My players are looking for ways to get Gargadros corpse back to town, they think its a priceless artifact to be studied. I've told them that its impossible to move a 25000lb slab of frozen meat down the pathways of Hook Mountain, but they're pretty determined.
How would you deal with PC's raising Gargadros or speaking with dead with his corpse? What does he know?(Looking for suggestions)
My PCs kept thinking about doing this, but never did it. Would have been hard to give good answers without the material in #6....
If they did it now, I'd say that he was born around the fall of Thassilon and actually never saw Thassilon at its height. His parents, who had, raised him under the ashen shadow of the Empire's collapse and taught him to work tirelessly for its restoration. But he himself, as he'd never been under the rule of the Runelords, was skeptical and a bit cynical. He rose to leadership of a large giant enclave, but they were overrun and defeated by (your choice of icy monster here--remorhaz? white dragons? ice devils?)
Now he's trying to find out about the new world he's wakened into. Initially he's skeptical and a bit rebellious about the idea of Karzoug reborn. Unfortunately for the PCs, the closer he gets to Karzoug the more he's pulled into the old Rune Giant way of thinking, even against his will.
Mary
I thought I had it bad when the players suggested that peeling up the magically preserved stones of the Catacombs of Wrath would yield indestructible building materials worth much gold. They also suggested stealing the doors off the hinges. I shot them down and said that the magic would break if they started taking the dungeon apart.
Raising Gargadros strikes me as dangerous. He's going to try to take over as soon as he gets up to speed.
I'm not sure I buy the idea that Gentle Repose from the Sihedron Amulet would mean you could cast Raise Dead on him after 10,000 years. It's technically true, but seems to be stretching the power of the spell a bit. But there are a number of ways to avoid the problem, if you don't want to deal with it:
1. Assume he died of old age, then he can't be raised.
2. Assume he was killed by a death effect, again, he can't be raised.
3. Assume his soul is not free or willing to return (suks to yer 5,000 gp in diamondz!)
Do the PCs realize that the 20-pound Gargantuan Sihedron Medalion is the only thing preventing Gargadros's body from crumbling to dust? If they remvove it, he turns to dust and Speak with Dead is not possible anymore. If they try to haul him off the mountain and don't secure the medalion, he might turn to dust on they way down!
The corpse gets a will save against Speak with Dead, but the base Rune Giant gets a +7, relatively sucky for a CR 14 beasty. Amusingly, this goes up to +8 because of the amulet, but he turns to dust if you take it away to lower his save.
However, if you assume that he had some Class levels, which is pretty likely if he was ruler, you might be able to bump up his Will save to the point that it would be difficult for the PCs to get his corpse to talk. Also, the PCs probably need to have tongues running so they can speak to him in ancient Thassilonian. Gargadros doesn't speak common, and PCs in most campaigns won't have encountered spoken Thassilonian at this point in the AP.
If the PCs do succeed in casting Speak with Dead on Gargadros, it might give them some interesting insight into ancient Thassilon, but the information they get might not help them much in the short term. They have to ask the right questions, and then the answers they get back will be cryptic and repetitive. So you have a lot of leeway as a DM to limit how much of the "plot" that Gargadros gives away.
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In preparation for my group wanting to do something similar with this guy, I Googled Gargadros and Runebound King and came up with this, which at the very least is useful to see how others have handled it.
Blackotter, what did your players end up doing with Gargadros?
I think my party will want to so somthing very similar