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Hello, my party is currently assaulting the Technic League base and nearing the end of The Palace of Fallen Stars. They have quite a few allies, including Isuma the Kasatha, Paeytr (Cohort) the Mad Druid from VoBC, an Augmented Gearsman Cohort) they modified, and currently Kevoth Kul after curing him.
As so many NPCs in the party, Casandalee is hard to make herself known being that she is deactivated most of the time to conserve power and often forgotten about. They have had really only one or two real discussions with the AI. The party is very motivated to kill Unity, so getting them to Silvermount is not a concern.
I was wondering of you had any suggestions on how to get her presence known a bit more, seeing as Divinity Drive has some very big stuff with her toward the end.
I feel like I made a mistake with her somehow in that the party tries to hide her so much, but she is just locked away and forgotten about. Kevoth Kul will not be a party member forever, once the league is dealt with, he has a kingdom to run. But Isuma, Paeytr, and the robot cohort (Named Unit 83_ Alpha Member) all have a more noticeable voice in party discussion.
As so many NPCs in the party, Casandalee is hard to make herself known being that she is deactivated most of the time to conserve power and often forgotten about. They have had really only one or two real discussions with the AI. The party is very motivated to kill Unity, so getting them to Silvermount is not a concern.
It isn't really your fault. After all the build up she had in Books 2-4, she ends up being "not all that" in the last parts of the AP.
I was wondering of you had any suggestions on how to get her presence known a bit more, seeing as Divinity Drive has some very big stuff with her toward the end.
Give her more expansive knowledge of the interior of Divinity. This would make her an interactive map.
I feel like I made a mistake with her somehow in that the party tries to hide her so much, but she is just locked away and forgotten about. Kevoth Kul will not be a party member forever, once the league is dealt with, he has a kingdom to run. But Isuma, Paeytr, and the robot cohort (Named Unit 83_ Alpha Member) all have a more noticeable voice in party discussion.
I don't know if it was you, or if it was the AP writers.
My players totally derailed the 6th module and that made the Casandalee Compact AI more important. Instead of fighting their way through the Divinity to reach the control room and destroy Unity, they spoke with Unity over a communicator in their small spaceship--I had let them salvage the Haunted Wreck in Scrapwall--and asked for a job as repair crew.
Unity agreed to hire them because it planned to kill them, take the compact AI, grow a new android with Casandalee's memories, and program her to never leave Unity. It thought of Casandalee as its best friend. But the party was really, really good at technological repairs and supernatural pest control, so Unity kept putting off killing them.
Casandalee advised them on getting a proper employment contract. The party had spent two modules searching for Casandalee's notes, mostly a wild goose chase to level them up. I wanted them to get some benefit from that compact AI. They were hired as engineering crew and given orange-level access cards to open restricted areas for repair duties. Casandalee also told them to how to use the repair tools, such as the glaucite reshaper, that Unity provided and other devices found inside the ship.
The party spent their 8-hour workday (Androffans have strong union rules) killing wraiths or repairing holes in the hull, and then they snuck around the Divinity to find clues to Unity's secret plan. Which was not the plan in The Divinity Drive, because i had to change it to a plan that required repairing the Divinity. A map of the Divinity was vital, and Casandalee was that map. And she also knew all the out-of-sight maintenance tunnels.
Meanwhile, the party openly befriended several of Unity's other minions and secretly explored the maintenance tunnels to learn Unity's secret plan. I rewrote the security robot Bastion to be sentient to add had another minion to talk to. My version of Bastion was older than the Divinity, an early-model space exploration robot who had wirelessly wired itself into the security system during the space battle to bypass systems destroyed by a particle beam. Bastion could not leave the security center, to explain why it did not make the repairs the party was doing. And absolute loyalty to proper authorities was built into Bastion's original programming, so it could not betray Unity.
Boffin, the party's tech expert, was talking with Bastion, trying to get more information about Unity's weaknesses. The conversation drifted. Boffin asked, "Are you more concerned about the security of the ship or the security of the crew?"
Me: Make a roll for existential philosophy.
Boffin's player: I'll make a Wisdom check. 21.
Me: Bastion says, "To the crew, of course. But they died off. The only crew left is me, Unity, ... and you guys."
In the 500 years since the departure of Casandalee, the Divinity had not officially hired new crew members until the party had asked for a contract as engineering crew. Becrux was a contractor, Ophelia was unpaid, non-sentient robots were not people, etc.
Bastion was loyal to crew, and they were crew. And Bastion knew that Unity was violating official protocols about contact with alien races, i.e., the people of Numeria, and ought to be stripped of its position. My players had just subverted the third most powerful entity in the Divinity to their side. In the final battle against Unity, which ended up taking place all over the mile-long ship, Bastion was keeping them informed about the situation on other places, authorizing them access to the ship's internal railway system, disrupting Unity's communications, and ordering a powerful Annihilator Robot to obey them. The party could have won without Bastion, but not before Unity launched the Divinity itself and destroyed the entire city of Starfall. And that twist happened simply because I wanted Casandalee to give the party good advice about an employment contract.
Also, an alliance of three gods--Brigh, Alseta, and Desna--returned Casandalee's soul to the Compact AI, which made it more powerful. Except it wasn't the soul of Casandalee III, the last incarnation of that android. It was the soul of Bonnie Ann, the incarnation immediately before Casandalee III who was a pirate waves oracle. Bonnie Ann was pragmatic and ruthless. And with the help of Boffin, she successfully hacked Unity's computer brain and took control of the Divinity's systems. Too bad that did not stick because Ophelia used her Miracle spell to restore Unity.
I have no idea how any of this can benefit Falcar following the plot as written in The Divinity Drive. Casandalee as a map is fine, but if the party goes down any maintenance tunnels then they will bypass many encounters in the module. They could encounter various undead instead. I used hidden shadows, dread wraiths, and a dybbuk possessing a high-level gearsman on the thought that Unity could not destroy incorporeal undead without magic weapons and never thought of having one of his clerics cast Magic Weapon. I also used android zombies of my own design, but they ended up too weak.
Oh, I had a thought. Section D, Recreation Deck, is occupied by clueless androids because an explorer inadvertently activated an android creche decades ago. How about having a nearly finished female android body in the creche, room D9, ready to awake after her brain receives basic instructions. But the party can upload Casandalee's memories into the body instead, at Casandalee's request. Then they will have a new NPC cohort and you can make her any class and level you want. Ancestor oracle with shattered psyche curse would be the obvious choice, but I liked having her mystery and curse change with each incarnation when I made up the history of her past lives. The copy of Casandalee running in the Compact AI can still run in that unit, too.
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Thank you for the advice, I was able to get them a bit more interested in Casandalee by having Isuma mention her as a possibility to access the Elevator in the Technic league compound basement. She hacked the system due to her massive bonus on such checks and allowed the party to get to the lowest level to meet the Kytons below. I also had the Black Sovereign seem annoyed by the AI, but not enough to care too badly, mostly the barbarian king wants to kill some wizards, a robot who hates the league too is an tool for now and a problem for later.
The Party has mentioned trying to resurrect Casandalee in the past and mentioned it again, remembering they kept her corpse found in the Aurora. The book says she cannot be raised as her soul was judged, but doesn't true Resurrection bypass that because it can function on a dead soul at a minimum of 170 Years? I get that it is probably just story reasons so that may be the final say.
True resurrection can not do that, but Judgement undone can. Both require the soul to be willing to return. Why would the original Casandalee be willing? She has been chilling in what ever afterlife for some time now. Unless she was sent to Abaddon or Abyss I don't see why she would bother with mortality again.
Hi, we just started book-6 and my party doesn't care about her either.
She is turned off almost the whole time. I even had her tell my players (during book-5) that she had spent considerable time in Silvermount and had lots of advice for them when they were ready to enter the ship.
Well they so far have begun exploring Divinity and never even thought to consult her. I suppose eventually they'll need to turn her on to figure out how to defeat Unity.
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That is quite an interesting spell with a seriously expensive material cost, is that the highest set cost of a spell at 50,000 GP?
It looks like my party is more interested in what the AI has to say now, though I am not sure if they will have her ascend at the end. The idea of something replacing Unity was tossed about by an NPC and one player seemed interested in trying to be the one to fill the gap. With a Neurocam, I do not see why that would not work, and I suppose that would be a fitting end of a campaign to literally become a god. I suppose we will see, I have some time to figure that one out.