Story
We're halfway through Book 2: Rivers Run Red (with the trolls). Grigori came along and started smack talking the kingdom just like the book says. Eventually the council of PCs voted to execute him. The General took up the executioners axe and just before he could swing, Grigori cast charm person on him and the General failed his save.
Now the General was having second thoughts. Sure Grigori did terrible things, but executing their good friend was no solution.
It was already established that Grigori was using magic in his speeches so the PCs were wise to the fact that Grigori must have used magic again here. A second PC tried to execute him, and was also charmed. Finally a third PC tried, made the will save and performed a coup-de-grace auto crit... with a dagger. Even with the low damage it was save or die, but Grigori rolled a 17 and made it.
I decided he would try to bluff his own death rolling against all PCs sense motives (which I have on a card hanging from my DM screen). With PC sense motives ranging from +0 to a staggering +1 it wasn't hard for Grigori to beat them all.
Question
Now I have a very alive Grigori, who has a vengeance against the PCs, that the PCs do not know is alive.
How can I use him against the PCs?
He is certainly not going to speak out publicly against them again - that did not go well. But I am excited to bring him back for a surprise appearance in this or a future book.
Ooh! How about if the townsfolk spread rumors that someone resurrected him, or he became a revenant or something? Then Grigori could use that to his advantage.
You might want to figure out/ask what the PC's did with the dead body...
If they say they cremated him/put his head on a spike as a warning to others/etc, he presumably picked his time and made a break for it... but they know he's not dead (or at least got back up somehow).
Sure, feigning death buys him some time, but unless they just abandon the body on the spot without any clean-up (which would get pretty smelly in a couple of hours, assuming they were having their vote indoors), he pretty much does have to give up the act sooner or later.
If I were a player in the game, someone coup de graced Grigori, things were hand-waved from there, and then he showed up causing problems again I'd be disappointed.
Obviously they did something with the body. If it wasn't them directly, someone else moved him. And there would likely have been witnesses. I hope you're coming up with a REALLY good story for how he managed to get away with it and not have ANYONE else report it to the PCs that he was still alive.
Charm person only lasts an hour per level, so that would work for the short term.
The Nightmare Template (which allows things to appear dead after a hit) has a Heal check or Will save with a DC equal to 10 + 1/2 the nightmare creature’s Hit Dice + the nightmare creature’s Intelligence or Charisma modifier, whichever is higher if anyone physically interacts with the creature.
There's a 3rd party feat from Rogue Genius Games that allows you to pretend to be dead for minutes equal to your Con score (Feign Death) but that's bluff versus perception or heal.
I'm not saying what you did was wrong; you're the GM, it's your game, and you know your group significantly better than I do. BUT, if I were you, I'd be prepared for them to argue about him feigning death and getting away with it even though he made a bluff check and they failed their sense motive checks.
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This sounds fun and most of the advice the dude is so far getting is what he should have already done, which is not exactly the dude is looking for
I'd have him report back to Irovetti what he's seen, take a week or a month off before coming back, perhaps under a new guise. Though now that he's had one brush with death, make him more cautious, favor hit and run, sabotage, and spy work, stuff that lets him have a better chance of getting away and survive
But now Irovetti has a chance to know more about how the party operates
In Reverse's Kingmaker Podcast, Grigorij was hired on by Drelev in an official capacity, ended up his Grand Diplomat, I believe. Continued to be an annoyance to the PC(s), but they couldn't really touch him without provoking an incident.
They didn't restrain him or take spellcaster precautions?
Canarr wrote: In Reverse's Kingmaker Podcast, Grigorij was hired on by Drelev in an official capacity, ended up his Grand Diplomat, I believe. Continued to be an annoyance to the PC(s), but they couldn't really touch him without provoking an incident. You could also easily send him to Pitax, or even Varnhold (although that might discourage people from a rescue!)
Alive, obvious, but out of sword range seems the thing to do. He doubtlessly doesn't want to physically tangle with the PCs again, and he's not the work-in-shadows type.
Should he make it all the way to the Rushlight Tournament, having him make a heroic Boast in the Boasting Contest about his heroic efforts to outwit tyrants attempting to execute him and his cunning (and Boast-appropriately-over-the-top) tale of holding his breath for several hours and stopping his own heart should make a good story. The PCs won't be able to touch him there, either, unless they want a serious diplomatic incident for murdering a competitor in front of neighbouring kingdoms!
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In my game, my PCs managed to Out-Diplomacy Grigorij when he first showed up. The dwarven cleric of Erastil won enough Diplomacy checks against him to drive him out of the town for a while.
However, Grigorij wasn't a big hit with my players. They found him annoying, and not in the good way, so I decided to switch things up a bit. A month or two after he disappeared, a letter from him arrived for the baroness on a ship from Mivon - he'd relocated to there for the moment. In the letter, Grigorij warned them that the people who paid him - a fixer/troubleshooter for Baron Drelev - were also in cahoots with the trolls troubling their realm.
Basically, Grigorij stated that he didn't have any qualms in taking gold from one noble to harass another. That was fair in his book, but he drew the line at letting innocent farmers get eaten by trolls. So, he'd ducked out of his contract and was laying low somewhere else, until the PCs managed to deal with the trolls. Or the other way around.
In the end, Grigorij was abducted and murdered by the remaining two members of a Coven of Hags working for Nyrissa (an idea I stole from DaddyDM, I believe). The PCs had killed the third Hag, and they wanted to summon the Talonquake to their capital in revenge, but they needed a bard to play the magical flute to do so. They made him play the flute, then murdered him.
Canarr wrote: In the end, Grigorij was abducted and murdered by the remaining two members of a Coven of Hags working for Nyrissa (an idea I stole from DaddyDM, I believe). The PCs had killed the third Hag, and they wanted to summon the Talonquake to their capital in revenge, but they needed a bard to play the magical flute to do so. They made him play the flute, then murdered him. Ooh, you used the flute, too! :D Love what you did with Grigori there, it seems like a suitable end for such a person.
Spatula wrote: Canarr wrote: In the end, Grigorij was abducted and murdered by the remaining two members of a Coven of Hags working for Nyrissa (an idea I stole from DaddyDM, I believe). The PCs had killed the third Hag, and they wanted to summon the Talonquake to their capital in revenge, but they needed a bard to play the magical flute to do so. They made him play the flute, then murdered him. Ooh, you used the flute, too! :D Love what you did with Grigori there, it seems like a suitable end for such a person. ...annnnd I forgot that I stole that from you, too. Sorry about that - didn't mean to hog the credit.
Yeah, I liked the flute idea. The concept that the Owlbear is just randomly enraged miles to the south and then happens to stumble across the PCs' capital never sat well with me. The whole plot part with some bandit being tricked by Nyrissa seemed fairly contrived, TBH.
So in my game, while Nyrissa made the flute ages ago, and definitely used it repeatedly, this time it's just the Hags being pissed about their sister getting killed.
I found that a fitting end for Grigorij. Here he is, just barely having discovered something like a conscience, then gets murdered by creatures much worse than he is.
No worries, I was just glad to see that used. I honestly might have lifted it from somewhere else myself; it's been so long I don't remember!
:D
You know what they say: stealing from one source is plagiarism. Stealing from many sources is research!
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