I had mentioned it in the title, but SPOILERS FOR BOOK 4 OF AGENTS OF EDGEWATCH. Okay? Okay.
In Assault on Hunting Lodge Seven, the Agents infiltrate the Noxious Retort, delve into the poison temple, fight through venomous fiends and monsters all to arrest Jonis Flakfatter, the Infector, for the (attempted?) poisoning at the Irorium. Jonis, a clever man and member of the Twilight Four, surrenders to the Agents custody knowing his hired protectors will come to rescue him from wherever the Agents hold the poisoner.
Except this is all assuming that the Agents take him alive in the first place. I'm fairly certain my players won't care about Jonis being taken into custody, even if the poisonous priest doesn't fight them, and understandably so. Jonis is a devious, unrepentantly evil, murderer (and in my game a huge part of the drug trade) who orchestrated a terrorist attack all to appease Norgorber. Why on earth would the Agents care about taking him alive, beyond questioning him for information or an ironclad sense of justice and proper law enforcement?
In my view, the assumption that the players take Jonis alive leads to some fun and interesting gameplay, but its also a huge assumption on what the players will do. So what does a GM do if the players kill Jonis?
My idea would be to keep chapter 2 basically the same, but the attackers coming after the PC's are out for revenge and/or seeking Blackfingers' favor by taking the Agents down. To protect the Agents, they're brought to Gevrin Manor as a safehouse to hide out in until the legal/social ramifications of the Agents extra-judicial killing of a citizen/high priest (Norgorberite or not) is sorted out. All of the alchemists, poison priests, venom mages, clockworks, etc. can assault the hunting lodge as scripted with minimal tweaks. This also gives the GM time to show how the Rumormonger is turning the populace against the Agents and guard, each issue of the Eyes on Absalom "asking questions everyone is thinking" about the Agents activities. Sure, taking out a serial killer and murder cultists is all good, but Jonis was a semi-respected member of the community who ran an (ostensibly) gentle temple of Blackfingers. Its hard to hate the alchemy temple when they provide medicines and Elixirs of Life to the general populace.
If the agents murder a prime suspect, they should be fired and arrested as any other murderer. Especially considering their special training to even use things like poison non-lethally.
Like the whole point of part 2 is that so many different interests want custody of Flakfatter for punishment of his various crimes, those same interests in the upper watch would be very displeased if Flakfatter died.
It could lead to some sort of interesting evil adventure where the party tries to subvert the Twilight Four and take the city for themselves after committing such a lawless act, but doing this goes pretty far beyond the adventure's premise of playing just officers. Putting the party on leave while his death is investigated and having the rest of the events of the book take place with different motivations is probably about as good as you'd get to try and recover from this.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Sets up Book 5 perfectly as the Agents are now criminals for murdering a criminal that surrendered to their custody. I'd just do like you said and have assassins try to kill them in the Hunting Lodge Assault. Then move to the next chapter and run it normally. Your players pretty much handed you a crime to convict them of for Book 5. So your Book 5 hook is set.