Spoiler alert: Anyone who is playing as a PC in the In the Palace of the Emerald Champion adventure should not read any further.
I'm a greenhorn GM just now reaching the investigation phase, at the castle, of Satsume's death. (The PCs arrived at the castle at the end of our last session, after their approximately 8-day journey to get there, which went pretty well, in my opinion. But this particular transition point is entirely a horse of a different color..) I'm hoping someone might be willing to share "best practices", or ideas or a process that worked well from a GM perspective. I remain a bit vague as to how I'm going to go about running the PC's investigations. And after reading the conclusion of the adventure, I now see that there isn't even necessarily a black and white resolution to it that has been scripted, which doesn't really help, at least in my case. I had expected the adventure to be less open ended, so I'm concerned about exactly how I'm going to run the investigation side with relatively little to work with, if that makes any sense.. Do you just make stuff up?
And it's not that there's nothing to work with, of course. But how did you go about pushing the investigation forward? What process might you have used to reveal necessary information to the PCs? How many sessions did you play once the adventure arrived at the castle phase? Any thoughts or ideas are welcome, as I'm feeling kind of short in that department at the moment. Thanks for any help!