I'm prepping for the final part to the adventure this weekend, and I'm baffled by something all of a sudden...

*SPOILER*

The party at some point goes through the tunnel and comes out near the sea, where both Krijen AND Saskia are to be found. Why on earth would Saskia be there, and even more: how on earth would she be stuck on her own, sinking into the marsh?? It's got plot device written all over it, but I can't think of any good reason why she would even be there to begin with....
And according to the story, as soon as the party rescues her, there's a very good chance she's taken hostage by the dark elf?!

I did find a mention of Krijen seeing the backstabbing of Krieger by the dark elf, but no mention there of Saska. Additionally, if he followed her into the tunnel, there should be 2 missing boats, shouldn't there? Or did he just dump himself into the river in order to catch up?

Nisses said:

The ending is completely changing in my game. The game doesn't really account for the Baron telling his story about the Ring (after killing the Fenbeast) and the characters going right back to Krieger and telling him everything (oh, and they did press Saskia to tell her story too).

So Saskia never went back to town after that, for fear of being punished by Krieger. The party asked one of the hunters to take her to the Mouth of Morr, since the charaters just learned that Krieger has been interrogating the town.

But once they went to town they tried to play both sides, and didn't want to get on Krieger's bad side. So they told him everything.

Instead of the planned ending, its going like this:

-The players, Krieger, Voluria, Seth, and a couple of Krieger's Zealots have all set out to go to the Mouth of Morr to get the Hermit and Saskia

- I did not do the battle with the beast at the large pool

-They went on to the cave and found the Hermit and Saskia are both gone, and a boat is missing. They assume they took the boat into the Mouth of Morr. I have two more boats available there and they decide to follow

I am still trying to decide where I am going to take it from there, several ideas I am kicking around:

- The witch followed the party back to town, and then followed Saskia to the cave. So he was with her when they went into the Mouth of Morr.

- At some point, Volura needs to betray the party, not sure when I will spring it

- I thought it may be cool to have the smugglers at the other end, and there is an encounter with them. But then the smugglers help against the dark elves.

I think you have to "hold that outcome" (the three of them there) lightly but still it is a great set-up, complicate the who to believe or even just take side and fight with the threat to Saskia in meantime.

I played Saskia as having a big sister/maternal attitude to Krijn and she was with him and the scene worked out fine when I played it.

Interpersonal relationships and attitudes are a big part of what's going in the fishy town of Fauligmere, it's all very gothic and a mire sucking down an innocent fits nicely.

Rob

Seems I worried for nothing.

The party skipped right over that part, and instead focused directly on why Krijen & her didn't come to them for help as soon as possible.

I did figure sort of a nice gimmic-mechanic when they were rowing through the tunnel that had the party rolling a lot of dice for once.
Nothing something that happens that often, so they were able to catch up on some rolling-glee

In short, each side of the boat rolled an easy strength check for progress made, but the difference in # of successes made the boat veer off.
1 person could make navigation/steer checks to try and keep them on course, but as it got darker & darker, this got harder & harder. She was racking up a good amount of stress near the end. Each time the boat slammed into the tunnel sides, the hull deteriorated. Especially the dwarf was starting to eye the fast streaming water nervously by the time the scout managed to spot the end of the tunnel.

Have to say I was surprised to see how fragile the witch elf turned out to be (then again, our Dwarf did get fairly lucky).

in my group the whole adventure turned out totally different then planned. i have a rather large group of around 6 players per session, 2 of them are fatatic/zealot.

one is a roadwarden working to become a witchhunter and the second is a zealot trying to get to the prophet of doom career. so they practically told krieger anything he wanted to know, whilst the others ran off to tell all the people the other 2 accused to get out of town as fast as possible

in the end they were favoured by both, the zealots and the common folk. so they had a hard time to decide on which side to stand when the brawl started.

somehow they told the zealots into fighting against krieger's men, because they attacked the townsfolk openly.

then, when it came to the part with saskia being there at the beach for no apparent reason, they didnt care about her at all. all the zealots wanted to do was kill the witch and all the others wanted to do was save him. they haden't even figured out until that that voluria was a darkelf, since they saw her as an totally unimportant side npc all the time, no matter what i tried. and until the end they were looking for that treausre...hilarious.

they figured out to collapse the tunnel by setting explosives, the dwarf was pretty good at that. so they sealed the way to the reikland, but are totally unaware of that the elves came because voluria called them there. so i think i will get those in my next adventure.

for now we started playing the gathering storm campaign with another gm, so i have plenty of time for the elves to discover a side tunnel or another way through the marshes....hehe

always funny how differently these adventures turn out in the end