Doom Comes to Dustpawn help! [spoilers]

[Nosdarb]

So, I started running Doom comes to Dustpawn. Right out of the gate I hit a snag. One of my players has Detect Magic up at all times. He was able to detect that the water had magic stuff in it (the poison), and the party tracked the poison to the lake. So far, no big deal. The next thing that they did was cast Remove Curse on Dalviss Crenn and Nalan Hossler.

In the Dream Crystal Toxin breakout on page 18 it says:

Dream Crystal Toxin wrote:

In any event, dream crystal toxin counts as both a poison and a curse for determining what can negate its effects.

So that's pretty straight forward. Remove Curse nullifies the effects. Nalan and Dalviss both feel better until they start drinking the water again. The party tells them the lake is cursed and to draw water from the stream instead.

The problem is that in part five Nalan is supposed to turn into a huge rampaging monster. And then shortly after that Dalviss is supposed to turn into an id mutant and attack them. Now neither of these things will happen.

I'm pretty okay with this. It wasn't a totally cheap trick. One of the PCs is paranoid (Detect Magic all the time), and one of them has good intuition (Remove Curse on Dalviss, Nalan and the lake). They should be rewarded for being good adventurers, right? It just throws the whole feeling of the final act off. The module blatantly assumes that these things wont happen. Any ideas? I'm considering having another random townsperson mutate into the penultimate encounter. It feels like I'm robbing them of the experience (not just the XP) if I don't. On the other hand, not having to fight anything means that they can go into the final encounter with nearly full resources (HP, spell slots, SLAs, etc.).

Any thoughts? Remove the encounter? Run it anyway? Something else I haven't thought of? Any advice is appreciated.

[Just a Mort]

Ah ha...I ran this one before. Real awesome moments rping the cheers part. I clinked my green tea drink with the rest of my players as Dalviss offered them hospitality. And they all drank up. Great stuff. Then I rolled their will saves in secret for next few days, prompting them of headaches. I told them the entire town detected of minor necromancy (I felt the meteorite strike would translate to something like radiation). They fixed Nalan as Dalviss said he was acting weird. They didn't fix Dalviss, they didnt fix themselves. So on the final part, I removed the Nalan encounter, they ended up grappling and pounding Dalviss into submittion. Then I described to those who failed their will saves that they felt themselves losing grip on their sanity..

I even pre-decided before running the scenario which animals they would turn into...should they have failed their will saves.

Oh. Fun fun times. Can't wait to do it to another batch!