So I may have played up the red herring of the plague samples being shipped off to Korvosa a tad too much.
The players have just wiped out Ironbriar and his cult at the sawmill and are bound and determined to hop the next ship to Korvosa to prevent an epidemic. They know that a "mysterious woman" hiding out at the clocktower has been pulling all the strings in Magnimar but figure they dismantled her operations enough with the destruction of Ironbriar's crew that they can afford to let her stew for a week or three while they go off to prevent an even bigger atrocity in Korvosa.
I'm very much into letting the players take the story in their own direction, but this is a BIG departure. Some of the ideas I'm kicking around:
1)Retool Gedron Lam for a 6th lvl party - he is the contact the diseased rats are offloaded to and from there to the cult of Urgathoa. PCs bust up Lam which leads them to the hospice, and they foil the plot before blood viel is ever invented, then return to Magnimar.
2) There is a Lamia Matriarch working in Korvosa, using the plague to gather souls - go from Lam's to a re skinned clock tower encounter in Korvosa - Xanesha has fled by the time PCs return to Magnimar.
3)PCs don't return to Magnimar. Rework plot of COTCT to have Ileosa trying to rewawken Runelord Sorshen rather than the blue dragon. Puts the plural back into ROTRs!
4)To heck with free choice! Have a POed Xanesha ambush the PCs at the dock before they leave Magnimar. With the flesh golem and faceless stalker backing her up and the element of surprise this would almost surely be a TPK which leads nicely into the excellent scenario presented in another thread that has the PCs rewaken as prisoners on the Paradise gambling boat, and I can launch into Hook mountain from there.
Any suggestions or assistance form the forum would be most welcome...
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That's trouble.
1) Option 1 gives the PCs a way to get back to Runelording and away from Crimson Throneing without pushing the railroad too hard (unfortunately, that leaves some options for stubborn PCs to keep pushing the red herring. A couple ideas to help that along:
They finally catch up to him, and find the rat cage intact but notice that he has a rat bite and may well have been infected along the way. Since he went by boat and time has passed, the passengers are scattered and the ship has left port. This option leaves open the idea that there may be infected individuals for the Urgathoans to go after later (and this leaves open CotCT for the next set of PCs) but it spams the possible search area so much that the PCs will be unable to persue the thread.
2) The other Lamia could be Leucretia from Hook Mountain (a suggestion that has been floated around these boards has been to flip the order of these two encounters and move X to Ft. Rannick). They make the trek, kill L, feel like world-travelling bad asses, return to spank X and find that a murder spree has happened in their absense, including the Lord Mayor. They know where to look for the murderer and climb the clocktower to find it abandoned with completed kill lists and some clue that points to the Paradise Barge (a leaflet in X's nest or a gambling chip or something). Maybe the golem is still there but has been abandoned (tough to smuggle out a golem) and can act as an ally and give them a clue about where to go next.
If you do run CotCT in the future, you'd have to retool that to explain how the plague got started for continuity's sake. If the PCs weren't thorough enough at Misgivings, they could have returned and found another source.
3) Is a lot of work
4) Will feel like a railroad and still leaves the plague thread dangling for a stubborn PC to obsess about. Rather than send everyone at the same time, you could split those encounters - use the Faceless Stalkers and the golem on their own to do recon/ambush, have one or more escape and have Xanesha come by for round 2.
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I like Greycloaks suggestions, though out of the first two, Id definitely go with #2, as even if you make it so difficult to follow the thread of #1, it doesnt mean the pcs are going to be smart enough to pick up on 'maybe we ought to go back to Sandpoint/ Magnimar', which could end up with you feeling annoyed that they are being dumb and cant figure the thread out, and them feeling annoyed with you for making what they are supposed to be doing so difficult to figure out.
That being said, cibet44 makes a good point, too. I think a combination of his sihedron rune idea and #2 from greycloak ought to be a good way out of your situation. If you do just the sihedron runes though, that could lead them to believe they are on the right track, and dont need to go back.
If you're like me and you use GM fiat for leveling instead of static experience, I would go ahead and run a whole Korvosa side quest. Your ideas sound awesome.
Otherwise, you're going to have to restrain yourself to keep the XP on track.
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If you're like me and you use GM fiat for leveling instead of static experience, I would go ahead and run a whole Korvosa side quest. Your ideas sound awesome.
Otherwise, you're going to have to restrain yourself to keep the XP on track.
If XP is the problem just award 75% XP on the sidetrack and keep with that percentage until the PCs are where you want them. It's the same as DM fiat but your players get to write something down and have that sense of progres, however false. It seems to me that others commented about groups being short of XP at this stage anyway.
Thanks all for the good suggestions.
The mayor is definitely getting murdered while the PCs are away - I think them showing up at the abandoned clocktower and finding the completed kill lists (along with dates so they know exactly how many peopledied as a result of them not confronting X) will drive home the point of their decisions having consequences.
I think I'll give them a chance to intercept the plage rats as they are being handed over to Lucretia by Lam. I'm now seeing a scene that plays out like a bad episode of COPS, with the PCs busting up the drug deal and the villians all bolting in seperate directions. Just need to get my players to all wear mirrored shades for the session now :>
Any suggestions for ramping Lam and crew up to CR 6 or so?
My situation as GM was almost a mirror reversal of yours: the PCs were keen to go almost directly from the Sawmill to the Clock Tower, and Xanesha would have handed them their butts in an easy TPK had they done so.
I wanted them to level up and get some additional or upgraded equipment first. Fortunately they'd contacted local authorities to report the exposure and eradication of cult members at the Sawmill, and I was able to have the locals and it was those locals rather than the PCs who decoded Ironbriar's journal. Between their decoding and the PCs knowledge of "Vorel's legacy" the plague rats became an immediate issue, and the local authorities asked the PCs to look into that while they [the authorities] checked into Ironbriar's recent activities before the Clock Tower was approached.
I don't plan to run CotCT, though, so I made some changes there and dispatched the plague rats to Riddleport in the care of a pair of disguised Red Mantis assassins. Wanting to remain inconspicuous, the RM agents took passage on a vessel already bound for points north, with stops at Sandpoint, Windsong Abbey and Roderic's Cove en route. They disembarked at each stop, changed their disguises and reboarded the ship for the next destination.
The PCs chartered a ship to head straight for Riddleport, and got there hours ahead of the RM agents, got lucky and spotted them, killed one and captured the other after a couple of bad starts, and headed back to Magnimar with their captive.
The RM agents were quite well equipped and were CR 10 (party level at that point was 6th) so the PCs leveled up and were in better shape to face Xanesha after that side trip.