Tommy paces animatedly, waving his hands around as he talks, not really listening.
"But what can we do, Keldar? We were barely able to face a single one of these things, whatever they are. And I think we should all be especially thankful in our prayers for a while; that could very easily have gone far worse.
Our plan was to confront Turket and force him to tell us who the other Archaeologists were, so that we could then confront them and take them down in turn. But that's when we thought Turket was an ordinary man. I don't think we'll be able to force this creature to tell us anything. We'll be lucky if we can even keep it bound, once it wakes. It was amazingly dextrous, and I wouldn't trust any knots or chains to hold it for long. Sooner or later it will recover the use of that horrible spell, and we might not be so lucky next time."
"What do we know?" he asks, ticking points off on his fingers as he goes. "There's a group of killers and thieves operating out of Fallon. They use a series of secret tunnels, that are probably common knowledge by now, thanks to our assistants at the library. They may or may not have ties to several of the oldest and most powerful families in Fallon. And the only two living beings that we know to be involved with them are this devil, here, and Fingers. Who didn't tell us about any devils. Did he know? Probably not, but it hardly matters now anyway. Where can we go from here? Go door-to-door in the tunnels? It's been over a week since they were revealed; surely anything incriminating about them has been moved or hidden by now. Start interrogating noblemen, asking them if they're secretly killers? We'd be lucky to be just run out of town. Even if we do find them, what then? I've no confidence we can hope to defeat them, if Turket is anything to go by."
[sblock=ooc]I'm feeling a bit of Tommy's pain, out of character. It's really starting to feel like we've done what we can, here. Capturing Turket was our big plan, and while that's technically succeeded, his nature makes me doubt we'll get any answers out of him. We don't have the manpower to clear the tunnels; we'd need at least one or two front-line melee characters to pull that off. Trying it with our current crew is just asking for character deaths.
I've run a fair handful of games now, and read many more, both submissions in LEW and L4W and published adventures. I've read vast quantities of online content on designing and running adventures. What I'm getting at is that it's been a long time since I've been in a position where I had absolutely no idea where an adventure was heading. Every game I've played or lurked in for the last few years, I've generally been able to put my adventure-design hat on and make a pretty good guess as to the structure and goals of the adventure.
Every game but this one. Here, I'm totally confused. It looks superficially like a sandbox game: here's a city, run around in it and have fun, working towards stopping the guild of killers. But the defining characteristic of sandbox games is usually that there are lots of options, lots of threads to explore. If you get to the end of one, you have half a dozen more that you can pick up and follow. I feel like we've gotten to the end of a thread here, but if there are any other threads to follow, I'm not spotting them. Maybe I'm just being dense, or forgetting earlier clues, or failing to spot the plot hooks. But... all of them?
In roleplaying terms, it seems like when in doubt, you should try to think what your character would do. But we've reached a point where it really seems like the right in-character reaction is to hand Turket over to a temple and leave town, and hope really hard that no one comes after us.
But surely that's not how the adventure is supposed to end, is it? We must be missing something. Maybe we need some hints?
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