I'm getting ready to run Damned Cities. After the events of House of Dust and Ash and Tattered Fates, I'm afraid the players will insist on ripping the tower apart as soon as they hear the name "Haarlock's Folly". Any attempt by the Arbitrators to stop them will, of course, make them more suspicious and unlikely to be interested in investigating the murders.

Has anyone run into a similar problem with this adventure?

There's a remarkably simple way to avoid that problem. Simply don't reveal the name of the tower to the Acolytes or maybe change the name entirely. I agree that the name is a giveaway, but it is a problem easily mended.

numb3rc said:

I had some issues with this, in retrospect I would have simply called it The Folly.

Or something else entirely.

I had considered doing just that, but it kind of puts a damper on the whole "Marr commands you to get information on Haarlock . . . no excuses" angle that I was going to use to con my extremely puritanical acolytes in to making deals with warp entities.

I'm thinking about moving the precinct house to another location. When the players investigate the Folly they find it empty, but with evidence of recent entry and the removal of large objects. Any thoughts?

I would advise to leave the Folly where it is and instead give them a red herring inside theFolly

For example, you could place a room in the basement where Haarlock actually summoned the Mirror-Daemon and forged the Mirror. Psyker players coudl get glimpses on what was done through Psyniscience (if the nature of the Folly does not disrupt this outright). Perhaps the feint shadow of scratches that would make a summoning circle can be spotted with a good search test (the ritual involved nails wrought of cold iron which need to be hammered into the ground at certain fix points of the now long faded, blood-drawn summoning circle).

Allow the player to find such a point in the basement, let them get said info and stretch the fact that the daemon was summoned a long-long while ago.

The players will thereby be encouraged to think that all the strange effects of the Folly are a result of a massive summoning (and not some cheap plot device to keep a psyker to solve the murder mystery ahead of time!) and might perceive the Folly as the "point of initial clue giving". If this works out, the players will not pay further attention to the Folly further since it it just the "starting point" of their investigation into the daemonic.

Last but not least, add other Haarlock Holding to the city. Do not overdue this. Record might show that it used to be 13 (tam-tam-TAMM!) holdings, but a whole lot of them were torn down. Give some of them something spooky but unhelpfull or even distracting. Or just stick with what I mentioned above, this might work very well since "more Haarlock" will be more distraction from the real mechanics.

In another topic I suggested to run Damned Cities before Tattered Fates. DC is really the odd one out in the entire Haarlock trilogy. It really in essence has preciously little to do with the whole Haarlock storyline.

I would definitely change the name of the tower. Let the players find out during the adventure that the tower's nickname is Haarlock's Folly or something. I agree that if they know beforehand, they will zoom in on it almost exclusively.

The Laughing God said:

It is not only the name, me guesses. You know, if a thief sees a chest with a REALLY big lock on it, no-one need to tell him this is valuable. He knows it cause somebody took a lot of effort with this lock.

The Tower (no matter how you call it) is strange. It has all this "inert anti-psy" with no apparant explanation. This is because the game designers wanted to protect the npc that are encountered there from being psy-spoofed. By doing this, their the game designers dangled a huuuuuge lock before the eyes of our thief-minded players.

Unless they get some explanation (or hint or idea) for why this place is so freaked up, they will see a mystery and will try to solve it. Of course, the Haarlock Name makes it worth.


Perhaps it is better to send the pc to investigate the history of the tower as the "mission"...and the other stuff "happens" while they are their and the local council of rulers ask them to investigate.

this way round, they could have learned about the mirror and the shards long-long before the killing comes to their notice. And as they learn about shards then they might disregard the Tower as "set up" since it was where "the mirror" was stolen.. and begin hunting for the mirror shards.

In retrospect I agree that I would have been better off starting the campaign with this adventure. After giving it some thought I think I'm going to stick with the set-up as written. Over the course of the campaign I've emphasized the importance of building a solid case before moving against other Imperial authorities, so that should keep them from attacking the Arbitrators on suspicion alone. I'll just have to keep the pace of events moving quickly so they don't have time to get into any mischief.

Interesting. I simply erased the word "Haarlock" from the handout, and will try to bluff my players that it was a typo there. They will however know that the world was visited by Haarlock in the past, and should remember it from Tattered Fates star map, where it (along with Solomon, Quadis etc.) was marked as connected to the Haarlock dynasty.

But I have yet to read in detail about the Folly, and the idea about the signs of summoning could be interpreted as relevant (but dated) information, and keep my acolytes happy for now so they will investigate the murders etc. Not that I have a doubt that they will attempt to investigate the murders, but I don't want to risk them finding the culprit before they do so.

On another account, the players have complained a bit about these kinds of adventures because they feel they have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. Sure, they "win", but only because the modules are scripted so that no matter what the acolytes will face the BBEG and save the day in the end (Tattered Fates, HoD&A). For instance, the latter adventure they finished recently and came out with lots of stuff and kills, but they are clueless to what it was all about, and the identities of many attending. I hope they will have a decent chance to find out some more behind the scenes info in this adventure