I'm not fond of the way Soul Pillars and Lords of Oblivion tie together. SP requires some questionable work to learn that it's the temple that sent the assasins. LoO has a hokey "an NPC comes and tells the PCs what the adventure is". I'm considering changing it to:
As part of the ritual to create the Tree, the cagewrights need to unrelease mass chaos and fear. After months of behind the scenes work, the finally act out publicly. They:
1) Send some assasins to take care of those troublesome PCs
2) Ike lets loose some undead/demodands/something to cause havoc in the streets
3) Thifrane has gathered together some ner-do-wells that she's going to send out to cause havoc
4) V has retired to his home to complete his ritual turning him into the thingy. Maybe he has a hostage with him. Perhaps T's speech will mention this. Maybe T has a hostage or two as well that she will take to V to help him complete his ritual.
I think this accomplishs a couple things:
1) Gives something the PCs can act on. Thinking the PCs are going to be dead, the baddies aren't worried about Divinations. Locate Person, Scrying and such can give the PCs things to do.
2) Creates some good role-playign dilemmas. Which hostage do we go rescue?
3) Creates some good tactical dilemmas. Attack the baddies while they are at V's? Pick them off when they leave? Deal with them first or V?
The drawback I see is that it is going to boil down to three "assault the fortress" scenarios - T's, V's and the temple. Also there's little rest in there.
Once all of that concluded, they'd learn about the Soul Pillars and can go there (downtime if they want). Then downtime until Foundations of Flame and Thirteen Cages.
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Fortunately in our game, the players have a high streak of paranoia. Being assaulted in their own homes by capable assassins caused them to suspect even more the Church of Wee Jas and Vhalantru.
PCs made enough of a public nuisance of themselves that the catalyst I had to set off LoO was Lord Vhalantru sending messengers all over town "to find the heroes of Cauldron and invite them to a dinner in their honour, and to receive a just reward". That was enough to point them in the right direction, assault Vhalantru, and then but on the Vhalantru-suit and infiltrate Thirifane's party.
The shocked horror of the players when they discovered the party at Thirifane's wasn't a meeting of the Cagewrights, but a recruiting/Amway meeting for Cagewright-wannabees. *NOW* they're scared of the Cagewrights.