Last night, my players did a good job sneaking into he Hospice of the Blessed Maiden, until they didn’t and accidentally got the whole place up in arms against them. They basically had to fight every villain in the place, including the good doctor, at the same time. I ended up giving them he opportunity to surrender, which they did but one PC, the bard, got away. I was thinking about either having them start next week in the cells in the temple below, or in G5 (the operating room) where Rolth experiments on them. But I figured I ask the community here if there are any better options. Maybe drop them into “The Dungeons of the Slave Lords?”
So what do you think might be a good option?
Without a reference of what has happened with your group in the past I would say it may be hard For you to continue with them unless you can figure out a way for them to escape. Think about the next adventures and how that will effect the entire campaign not to mention a plausible way for the group to escape and still operate in town.
My vote would go to Dr Dav, turning the group over to Cressida for punishment maybe. Perhaps he does not suspect they are working together and expects her to punish them. This is with the thought in mind that they have not figured out any of the secrets yet. This puts Cressida on the spot of letting the group go but also needing to figure out how to make it look like an escape so she can seem to still be on the side of the Queen. It also puts the PC’s in a spot of owing her one!
Okay, so the PCs will have to do the last part of the book marked as criminals, getting a taste of what is to come. I like that.
I was thinking about how this would affect the conclusion of the book, and I'd say it stays pretty much the same. If they expose the Doctor (whether he is alive or not), the Queen will label him a traitor, and make it seem as though the accusations against the PCs came only from him (because she can't condemn the heroes who stopped the plague). So if they defeat and expose Davaulus, they'd regain their status as heroes.
Honestly, I would have simply had them tied up, brought downstairs to Rolth to be disappeared and experimented on, but in the midst of Rolth's gloating over capturing the vandals who ruined his hideout in the grey district, given them an opportunity to escape (with maybe only part of their gear) or even remount an attack from the inside.
Might be interesting, I don't know of any good modules to pair with it, but the last dungeon from the Remaster in History of Ash should still be good. You can have the Grey Maidens have locked both Kroft and Edrin in the same secret cell (and play up the not so subtle crush thing that Kroft has for him).
Just remember that the end result is that the PCs get the information in HOA in order to find the serinthal. HOA is a decent adventure so far(we just started it and made it to the acropolisis). Truth be told, reading ahead I didn’t really love this adventure before and it was the one I was looking forward to the least easily because it is such a switch from the original adventures but I have to say I am pleasantly surprised by it.out of all the adventures it took the most planning and organizing beforehand. You need to figure out how long it takes the group to move from place to place, encounters and knowing about the Stovall plateau.
I would recommend keeping the adventure because it details the groups next course of action and starts them half way to scarwall. Plus as it was mentioned before the last part has the assault on deathhead which is awesome.
I don't know if it's too late, but I would recommend leaving Endrin as the captured one for the soul reason of the heavily implied romantic interest between Kroft and Edrin. Saving her crush is a great way to curry favor points with Kroft.
Otherwise, you could just make her get kidnapped and replaced with some sort of doppleganger/shape shifting devil creature that begins cleverly crippling the resistance effort but can easily deflect any blame as a lesser mole in the resistance, and then the realization is that the real Cressida Kroft has been gone all along.
Instead of her being resurrected by the Everdawn Pool, you could simply have them fight a simulacrum from the 6th book. It makes sense why she dies so easily but also as soon as they realize that it was just a simulacrum, they can get really afraid of her true power. Also the gross factor of her turning into a pool of blood like the monster from The Thing, and the potential for any remaining Grey Maidens in the fight to see this and loose faith and join the resistance speaking out against the Queen.
Hmm... seems to be something they wrote out in the remaster from the original. In any case, she stops her introduction at the beginning of book 3 to become broken up over Endrin (quite literally saying "... Endrin is dead." about a character that hasn't otherwise even been introduced). Not present in the remaster anymore unfortunately.
I did apparently subconsciously add something to the end of the Deathhead Vault as there isn't any development text for what happens when they reunite, but to me that just seemed natural.