Fine-tuning my FR adventure for this week... help?

SurfMonkey01 · Jun 27, 2002

[ Amn ]

* Army of ogres, goblins, kobolds, and other monsters led by ogre mages have taken the southern portions of Amn
* The council of six has vanished – 1 is the ogres’ prisoner, 4 are missing, and 1 is “undercover” amongst Amn’s defenders
* Amn’s forces lack organization and leadership necessary to repel invaders
* Harpers, clerics, paladins, and a red wizard all vie for leadership
* Church of Selune continues to press for the reclamation of their temple
* The Shadow Thieves have resorted to guerilla tactics to take advantage of the current Amnian confusion and vulnerability for their own gains
* Zhentarim loyal to Bane have begun marching on Amn, looking to claim the lands for their deity
* Artemis Entreri lies disguised amongst Amn’s defenders, looking for an opportunity to expose and murder the hidden councilman

Psychotic Jim · Jun 27, 2002

What sort of advice/input do you want?
As far as the Shadow Thieves and Amn go, I always thought that that the ruling bureaucracy, especially the Council of Six, always had a semifriendly relationship with the Shadow Thieves, the sort of "As long as you give us money and are discreet about your crimes, we will look the other way" sort of agreement. I would think that the Shadow Thieves would want to keep things that way and may even come to the defense of Amn (for their own befenif of course), especially considering that one of their members was in the Council. Perhaps they are wagling gueriila warfare against the ogres and other factions that want to take over Amn. Artemis could have been sent by a rival thief's guild, like say the Nightmasks, to assassinate one of the Council in order to upset the Shadow Thieves' power.

SurfMonkey01 · Jun 27, 2002

I was just kind of looking for opinions on how it sounded, seeing if you had any advice for me to make it better. As for the Shadow Thieves/Council thing, yeah, I know that's how it was before. But I'm restructuring a whole bunch of the Realms in my game... for example, the Shadow Thieves have expanded, become more ambitious, since they were taken over by Entreri and Jarlaxle and merged with a bunch of drow. So they see this chaos as an opportunity to shed the old rules and increase their powerbase even further... in the end, I'm going to change a LOT of how the Realms works; I think I posted my campaign outline on here a few months back, if not I could always do it later if anyone was interested...

MavrickWeirdo · Jun 29, 2002

What level(s) do you plan on this campain covering?

SurfMonkey01 · Jun 29, 2002

Well, this is kind of the mid-way point of my epic-level game... kind of me testing the waters for more epic-scale things. The PCs are 16th level as all of this goes down... where the end up, who knows?

Altin · Jun 29, 2002

If they are 16th level characters, what is there to prevent the high-level mages/druids from systematically wiping out the various threatening armies with spells o' mass destruction (especially the fairly weak monsterous humanoids)?

Also, is the coucil of six going missing meant to be an important subplot - because a few cleverly applied locate person and scry spells might make them very easy for such high-level characters to find.

Essentially, the potential problems (threatening armies and missing leaders) shouldn't be that hard for 16th levelers to overcome considering the magical arsenal probably at their disposal. If you're asking me, what you need is a compelling reason why they can't just go and clean up house themselves so they are forced to play diplomats between the conflicting power blocks at home before they can confidently face the external threat.

Yours,
Altin