Possibly but the PCs basically have nothing on Balabar - certianly nothing that would stick. In fact Balabar is basically the 'good guy' here...after all he's exposing Ragnolin for having a cult in his mine.
Balabar is a corrupt evil mine manager but he's also very smart. There are no threads here worth 'cleaning up'.
Depend on your play style but there is a certain gritty flavour here that may be worth leaving undisturbed. My players really would have loved to see Balabar go down but they got nuth'n and they knew full well, by the end of this that it was going to be the corrupt Balabar that would move in and take over Ragnolin's mine thereby increasing his corrupt stranglehold on Diamond Lake. It's unfortunate that this is the turn of events but the PCs have bigger fish to fry.
Personally I liked this element.
Well I note that Smarnil le Couard's take has Balabar even less a culprit then the original take and in both cases Balabar is only pretty lightly implicated and soon takes action to combat the cult. Pretty much in almost all circumstances Balabar is on the right side of the law in all of these cases. Sure he is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons but by and large he is doing the right thing once he gets the PCs to launch an attack on the 'evil cult'.
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I think that I'm going with the suggestions in this thread
http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizoPublishing/olderProducts/dungeon/ ageOfWorms/threeFacesOfEvilTFoESomeNewPlotTweakings
That means having a preserved head of a competitor as blackmail, and dead bodies being shipped by Balabar's men. There must be some sort of accounting somewhere. The Hextorites are orderly!
This thread may have the way out, however. Balabar can also blackmail the players - they trespassed on the observatory, kidnapped Balabar. Filge was indirectly a grave robber but the players can't prove that if Balabar cleansed the place of evidence...Two of my players are lawyers. Let's see if they come up with anything.
But if Balabar goes to the sheriff with this as soon as they enter the mine, why wouldn't the police go after the players right away?
Glad you liked it...
For the record, I played Belabar as a dishonest but far from stupid SOB.
Here is what he did IMC :
1) years earlier, as he struggled to get a foothold in DL, he did kill himself some guy he paid to provoke some accident in a competitor's mine who got too hungry, before throwing the corpse in a deep shaft in Deepspike mine (his only one at the time), where the bad guys recovered it "just in case";
2) he did get blackmailed by Ragnolin into providing him body parts on the sly, through his contacts in the Guild of Thieves (and the Embalmers' guild).
3) he did send Mestal in Ragnolin's mine to find out what he was doing, and got back a worm and Mestal's head.
He didn't had to smuggle bodies for Filge, as the practice of necromancy is legal for Guild of Mages members in Greyhawk (the cuurent Guildmaster is a necromancer, after all), and there must be legal channels to procure bugbear/trog bodies (so permits can be obtained or forged, take your pick).
So he really hasn't a lot of dirt on his hands. Body trafficking is small fry from his point of view, and he isn't stupid enough to send the merchandise within crates stamped with his crest, as stated by the module (what else? an invoice, too?).
I don't think he would have anything to gain by openly assaulting the PCs. I do too prefer a gray ending, where the PCs' success against the Triple Abomination is somewhat dulled by their knowledge that they have been instrumental to Belabar's last surge of power.
I made him lie through his teeth to my PC's, telling them that he was blackmailed into delivering goods and supplies (almost true), and giving them three goals to accomplish in exchange for his help : 1) removing all evidence who could unjustly sully his good name (red herring, he doesn't care: there isn't any, and he knows it); 2) do the housecleaning themselves, without involving the authorities beforehand (who could be more curious about his real motives); 3 and last, as an afterthought) bring him back the bodies of his minions (plural!) for resurrection (untrue, and his real goal here: he wants to get back his victim' head/skull).
It went like a charm: my PC's found out the real nature of the "goods" but have absoltely no real proof of Belabar's wrongdoing. They KNOW it, but can't do anything about it. Note that IMC said goods were intended for the Faceless One, and stored next to his labo (so the Hextorites had nothing to account for, except for normal goods provided and paid for by Ragnolin).
I did make some Belabar goon (Rastophan) wait for them when they exited Ragnolin's mine with a string of prisoners, but it was to ask about the success of their mission and collect the bodies of "his colleagues". Being lawful minded, my PCs honored their part of the deal and handed over the headless body and the skull they found in Faceless' labo (Nota : I had a plan B in store for Belabar if they reneged on the deal and chose to involve the authorities. He had prepared a formal complaint and an hefty bribe for the sheriff to ensure a swift arrest. He planned to muddy the waters and so gain some time to make good his escape and skip town.)
Full details on this thread (if you can read french!)
I meant that Filge dug up the skeletons of the Land estate - that must be illegal.
Oh, sorry. Sure it is. IMC, he tried to bluff claiming he had permits for them too, wasn't aware they were stolen, would never had bought them to Kullen if had known, etc. My players didn't believe him but didn't press the issue when they realized that they had trespassed on Belabar's property. They just took away the skeletons for a proper burial.
But if supplying bodies to the Ebon Triad is perfectly legal, why did they need to go through Balabar in the first place? Dourstone could buy the bodies.
I haven't said that. It is only legal for a proper member of the Guild of Mages, which Ragnolin isn't. Furthermore, I ruled that for the proper distillation of the "necrotic reagents" used in aiding the growth of the Triple Abomination, a quite huge quantity of bodies was needed. Buying them legally through a proxy would be possible, provided there is sufficient offer (that is, bodies of indigents without families disposed of this way by the ever ingeniuous Greyhawk Revenue Service), but would leave a proportionately huge paper trail, undesirable from the cultists point of view.
Hope this helps.
My players were convinced it was Smenk who hired the dopplegangers (and ultimately Zyrxog) to take them out. Imagine their surprise when they found out the truth!
A final showdown with the ex-mine manager is about to take place in the near future...