Need advice for an idea I had (replacing Shensen) (Spoilers)

[MaxTheDM]

Hey all! I’m planning to run this adventure after my group finishes Rise of the Runelords, and they are huge fans of Ameiko. I wanted to indulge them in that, but because Jade Regent isn’t particularly to my liking, I had a different idea. I was thinking of replacing the petrified Shensen with Amaya Kaijitsu from one of the appendices. This is for two reasons; number 1 is that I can link the Kaijitsu family to the story (Amaya seems like a cool NPC, and it would be fun to connect it to Rise of the Runelords), and number 2 is that I can swap out Shensen. I don’t hate her, she seems like a cool character, but I kind of want to swap her out for the same reason I don’t want to run Jade Regent (that is, it seems like the spotlight will get stolen away from the PCs).

So I was wondering, will this disrupt the campaign at all? I seems that Shensen’s main role in the campaign is that she is capable of bardic performance, and since Amaya is as well she should be ok on that front.

[zimmerwald1915]

MaxTheDM wrote:

So I was wondering, will this disrupt the campaign at all?

The party visits her shop twice, but nothing about the first visit would need to change if Shensen was replaced. If you want to keep Shensen's friend Guttuger, the awakened deinonychus, who the party finds when they go back, you'll need to come up with some other justification for his presence.

I wouldn't worry overmuch about Shensen overshadowing the party, though. She's only rescued at the end of Book 3, and can be immediately placed on the sidelines after that by sending her to patrol a liberated district or something. By the end of Book 4, the PCs will have outleveled her substantially.

Amaya's a good choice to include, though, being in much the same position as Laria: a veteran of underground and [quasi-]subversive organizing.

[Kasoh]

And if you don't have a Silver Raven with a good enough Perform (Sing) then Shensen is the AP given way to actually perform the Song of Silver. But any sufficiently talented bard should suffice. (Which might have been what you meant.)

[Warped Savant]

Shouldn't be a problem.
Have Amaya be the one the owns the Silver Star instead, she can do everything Shensen does (without the bizarre, rule-breaking backstory) and simply remove the dinosaur.

(FWIW: I like the character of Shensen but her backstory left a bad taste in my mouth so I barely used her in the campaign I ran and completely removed Guttugger.)

[zimmerwald1915]

To reiterate, Amaya's a good choice, but if you want other options, there's a bard in Lost Omens Legends that makes a good Shensen replacement. I don't remember her name, but she uses the alias Sapphire Butterfly. She'd probably have the masked performer archetype in 1E.

[Ian G]

I reworked Shensen's backstory, I have her being recruited by Andoran's Revolution Exportation Department from her opera-singer career because she could act, too, and so now she's an opera singer who's also a badass secret agent. Guttugger is her trainee/subordinate who pretends to be an exotic pet to listen to and pick up information in public gatherings. This went over pretty well with my players; my player whose arcanist who grew up in the theater tasked her with rescuing the cast and crew (who were being forced on threat of painful execution to put on a play glorifying Barzillai's divine good looks, infinite wisdom, brilliant mind, incredible generosity, great benevolence, prodigious manhood, and of course unimpeachable modesty) during the opera house scene, so I had the players see her using Dimension Door scrolls to go all Batman on the bad guys and rescue the cast while the PCs were slaughtering Barzillai's devil minions in the galleries. That seemed to work for everybody. :)