Fuzzybear
Explorer
Episode 13 - Burning Questions
First things first, I know it has been a while. I can only say sorry. I've been keeping up with the remastered episodes as they come out, but we haven't been putting them out much recently. A combination of holidays, too much effort for reward, and real life have contributed to these episodes just not being done as often.Second - there was some discourse that happened off screen between episodes 12 and 13. We did this earlier on in the campaign when we weren't thinking so much about how our recordings would be released and more using them for ourselves. In this case, they split into 2 groups, Rayland and Winry in one, Myetharia with Jack and Bryn in the other. The first group started investigating the bridge building while the later went into the ruins of the elven town. After a bit of exploration, including Jack finding the sylvan necklace and Rayland ceding the lockpicking to Winry, they met back up on this hilltop shrine where they were ambushed, starting off the episode. I tried to give something of a recap before to keep people up to date, but we felt bad and stopped doing this after talking about it.
The combat itself was never going to be threatening and the dice rolls didn't help really. What was fun was giving Torrent a bit of purpose. I was hoping that Bryn was going to cast Turn Undead and have that moment, but when she didn't I really wanted to make sure that the shrine was opened up. This gave Torrent an important action to perform if Bryn didn't take care of things on her turn. By stepping up and turning the enemies, she cracks open the shrine in order to get the group inside. I did give the enemies a little bit of a pity, but I didn't want to dwell on their backstories unless it was required. The whole eating children thing felt gratuitous to really revel in much.
After mopping up the enemies, Rayland heads inside with Winry in tow. The gag continues with Winry spooking Rayland by following him when he is not expecting it. This was one of our groups favorite gags for a long time. Inside they find Bhurisrava's dead body, a Shahalesti soldier in stasis, a statue of Anyariel, along with what appears to be a stolen item. They spend a lot of time both here and in the future trying to piece together what happened here with many wild theories and really danced around the truth as much as they could. In the end they do figure things out, but it takes a number of episodes before getting all the information required.
I decided to make Diashan a former acquaintance of Myetharia back from before all of these events. It helped to connect her to her own fate, since she is currently bound to the fires of the forest, and make it more clear the importance to resolve the issues here successfully. I decided to give the shrine some ability to keep him relatively safe so that they could get the information out of him without it being a death sentence.
The party then heads back to the bridge and decides to break into the building after all. I made a small change to the "riddle" as my players would know the speak friend bit from Lord of the Rings. I did something similar, but wanted to change it up just a little bit. Instead of making it verbal, I decided to make it where anyone touching the doorknob, knocking, etc. would trigger the trap while anyone just pushing the door would open it simply. It was really just an overthinking trap which was fun. Investigating the rest of the tower, they start to get a history of Bhurisrava from the journal as well as finding the pouch of dream seeds. The group decides to settle in at this tower to decide which direction they should go when we end the session.
This brings me to one thing that I think is a bit of an oversight in the 5e conversion. There is a lot of discussion in this adventure about dispel magic uses and such, but there is no way for a PC to have the spell at the levels for the adventure path. I don't know if this is different from 3.5 when it was first written, and I know this would be different than 4e where it wouldn't be a "spell" per say but a ritual, but I do think it is fairly story useful. I decided to give the chance to recover a wand at the start of the adventure and Jack ended up getting it with mage hand in episode 11. This is the first time that it is really meaningful. I don't know if this is required per say, but I will say that I think it was impactful in getting all the story details out to the players more on their terms. I'm curious how everyone else went through this or if they had some other way of getting dispel magic to the players early.
Next time, a devil of a deal is proposed!