Digging for Lies Questions

SPOILERS

Couple of fairly stupid questions cropped up while prepping for and running our second session of this adventure:

1) Why is there a player map of the first Ziggurat? I can't find a reference anywhere to them ever finding one.

2) Why does the staff of the ancients accidentally summon gidim war beasts during 'the incident'? The text states that the energy from the beasts matches that stored in the staff, but there is no reference to any of this in the item description. (NB: I understand that it was found in the Ziggurat of Apet, but that does not provide a mechanical reason for it temporarily summoning waarbeasts when Langfield tries to use it as an implement.)

In both cases I could simply be missing something very obvious, but I have checked and double-checked, and would be grateful for any help.

Thanks!

gideonpepys said:

2) Why does the staff of the ancients accidentally summon gidim war beasts during 'the incident'?

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See the Summoned Monsters sidebar on page 13:

Simon Langfield’s staff of the Ancients was actually used in the ritual to close off Apet, so it has the unique power to bypass the lesser seal. Its extreme age has damaged it slightly, though, and if precautions are not taken, whenever the staff is used a tiny rift to Apet opens, long enough for a creature to slip through. These monsters have permanently crossed into the material world and are stuck here.

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Can't help with the first question, though. I'd like to think it's there for people like me who are porting the maps directly into virtual tables like maptool. Not having the traps marked is a great boon.​

Thanks. I knew I was missing something (and remembered reading it originally).

Yeah, the 'player's map' is just so you can use it as a battlemap or for an online fight, without giving away the locations of the traps.

Also, the staff releases monsters because we thought it was an interesting element for a fight, wherein the PCs need to get someone to stop helping.

RangerWickett said:

Also, the staff releases monsters because we thought it was an interesting element for a fight, wherein the PCs need to get someone to stop helping.

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What happens if a PC uses the staff as an implement for their own powers? Do they run the risk of summoning monsters from Apet?

mort655 said:

What happens if a PC uses the staff as an implement for their own powers? Do they run the risk of summoning monsters from Apet?

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That's what I was wondering.

@ RangerWickett - Unfortunately, in our campaign, Simon died in the first round. (And my caring players neglected to revive him.)

I'd say up to you. My suggestion is no. It was, I dunno, residual energy.

Narratively, monsters pop out of the staff so the PCs will be curious and investigate, and if they've been paying attention they'll notice that this sort of summoning is weird.

I just wanted to chime in and say that I really appreciate that you provided a player version of the Ziggurat map, and hope to see more of these in the future for those maps that have too much information on them. In fact I just finished running the Nettles Church series of encounters and unfortunately I couldn't use that map at the table because it divulged too much info that the players were supposed to figure out. I love printing out the maps because they are wonderfully done and make the combat feel much more immersive than your traditional grid-and-dry-erase map, so I try to use as many of them as I can. But anytime there are labels for secret doors, trap locations, or anything else that requires a check to discover, I have to decide whether to use the map anyway and get my players to pretend they don't see those labels, or forgo the map entirely. (Unfortunately, my PS skills are poor enough that if I tried to cover up those labels it would probably still be pretty obvious.) Aside from just adding them as extra pages in the PDF (I don't know if you guys view that as a good or bad thing), you could potentially do this with layers, or maybe offer the "clean maps" as supplemental content outside of the PDF. Any solution is fine by me - I'm just throwing a few ideas out there.

On a side note, I just pulled up the DFL maps and found them to be strangely lower-res than the other PDFs. I'll start a separate thread about this.