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It's structurally important for my campaign that Ochymua has discoverable activities between when we see him at the end of #1 and when we see him at the end of #6.
My player heard that there had been a change of leadership in a sahuagin city north of Ancorato, and leaped to the conclusion that PurpleEyes (as they think of him) is up there and angling for control of the city. Sounds good to me, actually.
He is taking early steps toward the network of psi-repeater plants that show up at the start of #6 (and an underwater version). The PCs are very keen botanists and will freak out if they ever find one, though they may reach a wrong conclusion about who is responsible.
He has funded the re-opening of an ancient Azlanti ioun foundry. The refurbished foundry, run by a ceratioidi witch, is churning out ioun stones according to plans provided by Ochymua; the stones work fine but give you -2 saves vs. aboleth magic in a hard to detect way. These will get sold in Talislantri and the sahuagin city, also eventually in the colony. Having seen what happened to Onthooth, Ochymua is not going to act directly against the heroes, but weakening them is always good.... This should provide a nice side adventure between modules #3 and #4, as it has clues pointing to Talislantri.
I think he should have something going in Talislantri as well, but haven't worked that out yet. Veiled masters are supposed to manipulate; I want to see him in action, albeit offstage. (Obviously I can't give 8th level PCs a crack at him.)
My other awkwardness is that Onthooth actually got away at the Flooded Cathedral; they had to turn back halfway through the basement and regroup. He left a lot of nasty physical and mental surprises behind among the human prisoners and then fled. They have finally, at the waste of nearly a month, dealt with that and are ready to look for him, which means I need to know where he is and what he's doing. (Plotting against them, for sure. He's really angry over losing the Mutation Machine and all his skum and prisoners.)
I dunno if anyone is reading this, but if you are, any further aboleth ideas?
I'd probably look at Lord of the Rings for inspiration. Sauron weakened his opposition by manipulating their leaders long before they realized he was back, which sounds like something Ochymua would also do. Like giving someone a powerful but corrupted artifact (Palantir) or using a disguised lackey to influence some places politics (Wormtongue).
He doesn't need to conquer anything after all, he just needs to make sure people are occupied while he gets to the doomsday device.
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Funny moment from last session:
The PCs went to the ioun stone foundry and told everyone, with great seriousness, that the stones might be compromised and they needed to check the plans. With a series of rather high Diplomacy checks and some inspired player actions as well, they got this to work. They then surprisingly made the DC40 Arcana check to recognize that the stones were, in fact, compromised.
I was thinking, wow, how did they know? My player must have read my mind again. (I've been married to him for 28 years. These things happen.) But then--
Player: OMG. The PCs freak out.
GM: What, because they confirmed exactly what they suspected?
Player: They didn't think it was true! They were BLUFFING! They just wanted to get a look at the plans so they could make stones of their own, and that was a convenient lie!
I made the PCs roll a hard Bluff check to hide their surprise--the ceratioidi witch would certainly have launched into "I'm so sorry, this secret can't be allowed out of this room so I'm afraid you will all have to die"--and they made it. They told the witch they'd be back later, and slunk out.
This led to a very intense council of war back at the colony, because the PCs saw that they could either publicize the bad stones right away to all their marine friends and allies, or keep them secret and try to track them to the source. Both plans had strong arguments in their favor. We finally, very unusually, had to take a vote among the 6 PCs and 2 NPCs involved, and neither the player nor I knew what the outcome would be until the end. 5-3 in favor of publicizing immediately, as it turned out: the deciding moment was probably the PC who said "I'd rather we were known as the people who tried to warn everyone, even if it didn't work out, than as the people who kept this secret until the aboleth decided to use it."
I hear that the PCs will go back next session and tell the witch they need her to help make new, uncompromised formulae. I think it's about 80% likely that this ends in a fight, but the PCs have surprised me before....