For my first post to the Pathfinder boards, I thought I'd talk a bit about Clegg Zincher. My party has recently finished Adventure 2 and well into Adventure 3 at this point, so a lot has happened. The biggest plot point so far has been their idolization of Clegg. Every time my party hears of some terrible act performed by Mr. Zincher, they are genuinely impressed with how awesome the man must be. The high point for this was when they heard how Clegg had taken a boat to Devil's Elbow which he seized by brute force.
So at the end of Adventure 2, the party sadly had to fight Clegg in an unfortunate turn of events. A lucky hit from one of the players killed Clegg, though they were sure to bring the island back to Riddleport following their excursion to the island. This is where things got weird...
My players decided it was top priority to bring Clegg back to life, though they lacked the funds to secure a Raise Dead spell. Instead the party druid acquired a scroll of Reincarnate which they intended to use on Clegg in hopes of returning him to his former stature as solid crime boss of Riddleport.
They reincarnated him alright... as a Bugbear! I kid you not, Riddleport's premiere crime lord has returned as a creature that can apparently track by the scent of fear. Now as the party leaves to the Mierani forest, they know they leave Riddleport in safe hands/claws.
With all this in mind, does anyone else have good tales about the next RPG Idol 'Clegg Zincher'?
For my first post to the Pathfinder boards, I thought I'd talk a bit about Clegg Zincher. My party has recently finished Adventure 2 and well into Adventure 3 at this point, so a lot has happened. The biggest plot point so far has been their idolization of Clegg. Every time my party hears of some terrible act performed by Mr. Zincher, they are genuinely impressed with how awesome the man must be. The high point for this was when they heard how Clegg had taken a boat to Devil's Elbow which he seized by brute force.
So at the end of Adventure 2, the party sadly had to fight Clegg in an unfortunate turn of events. A lucky hit from one of the players killed Clegg, though they were sure to bring the island back to Riddleport following their excursion to the island. This is where things got weird...
My players decided it was top priority to bring Clegg back to life, though they lacked the funds to secure a Raise Dead spell. Instead the party druid acquired a scroll of Reincarnate which they intended to use on Clegg in hopes of returning him to his former stature as solid crime boss of Riddleport.
They reincarnated him alright... as a Bugbear! I kid you not, Riddleport's premiere crime lord has returned as a creature that can apparently track by the scent of fear. Now as the party leaves to the Mierani forest, they know they leave Riddleport in safe hands/claws.
With all this in mind, does anyone else have good tales about the next RPG Idol 'Clegg Zincher'?
So far, we have the opposite problem; while the PCs were working for Saul, they knew a bit about the backstory (sufficient Knowledge [Local] rolls) between him and Zincher, and figured Clegg placed the snake in the kitchen (which was killed, skinned, and the fighter chick wore the skin as a headband and belt set when she went to visit Clegg's place and have a very obvious drink at the bar). After the Raid, the half-orc rogue figured Clegg was behind EVERYTHING that went wrong/bad, not just for the GG but in town, in the sky, you name it, and snuck around town, whispering in people's ears: "It's Zincher's fault."
Since none of the party looked up Lavendar Lil, I had a DM PC do so (they both have fiendish blood, so it was a match made in--somewhere...), and he's been seeing her for awhile now. She hasn't asked for his help against Zincher, but I spell-trapped the last page in Depora's journal (the important one, with the summary, prediction about the meteor's fall, etc.), and the party needed comprehend languages and true seeing to figure out the text, which meant seeing Madam Shorafa at the Silken Veil. Her price for casting such powerful spells (it was fun watching the gnome sorcerer squirm until she told him what she had in mind!) was that the party talk things over with Zincher and convince him to let Lil off the hook (yes, Calistria is about revenge, but she's also about personal freedom, and Lil's been trapped at the Veil [I'm using the CN version of Lil; I like that one better]); now that Saul was out of the picture, Clegg wouldn't need to lean on her so hard any more.
And Zincher should be glad to know that Saul had a beautiful, ring-side seat in Shoreleave to watch the meteor coming in...and not be able to do a thing about it, or leaving town like he planned. ;->
It will be interesting to see what happens in Children of the Void with these folks... ;->
LB
My player's repeatedly needed excuses not to kill Zincher ahead of time (so he spent all his time guarded, high level and in the middle of his own Arena).
You see, one of my players became a lot more than friendly with both Lavender and Shorafa, and to top it a bit was a bounty hunter ranger with a very pious (Calistrian) belief.
Another of my players was an old-timer Riddleport rogue, who knew a lot of Zincher and Saul. While he at first hated Zincher intensely due to professional reasons (being the new floor master at GG), he later started hating his group - oh my! - and therefore (shortly) allied wth Zincher. That was discovered by the team Cleric of Sarenrae (who really didn't like betrayal). Then the rogue re-allied with the group (and Saul) who still hated him, which concluded in the rogue allying up with Saul to lure his fellow players (suspicious lot with high perception) into the Boneyard ambush.
On top of everythng people already had against Zincher, I made a business out of connecting every last enemy the team had (Lymas Smeed, Braddikar Faje, the half-orcs) to Zincher. Mainly to keep them busy hating him and therfore away from prematurely killing Saul (could have happened) right after they (did not kill) and met Lymas Smeed (yes, they discovered that Saul cheated them. Yes they figured out that Bojask killed Larur Feldin). So basically hating Zincher kept them "content" to stay around Saul until they had more proof that he was bad.
Oh yes, and then there was the over-perceptive Cleric (of Sarenrae) who made it his personal business to redeem all of Riddleport (as if!).
And then there was the wizard. Who is a really close friend of Samaritha Beldusk. And who allied with the Cyphermages. Who wanted Zincher (as a supporter/friend of the current overlord) out of the way.
So Zincher is miracoulously still alive and able to make it into Children of the Void (but all deities save him when they find him working with aliens and drow).
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I'm a player in a SD campaign and we had quite a lot of initial antagonism with Ol' Clegg.
Clegg showed up at the grand reopening of the GG (we had three grand reopenings after the initial robbery) to scout us out. He tried some veiled threats which the party bard (a kobold disguised as a street urchin) roundly dismissed; indicating that he only killed what he intended to eat, so please go away.
That prompted him to try to assassinate us with a viper set loose in the kitchen. My character, the kobold, slept there since the hearth warmed his cold blood. Luckily, he survived and the rest of the party killed the snake. My character had a fine belt made of the skin and sent Clegg a note, thanking him for the meal and saying he'll always think of him whenever he wears his new belt.
We responded with a brilliant smear campaign. The bard (in child guise)went hobbling along on his crutches, telling a tale of woe, how Clegg had made improper advances on him, and when he refused his depravity, set a snake loose in the kitchen of the GG to kill him! We also tagged walls around his compound with uncomplimentary slogans like "Clegg is a Lamprey", and introduced bottom-feeding Cleggfish to the menu at the GG.
That lead to an all-out gang war. The incident with the wine shipment resulted in Clegg loosing a cap (head sent back in a box with a bow). When we were attacked in the GG by the half orc thugs and trounced them (more heads returned to sender), he finally backed off for a while.
Now, mid-way through Armageddon Echo, he's little more than a small fish -barely worth taking the time to notice. The bard will tell him as much if he has the opportunity.
My PCs have just met Clegg. I am playing up the Sopranos-esque aspect of Riddleport, and Saul (aka Tony) has explained that some of the guys around (Clegg et al.) are "made men" and that if you were to kill any one of those, everyone would be against you from the Gendarmes to the hookers to the dock workers. I think they get the hint that they have to work it without direct crime boss killing.
My players have hated Zincher's guts for quite a while (in module #5 now), but he's still alive, even after they took out the Overlord *and* he had an
Zincher and indeed all of the major npcs from the first few installments are winners in my opinion. Honestly after running the whole of the second darkness AP I wish it had stayed in Riddleport and dealt purely with the mob wars possibility and the few dark elves as just red herrings. If I ever run it again I probably will do that and focus on the relationship between Saul and Clegg and Lavender Lil. I mean just endless plot hooks and frameworks in these people. Clegg became my groups boss/rival for a bit at the beggining of the 2nd adventure and eventually even got a pc kill from a critical pickaxe during a downhill chase scene battle resulting from a failed ambush. Ah memories.
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Clegg was one of the coolest NPC's I've run in a long time. From the get go, one of my players rolled a dual wielding rogue named Eldon... Zincher, Clegg's nephew. That put him completely within the Saul, Lavender, Zincher triangle and it was lots and lots of fun. The roleplaying quality was better in my group during the first AP than it ever was again. If I could turn back time and do it all over again, I'd start the AP using the slow advancement rules add in a ton of additonal material to Riddleport and finish the AP after AP3 and have the characters actually save the world in the Celwynvian and ignore the rest of the AP.
Once we got about half way through Zinarkaykin, my players just kinda disengaged from RP mode and I haven't been able to get them back in the mood since. The tabletop battles have been great and the overall story has been good, but the rest of the AP just seems to lack "heart", I guess.
My group has been having a grand old time treating Clegg as their major rival from almost the get-go. Besides his ongoing harassment of the Gold Goblin and Saul's fear/hatred of him and the PCs taking his threats against the boss quite seriously, one of my characters had an ongoing affair with Lavender Lil, and considered Clegg his chief rival because of that even before Saul came into the picture. In a side-quest they actually took a shot at him when they found out that he was trying to make a deal with one of the other crimelords, which bumped them up from Saul's thugs to problems in their own right (he got away, or they got away, depending on who you're asking).
To better fix him up as a challenge (and fill him out back-ground wise) I gave him a level of the Crimeboss Prestige Class (from the Freeport setting), and since the gang's last encounter, have been considering giving him a level of Alchemist (from the current APG beta) as well, given his brother's pre-mortem profession. Has anyone else come up with clever and interesting modifications or ideas for old Clegg?
Has anyone else come up with clever and interesting modifications or ideas for old Clegg?
I made him into an angry british pugilist, drawing heavy inspiration from Guy Ritchie film antagonists. The PCs, after they had killed Saul, brought his head in a box to Clegg so he'd call off the hit that he'd put on them. Clegg was feeding non-specific pieces of meat to his axebeaks during the encounter. They didn't ask, he didn't tell.
I also got to have this quick exchange with the PCs that made my night:
Paladin of Cayden Cailean: "So... what now?"
Clegg: "Now? Now I call up some old friends, get us all together in one room before someone says something stupid, when we can still stand eachother's faces and nobody has a weapon drawn, and we all have a good drink now that the world has one less smarmy little rat living in it."
Pal: "I meant what now between me and you? "
Clegg: "Oh, that 'what now.' I tell you 'what now' between me and you. There is no me and you. Not any more."
Paladin: "So, we cool?"
Clegg: "Yeah, we cool."
Paladin: "So, we cool?"
Clegg: "Yeah, we cool."
Nice. I LIKE it :)
I wonder how many other groups have had the same "Head, Box, Present" idea?
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I'm a player in a SD campaign and we had quite a lot of initial antagonism with Ol' Clegg.
Clegg showed up at the grand reopening of the GG (we had three grand reopenings after the initial robbery) to scout us out. He tried some veiled threats which the party bard (a kobold disguised as a street urchin) roundly dismissed; indicating that he only killed what he intended to eat, so please go away.
That prompted him to try to assassinate us with a viper set loose in the kitchen. My character, the kobold, slept there since the hearth warmed his cold blood. Luckily, he survived and the rest of the party killed the snake. My character had a fine belt made of the skin and sent Clegg a note, thanking him for the meal and saying he'll always think of him whenever he wears his new belt.
We responded with a brilliant smear campaign. The bard (in child guise)went hobbling along on his crutches, telling a tale of woe, how Clegg had made improper advances on him, and when he refused his depravity, set a snake loose in the kitchen of the GG to kill him! We also tagged walls around his compound with uncomplimentary slogans like "Clegg is a Lamprey", and introduced bottom-feeding Cleggfish to the menu at the GG.
That lead to an all-out gang war. The incident with the wine shipment resulted in Clegg loosing a cap (head sent back in a box with a bow). When we were attacked in the GG by the half orc thugs and trounced them (more heads returned to sender), he finally backed off for a while.
Now, mid-way through Armageddon Echo, he's little more than a small fish -barely worth taking the time to notice. The bard will tell him as much if he has the opportunity.
Clegg may be a lampray, but his name lives on, long live Cleggsteel (aka Noquol aka Nyquil)