it during the voyage. The crew decided to stay and enjoy the party, which was going well until a halfling with a spear in his back shuffled in and collapsed dead. The Venture Boys decided to investigate, finding a deserted village up the beach and signs the inhabitants had been kidnapped to the neighboring isle.
Negotiations with the local grung led them to discover the local lizardfolk were using the villagers as the main course for a feast of their own. The party rescued one group of captives from a ziggurat, Vinnie summoning a shadowspawn to attack directly while he provided support fire. They then ventured to the lizardfolk caves to rescue the rest of the captives, Vinnie using his magic to make a safe path through the earthy tunnels and around the lizardfolks' traps.
Heading back to Allisyos, the Venture II was waylaid when a mysterious fog surrounded it and caused it to nearly ram into a massive ship. The ship kept appearing in front of the Venture II as they tried to sail out, leaving the crew no choice but to investigate. The vessel proved to be haunted by spirits and driven by vampires].
Many of the monsters proved resistant or outright immune to Vinnie's shadowspawn's attacks, leaving him to use his magic to support his allies and hamper his enemies instead. After rescuing the captives and treasure from the hold, they reboarded the Venture II and continued back home.

Secret of the Porvenir

After taking a little R&R in Allisyos, the party set out for the town of Fidanza for their next job. Xaeyruudh had heard a shipping company was looking for someone to recover one of their vessels captured by pirates. Arriving in town, Vinnie went with Althea and Erica to meet the merchant while the rest of the crew resupplied the Venture II.
There they met Lady Candelaria Sonavella, daughter of the Sonavella family and prominent member of the equally prominent Sonavella Shipping Co. Lady Sonavella explained pirates had seized a ship carrying precious family heirlooms along with its usual cargo. The ship in question, the Porvenir, had somehow become stuck in a cove normally blocked by rocks and coral. She'd already sent one group of mercenaries after it, but they retreated after the Porvenir fired on them.
Lady Sonavella offered a hefty sum to board the ship and investigate its status with additional payment for each heirloom and member of the crew recovered (if any had survived the pirate takeover). The heirlooms were sealed in magical spheres for protection, so she was confident the pirates couldn't have damaged them. Once the party accepted, Lady Sonavella stated she would follow them in her own ship, eager for a status report after the first mercenary group's failure. They set out at dawn the next morning.
The voyage went smoothly until Captain Reynolds discovered they were working for the Sonavellas, enraged that the party had already agreed to a contract with people he described as "sharks in humanoid skin". He angrily locked himself in his cabin to avoid being seen by Lady Sonavella, much to the party's confusion.
Despite the lack of detail, Vinnie and his comrades concluded there must be some sort of bad blood between Captain Reynolds and the Sonavella family. The Venture II eventually arrived at the isle of Fellcay. Since the previous mercenaries approach from sea failed, the party opted to cross the island from its opposite end and approach the Porvenir by land.
While crossing the island, Althea rescued Father Nemesi Amáiz Vilar i Costa from being swept down a river when she heard him yelling for help. The drunken dwarf thanked her and explained he'd been shipwrecked before seeing his old friend Vinnie and reuniting with him. Vinnie sent his familiar to escort Father Costa back to the Venture II while the group pressed on.
Coming to the cove and boarding the Porvenir, the group started to search the seemingly deserted ship. After Bakris found the captain's journal and left to join the others, Vinnie continued to search the captain's quarters and met the ghost of Captain Deze himself. Deze told Vinnie he was looking for revenge against the traitor who doomed him & his crew and that Vinnie might be just the wizard to help him.
The ghostly captain was enraged when he learned the Venture Boys were working for Lady Sonavella and was prepared to kill them or be destroyed trying. Althea managed to persuade Deze back to calmness so that he could explain the situation to them instead. Deze informed them how his crew had unknowingly been carrying some monster on the ship that then became the ship before attacking and devouring him and his crew.
He was convinced a traitor on his ship working with Lady Sonavella directly and with some sort of protection from the monster was the blame. He offered them a reward of gold and jewels for the traitor, who he believed was in the cargo hold.
When the party went down another deck, they fought a few skeletons that melted into grey goo sucked up by the ship after being defeated. Soon all the skeletons, even those uninjured, were absorbed into the ship as a telepathic voice bid Vinnie and his friends to come speak in the cargo hold. They found the hold made of flesh and bone rather than wood as they stood in the deepest part of the ultra-mimic.
The mimic explained its history, how Lady Sonavella orchestrated its creation and put it on a ship to control what form it took and allow it to feed on the crew. It regretted killing the crew but had no more than animal intelligence when it did so. It was only by consuming the crew and their traits that it became self-aware enough to feel ashamed of its actions. Vinnie and his allies left the creature in peace after it promised to raise its children away from inhabited areas.
On their way out, they did find and capture the traitor working for Lady Sonavella that Deze wanted dead. The party knocked him out and allowed Deze to strangle the man, despite Althea's failed attempt to convince the ghost otherwise. Vinnie also used the corpse as an opportunity to messily feed Cappy, to the disgust of everyone save the emotionless N64. The ghostly captain paid them for their services before departing to the afterlife with his unfinished business concluded as the party resolved to confront Lady Sonavella, the real monster of this entire event.

Interlude with a Witch

The party walked back across the island to find the Venture II's crew had evacuated to the island's beach. During the party's absence, several crew members had died mysteriously in their sleep with no apparent cause of death. The crew feared either plague or a curse upon the ship, though Father Costa was able to rule out the plague theory.
Vinnie was unable to find any sign of a magical curse, though Erica spotted a stranger on the ship that disappeared after she called out to him. Using the information they had, Vinnie was able to deduce the culprit was likely a night hag that was killing from the Ethereal Plane.
That night, the group took watches so that Althea could strike the hag in the Ethereal Plane using a magic sword they had discovered on the Porvenir. She noticed the hag just as it was about to set its claws on Bruce and unleashed the full fury of her holy powers, dealing a near-fatal injury to the hag and forcing it to retreat for the time being.

Troubles with the Sonavellas

The next morning, the party took rowboats to Lady Sonavella's ship to confront her over their findings on the Porvenir. Vinnie took the lead in the conversation, trading half-truths with Lady Sonavella as each of them tried to get more information without revealing too much to the other. It was going well until Althea's aversion to lying reached a breaking point and she spilled the beans about their whole adventure to Lady Sonavella.
The merchant woman took the information in stride and paid the party the agreed-upon sum for their investigation before departing. With mixed opinions about the whole affair, the party returned to the now safe Venture II and Reynolds set a course for Soeurs Noires.
Arriving in the Shiptown harbor, Vinnie and the rest of the party (plus Gibby) left for the annual wizard's swap meet while Captain Reynolds attended to other business. They split up on arrival and Vinnie was quick to chat up his fellow wizards, swapping spells with colleagues and rediscovering a lost magical wand that's true power is only visible to drunk individuals.
He also came across a friendly looking bugman who he quickly got drunk after offering the bugman some sweet, surgery wine. Althea eventually came to find him so the group could check out the auction house and list of items before the event the next day.
Vinnie was the first to spot Mathayas and Arachnor standing by Captain Elgar when the group entered the auction hall. He won several items during the auction (magical reading glasses, a tankard belonging to a legendary brewmaster, and a lantern that's light revealed the Ethereal Plane).
When he noticed the Argus Pirates leaving, he followed them during the rest of his group's confrontation with Lord Sonavella's party. Vinnie lost track of the Argus Pirates but was in position to hear Lord Sonavella complaining about a lost treasure ship as his tiefling henchman inquired about the situation.
Rejoining his friends, Vinnie & co. quickly found the Argus Pirates again as a beam of light shot down from the sky. Alarm bells rang and aarakocra guards flew towards a disturbance at the harbor. The group followed and arrived just in time to see Mathayas and Gyaos retreating from the guards. Their roughed up but alive crew said they were looking for Gibby, who returned with Xaeyruudh just as this was being explained.
While the crew recovered and prepared to sail out looking for Lord Sonavella's lost ship, Vinnie started cleaning the dirty lantern he'd won at the auction. The door of the lantern burst open and a vortex of flame flew out above the ship, forming itself into the efreeti Cyndra. The elemental thanked Vinnie for cleaning her home and offered to answer three questions, but warned him she'd return to sleep for 1000 years after answering the final question.
He asked, "What are the two best questions to ask you next?" Amused by his response, she first gave him a rundown of the Argus Pirates history and their current efforts to repair their ship, warning him that they'd become a more active threat once the Jeweled Eye was functioning again. Cyndra then explained how the Jeweled Eye's teleporter had damaged the barrier around Nexus keeping residents of the Outer Planes out. The damage was rapidly growing and already beyond the point of being fixable.
Cyndra returned to her lamp and this new information gave Vinnie cause to worry about a renewed devil invasion, just like in the ancient war. He used his magic to contact Porvenir, first confirming the mimic ship had successfully escaped Candelaria Sonavella. He then asked if Porvenir would be willing to help them fight in the future, to which the mimic agreed but only after its children were safe. As they began to set sail, the group noticed Gibby sniffling and starting to look sick, having spilled a half-finished magic potion on himself earlier when Althea briefly left him unattended.

Sirens, Pirates, & a Sea Serpent

Gibby's sniffles soon turned into a full-blown cold. Each time he sneezed it created some kind of magical side effect for a member of the crew. Halfway through Gibby's bout of sneezing, Vinnie found himself teleported to Aliiysos and sitting across a table from Fast James "Jimmy" Deric, who was holding a hand of cards and stared at Vinnie open mouthed. Vinnie didn't know it, but Gibby had caused him to swap places with Guu the Slime. Just as Jimmy opened his mouth and asked, "What-", another of Gibby's sneezes swapped them back and Vinnie was back aboard the Venture II.
N64 decided to ask his docent for information on anything that could help Gibby. The docent provided him with a spell that would summon a being called Machina that could presumably help. N64 relayed this information to Vinnie who said the magic words, "Klaatu berata nikto," and summoned Machina the sphinx. The group answered his riddles three and were rewarded with an Orb of Machina, which could fixing any broken or breaking magic item. This cured Gibby's illness instantly as the sphinx took his leave. With that situation handled, the Venture II continued onwards towards the Sorrow Shoals to find the missing treasure ship.
Their first stop was the town of Eishum, the closest settlement to the shoals, to see if they could pick up any information from the locals. Vinnie said there was one place in every town that was guaranteed to have information: the bar. The party found a tavern called the Sailor's Delight and He sat down to look over the drink menu. He noticed the barkeep seemed afraid of Althea for some reason, talking very nervously and keeping his distance. When the barkeep brought out Althea's salad, he saw the fork was made of iron and burst out laughing at the barkeep having mistaken Althea for a fey (due to Althea's new rabbit ears & tail).
When Althea approached a ship's crew getting the stink eye from other bar patrons, Vinnie and the others joined her to ask what that was all about. Captain Molly explained that her all-female crew were the only ones who could fish the rich waters near the Sorrow Shoals because they were the only crew completely immune to the songs of the sirens that lived there. The rest of the party came over and started to negotiate for Captain Molly to take them towards the Shoals, learning she saw the missing treasure ship enter the area fleeing pirates a few days beforehand. They eventually settled on a deal and set out the next morning on Captain Molly's ship, the Crystal Wave.
Captain Molly would go no further than a quarter mile from the Shoals and the party took rowboats in, Vinnie riding with Erica. They were quickly attacked by a group of sirens, which fled after half their number were killed. Soon after, Vinnie's familiar found a siren nest nearby and saw a man in a cage among them. Althea insisted they save the man, despite arguments from Vinnie and Erica that they should leave him since he was either a pirate or one of Sonavella's men.
The Venture Boys snuck up on the sirens and the battle began, this group being led by a more powerful siren queen. Vinnie used his summons to attack the sirens while keeping himself at a safe distance, hiding under one of the rowboats. Once the sirens were all dead, the now free man, Todgar, told them how he was a sailor on the missing treasure ship that was grabbed off the deck by a siren. His ship was still fleeing the pirates that had chased them into the Shoals, so they couldn't come back to help him. He was also able to provide the direction he last saw his ship sailing in, giving the party a general direction to head in.
They did come across the treasure ship, but it was half sunk. The pirate ship was also there, temporarily trapped in a small cove barricaded by rocks until the high tide finished coming in. The pirates yelled at the party, getting them to row over just as a sea serpent tried to snatch up one of their rowboats in its jaws. Pirate Captain Ward explained the sea serpent had sunk the ship and was staying underwater to avoid their cannons. He told the party that if they could lure the beast into firing range, they'd kill it together and split the treasure 50/50. Erica agreed on the party's behalf while Vinnie started scheming to murder the pirates and take all the treasure rather than fulfilling the agreement. The sea serpent was a powerful draconic opponent, but in the end the party was victorious through a combination of their own efforts and support fire from the pirates.
When Vinnie tried to lie to the pirates to keep most of the treasure, Captain Ward saw through his deception. However, Ward had heard about how Althea had spared a member of the Sea Devils and gave Vinnie a chance to come clean rather than turn the situation to violence. Vinnie very reluctantly agreed since he was unsure they could win another fight after being banged up by the sea serpent. After the pirates left, Vinnie's familiar managed to locate the sea serpent's treasure horde and the party looted gold, jewels, and mithril onto their boats. The lair also contained several magic items on a shrine to Bahamut, Dragon Lord of Justice, which Erica eagerly grabbed despite Althea's warnings that taking the items could potentially anger a deity. After heading back and giving Captain Molly her cut, Vinnie and co. boarded the Venture II to find Gibby once again ill.

Finishing the Argus Pirates

This time, Gibby's situation was his own fault. The party returned to find him surrounded by empty candy wrappers while rubbing his swollen tummy. Seeking a cure for his tummy ache, Gibby asked if they could visit the nearby kuo-toa village where he was born to get them to pray for him. They set sail for the island and just as it came into view, they saw beams of light, globs of Gunkers, and trails of smoke coming down from the Jeweled Eye as the Argus Pirates launched a full-scale attack on the island.
Once they got close enough, Gibby teleported all the officers to the beach on the outskirts of the burning village. People were fleeing & hiding as Gunkers swarmed the area looking for them. Vinnie remained on the beach, sending one of his summoned monsters in to fight up close while he supported it from range with his magic. They realized why the Argus Pirates were here: to kill the kuo-toa]kuo-toa and remove the source of Gibby's godly power. The fires from one building turned into an immolith demon and approached the group as Mathayas, murderer of the kuo-toa]kuo-toa, started coming up the street firing spells at them. These foes proved no match for the Venture Boys and were dispatched with fairly minimal effort.
The group then split up; Vinnie and the other Venture Boys would cut straight through the forest to get to the main kuo-toa]kuo-toa village while Gibby, Captain Reynolds, and Xaeyruudh would follow the road around the woods. Halfway to their destination, the group was ambushed by the revenge-seeking Vengeance Coven. Vinnie once again summoned a monster as back-up while he tried to keep his distance from the hags. In the end the group was victorious against the hags with Vinnie's summon bludgeoning one hag to death and personally killing another by obliterating its head with a fire bolt. The third hag, unfortunately, managed to flee after seeing her two sisters destroyed. After taking a brief moment to bandage their wounds, the group pressed forward.
Standing at the tree line, they saw Gunkers entering the pond leading to the tunnel entrance of the kuo-toa village. Beyond that, on a hillside, was Captain Elgar using his disintegration ray to dig straight down into the village caves. The party split up and went around the pond to surround Captain Elgar and his minions on all sides before attacking. Vinnie had decided to pull down his pants and moon Captain Elgar, going as far as to walk towards the beholder ass backwards. For this insult, Captain Elgar struck him with a paralysis ray (twice) and he was became stiff as a statue, only able to continue mooning for most of the fight. Once he was finally freed from the beholder's magic, he managed to dodge several other rays even as one grazed him and unleashed a powerful blast of lightning that destroyed Captain Elgar once and for all. Considering his job now done, he summoned another monster and rode it into the sunset rather than return to the rest of the crew with the other surviving Venture Boys.

Aligned Organization

The Venture Boys

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