So, I run kind of an open-ended style of home game, where I come up with some loose plot ideas/encounters, and then fill out the ones that my players go for. In this way, the group has bounced between Vidrian (where they learned of some political machinations by Mzali to weaken the area and drum up anti-foreigner sentiment, and pushed back an undead attack, then got themselves in political trouble for mistreatment of a prisoner), to Absalom (where they dealt with a minor noble air genie who was holding Absalom's shipping for ransom by forcing air elementals to stop winds around the island), and back to Vidrian. In between, they've dealt with a classic murder mystery (old woman dies, which one of her potential heirs did it? Where's the revised will?), rescuing a Chelaxian noble kid before his Paladin-in-training girlfriend could get herself into a world of trouble doing so herself, and they also met a sea dragon who now considers them his vassals, though they haven't checked in in a while.
So anyway, when they got back to Vidrian, Anthusis was in an economic downturn. Tons of unemployment, low wages, little food...they investigated, and discovered that an Alchemist with an awful lot of funding/backing was using alchemical golems to poison the farmland of Vidrian to cause a famine. As a side effect of this, evil Fey were being drawn to the area and causing additional chaos, and poverty was driving many people to banditry. They spent some time chasing this Alchemist around, destroying his golems, and a small mobile lab he had on a riverboat, but the Wizard's reliance on Scrying, even after the alchemist saved well enough to know he was being watched bit them after he set up an ambush for them in an Anthusis warehouse, collapsing it onto them. This is probably too much detail.
Long story short, they eventually tracked down his benefactor, an Aspis (though they haven't confirmed this) agent who is intentionally tanking the local economy to make it easier for them to take over. They responded by taking a week of downtime to spread rumors that she and her shell companies (they only knew of one) were responsible for the famine. A week later, they found the burn-out shell of a merchant wagon belonging to one of her companies, and a lot of anti-outsider propaganda (recall, they never fully rooted out the Mzali agitators the first time they were in Vidrian).
Now, one of the story threads they left behind from last year was a locked door in a temple that was marked "do not open, a great evil has been sealed here". They decided (at the Wizard's urging) to basically bail on the town (reasoning that they could only make it worse) and go explore that temple instead.
How badly screwed could Vidrian be when they return? Full Mzali-friendly coup in effect? Open uprising in the streets? Pogroms against foreigners? I'm open to ideas.
It's hard to be "Mzali-friendly" when they have such a strong death cult. Don't forget that there are anti-Mzali rebels, Bright Lions, who could oppose anything Mzali and the child emperor cooks up. Maybe the "great evil" ends up opposing the Mzalis too, just because they're both evil doesn't mean they're going to like each other.
Sounds like you have a lot of irons in the fire. Some of those irons should be directed at the PCs, nudging them into action.
Is Mzali's death cult well known, though? Walkena is described as having a good public image in general, though the country is known for being opposed to outsiders, an having terrible punishments for any legal infractions. I sort of pictured him as the smiling dictator type, rather than a Frieza type of tyrant that everyone hates.
The group has met a Bright Lion (though I doubt they remember), an older refugee living in Anthusis. This was during their first trip to the region, when they were investigating a string of murders that they tied back to a Mzali-backed cult.
The way I figure it, the PCs spreading those (true) rumors was the perfect opportunity for the remnants of that cult to get what they wanted: destabilization of the Vidrian government and more people open to their ideology. Draw in new people with anti-outsider rhetoric, and maybe they won't mind the necromancy so much. I don't think the Bright Lions have much of a presence outside of Mzali (where they're fighting as an underground group against Walkena), so while I'd love to see the PC's reach out to them, I don't think they could plausibly save the PCs here.
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One thought, if you don't want to to collapse *utterly*, is to figure that, hey, They're not going to be the only adventurer party in all of Vidrian, and other groups might also occasionally fix things.
If you're doing this because you want to make your players feel bad for not solving absolutely everything, though... well, do you want the campaign to be a place here the PCs are the only thing saving the world from collapse, and they can't afford to miss any problem ever because if they don't fix it no one will? That sounds kind of like what you're building up to. So maybe instead they come back to some *other* adventurer party being hailed as heroes of the city for exposing and thwarting the terrible Mzali plot, and possibly talking about the PCs in somewhat dismissive ways.
Other than that... well, it's oging to kind of depend. How long are they going to be away from the city? How much happens is really very dependent on how much time passes.
One thought, if you don't want to to collapse *utterly*, is to figure that, hey, They're not going to be the only adventurer party in all of Vidrian, and other groups might also occasionally fix things.
Yes, this is one of the things I was thinking of. I don't like the players to feel like they're the only important people in the world; on the other hand, I *do* want them to feel like their choices are important, and if they abandon a problem, it's not going to wait for them to come back before it progresses. I was thinking that another group of adventurers might swoop in and save the day while they're dungeon crawling, and they return to find that group enjoying the accolades that could have been their's.
Of course, they left on the eve of a large riot, so I imagine things will still be something of a mess when they return, unless they take several days to get back.
Another idea is splitting the difference, and having a group of heroes from Mzali save Anthusis, bringing Vidrian closer to being under the influence of Walkena and Mzali. The PCs wouldn't be able to just oppose them directly, because the Mzali interlopers are the *heroes*.
So, it turns out I may have been worried about nothing: there's a chance they won't survive to return to the city. The dungeon they're in is a small one, and I even let them get a full night's rest before going on to the boss, but he (a Sepid Div, CR 14 vs 4 11th level PCs, should have been a reasonable challenge) critted the living hell out of them. Only the Wizard is still up, and he's in an awful lot of trouble.
And to think, I drew up a rival party for them to meet back in the City for nothing:
- An adorable cactus Leshy monk
- A secretly evil Wizard from Mzali who rallied these heroes as part of a propaganda campaign
- A disguised Dullahan who acts as the group's front line, and the Wizard's personal bodyguard
- A marooned pirate captain who washed ashore in the city after a wreck
- A Dhampir Cleric of Abadar from Ustalav
- An Assassin that I didn't come up with an interesting hook for yet.
Basically, the idea is that six heroes saved the city, half of them are evil and doing it for bad reasons, the other half is unaware that they're adventuring with villains. It would have been a fun time, either with the PCs trying to convince the neutral/good members of the group that they're on the wrong side, or starting a big fight (or both). We'll have to see if I can find a plausible way for them to survive this Div.
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+3 is, like, reasonably-the-end-boss-of-the-campaign territory, and I can see it getting especially bad with bad luck, an unfavorable match-up or an undervalued creature. I don't have ideas for resolving that, unfortunately...just letting you know that a +3 creature is a little more than a reasonable challenge.
It’s an entirely optional encounter - they went down there assuming there was treasure, and +3 is pretty average for any dungeon boss. +4 is “extreme”.
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I think a lot of the concern around level +3 encounters is generated from a lot of gameplay being at low levels. At level 11, it doesn't seem unreasonable to be using level +3 encounters as bosses for a dungeon (especially optional ones), so long as it's telegraphed heavily and its strength emphasised narratively. That being said, even at 11th level, level + 3 encounters are only a few bad dice rolls away from a really bad situation (like this one shows). Do you have any thoughts for what you'll do if the wizard goes down? The div doesn't seem the type to really take prisoners, unless they have some way they can get the PCs to cause amounts of violence. If the creature has some way to know about the Vidrian situation, that could be an interesting way to play it.
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Yeah basically severe soloboss is hard fight regardless of levels, but it is more reasonable at higher levels. But yeah, severe basically means "there is good chance of pc going down during the fight".
Pretty much up to you what you want to do. Maybe sepid takes them as prisoners to later sacrifice them, maybe they want to manipulate pcs somehow, maybe they just kill them and raise them as undead, maybe someone else comes to interrupt the fight.