This -shouldn't- be a spoiler to anyone this far into the game. Upon picking up and looking through the Anniversary Edition, I was thrilled to see the added content, fleshing-out, etc.
Except for this. We know from the original that old man Lonjiku was a jerk. Killed his wife, ostracized his son, et cetera and so forth. The players/characters didn't need to know that, per se, and the shock and horror of finding him in the Glassworks did well.
With the tavern incident in the Anniversary Edition, though; I'm not really sure -why-. Any good aligned character (and even some neutral) worth their salt is still going to be horrified at Lonjiku's fate; but I kind of feel that the incident in the tavern beforehand lends just a touch of apathy to the discovery. Kind of along the lines of "he probably had it coming."
Was this the intent of adding the confrontation between Lonjiku and Ameiko, or am I missing something?
Creative Director
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Runelords spoilers!
There was always supposed to be a scene early in the adventure where the PCs meet Lonjiku and realize he's a jerk, but that was one of several I ended up having to cut for space (along with the scene where the PCs go find the missing bones in the graveyard).
This way, when they find Lonjiku's body in the Glassworks, it's not just some guy that no one in the party's ever met. It's closure to a story that's been going on a long time before the adventure began, but one that the PCs got to witness the beginning of the final chapter of it at the Rusty Dragon.
The "horror" in the Glassworks should not really be the fact that Ameiko's father, who we know is a bad guy, met a bad death, but the fact that her half-brother, whom she tried to redeem, ended up turning against her and the town.
Ah, okay. Well done, in either case. I do have to admit, though; the final result of Lonjiku's death still strikes me as one of the more creative and gruesome deaths I've seen in any module/campaign. Color me impressed.
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Finding him dead in the Glassworks is not the tragedy. There's no doubt that Lonjiku had it coming to him. His guilt at murdering his wife and belief that Tsuto had proof allowed him to rationalize compromising Sandpoint's safety. People died because he needed to save face, and no matter how you slice it, that's cold.
So yeah, I doubt any PC will shed a tear for his passing. Still, finding his corpse covered in sheets of cooled glass? That's depraved, and shows that however bad his old man might have been, Tsuto's much, much worse. I think most PCs should be shocked at this sort of escalation in violence, even if it's someone as dispicable as the elder Kaijutsu on the receiving end.
And yeah, definitely a creative way to go!
Ahem... "Well, that escalated rapidly!" =^-^=
