| Mr. Grogg |
I posted this in the Stolen Land forum last night, but realized this morning it's more appropriate here since it spans the whole series. So apologies if you've seen it already - it's too late for me to delete it there.
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I had an interesting thought this month and have decided to run with it. My players have just begun. They chased off the bandits at Olegs, randomly encountered a group of Grigs, met Bokken, dealt with radish-defending kobalds, and discovered the giant trapdoor spider.
I'm thinking that here, at the beginning, is a good place to foreshadow that something is going on that's big.
So I started thinking about Nyrissa and her goals. She wants to steal the Stolen lands and bottle them up. It isn't explained terribly well exactly how that works. There are dribs and drabs, and the mechanics of how you tear a giant swath of land out of its dimension aren't terribly important, so it's okay that they aren't perfectly addressed.
But I thought of a way to address it and add good foreshadowing at the same time.
On very rare occasions (like, just once per book!) the PCs will see a metallic sphere doing something up in the air. They may see light being projected out of it onto what seems to be an invisible wall. They may see it sprout an articulated metal arm wielding a shining instrument like a small knife as it seems to cut the air, leaving a line of black scar floating there for a few seconds before sealing. Perhaps they see it doing the same kinds of things on the ground. If it senses them watching, it will cut a hole in the air and float into it, disappearing as the hole heals behind it.
If it turns to them, they will see that one side of it is blackened and dented.
This is an enslaved modron, given to Nyrissa as a gift from an ardent follower of hers some time ago. The one who gave it to her stole it from Regulus (Mechanis, whatever you want to call it these days), and selectively destroyed parts of it, removing its freewill and disabling any communication with other modrons and anchoring it to this dimension. Nyrissa is using its abilities to weaken the connection the Stolen Lands have with this dimension so that it can be more easily uprooted.
Of course, the players never need know any of that. They will simply know that a damaged modron is working in the area on something. They are knowledgeable players and will know that modrons tend to work on repairing rifts in the fabric of space.