The Songs of Shazathared are obviously patterned after the Arabian Nights. A lovely princess (Shazathared, Scheherezade) is captured by a lord, and tells him a story every night to preserve her life. Cool.
The thing is, in 1001 Nights, after 1001 nights, the lord agrees to let the princess live, happy ending, and the stories get dispersed.
In the Golarion version, Jhavhul gets bored of Shazathared, and she moulders in his mansion for centuries, still trapped, even to the present day. Why does anyone know the stories? How do the stories get transmitted from a secret chamber in a palace in the City of Brass on the Elemental Plane of Fire to the Material Plane? Does Jhavhul repeat them? He doesn't seem like the type.
One of my players is really taking the Songs of Shazathared as a personal quest, so I know this is going to come up. Any ideas?
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Shazathared was an accomplished story teller before she was kidnapped by Jhavhul, it is why he made the effort to grab her and set up a special place for her in his vaults as opposed to his harem.
This. The Songs we get to see are her 'published work' from before she was captured. Note that few if any are the sort of thing she'd likely tell Jhavhul, and none rely on knowledge she could not possess prior to her capture.
So if you free her, you (theoretically) could get a whole wealth of new stories never before heard...
Yeah, that could definitely explain it. I think it sort of reduces the magic of the 1001 Nights meta-story, but that does get made up for by being able to rescue her.
Although, I think it might make sense if Shazathared had been telling Jhavhul those stories... He likely sympathizes with different characters than you or I, and might find them more humorous, but the stories about the Firebleeder, for example, seem to be something he found very interesting.
I am toying with the idea that, at some point in the past, a mortal managed to sneak into Bayt al-Bazan and overhear Shazathared's storytelling, and when Jhavhul had gone for the night, they wished aloud at the magic fountain that the people back home could hear those stories.