I would say that they take over the dock area beside the ship and set up the entertainments there - sort of a forebear of the amusement park piers of modern times
Good thinking! Thanks.
I wish the adventure's authors had thought to include a sentence or two along those lines.
I would imagine faking a "human" accent would have to be part of the disguise for exactly the reason you propose. These fair runners are interacting a lot with regular people it would be an instant give away if they didn't disguise their accents. I would say they have really outrageous pirate-style accents. Arrgh!
You would think that, yes, but according to the adventure, they still have slight Elvish accents that the PCs can learn about, either by listening to the sailors themselves or by talking to the carnies. The accent thing is but one of a number of clues that the sailors are not human. But as I said, there doesn't appear to be any real consequence to the PCs finding out that the sailors are not what they appear to be.
They can destroy the figureheads, which causes the drow sailors to all hide belowdecks, in order to somehow hinder Jarlaxle's plans (although it's unclear how this hinders his plans, since even with the figureheads in operation, the drow can't leave the boats without revealing their true identities anyway), but that's about it.
Yeah the submarine seems like something that should be left as a surprise discovery if (when?) they explore Jarlaxle flagship. Who is Zelifarn? I've not encountered him yet?
Zelifarn is the young bronze dragon swimming around in the harbor. He is the subject of one of the Force Grey sidequests. There's also an optional event at the end of Jarlaxle's chapter ("A Friendly Dragon"), in which he meets the PCs as they are rowing out to Jarlaxle's ship and says he'll give them a chest he found in a shipwreck if they discretely find out about the "craft" attached to the underside of the
Eyecatcher. That's the bit I ran the other night.
So this adventure continues to puzzle me ... It all feels a bit half-baked...
I'm beginning to regard it as a hot mess that is undeserving of the rave reviews it's been getting. It's got some real pacing issues, especially in chapter 2; the whole "run a tavern" thing seems like a distraction and doesn't really sit well with the overall theme of the adventure; and the ending is about as anticlimactic as it's possible to get.
There are also just tons of gaps where things don't make sense (e.g. Jarlaxle's
hat of disguise might let him *look* like Laeral but it sure isn't going to make him *sound* like her ...) or don't quite line up (e.g. the Sea Maidens Faire ... is it an active faire or is everyone just hanging around on the ships waiting for something, like the Day of Wonders parade ...).
Ugh. I gave up on trying to continue my previous campaign because finding a suitable follow-up for 11th level PCs that had conquered the Tomb of Annihilation was looking like too much work, but I think this adventure is actually worse.
I wonder if this is because Perkins et al have been spending so much of time on Twitch that they're not leaving themselves enough time for QA.