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In the course of running this chapter, my party ran into a few complications which delayed their travel. Chiefly they utterly failed at stopping the warehouse fire and started a week behind. Then poor N'Cheki died from some random circumstances concerning a certain shadow demon. I just prorated the travel time benefit N'Cheki provided giving the party roughly 2/3 of his travel time bonus. This puts them arriving in Tazion on Day 61 after the Red Mantis and the Aspis Consortium.
In the Tazion preface, it states that both groups gain access to the pillars of light without majorly impacting the denizens of the city. The Mantis, through stealth, and the Aspis, through bribery and diplomacy. My question is this, what effect does this have on the locations of the focusing crystals?
Obviously the Mantis managed to stealthily steal the crystals from both Rougaru and Issilar and activate the pillars without their knowledge. Wouldn't they just take the crystals with them after leaving? I simply can't believe they managed to activate the pillars blindly with a DC 40 UMD check. That's just silly.
But let's suppose they did. Now the Aspis comes along and negotiates the crystal from Rougaru and gains Issilar's assistance in activating the pillars. This would leave all 3 stones in Issilar's possession. I get that. The main question I have is why is Issilar trying to activate the pillars to start with? He came FROM Savith'Yi to Tazion to convince the Chuaru'Ka to fight for him and take back the ancient city from his enemies there. He knows where the city is. I don't understand his obsession with activating the pillars. Thoughts?
Issilar doesn't know what the pillars do. As you point out, he's only in Tazion to gain enough power to regain control of his tribe from Akarundo. Recruiting the charau'ka was a good step, but he figures he needs more than that so he's hoping that this ancient whatsit will help.
So once the Red Mantis activate the machine and he sees that it's just a map home he really has no need to keep trying to figure out what it does. That leaves the question of why he stays in Tazion, and the only answer that I have is that he doesn't know what else to do.
Remember that Issilar is probably the loneliest guy on the planet. As far as he knows, he's the only serpentfolk who isn't an utter moron, and his entire tribe (including his whole family) has been suckered into working for some sort of mind-reading shapechanger. He knows he's not tough enough to face Akarundo alone, but doesn't know how to get stronger. He'd probably be willing to make an alliance with Khalid-Shah if he thought he could, but doesn't know any way to bring that about. He feels the heavy weight of responsibility and has no way to do anything about it.
Maybe he's just in a funk.
ETA: Once the Pathfinders get there they probably take the focus gems with them, since that's what Pathfinders do. This won't really affect the PCs though; by now two or three caravans of a hundred or so people each have tromped down the trail to Saventh-Yhi, so Tazion is just a time sink.
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Thank you tbug, that actually helps put things in perspective quite a bit.
Perhaps I'll play it so that the Mantis did steal the crystals from both Rogaru and Issilar. They snuck past all the guards in the pyramid and then activated the pillars. Once the map was up and the inscriptions copied they did their ninja thing and were gone, leaving poor Issilar to walk back to his puzzle sometime later to find it all aglow and showing a map to the city he had fled. Poor Issilar, he just can't win.
The Aspis pay the baddies off for a peak at the map and Issilar pens a missive to deliver via a charu'ka runner all the way to the gorilla king for an "audience" to strengthen an alliance and that Issilar will lead the great king to the fabled city in exchange for it's conquest.
That leaves the PC's to stumble into the middle of all of this only 2 days before the pathfinder's show with a fair chance of encountering them before they leave the ruins.
I like the tie to how the Gorilla King knows where Saventh-Yhi is. Nice!
Not everyone in the Red Mantis expedition is an assassin, so I think that there would be a decent chance of being able to follow their caravan's trail. Once it's been retromped by the Aspis Consortium it should be that much clearer. The Pathfinders are the people who make it unnecessarily to even try, since they're the third group down the trail.
The adventure is called "Racing to Ruin" and it sounds like your party lost the race. That's okay, because it's only chapter two of six. Maybe it's time for them to skip ahead to chapter three? The first few encounters there will be dead already, so at least they can get into outskirts of the city.
This thread actually helped solve the same problem I'm anticipating with my group. Thanks. I feel silly for posting about it in another thread, now.