6 - Broken Promises (GM Reference)

[Vince McDonald]

Theoretically, if they could contact Mengkare, I'd say that it could short-circuit Emaliza's threat altogether. Inizra can fill in her spot in the plot, minus the imminent betrayal.

Of course, Mengkare wouldn't know the PCs from any other rando throwing messages at him. Is he likely to take an unsolicited spell message seriously when there's a world to save?

That said, even considering that Mengkare is in Axis at that point, sending targets "1 creature with whom you are familiar," and dream message targets "1 creature you know by name and have met in person" - neither of which are likely to apply. They'd need some other means, and then would still need to convince him that it's more important than his research into the Anima Invocation.

[Dwim]

Wait ...

E7. Mengkare’s Archive
(...) Despite the presence of seating for up to 16 people, Mengkare has never allowed anyone else access to this room (or to the archive vault beyond)

E8. Archive Vault
(...) Mengkare will occasionally provide an individual with a unique archive pin that overrides this ward, allowing access into the vault.

What is it then ? Never anyone, or sometimes someone ? I'm confused.

[xcmt]

Dwim wrote:

What is it then ? Never anyone, or sometimes someone ? I'm confused.

I never noticed the discrepancy, but I've been operating under the assumption that nobody has access to the vault or the private archive just before it. If anybody had access to the vault it'd be his trusted advisor Emaliza, and if she ever had access then she wouldn't need the party to steal the orb shards. Also if anybody ever had access to the vault then they'd have access to the archive, where they could easily piece together Mengkare's nefarious plan, which would be problematic for Mengkare.

I ended up establishing a kind of 4-tier access system. Sometimes people are allowed into the entryway to maintain the access ledger. Less often people are allowed into the first archive for sensitive administrative bookkeeping. Incredibly rarely people are let into the citizen archive (Ingnovim for cleanup purposes, probably Emaliza at some point), and nobody but Mengkare gets into the private archive or vault.

Incidentally, my party just started their confrontation with Mengkare last week, and despite discovering the truth about Emaliza Zandivar's name they bought her BS about being powerless to move against her brother without documented proof of the Triad's extracurricular activities, and brought her with them to the debate. Yada yada yada, two PCs died before they could take down Emaliza. I don't plan on penalizing them during the debate for this conflict because I changed some of the information drip to slow-play Emaliza's evil and amp up the conspiracy mystery angle, expecting the party to dig into trying to sniff out NPC motivations a little more thoroughly, but they mostly didn't react.

[Dwim]

I noted the attack bonus of the Promise Guards are particularly out of line (+38 is 3 over an extreme stat for a lvl 17 creature according the GMG). I brought them down to +33 as they already have an extreme armour class.

[Moth Mariner]

After having just dealt this tragedy to one of my fighters this session, a warning:

Enfeebled 8 is not fun. Dragonshard Guardian crit fail effect. Level 22 creature means trying to counteract it with Sound Body is rough also.