Emirikol Session III recap

 Here we really see the advantage of having seeded and built out the setting from the adventures – was able to seamlessly move from the conceptual data in Last of the Iron House (the actor pretending to be the high ranking cleric who worked against pirates) to the Lurkers in the Library to the tunnel complex of Last of the Iron House to the warehouse sequence that I just made up on the spot as the PCs chose which threads to pursue inside the city. And at the same time drop some information that slowly advances the mystery of Hightower Tor from A Dark and Stormy Knight. 

Because actions have consequences that they didn’t decide to bend all their energies to chasing Reme after the ambush he was able to follow through on his plan to kill the Cardinal of the West and frame Sebastian for it, entirely “off screen” because there was no possible mechanism for getting the PCs involved. They only learned about it the same time everyone else did, with the morning broadsheets. Their not spending the day tracking down more on Hightower Tor just left that thread sitting fallow as Alejandro is still searching for the book that didn’t turn up in the delve and there’s no reason for the PCs to know about that either. 

What they did do was earn a TON of credit with the library and the Loremasters, and if they didn’t stop the full extent of Reme’s actions they uncovered in advance what the outlines of the plan were, which will help them going forward. Again, the trick is to have lots of possible things happening that may or may not advance if ignored, and the PCs can follow up on them or not. After the fact it will look like a coherent narrative but it’s not cutting into the players agency at any point. 

The introduction of Hero Points did exactly what I wanted: the PCs could magnanimously hand over the lesser magic items to the Paladin Order for the Hero Points that they spend later in the game just as if they had sold them and then bought potions of stealth or climbing. It removed so much of the economic bookkeeping from play and got me the feel I wanted for this sort of campaign. 

Jim, Melas’ player, wasn’t able to make this session or the next one, so we instead did a PBEM sequence over the two months to track what he was up to. This nicely advances both his family machinations and the pirate/hag plotlines. The next 6 weeks of blog posts are that PBEM before we get back to session 4 (which Jim/Melas is also not present for).