Well you guys have a couple options here. The way I see it, you can:
- Listen to the merchant (the actual merchant) and try to capture the spirit, bringing them back to the city.
- Listen to the "merchant", letting him take the 'item' inside the wagon.
- Look inside the wagon to see what all the fuss is about.
- Kick in both their teeth and take the item for yourself.
- Other options I haven't thought of, but I'm sure are bouncing around your heads.
So I want to go invisible probably walk around the other side of the wagon where no one will notice using stealth, hopefully the mercenaries are too busy making sure each other are ok. Then cast invisibility and silence. Climb on top of the wagon and get the jump on trying to disarm this guy since he won't see me coming, I could cast silence on a random grain of sand just 20ft from the merchant so he doesnt suspect anything.
Bad plan? Anyone have any better ideas?
Dang a ninja.
I thought he is going to kill the merchant if we try anything obvious?
I'm a little unclear, how if he is watching Lindale, he could see Toramin coming from the other side or if he did what would prevent us from healing the body before it died, but it seems like destroying the weapon is not where the story is going.
I'm up for listening to the merchant and helping him get his body back but he hasn't been especially helpful either.
@Lindale. Well yes, it would need to be something tricky to disarm him, such as approaching invisibly. I'm not saying necessarily if that idea will work or fail, but it is an indirect approach.
@Toramin. There's a chance he might not totally kill the body before you disarm him. If it's a risk you're willing to take.
I'm going to give some others a bit to post their reactions to the situation and make their rolls.
I'm not sure what else there is to discern. I've tried Sense Motive, Arcana, and Dungeoneering. If 26 Dungeoneering doesn't tell us anything helpful, there's not much else Bjorkus can do.
Who dares to be the first one to touch it?
Bjorkus fully expects the thing to be trapped. Rilka should check it out.
Dalton isn't getting near it. In his current guise, it seems out of place for him to be making this "deal" and being the one to shuttle merchandise.
Hehehe, I love my little tricks.
As far as perception, knowledges, detect magic, and detect evil says, this is a hollow cube of lead. Not much more can be gleamed just from its appearance, although it is a wonder what is inside of it, and why somebody went through the trouble to seal it in such a manner...
Hello everybody, I will be visiting my girlfriend this weekend and my posting will probably be non-existent until Sunday evening. I'll see you all then.
Thanks for the heads up.
Alright I'm back. Ball is in your court gentlemen.
Somehow, I think - as a player - giving him this item will be a pain in our asses. Yet it's exactly what Dalton would do in the situation.
We want to get PAID guys. right?
Let me be clearer:
Dalton is aware there's a mind swap/magic jar thing going on. He's perfectly willing to let evil villain escape with box of doom as he believes box of doom might not actually be box of doom AND because he's likely more powerful than us.
Besides, we'd be left with the wagon as payment and the 'merchant' to do with as we desired.
Well if that's the case we can't let the merchant live or he will get the whitecloaks onto us and I think that would be worse. If that leads to us being arrested or thrown out of the city... very bad. Not to mention we don't want so much attention on ourselves yet right? We still have the tournament and everything.
So i see two options that seem the best for us. (or i could be totally wrong).
1. Let bad guy take thing, kill merchant and take his stuff. No whitecloaks etc(hopefully).
2. Kill merchant, take ALL the things. We have all the things and no one knows except the bad guy.
Depending on me finding out who/what Lolth is Lindale will discuss these things with you.
I definitely feel like we should try to suss the truth out of this guy but as far as I can tell he holds all the cards.
Mysteries mysteries. Suddenly everything turns grey, and the path ahead is unclear...who's playing this game, and what are the rules? And are you observers, players, or just pawns?
I dont think we are being greedy enough.
We are being very greedy. But Dalton is an avaricious merchant. Now he knows how extremely valuable the artifact is, he can't simply leave it be. It's clear the man isn't powerful enough to make out with it on his own. Yet it's unclear how powerful he would be against us.
It is time to test that.
I "ginsu"-ed my thumb cutting meats for a picnic this past weekend. It's very difficult to type. I am still live though.
Oh man, I hope it heals alright. Might I suggest downloading a program like Dragon Dialect? It allows you to speak to your computer and it converts it to text.
Anyways, we're mostly locked up in a tough RP decision right now.
This definitely feels like the un-good option but considering we have almost zero information to operate on, it's not unreasonable.
If the forces of good want us to be cooperative, they should be more forthcoming with information.
Toramin wants to throw a fit, but cannot figure out how to do so without endangering the mission.
Like I said, it’s obvious this is a bad idea but the alternative doesn’t stand out as any better.
We have an evil artifact that a body snatcher wants. By all appearances, he’s all-powerful and we don’t really have a way to stop him even if we wanted to.
The ‘victim’ in charge of transporting the artifact has provided us with zero information about him, the artifact, or his mission. If he’s a member of the Order of Evil Artifact Guarding, now would be the time to cut the b#~$&%$* and spill the beans.
Yes, a bit of a surprise supposedly finding an item of this power. I do love watching you guys run around to try and unravel the thread I have weaved...
It depends what you define evil as. Regardless, it would not stop Dalton's decision in this case (though party intervention might).
This ambusher has great power. Power great enough to dispatch with most of, if not all, of us, Dalton assumes. Letting him walk away with the artifact - IF that's what happens to be inside the cube (it's possible it's empty, a ruse) - would seem to obviate the rather unbecoming downside of DEATH for us.
Is he happy about the choice? No.
Is the opponent getting the lion's share of this deal? Yes.
Is it the best that could be done under the circumstances? In his eyes, likely. He even haggled-out not only the wagon, but a freebie get-rid-of-Targ, no money down coupon. Side affects may include collateral damage, but he even tossed in the terms of attempted avoiding of that, which he didn't reject.
If we died and he took it anyway, that is a lose-lose. At least this way, if he oversteps his bounds with said artifact later, Dalton will share a triple serving of Bjorkus's sentiment with the no-b&@#*+*# cloaks-and-curtains game the Aesthetics/merchant and the like seem to play with information. Undercover operatives in a distant land outnumbered and outgunned don't often get to take the high road in every circumstance.
In his eyes, this is the best way out of this pickle. Morally, his stones are less on the goody-two-shoes side as some of the group, but they're not all on the other - it's just in this case, judging by the results, this seems to be the less negative act, effectively.
If we died and he took it anyways, that is a lose-lose.
That made me chuckle. "No sir, I do not agree to your deal. Death is very inconvenient."
I love you detailing out your thought process Dalton. Not only to help elaborate your thinking, but also because Dalton is the character I've had the most trouble getting to know.
When the situation arises. It's a good character-defining moment.
Bahaha, my roommate just looked over my shoulder when I was referencing my notes for this campaign, then he just looked at me and said "You dick."
Not that there's anything to be concerned about of course. >.>
My thought is the same as before, if he could possess us easily, then he would have done so already. I know that losing control of your character sucks, but I trust that Omen's narrative has integrity.
I tend to avoid taking control* of PC's. If I want to create inter-party conflict than I'll create a good plot reason for them to act against the party in character. Nobody likes to hear the DM say "You're mine now...so you can just kinda sit there and watch me use you to wreck havoc."
Edit: *Long-term control. I still would have a smart enemy spellcaster use dominate person on the party bruiser.
My solution for short term and long term mind control on PC's wasn't to take control, but to change their characters perspective and let them RP it. Or at least thats what I planned. I have a couple campaigns I'm going to be running some day for different DnD editions and one of them definitely had this issue come up in my plans. So instead of 'you sit back while I control your character' it's 'you're character now see's this guy as an ally and this guy as an enemy'.
I've seen it done that way in the first campaign I played in and it got some -really- interesting RP. Ontop of that, the groups leader/strategist was... really fricking devious and when he got charmed he just turned it to his advantage. Without metagaming.
Yeah this is a difficult choice. It feels very “real” in the sense that so much of our choices in life are made with an incomplete amount of information for any given situation. Could this adversary defeat us? I don’t know. I think Rilka is willing at this point to give up the cube in order to focus on the mission they were sent on.
Ooh, interesting. It looks like Dalton intends to simply walk over the cube, making the decision his own. Does anybody that disagrees with him going to try and stop him?
Bjorkus doesn’t know enough to justify breaking character.
Since Toramin seemed the most heavily opposed I'll give him a bit more time to post, but after that I'm going to move on.
So what's the plan? You need to handle the merchant and the mercenaries, then decide what to do after that.
So what's the plan? You need to handle the merchant and the mercenaries, then decide what to do after that.
1. Get a response from Toramin.
2. Begin to head back as outlined. I've "handled" the mercenaries in a loose fashion. The merchant I've made a point of not handling.
If others want to chime in, go for it. However, we really did just spend one week on post-combat dialogue with 3 NPCs, only one of which whose name we know.
Toramin is still having some trouble posting. I've PM'd him and he hasn't responded for over a week, so I'm not quite sure what to do about that.
Yeah, I didn't think they would get involved this heavily. Maybe I was just saving their names for a dire situation where it could save their lives.
We'll call the red-haired merc Malley and the thin one Fuero.
Bjorkus is 100% following Dalton's lead here. He's not in a position to be making decisions.
Toramin is still having some trouble posting. I've PM'd him and he hasn't responded for over a week, so I'm not quite sure what to do about that.
Yeah, I didn't think they would get involved this heavily. Maybe I was just saving their names for a dire situation where it could save their lives.
We'll call the red-haired merc Malley and the thin one Fuero.
It really is less about the names and more about the speed. The summary of last week: Adventurers give box with perhaps containing evil artifact to assassin.
I believe that's more of the crux of PbP, not naming NPC's. Combat runs quickly, but without everybody sitting around a table it's hard to know when it's ok to move on. Did everybody check in yet? Does that person want to say something? Should we pause in case they haven't checked in yet?
We could create a stricter policy on the pacing, but I will leave the details of that up to you guys.
I'm 98% sure we're ready to move on. This scenario is dragging because we're all really lost. If more information isn't going to present itself, we should just advance the scene.
Yes, the group is very poorly informed right. That's by design, it's one of your biggest challenges in this organization of subterfuge.
I understand that's an important theme in this campaign. My point is just that we need you to be aggressive with the pacing because this sort of thing is going to happen a lot. Anytime you present players with a scenario and then provide no real way to surmise what they're supposed to do, they're going to shrug their shoulders and wait for something to happen that they can react to.
We're all having fun, it just feels like there's nothing we can do right now.
In that case I make a counter request. If things are going on and you are not sure of how to proceed, tell me. Doesn't need to be anything big or fancy, but just drop me a line that says "Hey DM, we're a little lost right now. We either need more clues or we need to move on." Because I don't know half of the time if you guys are stuck or if you just haven't checked the forums recently.