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Context: we're in the late stages of RRR, and I'm using DudeMeister's "Hargulka's Monster Kingdom" (plus some tweaks of my own). One of my players made a point of collecting a hair from Hargulka's chair after the Monstrous Feast, and he's recently acquired the Scrying spell. He plans to scry Hargulka every day.
As far as what the character sees Hargulka doing, assuming he scries at random times I'm just going to dice for it. Given that he's only seeing a few minutes out of the whole day, I've decided there's a 5% chance of seeing something useful, a 20% chance of seeing something interesting, and otherwise Hargulka is just doing mundane stuff and not discussing anything of great import.
On a day when Hargulka makes his Will save, the rules say that he "feels a hostile force or a tingle, but cannot deduce the exact nature of the attack." When he fails the save and the scrying occurs, he still gets a DC 23 Perception check to notice the invisible sensor.
What I'm wondering is, what will Hargulka make of the scrying sensor if he spots it? IMC he has an Intelligence score of 16, so he's pretty smart, but he has no Knowledge (Arcana) or Spellcraft skill. Still, this thing is going to be showing up day after day, invisible and following him around...
Possible things he might decide:
- It's some sort of creature, although it doesn't smell like a will-o-wisp (which is a scent he's familiar with).
- It's some sort of spell or curse
- It's some sign of divine favour
- ...?
Then there's what he decides its motivations are:
- It's spying on him
- It's giving him bad luck
- It's giving him good luck
- It's just one of those things, and can safely be ignored
- ...?
I'm looking for ideas about how I determine what he decides. I don't want to automatically say "he immediately becomes suspicious that it's spying on him" and acts accordingly (not letting on that he's spotted it, not giving away anything important, perhaps trying to use Bluff to give false information), but I'm finding it hard to imagine how else one might interpret a small invisible flying thing that follows you around and tries to keep a low profile and doesn't talk to you.
(Of course, there's a chance you can cast Message through the scrying, so the sensor could actually "talk" to him if the player chose to... which might skew things towards a particular interpretation.)
@Andre Roy - I actually pre-rolled his saves and Perception checks. His first successful save isn't until after he's failed quite a few times, and he notices it several times in that period. Since the character casting the spell met him in person at the Monstrous Feast and has some of his hair, Hargulka is suffering -10 to the Will save, so he has to roll pretty high to make it. His Perception is pretty good relative to the DC to notice it, however.
@pennywit - It's a good thought, but the PCs finally managed to kill the Spirit of Stisshak recently, so the Monster Kingdom has no will-o'-wisp any more. I wouldn't want to introduce a new wisp at this point, as it would feel like negating the players' success.
Really, the PCs have backed Hargulka into a pretty tight corner. Most of his non-trollish allies have been picked off, and the PCs also snuck in and rescued the River Kingdom slaves that Hargulka had been planning on using as food for his trolls through the Winter. It's not so much a matter of *if* the troll armies will attack as *when*, because basically they can't survive the Winter... we're definitely into the endgame for the Monster Kingdom.
So, the main thing the scrying is intended for is to see if the troll armies are on the march, so the PCs have a few days' notice of the anticipated attack. However, there are some other things going on, so I want to have Hargulka react realistically when he notices the sensor.
Given that Hargulka has been thwarted at every turn recently, playing him up as becoming increasingly infuriated and paranoid also feels right, but again, I don't want to just arbitrarily say "he sees the scrying sensor and instantly reacts as if it's a spy and a threat." I feel he will come to that opinion eventually - potentially even immediately - but the question is how do I determine whether he does, and how many times can they scry him before then?
I could just let the dice decide I guess: give him an Intelligence check each time he sees it and set an arbitrary DC...
With thing like that, I tend to consider how I might react - and see if how it fits the situation.
I suspect if I spotted a 'thing' following me around - I would shake my head and ignore it as 'something wrong with my eyes' the first couple of times. If it was consistent (Ie same shape, size etc) I would probably go to look at it and try and touch it. A Troll eye (apparently) looking back down the scrying 'line' :) Or a big hairy troll finger poking at the scrying point. Or maybe try to eat it (because he is bored)
After that I suspect that would start getting suspicious. Were I a troll I might pick up a club and start using it for batting practice :) or try hanging a cloak on it. That could be a bit of fun the first time you describe it.
After that I think I would legitimately let him fee worried by it :)
Thanks, JohnB. That all sounds reasonable.
It's not clear what a creature notices when they make the Perception check to spot a scrying sensor. It's invisible, so does that mean that they notice a noise, a smell, a faint outline, a distortion in the air... all of the above? Assuming it's at least a couple of those, I think you'd be able to decide it's not something wrong with your eyes pretty quickly with a bit of experimenting (turning your head, covering one eye then the other, moving towards or away from it). Seeing the subject doing that would make it pretty obvious to the scrier that the sensor had been spotted, though.
Also, the scrying spell says that you always see "approximately 10 feet in all directions of the subject"... that would imply that it tries to stay a constant distance from the subject. So, if Hargulka tries to approach it in order to touch it or attack it, the sensor would back off and try to maintain its distance. It might be possible to back it into a corner and approach it if you're indoors.
As an added wrinkle for the character doing the scrying, he doesn't have Darkvision, whereas Hargulka and his trolls do. The trolls don't bother with lights inside their stronghold, so if Hargulka is in his stronghold, scrying him will just show darkness. Fortunately scrying allows you to "see and hear the subject and its surroundings", so even in the dark the character can hear activities or any conversations that occur... and he can speak Giant :)
I don't have much to add on the the topic of Hargulka's reactions, but if your PCs are near the end of RRR, it does look like the perfect way to add some sens of impending doom upon the troll storyline.
In my game, I played the whole troll army as ont eh defensive. The trolls themselves would like to assault and raid (with extra motivation due to hunger), but Hargulka and his lieutenants refrain everyone from leaving their defensive positions. The reason is that they're digging deeper in the cave (with the help of kobolds minions) to uncover some sort of "rift" between the Material Plane and the First World buried deeper in the rocky cliff.
That also explains why in the end, out of fear and devotion to Nyrissa, Hargulka will (quite stupidly, as written in the book) stay in a dead-end cavern to await the PCs and fight them to protect his mistress' McGuffin.