SESSION 36C: HUNTING THE HUNTERS

January 24th, 2009
The 19th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

CATCHING THE HUNTER’S SCENT

While the others had gone to Mahdoth’s and the Hammersong Vaults, Elestra had been walking the streets of Oldtown. Two stories were competing among the newssheets, the rumor-mongers, and the tavern-hangers. Headlines proclaiming “Blood in the Bathhouse” and the like led stories relating to the events in the Row Bathhouse, while “Vile Rites Performed in Oldtown” spoke of what the City Watch had discovered in the Oldtown apartment complex used by the cultists.

Their involvement in both affairs were not the subject of wagging tongues, but there were other whispers circling through the city: People were asking all over town for “Laurea” (the pseudonym Tee had used with the cultists).

It was nearing the time when they would need to refresh the alarm they had placed on the door in the Banewarrens. Ranthir volunteered to do so and remain behind, freeing Elestra to return to the Ghostly Minstrel with the others.

On the way, they returned the golden key to Tee’s vault and stopped by the Temple of Asche to relieve the en it had placed on her soul. When they reached  Delver’s Square, Tee let the others head into the inn ahead of her while she went down into the Undermarket to check in with the Delver’s Guild. There she found waiting for her a message to “Laurea” from the cultists:

YOUR PAYMENT WILL BE IN KIND.

Grimacing, Tee went to join the others in Ghostly Minstrel. But even there they discovered that Iltumar had been asking around the common room earlier that day for “Laurea”.

“Oh, Iltumar…” Tee murmured.

HUNTING THE HUNTERS

They needed to deal with this before it got out of hand. The good news, at least, was that Tee’s true identity hadn’t been discovered. At least not yet. But they feared it was only a matter of time. “They’ve got descriptions for all of us,” as Elestra put it.

They headed back up to Oldtown and gathered Ranthir from the Nibeck Street mansion. From there they retraced Elestra’s steps, rapidly tracking the query-laden trail of the cultists who had been asking after “Laurea”.

They caught up with them in the Boiling Pot, a small tavern in the southern end of Oldtown. There were five of the cultists – easily picked out from the crowd by their prominent tattoos depicting black hands. Each also appeared to be marked by some horrible deformity or mutation. They were scattered throughout the crowd, asking their questions.

Tor and Tee, having barely stepped through the door, turned to look at each other – forming a plan of action in less than a glance. They split off from the others (who were left somewhat confused near the door). Tor headed into the crowd, quietly warning people that they should leave. Tee, meanwhile, palmed a dagger and headed towards a cultist who was draped over the bar, favoring a hideously twisted arm.

Tee tried to strike up a conversation with the cultist at the bar, trying to get some sense of whether the cultists were still asking after “Laurea” or if they had some inkling that it was a false identity.

Tor’s ministrations, however, didn’t go unnoticed. One of the cultists, seeing what he was doing, started crossing the tavern towards him. As the cultist’s hand landed on Tor’s shoulder, however, Tee sprung into her action – her palmed dagger easily gutted the cultist in front of her.

Confusion instantly exploded from one side of the tavern to the other. Two more cultists rushed her from either side, but Tee slit the throat of one while drawing her rapier to run the other through.

Tor meanwhile had drawn his own blade with preternatural speed and leveled it at the throat of the cultist who had approached him (taking advantage of the confusion Tee had created on the other side of the room). “Yield.”

The cultist went for his sword and Tor cut open his throat. The last cultist came running up behind him and was almost instantly cut him down as well.

The entire blood-soaking confrontation had taken only seconds.

Tor turned to face the remaining patrons, who were mostly frozen in shock. “Sorry about that. We were hoping to get you out of here before what needed to happen happened.”

The bartender was incensed. “Who’s going to clean up all this blood?!”

Tee dropped ten gold pieces onto the bar.

The bartender immediately scooped them up. “I’m going to clean up this blood… Now if you wouldn’t mind leaving before the watch shows up.”

Tee quickly had Ranthir write a note (using his great skill with pen and ink to scribe it in a different hand):

PAYMENT NOT NECESSARY.

Using a common dagger, she fastened it crudely to one of the dead cultist thugs.

Running the Campaign: Group Chemistry – Campaign Journal: Session 36D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

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As described in Part 4B, you have everything you need for the PCs to penetrate to the heart of the Kraken Society conspiracy and rescue King Hekaton.

But what if you want to take this even farther?

Here are some options. You can easily use one, some, all, or none of them.

OPTION #1: ADD A STORM GIANT THREAT

The storm giants know that King Hekaton and Queen Neri were meeting with representatives of the Lords Alliance and the Open Lord of Waterdeep, and they assume that the small-folk are guilty of murdering the queen and kidnapping the king. Isn’t it possible that, with or without Serissa condoning the action, the storm giants might be making retaliatory strikes on the coast and/or coastal shipping?

You can easily add this element to the adventure, adding aggressive attacks by the storm giants that mirror those from the other giant factions, and creating a new vector for the PCs to learn about Hekaton’s disappearance and/or get pulled into the politics of Maelstrom.

(The potential drawback to this option is that it removes the contrast between the storm giants — who have simply gone radio silent under the waves while their former subjects run wild — and the other giant factions.)

OPTION #2: THREE CITY HOOKS

To remove the element of random chance from the PCs getting pulled into the Kraken Society investigation, add explicit hooks from each of the Three Cities pointing to the Uninvolved nodes. (These connections do not have to be direct, of course, or even terminate with the Kraken Society. You just need quest lines that intersect with the Kraken Society nodes.)

Alternatively, you can have missions given to the PCs by any factions they choose to join to point them to these nodes.

OPTION #3: EXPAND THE KRAKEN SOCIETY

To expand the Kraken Society’s presence in the campaign, add more Uninvolved nodes throughout the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier. You can do this by just flipping through Storm King’s Thunder, picking a location from the gazetteer, and then brainstorming ways that krakenar agents could be trying to infiltrate that location.

As with the extant Uninvolved nodes, include clues in these nodes pointing to other Uninvolved nodes and also the Involved nodes. (Remember that your structural goal is to pull the PCs towards the Involved nodes, where they can find the clues leading to Hekaton.)

One particular place you could look at is the Dessarin Valley, where Ghald & Unferth are trying to launch multiple krakenar operations. Lord Drylund’s operation in Yartar is also located here. By adding several Kraken Society operations throughout the valley, you could turn the whole region into a micro-campaign within the campaign.

OPTION #4: BURY THE INVOLVED NODES

In the default structure, the PCs can run into either the Uninvolved nodes or Involved nodes during the Phase 3 pointcrawl. If you want to create a greater sense of depth in the Kraken Society conspiracy, however, then DON’T make the Involved nodes accessible directly from the pointcrawl: The only way to reach the Skum Lord, Reefkin, or Lord Drylund is via clues picked up in the Uninvolved Nodes (which remain accessible from the pointcrawl).

In practice, this will create a flow from Uninvolved nodes to Involved nodes to Purple Rocks to the Morkoth. The players will truly feel like they’re getting pulled deeper and deeper into the conspiracy.

This option is probably best used in combination with Option #3. Since you can no longer enter the Kraken Society investigation through the Involved nodes, you’ll likely want a few more Uninvolved options to replace those entry points.

OPTION #5: ENTRY VIA MAELSTROM & WATERDEEP

The burgeoning political crisis between Maelstrom and Waterdeep creates an alternative vector for the PCs to follow.

For example, imagine that the PCs follow a path similar to that suggested in Storm King’s Thunder: They journey to Maelstrom and manage to get an audience with Serissa. She would like to trust them — it’s what her mother would have wanted — but it’s impossible under the circumstances. If they want the storm court’s help (to do whatever it is the PCs came here to ask them to do), then they need to help bring those responsible for her mother’s murder and father’s disappearance to justice.

Rather than giving them a casino chip, however, Serissa is going to point them in the direction of the “treacherous” Knights of the Blue Moon.

Meanwhile, in Waterdeep, Laeral Silverhand knows something has gone wrong: She was supposed to meet with King Hekaton and Queen Neri, but then, from her perspective, they abruptly postponed the meeting and a storm giant raiding party ransacked the Hall of Reflected Moonlight and murdered many Knights of the Blue Moon. (If you’re using Option #1, this may have been followed by additional storm giant raids.)

If the PCs are already working with the Lords Alliance or Harpers, it’s not hard to imagine that Silverhand might want to call in some agents with a proven track record for dealing with giant issues to get to the bottom of what happened at Red Rocks.

Either way, the PCs will get briefed on the details of Neri’s Peace — or, at least, a version of those events — and pointed in the direction of Red Rocks, the Hall of Reflected Moonlight, and the Knights of the Blue Moon.

Whichever direction they’re coming from, this investigation could quickly reveal the mismatch in communications between Waterdeep and Maelstrom.

From here, add three clues to reveal the agent responsible. (A chambermaid working for Silverhand? A lesser Knight of the Blue Moon who’s secretly a krakenar agent? Both of them locked in a forbidden tryst and working together?)

This agent, through three more clues, can then point the PCs in the direction of the Skum Lord, for whom they work.

The Skum Lord, of course, is an Involved node, and the PCs are now inside the Kraken Society conspiracy.

Tip: You might find it useful, particularly if you’re using this option, to have Imperator Uther discover Queen Neri’s body and lead the raid on the Hall of Reflected Moonlight during the events of the campaign, instead of having these events play out before the campaign begins. It will be a lot easier to create the sense of high stakes if events are playing out in real time, rather than waiting on hold for weeks or months for the PCs to level up.

OPTION #6: THE EXPEDITION TO ASCARLE

An expedition to the sunken city of Ascarle sounds incredibly cool!

… it’s also a huge undertaking and probably way outside the focus of a Storm King’s Thunder campaign.

If you’d nevertheless like to provide a path for the PCs to follow to Ascarle — one more layer hidden within the Kraken Society conspiracy! — then I’d recommend placing clues in Purple Rocks and on the Morkoth pointing the way.

Go to Part 4D: The Hekaton Revelations

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To clearly see how the PCs can rescue Hekaton, we need a few key insights.

First, finding Hekaton is not the end of the campaign. For the reasons we’ve previously discussed, and which we’ll take an in-depth look at in Part 5, Hekaton’s disappearance is not the reason the Ordning is broken, nor will returning him to power restore the Ordning. Therefore, saving Hekaton will not end the campaign.

Importantly, this also means that solving Hekaton’s disappearance doesn’t need to be positioned as the end of the campaign: We don’t need to stop the PCs from “prematurely” solving the mystery and ending the campaign early, which will conveniently make it much easier for us to design a robust scenario for solving it.

So if we shouldn’t think of this as the end of the campaign, how should we think about it? Basically, on par with the other giant factions. “Solving the problem of the storm giants” will likely require a different solution than “solving the problem of the hill giants,” but it slots into the same “there’s something wrong with the giants and it needs to be fixed” structure.

Second, the PCs are not assigned to find Hekaton. Or, at least, they don’t need to be. Maybe they journey to Maelstrom, find a way to befriend Serissa, and she asks of them a boon to prove that not all small-folk are treacherous. Or maybe they’ll end up working for a faction and you could have them order the PCs to rescue Hekaton.

It’s more likely, however, that the PCs will simply discover that Hekaton is missing and then decide to deal with that situation themselves. Or they’ll report it to someone and the response is for that person or faction to ask them to look into it further. Either way, the impetus of action is flowing from the players.

Third, it’s the investigation of the Kraken Society that reveals the plot to kidnap Hekaton, rather than an investigation into Hekaton’s disappearance that reveals the Society. This will probably make more sense as we dive into the specific structure of the remixed investigation, but the key insight is that if the storm giants had been able to find any good leads at the crime scene, then they would already be pursuing those leads, not sitting around for months until a random group of small-folk showed up at their doorstep.

Therefore, logically, if you start from, “Hekaton is missing! How do we find him?” there aren’t any good leads.

The reason the PCs can be the ones to solve this is because, structurally, they approach the problem from a completely different direction.

THE BASIC PLAN

The Kraken Society addendum of the Remix provides a full breakdown of the organization. We’re going to break that organization into separate nodes, and then we’re going to classify those nodes as being either Involved (in the Hekaton conspiracy), Uninvolved, or Distant (and, therefore, unlikely to be encountered by the PCs).

INVOLVED

• Waterdeep – Skum Lord
• Neverwinter – Reefkin
• Yartar – Lord Drylund

UNINVOLVED

• Luskan
• Thornhold
• Dessarin Valley – Ghald & Unferth

DISTANT

• Caer Westphal (in the Moonshae Isles)
• Purple Rocks
• Ascarle

For the moment, let’s discard the Distant nodes. The remaining nodes, whether Involved or Uninvolved, can all be encountered by the PCs during the Phase 3 pointcrawl. Any one of these, when encountered, therefore becomes the PCs’ entry point into the Kraken Society investigation.

In each Uninvolved node, include clues pointing to:

• One or more Involved nodes.
• One or more Uninvolved nodes.

In each Involved node, include clues pointing to:

• Optional: One or more Uninvolved nodes.
• The other two Involved nodes.
• The Morkoth and how the PCs can locate it. (See below.)

And we’re done. The PCs can encounter one or more Kraken Society nodes while traveling across the Sword Coast and/or Savage Frontier, then follow the clues they find until they reach Hekaton. (Potentially unraveling krakenar operations as they go.)

THE LUSKAN AGENDA

To include Luskan on the list of Kraken Society nodes above, we’re presuming that there’s some fresh operation afoot there to reestablish the Society’s presence in the City of Sails.

It’s possible that this operation was under the command of Tholtz Daggerdark (SKT, p. 221), who we might characterize as a member of the Arcane Brotherhood. Daggerdark is now the captain of the Morkoth… perhaps the ship was built in the shipyards of Luskan? And the Kraken Society’s current scheme might have something to do with those shipyards, too?

FINDING THE MORKOTH

The basic concept here is that the Morkoth is sailing aimlessly through the Trackless Sea in the vicinity of the Purple Rocks, loaded up with wards that will prevent divination spells from revealing its location or the location of anyone or anything onboard.

This scenario is fundamentally sound, but it obviously means that the PCs need to (a) learn that Hekaton is onboard the Morkoth and (b) figure how to actually locate the Morkoth.

In the book, there’s one method for doing this: Drylund tells the PCs that the Morkoth is in the Trackless Sea and then the PCs just sail around randomly hoping they bump into it.

This option is not particularly compelling, and since it feels pretty hopeless unless you know that The Plot™ is going to deliver you to the ship, you may end up in a situation where the players just won’t go to the Trackless Sea because they’ll be convinced they need more information before they can succeed.

With that being said, keeping “we know the ship is somewhere in the Trackless Sea, so let’s just sail around and see if we can spot it” as a backstop option isn’t a bad idea. Fortunately, there are also some other options we could use:

• The PCs discover navigational charts indicating where the Morkoth will be so that they can intercept it. The most logical reason for these charts existing is that someone in the Kraken Society has a reason for periodically intercepting the Morkoth; e.g., to deliver fresh supplies.
• Alternatively, the PCs discover a beacon designed specifically to pierce the wards around the Morkoth and allow a ship to find it. (Probably for similar reasons to the navigational charts. Or perhaps the ritual which wards the Morkoth even from divine eyes actually requires the creation of the item as a lynchpin for the spell.)
• The PCs access the kraken’s lighthouse. This powerful psionic artifact is attuned to kraken’s compasses, which are carried by ships and undersea agents loyal to Slarkethrel. The system allows for hyper-accurate navigation, but also allows those in control of the lighthouse to keep an eye on everyone using the system. The Morkoth is using a kraken’s compass to avoid other ships in the region, and it’s a key weakness in its wards.
• There’s a permanent teleportation circle onboard the Morkoth. If the PCs can learn the sigil sequence for this circle, they can teleport straight to the ship.

You can pick whichever one of these sounds most compelling to you, and have the clues in the Involved nodes point to it.

Alternatively, they could ALL be true, with each Involved node having one of them as an option. There is a point, though, where a superfluity of options will make the Kraken Society feel childishly incompetent in their efforts to secure the Morkoth, which will also cheapen the players’ sense of accomplishing in conquering it.

So what I would recommend is picking the one you like best, putting it at Purple Rocks (so that the PCs have to go into the heart of the creepy krakenar cult), and then putting clues in all of the Involved nodes pointing to Purple Rocks.

With this done, you’ll have woven all of the Kraken Society nodes together, collectively pointed them through the Three Clue Rule at the Morkoth, and created multiple entry points the PCs can use to enter this knot of nodes and begin exploring them.

You’re good to go.

Go to Part 4C: Expanding the Path

Player: So in Dweredell the Guild is like a local trade organization, right?

GM: That’s right. It’s ruled by a large number of powerful merchant families and its official function is to maintain commercial standards and regulate all matters of craft or trade. But in practice it’s more like a protection racket.

Player: Great! Can you tell me every single member of the Guild and also their immediate heirs?

GM: Uh…

As a GM, it’s actually kind of surprising how often you’ll run into questions like this. In the real world this is the sort of encyclopedic data that you could pull up with a five-second search on the internet. But the game world, of course, does not actually exist, and there’s no quicker way to strip back the veneer and reveal that harsh reality than saying something like, “Tell me the names of everyone who lives on Albert Street!”

On the one hand, it’s a lovely vote of confidence: The players are so impressed by the verisimilitude and depth of your game, that they just naturally assume that the answers to these sorts of questions actually exist!

But however flattering that may be, it doesn’t really change the fact that it leaves you staring out into the vast void of the unknown that they’ve invoked, wondering how it could possibly be filled.

Other examples I’ve encountered include stuff like:

• Can you name every Imperial church and chapel in the city?
• Can we get a list of every front page headline from the Gazette for the month of March 1929?
• Before we question [fictional author], can I get a list of every single book she’s written?
• I’m going to go through the warehouse and check the label on every crate. What do they say?

Of course, sometimes you actually will have a list of every Imperial church and chapel in the city. Those moments — as you reach out, grab the information the players are asking for, and present it with a flourish — are, of course, delightful.

But it’s far more typical, of course, for you to have NOT prepped a label for every crate in the warehouse.

And staring into that void, it’s easy to become trapped in it: Maybe you try to improvise your way through it. Maybe you burble some inanities and then stammer to a halt. Maybe you bring the session to a slamming stop as you spend five or ten minutes brainstorming a bibliography for the fictional author.

Sometimes you’ll want to slam the door shut on the void, even if it doesn’t make any sense: “The identities of the Guild families are a secret!” you’ll cry. Or perhaps, “The crates are all labeled in an unbreakable code!”

Stalling for time is another option, particularly if Google, Bing, and their equivalents don’t exist in your campaign setting: “How are you going to find that information?” (The only drawback here is that the stalling tactic is often limited in its effectiveness and frequently rather boring to actually play through.)

What I usually find effective in resolving this kind of research fishing expedition, however, is a much simpler technique:

“What are you looking for?”

The players have made a very large ask and you’ve become fixated on the impossible scope of it. In actual practice, though, the players are actually interested in some very specific thing related to an unspoken plan they haven’t shared with you yet. (For example, they want to know some details about the author’s work so that they can pose as fans when they talk to her. Or they’re searching the Gazette specifically for any reports of odd occurrences in the Ravenswood neighborhood.)

If you can get them to tell you what they’re really looking for and/or what they’re hoping to do with it, then getting the information they want or creating it or giving them an alternative option or whatever else makes the most sense is often A LOT easier than improvising entire history textbooks or Yellow Pages listings for a fictional setting.

In many ways, this is another invocation of a general principle we first explored in Random GM Tips: Are You Sure You Want To Do That?:

If you don’t understand what the players are trying to achieve with a given action, find out before adjudicating the action.