OK, so I'm running AoW in Eberron, and my players killed Bozal Zahol and the ulgurstasta (resulting in a PC death). They've won the Champion's Games. Raknian is running with his tail between his legs. They've got some pretty incriminating evidence against Raknian (pile of ulgur-goo, dead tiefling, zombified Lahaka, invoice for their own assassination and appropriation of necromantic doomsday scrolls, and the Apostolic Scrolls themselves). The chase is on, and they've called in a favor from the ir'Tains to get help tracking them down. I want to involve the King's Citadel, but don't know how long it would take to get them riled up, how much evidence they need to go after Raknian, and how long it would take Raknian to leave Sharn? Would he use teleportation? Would he take a lightning rail/airship? Would he hire the doppelgangers again to pose as a decoy while he escapes another way? Have any other DMs come upon this situation, and if so how did you resolve it? The PCs are leery of getting in trouble with the law, but they want Raknian brought down. Thanks in advance!
I'm probably going to have him make his way to Alhaster. There, I plan to set it up so that the PC's are able to confront him and take him down (so it will have to be somewhere that's not too public).
But in my game, he ran off and my group were not terribly interested in trying to follow him (probably because last time something like that happened, they spent ages trying to chase down Theldrick until eventually the trail went cold, then of course he turned up eventually anyway). So I haven't had to deal with exactly how he got there.
If you want to do something similar, there's plenty of ways to allow him to get away, generally by changing between various modes of transport (I had Theldrick run on foot, hitch a ride on a caravan leaving town, then steal a horse at the first overnight stop. Eventually the PC's lost the trail, and with it their desire to just go the the Free City and wander around looking for him with no real leads).
Yeeeah...so I tried to do the whole "raknian flees" thing. Didn't work out like I planned. Raknian stole a horse and had about a day's lead. I figured he was in the clear for sure, but then the PCs scry on him, figure out where he is, and transport via plants.
A couple of flamestrikes and some sneak attacks left me with a dead Okoral and a captured Raknian. Oh well. You win some...wait, no...I only lose. :(
I Cheated.
I gave Raknian a Ring of Teleportation...poof! This mainly came about because I loved the fact that my players hated him so much, and I knew the fight with Ugly would steal the show. If the PCs "failed", then he gets his rocks off and becomes an uber-cool death knight. They didn't, so I felt that taking on a straight class fighter after most of the party was dead or severly depleted was kind of anticlimatic. I'll let them hold him accountable for their PC deaths; it will make it all the sweeter when he returns. He's going to show up in the WormCrawl fissure...