Question for those of you who've finished Chapter 4: Did you let your players keep Splintershield's equipment? He is probably supposed to be taken alive, after all. My players are lusting after his stuff, though. My instinct is to say that they could probably get away with holding on to it -- after all, the Cagewrights only want his person, not his stuff, and he doesn't seem to be likely to make a fuss himself given his passivity once he's subdued. But it also seems to me that it should probably be construed as a chaotic and evil act, which perhaps should have some alignment consequences. But how did you/would you handle the issue?
IMC they killed him accidentaly, they brought back the body but kept for themselves only the miscellaneous magic, they left weapons and armor as said by the group dwarven fighter.
Keeping all the items is not an evil act, he is a "monster" after all but it's easier if he is dead.
I don't know about that. Being in essence a criminal doesn't make him lose all property rights, does it? Besides, there's actually something a bit dodgy about the whole mission anyway. The PC's are the unprovoked invaders, and it turns out that Splintershield doesn't even want to be rescued.
Yes it depends on the style of play, if you kill the dragon you take the treasure, don't you?
They were reluctant to take all the items and as you say the mission is strange anyway.
I didn't make a fuss over it, and I was going to let them claim the stuff without consequences if they wanted to take it. But they independently came to the conclusion that it was the wrong thing to do, so they handed over Splintershield's equipment along with Splintershield.
Also of happy note: the players thought it was extremely suspicious that neither Celeste nor Davked Splintershield was on hand to receive Zenith. They almost decided to hang onto him. But then the uncontested party consensus was, hey, this is Vhalantru we're dealing with. If we can't trust Lord Vhalantru, whom can we trust? :-)
Not sure how much of this should go into a spoiler, so just to be safe:
When they returned to Cauldron and found they couldn't reach Celeste or Davkid, they became VERY suspicious. Vhalantru had been their patron, even providing them with a small house. While they've had some minor questions concerning his role in the government and such, they hadn't up until now really suspected him of any wrongdoing. But his insistence on taking custody of Zenith really got them thinking that something wasn't right.
They instead insisted on keeping custody of Zenith until Vhalantru could arrange for his transport, and furthermore insisted on at least one of them going with him when the time came. They took Zenith home and secured him in the basement under constant guard.
Vhalantru arranged an extraction that night, which went very smoothly. Needless to say this made the players even more suspicious of Vhalantru as he was the only one they had spoken to in the city about having Zenith.
Long story short, with Zenith now gone, all his equipment was just sitting there waiting to be claimed. The players sure weren't going to hand it over to Vhalantru at that point!
I had given the dwarf in the party a backstory at the start of the campaign about being a Splintershield himself (a distant cousin of Zenith). I gave Zenith's axe a name and history, so our dwarf was quite happy to get it. He is a law-abiding paladin, but given that Zenith had gone off the rails and turned evil made him feel quite justified in keeping it.