Tale of Mermaid - a play report

 I ran the thing. I applied players to my oneshot and it didn't absolutely get blown apart. They even claimed to have enjoyed it at the end.

Should be obvious but if you're looking to play through this at some point, maybe don't read any further as we're about to go over what happened in the three hours these two people took to play through the adventure.

Tale of Mermaid - An investigation based oneshot

We began the game as dusk was turning into night and the PCs arrived at this small port town by the sea. They were guided towards the tavern by some locals and walked in to notice that the place was packed absolutely full of sailors. A large fishing vessel had just recently pulled in and these men were now entertaining the townspeople with tales about mermaids they claimed to have seen.
The PCs found themselves a table and got a room for the night but hanged around on the tavern-floor of this establishment, taking in conversations and rumors these sailors were telling.

Before heading off to get their rest for the night, an old sailor was sent crashing against the table the PCs were sitting by as a result of some more-or-less drunken fighting and disagreements by the sailors of two different opinions on how these alleged mermaids they had seen had looked like, angelic or horrific.
The man gathered himself as he left the tavern, muttering something about showing just how beautiful the mermaids had been.

Next morning the players woke up to a pair of guardsmen knocking on their door, demanding to know where they had been last night.
After properly waking up the party headed downstairs for a breakfast and to figure out what these guards were waking them up for as they had almost gotten through the most heavily scripted part of the intro to the adventure.
A short time after getting their breakfast, an older woman rushed in to the tavern asking the tavernkeeper if he had seen her daughter who was supposed to have been out last night with the sailor who had turned up dead (this sailor had been why the guards had had interest in the PCs). After the tavernkeeper hadn't been able to offer the woman much help, she quickly scanned the room for anyone looking like they would be of help and turned towards the PCs, pleading for their help with her missing daughter and explaining the situation a bit better to the players. They now had a drowned sailor and a missing woman who was supposed to have been with the sailor last night.

The pair decided to head towards the beach where the drowned body had been found to see if they could find anything useful, and after arriving there decided to question a fisher mending his nets which lead them to learn that the body had indeed been found here and that the sailor and the missing woman had been in love with each other.
Not getting much more useful information out of the man, they now headed towards the docks to question some of the other sailors.

Arriving at the docks, they mostly heard more tales about the mermaids but also a mention that the older sailor who got knocked into their table last night hadn't been seen anywhere today either.
After their little success with the sailors they decided to try the ship's captain, who they with some help from the sailors found from his cabin.
The poor man was woken up by their arrival and in a terrible condition that only got worse as they explained the situation with the dead sailor and missing woman, but couldn't be of much help apart from giving the PCs some more information on the drowned sailor and advising them that the guards around this town were not people to put too much faith in.

By this point the investigation had come to bit of a standstill so the PCs returned to the tavern for a meal and a hope at another angle of approach.
The people at the tavern weren't as lively as last night as almost everyone in the town had heard the news by now and from what could be overheard about the conversations was that the few townspeople in the establishment were starting to suspect Grahm, the old sailor who was involved in a fight last night.
The players quickly picked up on this and decided to question the sailors, now armed with a new lead and it did quickly become apparent that Grahm had indeed been involved in the fight but so had the dead sailor as he was one of the people on the "winning" side of the little brawl.
They then proceeded to ask all they could about this old sailor and learned that he had always been bit of a weird one that nobody really got along with and that he supposedly still lived at a fishing hut he owned just outside the town whenever the shipping vessel came in to dock.

This of course lead the PCs to head towards the fishing hut, near where they found the occasional heavy footprints leading to the hut but none leaving it.
The place reeked of dead fish as they got close and the inside of the hut was dark and rather barren, but a low humming or chanting sound could be heard from the basement.
After a bit of creative thinking the PCs picked the hut's window open to sneak inside, revealing dozens of crude drawings of women, fish and the combinations of these two laying on surfaces of the room and a trapdoor in a corner where the song or chant was coming from.
They came up with a clever plan of trying to cause a ruckus outside to trick whoever was down there to come up and had they continued it past their first attempt that might just have happened, but after kicking some barrels together outside the hut all they got was heavy footsteps from the basement floor, a pause, and another short pair of heavy footsteps before the low chanting picked up again.

Now all they had left was to go down the trapdoor if they wanted to find out what was going on.
A quick peek to the basement before descending down the ladder revealed a mound of something as well as a shelf littered with books and illuminated by faint candlelight .
Going down into the room itself the mound revealed itself to be a pile of fish guts, these piles seemed to litter the room that was nearly surrounded in shelves filled with strange sea creatures in jars as well as more drawings and books. The middle of the room was a table with even larger pile of fish innards, and there on the other side of the room was a dark figure hunched over another table with several candles and some sort of shape laid on the table.

Approaching as sneakily as they could, a creaky floorboard gave the PCs away and the figure turned around, revealing him to indeed be Grahm the old sailor who was now looking a mixture of surprised, scared and angry as he demanded to know why these people were in his home.
Grahm promptly turned back to grab a rusty harpoon from the nearby shadows that he brandished, demanding that the PCs leave his home as they shouldn't be there.
An attempt at peaceful questioning was had by the PCs, but Grahm was having none of it and charged at them with his harpoon.

The fight was over almost disappointingly fast. Grahm missed his initial charge and the specialist rushed in to wrestle the weapon out of the old man's grasp, followed by the fighter pummeling him while trying to keep within non-lethal means.
The following rounds consisted of the specialist performing more wrestling actions against the old sailor and holding him in place as the fighter went on to give him a beating, and promptly after Grahm had given up and been tied up and gagged as all the PCs were getting out of him was a lot of cussing and crazy claims about the beauty of the mermaids.
The fighter went off to inform the local guards of this man's deeds after the two of them had witnessed the spectacle on the table that Grahm had been facing when they first entered the room;
The missing woman, head drowned in a basin full of sea water and her lower body mangled and half sewn into a tail end of a fish with fish skins.

This is where we ended the oneshot, the PCs came out of the adventure with seven silver pieces they had found by going through the old sailor's hut for valuables as our adventurer's were nearly broke.
Other notable loot was a spellbook that they couldn't read that Grahm had supposedly used in whatever he had been doing, some remedies and herbs from the mournful apothecarist form delivering news about her daughter, as well as a reward of 1,000 silver pieces from the guard for apprehending Grahm.

Overall it felt like the session went over smoothly, which I was rather pleasantly surprised by as this was the first thing I had written so far and I'm glad the players enjoyed their little investigation adventure.

Definitely will try to run this again for some other people, or maybe include as a side adventure in a campaign if I ever get around to having one of those.