So I'm finishing Ire of the Storm - I'm very pleased with the adventure, and the players now have at least some interest in the Storm Kindlers and possibly learning more about the Eye of Abendego (which I'm perfectly willing to start speculation on). And I went and purchased Seers of the Drowned City as a potential follow-on sequel for them to do next.
But I have a little bit of a problem with it... The Age of Lost Omens began over a hundred years ago, Lirgen was drowned, and Hyrantam has been right there, with ruins to explore only a few feet under the water, the whole time.
In general there are long-term issues with the Golarian timeline - to accommodate elves, we have to have very long time periods through history where effectively nothing happened for countless lives of humans - but I need to account for humans being active for a hundred years, right there in the ruins, between the city flooding and the PCs showing up in Hyrantam and starting to loot it.
If I'm right, from the description, people have been living in the upper floors of these buildings for a hundred years. Clerics have been getting water breathing and freedom of movement all that time. And it's a harsh environment; those who survive to adulthood aren't first-level commoners.
How is it that nobody's looted the buildings over the course of that century? They're accessible to sixth-level adventurers. Hyrantam must have spawned a couple of those, given a century. Why is it that there's still a bunch of barely-guarded treasure down there, literally within a mile of them all, and a few feet below the surface?
Now, I'm not going to ask the question without suggesting a few possible ways to address it...
- It might be assumed by everyone that the buildings are worthless ruins by now, since they do have magical protections, which presumably the settlers thought had failed and the submerged buildings emptied.
- I could easily believe the water levels shifted - making a bunch of the city that formerly was under deeper water now in shallower, because the main fork of the river has now opened a different path. But I can't move an *observatory* to lower ground; everybody puts observatories on hilltops.
- I might make it that the whole of the current established town is newer, that storm patterns have shifted and people moved there only a relatively short time ago when it became less inaccessible, where it wasn't before (for some reason I can invent - it was totally flooded, or there were lots more sea monsters, or lightning used to hit everything regularly - I can work something out).
Does someone else have a better explanation, for how the timeline of the storm, ruins, settlement, and unexplored treasure accessible to sixth-level characters sitting a mile from where people (who can, after all, gain XP and levels) have been living, albeit uncomfortably, for a hundred years?
