Isobel = Kasvarina?

[Samuel Cole]

Hey, ya'll~

I've been attempting to reduce the number of Eladrin women in the story in order to reinforce the fact that they are special and rare. (One of my PCs is an Eladrin nationalist, so this plot thread is important to him.) Thus far, this has only really resulted in two changes: the Duchess's handmaid turned out to be Gale, and I gender-swapped Kaeia on the B team.

In Adventure 4, revealing Isobel to be a teenaged Eladrin sex slave was quite dramatic, and provoked exactly the sort of response I was hoping for - the team allowed the sale to occur without incident, and then jacked Nicolai the Necromancer in a high-speed carriage chase through the streets of Nalaam afterward, rescuing Isobel and smuggling her back to Risur via the Vekeshi Brotherhood, who passed her along to Gale.

Now that they're back in Flint, they went to visit her and have taken an interest in her recovery. Another of my PCs, who herself is a former Danoran slave, is beginning to teach Isobel to be a skyseer.

Now we're about to start Adventure Five, and I was thinking about how to introduce Kasvarina. My first thought was, "It feels weird to introduce yet another major Eladrin woman NPC when, for example, we have zero important halfing NPCs, especially given the party's emotional investment in the Eladrin we just introduced."

So I was thinking of doing something like this:

• Kasvarina had her mind wiped by Grappa, who attempted to escape Cauldron hill in the bronze Golem.
• Leone Quital caught them and stopped them, destroying the golem and taking the mind-wiped Kasvarina back into custody.
• Not knowing what else to do with her, he sent her to Han Jierre in Danor for rehabilitation.
• Jierre has a kingdom to run, so he entrusted her to Elanor, a slave-trader who has experience raising all kinds of people, including Eladrin.
• Elanor, however, realized that Kasvarina was a gold mine, and so she jumped on a train and ran off to Nalaam to sell her, figuring that after she made the sale she could disappear with the 2.5 million gold and live like a queen without Jierre finding her.
• The PCs grabbed Kasvarina and brought her to Risur. As of now, she still believes that she's a teenager due to Grappa's meddling in her mind.

What do you think? Is this workable? Are there major plot ripples this would cause that I haven't thought of?

 

[RangerWickett]

See, it's stuff like this that makes me glad I sometimes overwrite the adventures and put in too many NPCs who are from a supposedly rare group. Because then players and GMs can come up with cool twists like this, or the one where a PC in another game ended up being Kasvarina.

The plot ripples are:

Normally in Adventure 5, Asrabey rescues Kasvarina from the Cauldron Hill facility in the Bleak Gate. This could be a revelatory moment when Asrabey tears through the place, demands to know where Kasvarina is, and is told that she had her memories wiped so she thought she was a teenager. You'd either need Asrabey to have a way to realize this is Isobel (and then have him spirit her away), or you'd need to tweak adventure 8.

If you don't have Asrabey take Isobel/Kasvarina during 5, then instead you need to explain why the Ob don't find her. Like, they want their co-founder, and even though she's immune to divination due to Obscurati magic shenanigans, eventually they'd track down where Elanor went, and who was involved in the carriage chase/rescue. From there they'd probably be able to guess she'd been moved back to Risur, and spies would locate her. Maybe you could start adventure 8 with the PCs having to thwart an abduction attempt by Ob agents who've located her. (And if the party hadn't figured out who she is yet, then in adventure 7 they might be able to eavesdrop on a discussion where Han Jierre tells Nicodemus, "We found Kasvarina. She'd been given the new name Isobel and blah blah blah.")

But it might just be simplest to have Asrabey figure it out and abscond with her in 5. Fewer moving parts that might go awry.

I like the idea.

 

[Samuel Cole]

I failed to mention that Asrabey is the elder brother of one of our PCs, so having him abscond with Kasvarina/Isobel would greatly enhance the drama of that move. I dig it!