A New Sea of Thieves Adventure: A Dark Deception

I don’t normally get a chance to do adventures in the Sea of Thieves. Often, by the time I am available to play these adventures, everyone else has already done it, and I don’t want to drag people into doing things again for me. Sure, some can be done by playing solo, and A Dark Deception, the newest adventure as of writing, is easy enough. But was A Dark Deception any good?

Adventures are a one-off event. A Dark Deception will available to play for the next two weeks, before it disappears forever. Really, they are pretty stupid with how temporary they are. I however, for a change, managed to get online late at night to play with some friends, and got to… experience this adventure.

So basically, we get a message from Larinna telling us to go to an unmarked island. Someone wants to speak to us, and they want to do so on an island in the middle of nowhere. So that’s what we do, we go to an unmarked island in the middle of nowhere, where we meed the Pirate Lord. Immediately, there are some red flags, like the fact that he’s not talking right and the swords in his back and jacket are not ghost-y. But for the sake of the adventure, we continue onwards. The guy claims that he’s been robbed and wants us to track down the stolen items. Simple enough.

According to the guy (who normally teleports around rather than sitting around on an island), we need to go and speak to one of the nice ladies from the Order of Souls, in order to make a special compass that will point us to these stolen items. However, Olivia, the nice lady we visit, doesn’t want us to use a pocket watch which she cherishes. So, for some reason, we have to steal the pocket watch for her, and we do that by knocking on a door, which makes a rat with glowing eyes appear. The rat runs into Olivia’s tent, scaring the crap out of her, so we can steal the pocket watch.

We then have to go to a ship wreck on a nearby beach and steal the gems out of the idol on the front of one particular ship. Nice and easy, really. There’s another ghost rat on this island, but it just runs away.

With our ingredients required, we travel to a different outpost and get Olivia’s student to make a special compass for us. There’s also another ghost rat nearby, which runs off. We make the compass and the compass immediately points towards Golden Sands, so that’s where we go.

As an aside, I know it’s called Port Merrick now, but Golden Sands is a much better name. Even if they’ve made the island impossibly huge and awkward to navigate around.

Anyway, we go to Golden Sands and head to the tavern, where we find another ghost rat. We follow it down some stairs, through a storage room and into a small canal underneath the town. There’s a small hole that the rat enters, and, upon sticking our hand in, a magic stone door opens.

Inside are a bunch of exotic artifacts, some of which can be examined. But the prize in the middle of the room is Pendragon’s old sword, which is glowing red rather than blue. The clearly-not-Ramsey guy appears, laughs about tricking you then grabs the sword and disappears. Except, well, he does so really slowly. The real Pirate Lord has enough time to show up and spout a few words before fake Ramsey disappears. The actual Pirate Lord gets a bit pissed off at us, and frankly our characters deserve it because the other guy REALLY OBVIOUSLY WASN’T RAMSEY. He spoke wrong, he looked wrong and he wrote wrong.

The Pirate Lord (the real one) is quite upset, and mentions how the sword has been teleported outside the Sea of Thieves. Which probably means it’s in the sea of the damned or something. Either way, we dun goofed. So yeah, someone pretended to be Ramsey and got away with Pendragon’s corrupted sword. Which is a bad thing.

On the plus side, at least this adventure is pretty basic. Predictable, but basic. However, it’s also temporary, meaning we won’t be able to play it again. So, really, it was all a pointless journey, and all we got out of it was a dumb-sounding title and a nice pocket watch.