I just read through Encounter at Blackwall Keep (#126) and hope to run my party through it this week, but I need some help.
I am confused as to why the PCs go to the Lizardfolk egg chamber. If they make peace with Hishka, I would think they would stop treating the lair as a dungeon-crawl and never get to the egg chamber. As per the written story, Hishka has no idea of the danger that the eggs are in, so Hishka wouldn't tell the PCs any info that gets them to the chamber. If Hishka does suspect that Ilthane is a bad ally to the tribe and that Ilthane is guarding the eggs, that might persuade the PCs to do something. But, a 5-6th level party is not going to attack a black dragon in a egg-chamber.
I am missing some info within the story?
What are other DMs doing?
One way you could do it is have Hishka show the PCs a corpse of Kyuss spawnling. A couple of the eggs in the hatchery were already infected and hatched and the lizardfolk have no idea what's causing it. The kobold guardians are even making it difficult for the lizardfolk to examine the hatchery(the kobolds even killed a couple of the lizardfolk nursemaids). So Hishka requests that the PCs a)eliminate the kobolds and b) take a look at the hatchlings, this works great if you have a ranger in the group with Knowledge: Nature as a skill. So that puts the PCs in a dilemma, do they start destroying the eggs on the gross assumption that all of them may be infected or will they be more cautious and investigate the conditions of the hatchery?
While Hiska has no idea about the infected eggs and the egg o' worms, he does realize that the community has NOT been able to enter it's hatchery in quite a while and may ask the party to help him.
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I just read through Encounter at Blackwall Keep (#126) and hope to run my party through it this week, but I need some help.
I am confused as to why the PCs go to the Lizardfolk egg chamber. If they make peace with Hishka, I would think they would stop treating the lair as a dungeon-crawl and never get to the egg chamber. As per the written story, Hishka has no idea of the danger that the eggs are in, so Hishka wouldn't tell the PCs any info that gets them to the chamber. If Hishka does suspect that Ilthane is a bad ally to the tribe and that Ilthane is guarding the eggs, that might persuade the PCs to do something. But, a 5-6th level party is not going to attack a black dragon in a egg-chamber.
I am missing some info within the story?
What are other DMs doing?
I asked this question earlier, and James Jacobs offered a good answer to my question:
"If they ally with the shaman but don't want to go into the egg chamber, the shaman can ask the PCs to accompany it down to the eggs to make sure they're okay. Remember that since things turned bad, the lizardfolk haven't been allowed to visit their egg chamber that often, so the shaman certainly would want the PCs backing him up when he goes down there to make sure things are ok. Which, of course, they aren't."
Thanks everyone for the good ideas. I didn't think that the adventure made it that clear that Hishka hasn't been allowed in the egg-chamber and therefore suspected something was wrong.