So, my players beat Vordakai and got his Oculus of Abaddon. I made it clear to them that it's pretty dang powerful, completely evil, and has a malign intelligence.
Immediate low-effort attempts to destroy it obviously fail. One resisted the urge to play amateur eye surgeon on himself. Without even bothering to find out how to destroy it, they decided to just encase the thing in molten iron and dump it in the lake. Problem totally solved.
But let's be real. It wants to be found, forces that serve Abaddon know about it, and it isn't even in enough iron to block detect magic. Another year passes in kingdom building and they aren't keeping tabs on it.
So here's my question to the community: what do you think should happen here? Who might find it? Would it be taken elsewhere to sow misery or turned on the PCs again? Would it affect the environment/land over the year? How should this come back on them, if it does at all? I don't wish to be cruel but it does seem they've taken the lazy way out with no safeguards.
If it helps: the party is an occultist, paladin, sorcerer, and a skald. Thanks kindly.
I'd give them a _chance_ to figure out someone's looking for it. Every so often, make one of the kingdom events pertain to the ongoing efforts of the bad guys to find this item. Let them hear rumors of the search efforts (initially, the PCs hear that evil groups are looking for _something_; and only with time will they discover what exactly these villains are looking for).
And maybe, the PCs will get spooked, and will search for the item themselves (to make a better effort at concealing it, or to lock it away somewhere more secure), only to have a PC-quality gang of villains ambush them and steal the item, prompting a new mini-campaign to recover it and destroy it forever!
Hope this helps. ^_^
Franklin
I really do appreciate the help. If magic wasn't such a big thing in Pathfinder, you'd be dead on. But at the levels we're getting into (10th), anyone who knows about it would have the resources to get it with minimal hassle. Waterbreathing, scrying, teleporting, disintegrating the iron around it: all options. There wouldn't be anyone seen asking around or physically searching for it.
That's the other problem: even if there were signs, they aren't keeping an eye on it. At all. Not even an alarm spell on the thing. So I don't know how they're to find out until its too late.
I guess I'm also wondering who would go after it. Nyrissa and Irovetti are both the wrong alignment. Maybe a thanadaemon? Or maybe it just sits there and becomes a background threat, the evil leeching into and affecting the land, people, and animals like a curse.
Or something goofy like a NE megalodon just showing up in the lake with it, luring whole communities into the water ... or just blasting fishermen with eye-lasers.
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Ran this almost 10 years ago and running it again. One of my gamers took me aside and said he thought his character would not be able to resist putting the eye into his own socket. He volunteered his character to become a PC to see where the story took us. Huge sacrifice.
While I wouldn't see fey searching for this (doesn't really fit their nature), FWCain's suggestion rocks. This is an epic evil artifact, and every bad guy worth their credentials will want it. You could run a simultaneous kingdom event (though by this time, it's likely become a chore) demoralizing loyalty or stability due to the talk and rumors, as well as bands of seedy bandits and various creatures hoping to make their career on this.
If the PCs can't do something about it (or won't), perhaps the item ends up in the...claws...of an entrepreneur night hag who runs her own criminal empire, dealing in artifacts and souls. Now, the fey (good or bad) are also in this game because items like this don't resonate well with them. Perhaps the PCs find some dark-fey nemesis is also working against the night hag enterprise.
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I like the WotRK tie-in, especially given the PC levels. Another possibility is that Irovetti seeks out (and eventually uses) the Oculus to strengthen his hand against the PCs and/or Nyrissa. Maybe he doesn't intend to use it, just keep it in his back pocket, but as events progress he is no longer able to resist its lure... obviously he would use illusion magic to keep others from seeing what he's done to himself.
Another idea is that the thing is so evil that it starts corrupting the land around its resting place. Which lake did they dump it in? The one that their capital (I'm guessing) sits on the banks of and uses for trade and transport? Ooops. Maybe as things escalate the Oculus starts bringing in piscodaemons, which are, after all, aquatic in nature.
Yet another idea is that Nyrissa sends some powerful fey to find and remove the Oculus, because after all the land is ultimately hers and she doesn't want that thing hanging around polluting the landscape and attracting daemons.
Or heck, use all of the ideas! The Oculus is befouling the water/land, daemons are popping up in hexes bordering the lake, and while the PCs are trying to figure out what's going on, agents of both Pitax and Thousandbreaths are competing for the thing.
Well, there are people living by the lake. Citizens, presumably, of the PCs own kingdom, which has a Spymaster and a Loyalty roll, and is perfectly capable of garnering information.
Even somebody well set up to use magic to find it is still going to make something of a visible disturbance. Presuming your Magical Thief uses some relatively low rent but effective stuff like Water Breathing and Locate Object, Farmer Bob still saw a man in a dark robe magically appear in the middle of the night from nowhere, enter the lake for 3 hours, then came back out cackling "The fools, it's mine now!".
Depending on how you want to do it, you can have low-level rumours ("You hear people are asking about the Eye, and what your PCs might have done with it"), have a theft reported in progress, have a theft simply take place as above, or have negative side effects of the eye. If one assumes that the ring/eye -wants- to be found, then a fisherman nets it up, thinks it's valuable, cracks the iron, then inserts it into his own eye.
There's an endless array of options. The question would be what do you want to accomplish with it as the GM? Merely remind the PCs it's too dangerous to be left like that? Create a new villain? Overturn the campaign entirely?
Why not take a page from the video game and have Nyrissia desperatly seeking the artefact to recover Thorn?
She had a lot of her deformed sisters searching after the Occulus and even tipped her double agent's hand in order to secure it.
In the case of your campaign, have some of Nyrissia's Nymph group use magic to locate it and then steal it, and it can return at any point you want ? Maybe it allows her huntsman to secure thorn from Irovetti? Maybe one of her sisters wears it during a fight ?
Lots of possibilities. Nyrissa isn't Neutral Evil but lets just say she's not that far from it! She coudld feasibly have it herself! (In pf1e I know I retooled her to be an eldritch theurge with animal companion, she could even use it to explode her animal companion!)
Which Lake did they drop it in? If it was Lake Silverstep then a fun idea would be to have a stray Mudman find it and when it does the artifact unintentionally bestows intelligence and malice upon it and the mudman becomes the new villain.
The Baron or Baroness Drelev are the right alignment and might accept the artifact to get revenge. The artifact has the power to summon daemons, so you could say that it managed to summon a weak one itself and then that daemon sought out someone to take up the artifact.
I wouldn't focus so much on alignment, so long as the person has the artifact it will slowly influence them to become Neutral Evil.
Bringing it back for book 4 seems to have the most resonance -- I can certainly see Stroon being the sort of wizard who might look for it and find it, or one of the priestesses of Gyrona among the Tiger Lords.