Thread by @hexcrawl

We've reached the essential Must Have Encounter(TM) for the adventure to continue... but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

First, the PCs see a bunch of cultists fighting with each other and they MUST jump in to save one of them.

Obviously: What if they don't?

Continuing the thread from yesterday if you want to catch up.

https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1233482126160474112

If the PCs decide to just wait and let the cultists wear each other down, the NPC they absolutely have to talk to will almost certainly die.

If the PCs decide to help the OTHER guy (they have no reason to know which one they're "supposed" to be helping), the NPC will also die.

Second, if they save the NPC the first thing he will say is: "I am the serial killer you've been looking for."

Odds the PCs will now kill him without further ado? Pretty high in my experience.

Third, having just confessed to being the serial killer the PCs are here to kill, the NPC will now say, "Hey, can you help me take revenge on the people who tried to kill me?"

(I am not making this up.)

Fourth, remember that the PCs have been pressganged into a very simple job: Destroy the Dead Three cult.

So the last thing this NPC who's supposed to be pointing to the next part of this adventure says is: "You're all done! This adventure is 100% complete!"

Something else happens in this encounter. The NPC just flat out states the premise of the scenario: "If [my mom] gets her way, Baldur's Gate wills hare Elturel's fate and get dragged down into the Nine Hells."

This is the first time the PCs will be able to learn this, so...

...they're going to have some questions. The GM will also have questions (like, how does this NPC know this but his brothers don't, even though his brothers are explicitly more trusted by their mother? how much does he actually know?), but the adventure isn't going to be helpful.

What I'm more interested in is the pacing of major revelations in your campaign: This isn't how you do it. Don't just dump the entire solution to a major mystery into the PCs' lap as an offhand comment in an unrelated conversation.

I recently talked about how you can actually sow a lot more confusion around this central question of, "What happened to Elturel?" at the beginning of the campaign.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4416…

Even if you don't do that, there are still five basic phases to this mystery as presented in the module:

1. Elturel was destroyed
2. Elturel was destroyed by devils
3. High Observer Kreeg is still alive!
4. Kreeg is responsible!
5. Elturel was actually taken to the Nine Hells

This conversation short-circuits this entire process of discovery, jumping straight to the end.

And everything else is equally dysfunctional.

For example, instead of the PCs discovering that Kreeg is still alive (shocking twist!), a random NPC they've never met before walks up to them in the street and tells them.

There's an puzzle box that the PCs take to Candlekeep to have opened. And when they do, they find inside the infernal contract Kreeg signed that doomed Elturel...

...except the person who tells them to go to Candlekeep and do that literally tells them that's what's in the box.

So there's this big, cool mystery that the entire campaign is framed around. But the campaign constantly undercuts the revelation of that mystery and ferociously deprotagonizes the PCs while they "investigate" it.

Okay, so the serial killer tells the PCs what they're supposed to do next: Kidnap his brother so that they can use him as leverage while negotiating with his mother.

But negotiating with his mother to do... what?

The adventure doesn't seem to know. And promptly forgets the entire idea except to briefly tell you that it definitely won't work.

(I'm not making this up.)

The failure of the scheme doesn't bother me. ("Go ahead and kill him, I don't care," is a perfectly legitimate moment and builds pretty consistently from her known relationship with her kids.)

What bothers me is that there doesn't seem to BE a scheme.

The PCs are told to do a thing, but are given no coherent reason for doing it.

If you're going to put your players on a railroad, at least do them the courtesy of making sure the engine is in good repair.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/3690…

Anyway, once the adventure forgets about the whole negotiation hook, it presents another dungeon crawl where the goal is for the PCs to find two different McGuffins they don't know they need + the NPC who will tell them they need to take the McGuffins to Candlekeep.

Good news! If they return to the quest giver without finding the objects they don't know they need, they'll find the ? is still silver and the quest giver will tell them that they need to do "a more thorough search of the Vanthampur estate."

(Actual quote.)

If they're still fucking it up, the GM is instructed to have an NPC take them by the hand, lead them to the items, and repeatedly say, "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!" until they do it.

(Not an actual quote.)

(But that is what the adventure tells the GM to do.)

Once they have the items, the question mark will turn gold and they will be able to proceed to the next cut scene.

I apologize if I am getting overly snarky at this point.

This discussion continues over here.

https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1234491959609303041