they told Saxby too much; what to do??

Got myself into an interesting situation right at the end of Adventure 2: The Dying Skyseer. Looking for a satisfying way to end the adventure, and not miss out on too much of the awesome.

They've completed basically everything but the Climax. They finished out Smuggler's Night, rescued the Doctor (and have the papers, but have not analyzed them yet), hiked up Cauldron Hill, (and while up there, captured Cillian Creed), captured the arsonists, collected the papers from the Bleak Golem Warehouse, protected Nevard at Dawn Square, and otherwise did a lot of other good detective work. They even found the runes under the bridges of the Stanfield Canal and have a good idea what's going on with that!

The only major thing they missed is that they haven't met Gale, but she's scheduled for 10am tomorrow. And actually gotten the cajones to go after MacBannin. They know he's in charge of the "topsecret government witchoil weaponization project" ... so they took all the info they had, got a meeting with Saxby, and told her everything.

She started giving them a defensive lecture on the need to have clean hands, and they splurted out that they've had dealings with Kell and the Family. (They did this intentionally to test her.) She responded quickly that they were off the case, and that Team-B will take it over from here. She still firmly congratulated them, but just reminded them that this case was over their heads now.

In my game, I established that Saxby and MacBannin are personal friends. So, first thing in the morning, she's going to round up Team-B and head up to the Manor. I haven't, out of game, decided what the hell she's going to do there.

To add a complication, a judge has ordered the release of Cillian Creed, and he will be extradited at 11am tomorrow. The PCs know this, and are considering killing him in his cell (but I don't think they'll do it).

Meanwhile, the PCs are off talking to Thomas Grimsley and giving him all the evidence, trying to convince him that MacBannin kills dockers and is proof of the government corruption he's been looking for. So there's that wild card...

Anyway: what does Saxby do? The Skyseer PC even has her vision for tonight as "will Saxby arrest MacBannin?" I haven't figured out in my own head how deep Saxby is in the conspiracy, but I play her as a self-serving political animal to the hilt. So the only self-consistent action is going to be what advances her power the most.

I think I'm going to have MacBannin burn his own house down, and release false information to the press such that the morning headlines blare "GALE STRIKES AGAIN" with the rationale that it's retaliation provoked by Nevard's speech (which was filled with "Cauldron Hill isn't safe" warnings). Which has a nice side-effect of trying to discredit Nevard as a terrorist-provocateur.

But, then what does Saxby do from there?

It seems that there's no good way to preserve the courtyard battle with MacBannin, as excited as I was to run that and to cast his curses on my poor PCs

I'd like still be able to run the Lab/Reservoir combat. Not sure how to fit that in, but I figure when MacBannin burns his house down, he would leave that hidden and intact. The question is then how to get the PCs up there, and how to justify assassins following them into it and hassling them during the repairs.

I've really been playing up the tremors lately, and they expect something to happen on that front soon.

There's also the question of where does MacBannin go, after he burns his house down? (If I go that route) I'm guessing he just goes into hiding (only to resurface in Adv7). Shame, I was looking forward to the canonical "suicide in jail cell" moment.

Anyway, that's a bit scattered, but I'll take any advice I can get. Mostly just looking for brainstorming and seed ideas. No need to post fully-thought out responses!

Like you said, Saxby's a politician, and so she'd decide whether she has to throw Macbannin under the bus. (Well, train, since there aren't buses yet.)

How ironclad is the party's evidence? She might go to Macbannin, go into his mansion to "get him to come peacefully," and then privately tell him what was found out so his allies can start preparing to either discredit it or counter it in court. She wants to cover her own ass, so she plans to do what she's "supposed" to do, as if she were a proper upstanding leader of the RHC. She intends to arrest him, with the expectation that he'd get off the hook after a trial. And if he's found guilty in the trial, well she figures she can pretend to be shocked by his betrayal. This keeps her nose clean.

That's her plan, at least. So she goes up to the mansion, starts talking to Macbannin, and then the earthquake starts.

On the PC side of things, you can have their morning meeting with Gale. On the way there they spot people evacuating from the Cauldron Hill slums, per Nevard's warning. They meet Gale at that waterfall and have a talk, during which tremors strike several times. Add in a new element: she has a spy in Macbannin's household, a scullery maid named Rosie. When the conversation with Gale is over, the earthquake hits in full, and the PCs can see a bit of a dark cloud form around the crown of Cauldron Hill. Gale knows she cannot go herself, but asks if the PCs can go and make sure Rosie is safe. It will take the party probably an hour to get there.

Meanwhile at the mansion, the quake causes the building to crumble, witchoil starts exploding out of the ground, and Saxby runs away. Half of the B-Team comes with her, but one or two get left behind, trapped in the rubble. (In this version, it should take longer for a total catastrophe to occur; the place is just toxic and dangerous, but not yet lethal.) As the party makes their way to the mountain, they can see fires breaking out, smoke billowing, and when they're halfway up the mountain something like oil begins to slide down toward some of the slum buildings. Most of the people there have already evacuated because of Nevard's warnings, but if the party goes to help they can pull out some scared children.

Saxby and the B-Team see the party as they're fleeing down the mountain, and they're shell shocked. The B-Team reports that they saw ghosts screaming in the oil, and they can't bring themselves to go back up there. The PCs notice that the B-Team is a few people short. Saxby has a thousand yard stare as she tries to figure out if she's exposed, and if she'll get in trouble for abandoning Macbannin.

Heroic PCs will want to go up the mountain.

They find the manor riddled with pools of witchoil, which are bubbling up and flowing down toward the city. Instead of an ambush, have a few of the house staff who are possessed by evil spirits lurk and attack the party as they sift through the rubble for survivors. The whole place is rumbling intermittently, and survivors say they saw Macbannin and his butler running to the garden. A big tremor hits, and they spot some people fleeing from the garden shed. The party can descend into the laboratory, where Creed has control of the panthers, so the party faces Creed, Macbannin, and some panthers while stuff is breaking around them and sirens are blaring. Macbannin figures he has time to win the fight and still stop the explosion, but once he's knocked to 0 he'll surrender and offer to explain how to fix things.



That's how I'd do it.

First off, I never gave a return-receipt on this post. Thank you. The chaos around the manor was extremely well-received, and it was fun fighting a possessed Serena (whom one PC was dating) and rescuing a now-paraplegic Dima. We even conducted a rescue operation through a crumbling manor and had a foreshadowy fight with a fleeing Kaja. They ended up *very* ambivalent on Saxby. I didn't pull off the Macbannin fight as well: they were just way too willing to help him avert the disaster, and my pivot to "and now I'll kill the witnesses!" was a bit too forced. Oh well. Water under the bridge. We played out the courtroom scene afterwards, with wheelchair-bound Dima as one of the subpoenaed witnesses, who helped them understand the legal system. Also got to introduce Attorney General Starke as a friendly face, laying some groundwork for the upcoming Radical Vekeshi Plot (his son being the whackjob). Party feels like they really screwed up vis-a-vis Macbannin's jailcell death, convinced that someone had a small vial of witchoil nearby when they killed him in order to suck his soul out.

Anyway, the real reason I return to this thread is this: the party has once again told Saxby too much. Argh!! They derail in the most delightful ways.

After they got back from the ziggurat, they found a number of dirty gifts from Kell, designed to foul up the audit. One PC in my group is really fashioned as the loyalist (my LG Dwarf Eschatologist, if you've followed my other threads), and Saxby has chartered him with finding out what the audit will produce ahead of time, so that she can be prepared. Or, in other words, spy on his party members.

Well, one of my PCs (our technologist) really got under Kell's skin, and his MacGyvering of his apartment got some of his agents killed, and so he's got some extra special love focused on him. Cutting out a lot of details, Kell is triangulating in on this PC via his landlord, some crooked cops, and his personal contacts. (Poor chap is also recently made into a VoR zombie, so he's having a real bad run right now.) Just to make things extra spicy, I decided that this PC's landlord owns many buildings and is also Saxby's landlord (in my game, she has a penthouse suite apartment), so they know each other and look after each other to an extent.

Anyway, rumors of the PCs' (Kell-forged) misdoings are making their way to Saxby, who has in turn put the screws into our Dwarf to come up with the beans ASAP.

Parallel to all that, they're actually following the main questline too. I screwed this up a little bit (so any advice on how the following makes sense would be nice), but they followed the planar trail from Xambria's dormroom, to Saxby's apartment, to the Silver Swan (and noticed that the trail attempted first the front door, then the backdoor), to the warehouse near the Canal with all the gore inside. (This is a screwup on my part because Sijhen wouldn't know to go to Saxby's apartment until after eating Caius's brains. I made it clear that the PCs couldn't tell which direction the planar trail flowed, so they are wondering if it started at the Canal and ended at Xambria's or vice-versa, but either way, it doesn't make sense. Whoops.)

Anyway, last time the PCs met Caius, he was pain in the ass, and they realized they wouldn't get anything out of him. So after they realized that Xambria met him at the Silver Swan ... they did nothing. They just assumed that he'd lie to them, or Saxby would deny them a warrant, or something. They just ruled out going inside to investigate (where they would have found his dead body). What they did do is set up an emergency meeting with Saxby (they met her late at night in the rain, very noir) where they said that they had dirt on her, and that's what the audit was really about. The don't trust Saxby, and wanted to know what Xambria did at her apartment. Other stuff related to the audit and politics went down, but the real upshot is that, in the process, they revealed that Xambria went straight from Saxby's to Caius's place.

One PC remarked near the end of session: this campaign has gone from CSI to House of Cards. The audit is getting very intense, and the party spends long stretches of time talking about the allegiances of Delft, Saxby, Price-Hill, Stanfield, Aodhan, and others. It's fun, and it's starting to get a bit PvP actually, as they choose sides, etc., but that's offtopic.

Here's my problem: I don't see how the following can't happen: Saxby realizes that Caius is at risk, and immediately dispatches agents (or goes herself) to the Silver Swan, finds him dead, and covers everything up. Or at least swipes all the good evidence up. My PCs did find the star map in the ziggurat, and saw the planar trail go out to sea, so they know where to go next, but, because Saxby can look at Caius's star map, she basically also knows that the PCs will eventually want to go out to sea, and therefore she will logically block any requests to use any boats or to otherwise leave town for an international jaunt.
Now, as a practical matter to simply get a boat and get out of town, they could charter a vessel on their own dime, or otherwise sneak out of town. But they know they are in hot hot water with the audit (and who knows whose house Kell will try to burn down while they're gone), so they are skittish to misbehave too badly. There's also the strange metgame issue that they think that they "lost" Xambria and the golden plate, and that by it leaving town, it's effectively gone out of game.
A few trump cards up my sleeve: one party member is dating Serena on team B. (For example, I ran the whole Grappa's Golem scene as her secretly taking her boyfriend there, and making him swear to not tell Delft/Saxby she broke protocol.) Also, if somehow the PCs mention to Price-Hill they need a boat, he might be able to overrule. One of my PCs (Vekeshi) is interested in talking to Rock Rackus, who would maybe say enough about his work in the ziggurat of Jiese to motivate the PCs to take extreme actions.

Anyway, to summarize: the party told Saxby that Caius is in trouble, so the logical thing for her to do would be to clean up his evidence, and to prevent the PCs from going to the ziggurat of Mavisha.

(On the other hand, it's not the end of the world to just cut out the whole trip-to-Ber / Mavisha thing, and just stick around in Flint until the Gala of the Ancients. Xambria will eventually get bored down there, eat Fiorina's brain, and come back in time to unleash the evil genius plan and the book's climax. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm still on track to end the adventure properly. It's just a question of whether or not we get our promised one-naval-battle-per-book, I guess.)

The cleaning lady smells something nasty through Caius's door, reports to the owner, the owner nervously checks the room, finds a dead tenant, freaks out, and remembers, "Hey, there were constables here. I bet if I bribe them and give them access to the room they can make this go away so none of my other renters find out."

That seems the simplest way to get the party the clues without giving Saxby reason to block their request.

I do dig the House of Cards style of power brokering.