My players just voted on what they wanted to play next, and here's the campaign blurb (for Council of Thieves, natch) that won:
As the lead up to Aroden's return to Westcrown approached, the player characters became heartily tired of hearing about nothing but the God of Humanity. Being rather rich, they paid to have themselves placed into magical suspended animation for twenty-five years to give all the religious fervour time to die down. They awaken over a hundred years later to find Aroden dead and Westcrown in disgrace, and set out to better their home town.
So clearly the temporal stasis took a lot longer to be dispelled than they thought it would. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to justify it, but presumably Janiven arranged for it somehow.
I suspect that one of the first things that the PCs will want to do will be to tromp into the local bank of Abadar and withdraw large sums of cash. I plan to lead them on a merry chase for a while and eventually (perhaps after the Trials) lead them to Vuiper Ghivel, who acknowledges their bank balances but declines to give them any money, since he spent it all.
This should be a fun time. :) Any thoughts or suggestions before we dive into this?
You could easily have them placed into animation at Delvehaven, that could account for the time delay.
Instead of the usual start, invent a new bad guy, the bank of Thrune. Of course, they don't honor pre-Aroden debts. Naturally, there's a group of disgruntled customers, lead by Janiven and Arael...
I'm a few sessions away from finishing the second adventure and so far the biggest change I wish I'd made would be to have the minor Children of Westcrown characters not all be members at the beginning and stagger their joining out over the first half or so of the campaign. The first encounter with the whole group is an overwhelming amount of NPCs to meet at once, and the PCs will likely pick a few favourites and ignore the rest . Plus, having them be recruited as you go stops it from feeling like the Children of Westcrown have stopped doing anything once the PCs join.
I also tweaked the details on Arael's capture, switching it so that instead he had been meeting Vahwynne Malikstra, the Vampire Huntress who the PCs fight in Delvehaven. She's been hanging around the safehouse for a while gathering information on Ilnerik, and while the PCs were prepping for the play she left to go hunt him. They won't hear anything from her again until they're forced to fight her in the third book.
I'm also not too fond of the final part of this book, and as has been mentioned on these boards several times, it seems like the whole Council of Thieves plot comes in way to late. My solution for this is to instead make the campaign more focused on the shadow problem. I'm cutting the whole Drovenge part of the plot and making Ilnerik the Council's usurper and the BBEG. Chammandy is still around as one of his agents, but Eccardian will be cut completely unless I need another villain for something. This change makes the plot a lot simpler, which obviously isn't for everyone, but my group just finished with a twisty, political campaign and I thought something a bit more straight forward was in order.
The final change I've made is that once the PCs leave the Asmodean Knot they will find that the Children of Westcrown safehouse has been attacked by what seems to be Hellknights, who have killed Arael and a couple of the other members, as well as crippling Janiven. In reality, these will be disguised members of the Council tipped off by Chammandy after she left the mayor's party. One of the Children who the PCs heard has escaped will have in fact been murdered and replaced with a doppleganger spy, which will be my explanation for why the vampires are in Delvehaven at the same time as the PCs. The main reason for this change is because my PCs lack initiative, and it feels like they're just doing whatever Janiven and Arael ask them to do without really caring or planning. My hope is that this will force them into more of a leadership role in the organization, while also raising the tension and danger of the city.
Hope you enjoy the campaign :)
@Jam Falcon - very nice ideas. I also came up with the staggered children approach awhile back when I first read Bastards and thought I was going to run it. Its NPC overload IMHO. First volume of Serpent Skull is similar, if I ever run it I will ditch 2-3 castaways and play up the rest Abit more too.
We had the first session last night. I set the PCs (still under the effects of temporal stasis) in the Devildrome and had Janiven, Ermelos, Gorvio, and Yakopulio there trying to take them up. This also served the purpose of a staggared introduction of the NPCs.
The Devildrome guards are listed as level 4 warriors, and I saw no reason to change that. My PCs were a lot buffer than standard starting characters and I wanted to challenge them. This worked.
They decided that they didn't want to fight Hellknights though, so they bailed on Janiven and decided to do their own thing. Next session, among other things, they want to find out what happened to the Pathfinder lodge.
I guess we'll see what happens.