My PCs have just killed Rigg and the Grimstalker, and are about to confront The Dancing Lady. Half the party is on top of her tower (and she knows they're there thanks to Detect Thoughts) and the others are down at the entrance. It happens to be a mostly-female party so she's assuming that was deliberate and that they know more about her than they actually do.
However, one of my players is on the verge of changing character, writing out the current Spymaster (who is marrying Varn's nephew Felix) and taking over a sorceress who has just come into town and will make a natural Magister. This will leave a gap in the Spymaster role and I was thinking of encouraging them to negotiate with The Dancing Lady and eventually offer the role to her.
She has natural enchantment and divination powers, plus I've given her a level of Bard, and she can pass as an elf, so she'd be ideal for the job. And having an NPC spymaster could be fun later on.
So, do you think this could work? What will they need to do to convince her, what reasons might she have for agreeing, and how will they (and she) handle her blood drinking? Several of the Kingdom's agents are good fae, so how will they react?
Not her, she's cuckoo!
But npc spymaster is a good idea, i used an eager bandit from Staggy, David Langton.
Well, they've left her alive for now, with the same deal as Tiressia and Melianse - she'll keep an eye on their borders and try not to kill anyone who belongs to the kingdom. This only came about because the one character who escaped both the insanity mist and the dance proceeded to score a critical and then intimidate her into stopping the dance, otherwise it might easily have been a TPK.
However, since they didn't get to take her stuff, I have to get them interacting with her again at some point. I've placed Evindra's water clock in her tower (because I'm planning to mostly skip book 5). If they'd bothered to mention any of the hints they'd seen about Nyrissa I would have had her gift them the clock, but negotiations didn't get that detailed.
And that people were't being killed...but that they were disappearing, & strange things were happening to them.
They've pretty much said, though not in so many words, that she can still drain people as long as she doesn't get carried away and kill them. So maybe she'll drain them and then take them off to the First World for the accelerated healing factor. They'll come back after a few days, several years older.