SPOILER
SPOILER
I'm still quite early on in the campaign but got issue 146 yesterday.
Just wondering if anyone else will be using other methods than the one suggested to get their players to Scuttlecove.
I still want to include Harliss but want to come up with a better way for her to contact them. Having them contacted through a dream just won't fit in with the tone of my campaign.
Any ideas?
Creative Director
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This element was one that I wrestled with for some time during the adventure's development. At one point I considered using the sending spell, but that was too short. At another, I considered having Harliss somehow use a teleporting monster to teleport to the PCs to talk to them, but that seemed to me that it would throw off attention from the message to the monster.
Whatever you end up doing, keep in mind that if the method that Harliss uses to contact the PCs doesn't involve getting Tyralandi's aid, then you're robbing the PCs of an important clue in the whaling factory (the letter of introduction to Tyralandi that Harliss left behind). Without this clue, the adventure has a stronger chance of stalling with the PCs not knowing what to do next.
The only problem I had with the dream sending was that it all happens at the same time.
Vanthus rises from the grave conveniently when the PCs are gone and steals his sister off to Scuttlecove, the exact place where the PCs need to go to stop the shadow pearl plot anyways. Then Harliss calls on line 2 to tell them she needs them at Scuttlecove to help her get her revenge.
Fortunately I'm not playing the adventures in real time and have the opportunity to fudge the timeline a bit. I plan on having Harliss send a dream to the party while they're still in the City of Broken Idols. The message will send them rushing back to Farshore where, just as Harliss warned, Vanthus has abducted Vinia.
Plus, I think it'd be a cool RP moment to have the party settling down for camp before suddenly having them roll for initiative against a bunch of savage-templated people. As they fight the familiar battle, Harliss joins in just as before. After the message is delivered, the party member wakes up. Score one cool dream sequence.
Sorry if this is a bit off topic but the mention of "strange" messages brought to mind Lavinia's note left behind for the party. It's amazing she didn't bleed to death in writing it with her own blood. Everything spelled out neatly. When my group finds the note, it will be much briefer; something along the lines of "V! 2 gape maw"
Which is going to lead even further off topic as I recall a production of Tytus Andronicus a local Shakespeare troupe did a while back.
In the script, dude's daughter has been raped and mutilated, leaving her with no hands or tongue to tell her brothers who did it to her. By the script, she takes a stick in her mouth and writes the name in the dirt. According to Greenstage, though, she demured putting the stick in her mouth and instead went behind a nearby easel and wrote out the message in splashes of her own blood from her two stumps of wrists. When the easel was turned around, the villain's name was spelled out in perfect, beautiful calligraphy.
Of course, this was the same theater company that replaced Aaron the Moore with a guy dressed as a clown because they didn't have a black actor. (They even had the baby born with clown make-up on to keep the reveal of who the father was.)
Anyway, what were we talking about?