I'm starting this campaign now. I decided to locate Diamond Lake up in the Fenwall Mountains as a tributary to Korvosa as the Free City. That leaves the Mushfens as the site for the lizardfolk activities, with Blackwall on the border between the Mushfens and the main route leading up into the mountains from there, with another fortress south of the mountains to protect that border with the Korvosa hinterlands.
I'm still not sure what I'm doing to do about the arena. I like the idea of an underground complex but also considering introducing an arena into the city or perhaps on the city's outskirts.
I see the cinderlands to the north as a reasonable location for the Pesh battles and the Rift can be somewhere along the Storval Rise.
We had our first session last week and got off to a great, fun start. Looking forward to seeing the AP unfold over the coming months.
I'm doing a conversion of AoW to Pathfinder 1E and so far I'm thinking that Diamond Lake fits nicely in the Fenwall Mountains, which puts it a day or two by coach to a couple of modest towns, and 7 days along the Crimson Coast road to Korvosa, which is what I am replacing the "Free City" with. That means a mountain pass the other direction leads to the vast Mushfens where I can locate Blackwall Keep and the lizardfolk.
Less easy, but still proving workable, is moving the deities and notable figures to Golarion lore. It's a work in progress but proving fun so far.
Is there a specific year it's supposed to be inside Xin-Edasseril when the party arrives? Their Groundhog Day-esque life has ended and time is flowing normally for them at last, but they're still resuming from the year they were when that went into effect, right?
My best guess is "109 years into Belimarius's rule" which would be around -5293.
You could siphon loot from another area to include in the Vault. Or as I played it, the Vault other treasures were looted with Baraket. The gloves were left behind because didn't detect as magic, appearing as normal gauntlets (artifacts can be fickle like that). Allow the players to find a well hidden message in Thassalonian that suggests these gloves are more than they seem. This message was overlooked by the previous looting party. Gave my PCs a nice hook to investigate this interesting item.
That's how I played it as well, that it had been looted previously, but the idea of adding more treasure there if you feel the party's in need of more loot at this point in the story is a good one.
Since our party didn't participate in the AP which is presumed to have defeated Krune before Return of the Runelords begins, I needed something to give a little exposition about that.
The AP says that
AP wrote:
Amid the scattered notes on the polymorph plague are three other noteworthy pieces of information…
The third is a copy of a report from Pathfinder Society agents ripped from a volume of the Pathfinder Chronicles that details the results of a dangerous mission undertaken to defeat the return of Runelord Krune. Near the section that details the death of a newly arisen Runelord Krune, Leptonia has penned a disturbing gloss: “Dead for now, but if we can return him to life, a thankful Runelord of Sloth may just give us the support needed to bring the polymorph plague to the breath of every city it touches!”
As I made up the props for the other items mentioned there I decided to go ahead and write up what I imagined was on that journal excerpt. (Of course this is all invented since we never played that adventure.) Since it is ripped out of a larger volume, it begins mid-sentence.
Hidden here due to length:
Pathfinder Chronicles excerpt wrote:
pass that then, finally, we were there: his innermost sanctum, after passing so many Glyphs, Runes, guardians, and finally Lashmistress Vandiana herself. We encountered her mid-ritual, illuminated by the firelight coming from the broad stone altar. Unfortunately as we took in the scene, her ritual was finished and she rested, laughing at our arrival. “It is done! Even now he awakens from his long slumber!”
Looking past her, beyond the altar, we saw four thick chains attached to the walls, suspending between them a heavy stone sarcophagus several feet above the ground.
We knew the moment his soul left its crystal container and reunited with his body as we heard the thumping inside the sarcophagus followed seconds later by his bodily appearance in the room.
We were momentarily held in that time-stopping feeling of abject awe and terror that only one who comes face to face with a Runelord can truly understand. Nothing Venture-Captain Heidmarch told us ahead of our mission could have prepared us adequately for this moment.
Runelord Krune surveyed the room. His smug expression turned to a frown as he saw us, obviously not acting like the cowering subordinates he was expecting. In Thassilonian his voice boomed out to us, “Who are you who dare to stand there so insolently before your Lord and Ruler? Prostrate yourselves before me this instant and identify yourselves! Cast aside your weapons in surrender to my guards and my fury!”
In his youthful enthusiasm, Teodorin spoke back, somewhat over-confidently, “Krune, your rule ended 10,000 years ago. You are one with the dust of history and we’re about to put you back there!”
The Runelord scoffed at this, an expression that looked just a little bit like amusement on his heavily-tattooed face. “You poor fool. Do not think I will spare you the consequences of your lack of reverence simply because you are a weak-brained idiot spouting nonsense about history. You see my loyal servant has awakened me now that the great calamity I predicted has come and passed. I still rule Haruka, you pathetic moron.”
With a wave of his hand and the flash of a patch of runes tattooed into his skin, a great salamander appeared next to Teodorin. It was over before we could react. After our mission was over, I took it upon myself to visit his family to tell them of his brave death.
But now the battle of our lives was afoot. It was a bitter struggle which nearly cost us most of our lives, but with most of our spells expended, most of our health spent, time wasted following his teleporting ass from one end of his sanctuary to the other, we defeated Krune once and for all.
The world is yet again safe from the return of the Runelords of Ancient Thassalon. As his last breath escaped his mouth, his sarcophagus and soul gem disintegrated. It is over for good.
I posted this in another forum earlier but to support the idea of this as a central place for GM's to collaborate about running this AP, I'll repost here too in case it is useful or amusing to anyone else running the AP.
I was thinking about the contact they are supposed to receive from Sorshen in this adventure, and how I could make it fit more into the narrative I want to spin. Specifically, I wanted to turn what was a simple message into something more dramatic, that would really bring home just how powerful the Runelords are.
For context, here’s what the module as published gives the GM:
Quote:
At some point when the PCs sleep, preferably before they’ve explored much of Hollow Mountain but after Sorshen has managed to spy on them at least once via greater scrying, the runelord contacts the party via a dream council spell. All of the sleeping PCs experience the same vivid dream, in which they seem to wake from wherever it is they’ve bedded down for the night to find a visitor to their campsite: a radiantly beautiful woman who can be recognized as Runelord Sorshen with a successful DC 20 Knowledge (history) check.
Sorshen’s use of dream council has been augmented such that she can deliver a single 125-word message to the entire group of PCs, along with a single image to help guide them to their final goal in this adventure. She’s not interested in replies, and once the message is sent, she ends the contact, confident the PCs will make the right choices based on her message to them.
“I am Runelord Sorshen, but I am not your foe. Alaznist has risen, as you fear, and we will both benefit from her defeat. She has left Hollow Mountain to seek power elsewhere, and as she does, you must prepare. I have been watching. You seem heroes who might stand against her, but not without assistance. Seek out old Thybidos, Alaznist’s murdered predecessor, in the Forlorn Sepulchers beyond the weeping dragons. With an Abyssal runestone from the Gauntlet of Fury, his unquiet spirit can be compelled to aid you—yet perhaps not without some conflict. But exercise caution, for even humbled as he is today, the serpent still has teeth. When you are done with him, seek me in Korvosa. We have more to discuss!”
Along with this message, each dreaming PC has a vision of a partially collapsed stone archway carved in the shape of two weeping dragons, their necks raised up so their horned heads lock together. The archway is overgrown with foliage, but a cave entrance is visible within. As the PCs wake, each can feel that this archway exists nearby on the lower slopes of Rivenrake Island, and in following this urge implanted by the dream, they can arrive at the location with ease.
That’s not bad, but I wanted something a bit more interesting that would leave more emotional impact, and a slower reveal of who she is and what is going on that would build the tension a little more, even if momentarily.
I reworked the scene to include a little misdirection at first, providing a little mystery about who she even is so it becomes a slow reveal instead of, “Hi, I’m Sorshen.” Mechanically, I figured that she would have been able to enhance the dream council spell a bit more than is listed. (I mean, come on, there are perks to being a level-30 character who is famous for epic spellcasting, right?) Specifically, I determined that her enhanced variant of the spell allows her to inception herself into the targets’ dreams, having enough control over them to guide the dream and have a very brief conversation with them. So rather than make an image of the cave entrance appear in her message, they dream that while talking to her they suddenly find themselves there—as you do in dreams. I’m not too concerned about the variant making the spell OP since under the circumstances, the spell won’t be available to anyone else and even if it did, its effects are mostly dramatic and wouldn’t change the game outcome significantly.
Details under here (really, really, long):
Since they are dreaming and this is more interactive, I had to consider how to manage the party’s potential to derail the scene before it paid off without railroading them into just watching a “cut scene,” as well as generally how to adjudicate their actions during the encounter. So I came up with my own houseruled set of mechanics for handling actions when the PCs don’t realize they’re actually dreaming. Whenever they want to act, they make a wisdom check (disguised as a will save so as to not tip them off to the fact that something extraordinary is happening [dreaming it all] but easy to derive a wisdom check from a will save roll—and will saves are believable for any of a number of things a suddenly-appearing spellcaster may be up to). Based on that, another percentile role, and a very liberal application of Rule 0, they may end up being able to carry out the desired action, or maybe something else will happen, but always in the context of common dream tropes (e.g., they go to speak but can’t find their voice for a moment, they pull their sword only to find they forgot it back home along with all their armor, etc... it is all a dream, so... yeah.).
With all that said, here’s how I ran that scene.
This is timed to happen during one of the watches during the night. As it happens, my party had just explored the Forsaken Mezzanine and brought Viralane back to Tyalee’s Whim to have her held as prisoner there and let them safely spend the night before venturing back out to the mountain again the next day.
Those on watch are awake and thus are not part of the dream council and in fact are oblivious to anything happening. From their point of view, the party is sleeping and all is quiet. I contacted them privately and let them know not to panic, as it would make sense in a moment but they’re not present for this scene. As the scene unfolded I sent them a follow-up note telling them what they saw from their perspective and a clue for when it would be time for them to wake up the next on watch and react to their reaction at that point.
I had a choice here about whether the awake PCs would be out of the dream altogether or to have the other PCs dream that they were sleeping through the whole thing. I think either would work, although having them missing might spur them to take a more aggressive stance toward Sorshen, thinking she did something to them, thus interfering with her just delivering her message and leaving.
Quote:
You wake up, and right away a couple of things seem a little off… but you can’t quite put your finger on why. Just a feeling. (Now give me just a moment here to set this up before you react—essentially what I’m trying to convey is one of those moments where time seems to slow down while your brain registers several things in quick succession. I’ll describe them one at a time but in reality this all happens in an instant, hence the need to set it all up before we do anything. [All true, but also affected by it being in a dream.])
You make your way up to the main deck, feeling the slight sea breeze waft over the ship in the first light of the morning. You look around and realize that the first reason you felt something was not quite normal is that you shouldn’t have slept that long. It’s dawn, and you didn’t take your turn for guard duty.
Looking at the others who are similarly looking around deck with a puzzled expression, you’re probably all thinking the same thing. Where are Sasha, Shura, and Remi? They must have stepped away momentarily… but….
The next thing is very sudden, and catches you just as you turn from looking in another direction back to the center of the deck. There is someone leaning casually against the mainmast, who wasn’t there when you looked that way a second ago. And your brain takes in two odd, out-of-place things about that (apart from their sudden, unannounced appearance): first, there’s the manner of dress. While yes, the outfit could easily be called “traveling clothes” such as one might wear aboard a ship or out for a stroll in the woods, the materials and quality, from the fine leather and trim, to the intricate needlework patterns made of a glittering, silvery thread, are such as one would wear who was far beyond the need to consider that most people would spend a year or two of their lives earning the gold to buy that one outfit.
But the second thing is what really hits your adventurer instincts the most. You would expect that anyone who suddenly teleported unannounced into the middle of someone else’s ship would be tensed, ready to spring into action, to react to whatever happens next. But she literally could not be any more calm and relaxed, just casually standing here without an apparent care in the world.
As soon as she sees you notice her presence, she immediately holds up a hand and says, “You have questions, surely, yes, yes, but let me say I can only be here just long enough to deliver a message—one you will want to hear—and then I will be on my way and you can go on with your morning’s affairs. So if you will indulge me one moment? Yes? Good.”
(She doesn’t actually wait for a response, as she is not really used to anyone contradicting or interrupting her.)
(Incidentally I thought a long time about how to characterize her voice here, trying to picture something of the flavor of modern Varisia—which I picture as having a slightly Slavic or Romani feel to it—and what I imagine the more relaxed southern realm of Eurythnia in ancient Thassilon to have been like, without simply mimicking any existing real-world accent. What I came up with, oddly enough, seemed to come out like a fusion of Gru from Despicable Me and Janosz Poha from Ghostbusters II.)
Quote:
“Is because your lives are now on a trajectory that intersects the unfolding of major world events, all by coincidence and accident, perhaps? No, I think not. More like, how would you say it, you (extreme sarcasm) dare to oppose her exalted-ness of the severely violent temper tantrums, eh? (laugh) No, not to make light of it, in truth a world without her is a better place for all of us to live peacefully our lives in, it is true, and as such you are not the only ones to try to oppose her. But. In my observations (do forgive me doing that) I deem you as a group who actually might succeed at this.
“But you must understand, you will not.
“Not… unless… here and there from time to time you will accept a little bit of help? On the road before you, allies will be crucial to have.
“You see, our enemy is powerful, yes, and dangerous. But she is not unassailable. Is not without weaknesses that you can exploit…. If you know where to strike. I will give you a ‘for example’ on that.
“You see, like every other (ugh) stupid, short-sighted Runelord that came before her, she rose to her position of power by murdering her predecessor. I know, ’tis a senseless, wasteful tradition, but for her, it is much more personal. Alaznist would never be satisfied to merely dispose of him, to remove him as an obstacle in her path, no….
“You must understand, she hungers for the kill.” (pause)
“No. Not strong enough….
“She lusts to relish the pain, anguish, and humiliation she can extract from her victims! Oh, she laid a fell curse upon Thybidos, yes she did. Dismembered him, tore him limb from limb, yes, that too. Fatally wounded him by stabbing him with blades, yes, all true! But none of those things were the worst of it.
“Before he succumbed, she healed him. Then did it all again! Then healed him… again and again and again and again and I ask you, my friends, how long could any of us endure such a thing? Can you even comprehend it, to be held in an un-killable state, so she could kill him continuously for as long as it… (disgusted expression) amused her to keep it going? And I will tell you, Alaznist’s appetite for such… amusements… is not easily satiated.
“Now, perhaps you are hearing this and thinking, ‘Oh, I do not want to be on her bad side!’ and yes, this would be true, but there is an opportunity here for you. You have, I am sure, a strategy in mind for dealing with her? You are of course familiar with what happened some years ago to Runelord Karzoug, yes? Safely ensconced in his Eye of Avarice, until the heroes of the day penetrated his inner sanctum and destroyed him. Probably came as a bit of a surprise to him, that.
“If you are thinking, ‘We just do the same thing again in this case,’ well I have two things I must tell you about that idea. The first thing I will tell you is that if you took all of the Runelords and ranked them in order according to how powerful, how formidable they would be in a violent confrontation, Karzoug would rank in the middle of such a list. I will give you one guess which direction from him would be Alaznist.
“And so, if you did this same thing in her Eye of Fury, your story would have, I think, a more… tragic… ending to it. But this brings me to the second thing I must tell you. Alaznist is no longer at home.
“I see this news concerns you. But there is a mithral lining in this dark cloud. Think about it, my friends. She is out there, somewhere, focused—all of her thoughts—on bringing her plans to fruition. Not, I think, and if we knew the truth, not for many centuries has her mind really bothered to spend any thought to the fate of Thybidos, who as I have told you, has been suffering this unspeakable torment for ten thousand years. No, she is not thinking about him. But I promise you he is thinking about her.
“So. You are already exploring her mountain, yes? This is good! It is her base of operations. It contains her Gauntlet of Fury. It is where she would train and test her recruits, to see who was ‘worthy’. You be worthy. You win the prize—the Abyssal Runestone. He will bow his knee to the power of that stone!
“When you have it, go into her mountain yet again, but this time, go beyond the weeping dragons…”
Here, she makes a slight nod of her head over her shoulder. Following the motion you can see an overgrown cave entrance into the mountain a short distance away.
(This is, naturally, going to require a pause as the players realize they’ve been teleported somewhere without even knowing it was coming. In reality, of course, no such thing has happened since they’re only dreaming all of this, so no spell mechanics or saving throws actually apply but they don’t know that, which just adds to the perception that they’re dealing with someone noteworthy who can so casually throw around magic like this. Again, I’m playing this as the very common occurrence in dreams where you suddenly realize you’re in a new location.)
Quote:
Yeah, about that. So you didn’t see any indication from her whatsoever that she cast a spell, or activated an item, or anything. In fact, you’re not 100% certain when you changed location, but here you are now. For her part, she’s not acting like anything that happened there was even noteworthy enough to pause to acknowledge. In fact, she doesn’t miss a beat but keeps talking…
“Beyond the weeping dragons, to the Forlorn Sepulchre. There use the stone! Use all of the diplomatic skills you can muster! And… yes… to tell the truth… a bit of luck as well… and perhaps you can persuade the penultimate Runelord of Wrath onto a course of action that will, in one way or another, prove to be much less… amusing… to the current one.
“But I caution you… he may be but a pale shadow of what he once was, but do not forget what he once was! Do not underestimate what he may yet be capable of doing. But I am confident you will be successful in this matter.
“Now. When you have finished with him, come, seek me out in Korvosa. I will be there waiting for you. We will have, I think, much more to discuss and the luxury of time in which to discuss it, which unfortunately we do not have now, as I said at the start. And so I must leave you now. May you have good fortune until we meet again in Korvosa!”
(If they haven’t previously to this point, someone is bound to point out that they can hardly seek her out without knowing who she is. She seems taken aback by this.)
Quote:
“I… You must forgive me. I cannot remember the last time I spoke with someone who needed to ask me such a question. Not since I was crowned as queen, certainly… not, actually, since the days of my exile. (laughs) Oh, can you imagine? The greatest empire the world had ever known! And they were so afraid of me and my little friends that they cast us out… oh, but this is a tale I do not have time to tell now. But yes, you are correct, it was impolite of me to go on and on without a proper introduction.”
She extends her hand to the one who asked. Accepting their handshake, she says, “Droste, yes, and Remi, Vladimir, Sasha, all of you, so pleased to make all of your acquaintances. I am Sorshen.”
At that, the world goes dark as the dream ends abruptly, the party realizes that they experienced a dream, and are left to ponder the fact that there are multiple runelords in play already, and whether they want to trust Sorshen.
I posted this in another forum earlier but to support the idea of this as a central place for GM's to collaborate about running this AP, I'll repost here too in case it is useful or amusing to anyone else running the AP.
I played around with fleshing out a few things more than the AP provided to make things more interesting, as you do. One thing I had in mind was that I wanted to explore Gold's character a little.
As written in the AP, in room H17b in the underflume area you find the bedroom of Jana "Gold" Gildersleeves, in which the party finds "a journal explaining her side of the story of her mother’s betrayal of the town and Jana’s life in Riddleport after she and her mother were run out of Roderic’s Cove."
I wanted my party to get to know Gold a little better and have a little fun with it so I did my best to write a few excerpts from a journal that a young girl (and later teenager) might write.
hidden inside here because it's really long (mild language):
Erastus 18 4708
My name is Jana, I am 9 years old, and I DO NOT WANT TO GO AWAY. Everyone in the Cove is mad at mom and the bad people she talks to from Riddleport sometimes. My mom is Jess Gildersleeves. She is the port govnor of the cove. That means she runs the whole town xcept she is always in a mood after the people from Riddleport come. She never wants to talk about them. Now the Covers are yelling at mom that she is friends with pirats and say she will be arested and so she is forcing me to pack up and run away with her at middnite. I don’t know where we are going or if I’ll ever see my friends again.
Erastus 19
I hate camping in the woods. I hate all of this. Mom says it’s just for today then we will go with friends of hers. I alredy hate them too.
Erastus 30
I hate Riddleport. I hate mom’s friends. I hate what ever mom did that make us live in this stinky town. They are polit but I see more then they think. They are mean and I think are pirats or robbers. Mom says we will be safe here cause of her friends.
Calistril 9 4711
My exile in the gods-forsaken hole continues. Mother has settled into life as normal. This IS NOT normal. This IS NOT home. I hate it here. I will never in my entire life forgive her for making us escape her troubles back home and live here with all the criminals and thugs that are her “friends”. I have spent my time getting to know them and how they work. If mother won’t leave I will. As soon as I can. I have learned how to get around town and make a little coin. I am saving it all so one day I can get out of this stupid goblin-crap hole forever.
Gozran 23 4713
Happy Birthday to me. I learned the name of the pirate captain who has been demanding protection from ships going to the Cove and that he’s got the cooperation of the harbor master in this scheme. I have a new plan. I’m going to find out everything I can about the corruption in the Cove and who they are conspiring with among the criminal organizations here in Riddleport. Someday I’ll make them all pay for what they have done so the Cove can be free and a good place to live again.
Perhaps I’ve been too obvious about my need to save up all the coin I can earn here. My friends have started calling me by a nickname, “Gold.” Well, fine. It’s for something I believe in, not the selfish motives so many of them earn their nicknames for. Let them think I’m as shallow and low as all the rest of them are. Someday I won’t have to be here anymore.
Desnus 2, 4717
I am writing this by candle from inside the closet which is my hiding place aboard the ship I stowed onto. I don’t even know its name, I just heard it was heading to the Cove. After the news that mother had met with a fatal accident on the docks, I grabbed my life savings, notes, and ran to find the next ship out of here. I’ll sneak out at night to get food. I lived in Riddleport long enough, and am well-enough acquainted with mother’s “friends” to know what “accidents” mean and the danger that puts me in now. I am heading home at last to live in the only town I care about. And I have the names that will ruin a few people’s lives who seek to profit at the expense of the Cove in league with Riddleport scum.
Erastus 28
Still living at the Creekside. Can’t afford a real house with the savings I have. At least I’m home, and Galeena doesn’t mind me drinking away a generous amount of her stocks (paid for of course) to celebrate my return and drown my frustrations, and doesn’t mind if I sleep it off in the storeroom sometimes. That’s a fortunate thing for me in more ways than I dreamed. Today I discovered a secret door in the wall of the cold storage room. It leads to some old complex no one knows about as far as I can tell. It’s better than any house I could buy, and gives me an idea about how I can start making a positive change here.
Galeena agreed to 15 gp per month to rent the use of her cold storage room, and—to use a phrase I learned the full meaning of in Riddleport—“no questions asked.” She thinks I’m sleeping there sometimes but I have ideas for my new secret headquarters.
I can read people. To survive where I grew up, you had to. I have walked around the docks and sawmill and around the Cove and it’s so obvious who is unhappy with their lives here, frustrated by things as they are, and are open to joining with others who want to be more empowered to rise above their circumstances, demand fairness and have the strength to deal with the people on my list when the time comes. We can meet in my new hideout.
I even thought of a name for my gang. There is an intriguing symbol carved all over the walls down here. I don’t know what it is, but it looks like this: (image of Rune of Wrath here)
The tattoo artist I paid to ink the symbol on my skin said it looked like horns and fangs. Perfect, we’ll be the “horned fangs” which if I say so myself is an awesome gang name.
Kuthona 1
Had a run-in with Corstela today. Seems she has an issue with our gang symbol. She cornered me and demanded to know what I knew about the symbol and where I’d seen it. Relax, lady, it’s just our gang symbol. You WISH you thought of something that awesome for your little study group. She kept pressing about where I saw it, and I don’t want our hideout exposed, so I just shrugged that off and said I made it up.
I wish I could do the look she gave me before storming off back to her peacock manor.
Kuthona 4
Vancaskerkin can kiss my butt.
Kuthona 21
I’m still shaking a little. I was chilling in the cold room when the secret door opened. None of the Fangs were there so that was a shock to start with. What climbed out of the doorway, though, was something from a nightmare. It had a skull-like face, red eyes, and... the mouth... gods, the mouth. It was more of a mandible, opening sideways with rows of teeth. I thought it was deciding whether I would taste good, but with the amount of alcohol and flayleaf I had going at the time, I figured it was possibly just a bad trip starting up. Then it saw my new tat and the maw gaped open. It said something in a strange language I didn’t understand, and then a different one, and then spoke in Varisian, asking how a human came to wear “that rune”. I didn’t have an answer between my surprise and being drunk and high at the time, so he just opened the door into my hideout and said, “It appears this place is quiet for the night. Would you like another drink?” It led me into the nice chamber he called the “ambassador’s section” where he asked me a hundred questions about the town and the state of the world.
He kept asking about something called a “Hellstorm Flume”. When I eventually sussed that he meant the circle, he seemed really pissed off that the Flume thing had apparently been destroyed long ago. But then he got real interested in the Fangs, asking all about who was in the group, their abilities, their loyalty to me, and on and on like that. I think he may want to join up with us, but I don’t think he has The Cove’s best future in mind so I am troubled by this. He said something puzzling at the end of our chat. “I can feel the wrath simmering in you, all the wrongs done against your family. That will be a valuable asset.”
Abadius 3, 4718
Goblin balls. This is all such a mess now and it’s quickly moved out of my control. I wish now that Mozamer was a flayleaf hallucination after all. He swore that he would help teach me to be a great leader, to train up “my” gang, and lots of flattering talk. Now he’s ingratiated himself to the Fangs, telling them how he’d teach them new fighting techniques, saying how he’d make us all powerful and dangerous as his mistress Alaznist rose to her full power, with us at her side. Somewhere all of his talk to me about how he’d raise me up to be a power to crush my enemies and bend Roderic’s Cove to my will—unsettling to me because that’s more than I wanted to achieve anyway, but that’s just his way of talking—turned more and more into ME helping HIM rise to power, with me as HIS trusted lieutenant. And so I seem to no longer be in command of my own gang.
Mozamer won’t shut up about this Alaznist person who is going to take control of the world or something, and how we, the oppressed classes of the current regime will be in power to turn the tables and exact bloody revenge on everyone in our way.
This sounds just like Riddleport talk, only on an unbelievable scale. I’m spending a lot more of my time in my room now. MY room. Hah. MY room now has Mozamer living in it. I have a new room now, a much smaller one. In my own hideout.
He keeps telling me what place I’ll have in his army, how glorious it will be to give in to my hatred, blah blah blah. He’s even been inciting the Fangs to clash with the Keepers more. I hate him so very much but I can’t walk away from the Fangs when we might still be able to turn things for the better in the Cove somehow.
Desnus 9
Corstela continues to be hostile whenever she sees me. Thank the gods I learned how to disappear when someone’s looking for me. She keeps hassling me about our gang symbol. I think the Order of Resplendence is picking fights with my Fangs now or at least taunting them.
Desnus 27
The worst. We lost six Fangs last night. I’m certain Corstela is behind their murders. My investigation found out there was a midnight clash between the Fangs and an unknown group, with something shouted about us having no right to use our symbol, something Corstela has been arguing with me about for weeks and weeks. But now they’re dead, horrifically dead. The Order will play the victim, and my people will be blamed for everything, so we’re holing up in our hideout for it to blow over. Mozamer is increasing their training routines, and has been bringing in more of those flesh-glob things through the portal from his mountain fortress to spar with the Fangs. Some of them he sends (over my objections) up through the well to harass the Cove. He’s been working the Fangs into an angry frenzy to get revenge on the Keepers, who he’s telling them was behind the killing of the Fangs. Maybe they are. It would be like Corstela to use someone else to settle her scores, but I still suspect she’s behind it somehow, not the Keepers. Not that my opinions matter around here anymore.
We had a lot of fun in Roderic's Cove before moving on. My group actually didn't resolve Peacock Manor until the very end. They sent a couple of people in for a week in the middle of their time in town, who ingratiated themselves to Corstela as fellow scholars and learned a fair bit but then waited until they'd done everything else in the adventure. At that point they had a solid enough case to take to the Port Governor to get a warrant for Corstela's arrest which they managed to serve and take her into custody after a small confrontation resulting in Kantulin's demise. Alden didn't contest the arrest order for the sake of keeping the school going.
Based on the trap on the shrine in area E, it seems clear that the shrines are identical, and there is no way to tell from appearance which shrine it is. However, the detect magic + know(arcana) DC 30 does tell what it does - so they could know which feather to pluck based on that.
Exactly. I'd rather they stop, perform their skill checks to determine what the shrine does, and link that back to what they learned in the library, as opposed to looking at the map and saying, "Oh, this one is blue, so obviously..."
Majuba wrote:
Side note on Area E: I gotta say - Hobgoblin Forerunners was a .. very odd choice for this encounter. Mounted experts in a building, and no mounts even if they weren't?
Yeah, I took that as an in-universe consequence of the cultists rounding up what support they could find to bring back here to guard the temple, even if perhaps their particular expertise was better suited elsewhere.
I actually like that for the sake of telling an interesting story more than stocking a dungeon with optimally-configured denizens in every room. Of course, there are still plenty of ways to make the encounters challenging enough...
I seek a needed clarification on the appearance of the peacock shrines. My party has done their research in the Therassic Library and knows from that what each color of shrine essentially does, but from the description of each in the module, it isn't apparent that they actually look any different from one another when you walk up to one. I was thinking that they would need to put together some clues on their own to figure out which is which.
However, on the provided maps each shrine is color-coded for easy identification. Is that meant as a GM convenience that the players aren't supposed to see? Or it is really apparent on sight what color each shrine actually is?
I'd hate to have a metagame spoiler right there on the map I show them at the tabletop, so if they're not supposed to see that I'll have to go alter the maps myself to try to remove the coloring or something.
