This poor scenario hasn't received a lot of love.
Time for that to change. We actually began this scenario at the end of our last session, after the conclusion of the events in Poison. Unfortunately, I decided not to prepare as much for this adventure since it seemed relatively straightforward in comparison with the others, and the introduction of this adventure was somewhat rushed because I wanted us to get started in our remaining time in the session. As such, it didn't go as well as the others, but maybe my experience will help future GLs think about how to do it better.
The party, accompanied by Jearon the Varigal on their way back to Reizh, stopped to rest at the village of Dearg. They had been there once while gathering supplies during the Poison adventure, but I reiterated some of the description about the town, and they now had a bit more time to explore the locale. They were especially fond of the curiosities shop owned by Zaig, but unfortunately they weren't able to find anything they wanted (the players kept asking for rare or exceptional items, so I had them make difficult Luck rolls, which they kept rolling very poorly on). Saeth the occultist spent most of his time looking at rare books at the shop, the Temple faithful hung out with Firmin the monk, etc.
We fast forwarded to the next morning, when I told the players that they weren't able to find Saeth. I then described Saeth finding himself nearly dead along the coast of the lake with a dead body. He decided to hide the body as well as he could nearby and then return to town. I told him very precisely that he had no recollection of events past the previous evening.
When he returned, the party found him and tried to get some answers. Father Harn was able to miraculously heal some of Saeth's wounds, but the sight of a bloody, wounded man straggling into town caused a bit of a stir and caught the attention of a local militiaman, who was also on the lookout for Herven, who had gone missing. He insisted that Saeth go in front of the council and give a report.
At the council meeting (and trust me, the players are pretty sick of council meetings by this point
) I introduced some of the big players in town, including Meog Elarig. A few of the townsfolk in attendance accused the monk Firmin or Feondas, which actually caused some nice uncertainty in the player of the Temple priest. Since Saeth was a son of the Mac Lyr family, the council agreed to give him three days to prove his innocence before he was formally brought to trial (which, of course, they would have agreed to anyway, since it is the crux of the adventure, but the PC's status gave me a good way to add additional narration).
We hold our sessions at the home of two of the players, who are a married couple. The husband was clearly ready for the game to wrap up and asked if we could call it a night soon, so I planned on ending at the end of the next scene, "A Suspicious Rendezvous." However, the wife wanted the PCs to go back and investigate the body by the lake. I figured, "Okay, this should just take a minute and then we can continue." Actually, she asked a laundry list of very precise questions, like, "What kind of scratch marks are on the body?" "Do I detect any chemical smell around his mouth or nose?" "Is there any blood or skin under his fingernails, like he was fighting?" When I realized that the scene was dragging on too long, I said "You can't figure anything else out from studying the body right now" and suggested that they take the body back to town for the Demorthen to investigate.
By the time the PCs got back to town, I declared that night was falling and that they should wait until morning to continue investigating. The players all narrated their PCs lodging up for the night, with the paranoid Saeth barricading himself in his room at the inn.
I told Ned, who is the only one with points in Perception or Stealth, that while walking to the inn at night he overheard a suspicion conversation. Fortunately, he succeeded on the Perception roll and eavesdropped on a Varigal speaking with Alban Elarig, who I then introduced. I said that Alban left through the far end of the alley while the Varigal passed by Ned, who unfortunately did not stop to question the Varigal. I'll have to have the Varigal show up again next session to give a further clue.
On that note, we called it a night. We'll begin Act II and, with any luck, finish the scenario this week.
Notes:
-I think that I should have had the PCs stay in the town at least another day or two before launching into the adventure. Since they had only been there for an evening beforehand, the players kept asking, "What did I see last night? What was so-and-so doing then?" Having them stay for a few days would increase the mystery of not knowing who was doing what and when.
-Likely due to a mixture of lack of preparation and a rushed narration, I didn't give a lot of "color" to the town and its inhabitants. At the start of the next session, I'll probably make a point of giving a more detailed description of the town and recap of events and the people that they've met, since it's been a couple of weeks since we played.
