ZEITGEIST [ZEITGEIST] Ekossigan, Adventure #5 and dark stuff in Zeitgeist (Spoilers. Obviously)

Hi,

So my group are at a point in Adventure #4 where things could abruptly end at any session (god bless having ships at every port and a teleporting mage on standby). The Obscuriti know they are being looked at and the RHC know that they know that they know that they know. One of the players said Bree offering them a drink in their cabin was one of the tense scenes they've played in.

So I'm prepping Adventure #5 and I'm finally having to confront what I think is the darkest thing in the whole of Act 1 : Ekossigan's plan to hang 31 orphan children on a tree to open a portal to the Bleak Gate. I'm slightly anxious about running this subplot; whilst the general jist is good, a plot that basically involves a villain slaughtering children might be a bit much, especially as one of our players (in fact, the one who commented just above) is expecting his first child this September.

My plan is to go through some of the housekeeping for Adventure #5 before next session's game on Tuesday (such as talking about the B Team), and mention that child mortality might pop up in the adventure. I expect my players are made of tougher stuff than I... but in the event they veto such a plot, would Adventure #5 work okay without Ekossigan?

Sub question: What in your mind is the darkest moment in the campaign? I must admit to not going through Acts 2 + 3 with a finetooth comb, so the above scenario is definitely the darkest in my mind, in an adventure that also includes terrorist bombing and a main bad guy carving eyes out of sort-of-player characters. Adventure #4 with the murders is pretty harsh but happens mostly off screen, and Elanor's evil is a bit more back-story and easy to underplay. Sijhen is pretty nasty but he never sucks the brains out of anyone anybody cares about.

- Karma.

The murder of the orphans is easily the darkest moment of the campaign. But sucking the souls of factory workers (including children) into enormous vats of witchoil comes close. But 'souls' and 'witchoil' are more abstract and fantastical than a straight up lynching. It's also pretty grim when Lorcan Kell has that underling beaten to death on stage in the second adventure.

I wouldn't cut Ekossigan completely. If your group balks at the darker elements, just alter those elements. Or give them plenty of time to stop him. That is the idea after all.

The darkness mainly depend on DM's interpretation, I think. In my version of Zeitgeit, Risur is "we'll make peace with you even if it kills you"-militaristic country, which considers using Sidjen's teleportation ritual as a nuclear weapon (remember the finale of 3rd adventure), Sidjen himself killed PC's father, the same PC is slowly going mad because of 3 additional personalities in his head (Xambria, Ekossigan's aspect and Oscan Ligurio), the party is dealing with dragon and a band of dragonslayers at the same time... and still think they have higher morals than Ob (and they actually have lower mortality rate than published). Did I plan all of this? No, but I'm definitely complicit.

Regarding your specific question... I'm sure you can find another sacrifice, but this will require some work. From the top of my head, based on some headcanon material and utilizing the most of the previously introduced material:

• rear admiral Morris Dawkins aka Old Stag aka vekeshi leader of Flint has a life debt to Ekossigan, which is called due (pure fanon).
• Ekossigan manifests in Dawkins' body and starts searching for suitable sacrifice, as "prolonged death will open the door to Bleak Gate even for a living soul"
• how about convicted wrong-doers? They're serving their debt to society on a floating prison - Goodson Reformatory near Pine Island (see adventure 2), but certainly death penalty is more suitable for some of them
• an order from high-ranking admiral commands Goodson to concentrate the convicts with most severe crimes at a separate boat "for safety reasons", which is then tugged to some secluded river location.
• on D-day (or, rather, in the middle of the moonless night) the boat is hauled away by fey-creatures to the Parity Lake, convicts are locked inside and the whole thing is set ablaze amidst the lake, which is frozen by the Ekossigan turn to his winter incarnation
• you will have to add some clues for players to become suspicious of the situation (strange behavior of the admiral lately? corpse in prison clothes found in the woods?), tracking the boat is not much different than tracking the tree orphanage, I think.

Mechanically, Ekossigan plot gives the players some forewarning about the hill (via the poem and later with mad fey's prophecies in the battle), gives a chance to interact with Asrabey and fey side of Risur and sets up a way to enter Bleak Gate (though I'm sure no sane party would actually go along with children sacrifice to achieve that). If your players are not interested in fey and already have some suspicions about the Cauldron Hill, I think you can remove it completely.

Edit: typo

A simpler change might be that, well, maybe even Ekossigan isn't *that* heartless. He needs 31 orphans, but he doesn't need orphan *children*. He tracks down people who grew up in the orphanage but are now in their twenties or thirties, has his fey abduct them, and has them tied up and blindfolded in their old bedrooms. The actual current orphans might escape and lead the PCs to the spot if they need help.

I might put the darkest moment of the campaign as when Kasvarina has to watch helplessly as the Clergy uses her daughter as the focus of a spell that will kill both the daughter and nearly every other eladrin woman in the world. If anything, we underplayed the horror there.

I actually cut an idea I had for adventure 11 where, once the volcano in Alais Primos exploded, families started taking their children and throwing themselves into the lava, believing the world was ending and wanting to spare them from experiencing the worst of it.

Thanks for the replies!

The thing is - and this is my hot take of the thread reading it only half way through, not having actually GMed it - I feel like the fact that Ekossigan is able to do something this evil is half the point. The Cloudwood has lost most of its police force, so everything that is happening is a direct result of the chaos that the Obscuriti are (unintentionally) inflicting on the world. Add some really nasty witchy panic to the townspeople and I think it makes for an interesting scenario to parallel with the terrorism and gang war.

Toning down Ekossigan himself (making his targets adults or even in-mates) makes the plot less compelling, and I feel it'd be easier just to take it out and give the other two threads more focus. I'd rather not put in lots of work to make a less interesting version of the sub-plot. Asrabey can just show up unannounced later (I can't recall whether there's anything he needs to know or do beforehand). That's if the players veto the idea of running into a dead child as being too dark. Honestly I suspect I'm the sensitive one >.>

gideonpepys said:

But sucking the souls of factory workers (including children) into enormous vats of witchoil comes close. But 'souls' and 'witchoil' are more abstract and fantastical than a straight up lynching. It's also pretty grim when Lorcan Kell has that underling beaten to death on stage in the second adventure.

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Yeah souls are pretty abstract - isn't that how the Ob justify their actions too, that they consider souls an abstract thing?

The whole thing with the theater is nasty, but it is also a bit of a case of gangsters being gangsters. Carving an NPC's eyes out? Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....

hirou said:

Mechanically, Ekossigan plot gives the players some forewarning about the hill (via the poem and later with mad fey's prophecies in the battle), gives a chance to interact with Asrabey and fey side of Risur and sets up a way to enter Bleak Gate (though I'm sure no sane party would actually go along with children sacrifice to achieve that). If your players are not interested in fey and already have some suspicions about the Cauldron Hill, I think you can remove it completely.

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Yeah there's already suspicions that something bad is going to happen in Cauldron Hill (and I can use a reminder vision for the skyseer to bring the prophecies into focus). Plus Captain Dale shows up at some point to remind the players of what happened in Cauldron Hill last time.

RangerWickett said:

I might put the darkest moment of the campaign as when Kasvarina has to watch helplessly as the Clergy uses her daughter as the focus of a spell that will kill both the daughter and nearly every other eladrin woman in the world. If anything, we underplayed the horror there.

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Mass gendercide is pretty horrid (understatement!)... but it doesn't come from out of nowhere, the players have had plenty of time to sit on the concept, by that revelation they'd have been playing for a good 3+ years. But yeah it is definitely downplayed... a horrifying event that just appears as exotic backstory to the players, and not the triggering event of everything they are seeing now. Also I don't know if the gendercide is violently described at all? Where as lynching doesn't need to be described, you know how horrifying a death that is.

Maybe that's what I need to change. Ekossigan can just suck the souls from the children with his evil dark powers.

That will be much lighter.

I'm just about to wrap up the adventure with my group; they successfully stopped Ekossigan ONLY because I messed up the timeline... which was unintentional and led to a messy headspace there for a bit.

As far as I know, my group never really found out what Ekossigan was planning to do with those children. He held them prisoner, holed up in the old orphanage for a while, and he sure as hell planned to do something terrible to get his fay army into Bleak Gate. But what exactly his plans were, Ekossigan never revealed, and now he's not in the best health anymore so they can't ask. His underlings dispersed back into the Dreaming right when the Season was slain (by the group leader's excecutioner's blade, appropriately, although it was in the heat of battle), so they aren't telling either.

I can tell you, not knowing the exact fate Ekossigan had planned for those kids didn't undercut my players' determination to stop him. If anything, it spooked them when they found the child prisoners, without ever spelling out infanticide per se (the children were unharmed, even fed, after all).


BTW, if one of your players is expecting, it's great that you're on the lookout for such things, good job as a DM as well as a friend! I know that I've experienced a massive change in perspective when I became a parent.

Empirate said:

BTW, if one of your players is expecting, it's great that you're on the lookout for such things, good job as a DM as well as a friend!

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Awwww, thanks that made my day! Ironically though I think he is the player who would most vote for the darker elements to be magnified, weird how that works. For what it's worth, I've since spoken to the players and mentioned a dead child might show up, and they seem 'okay' with it.

For me I think the idea of sucking out souls instead of lynching works; it's still a bit on the pitch black side, but it isn't something people can actually do. You could put it in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and still show it at 8pm; hanging children, not so much.

I never mentioned in my earlier post, but my players failed to stop Ekossigan and he murdered all the orphans. I really didn't expect that to happen and it was exceptionally dark. It was the first time the group's failure had had such dire consequences, and really built up tension for the finale.

gideonpepys said:

I never mentioned in my earlier post, but my players failed to stop Ekossigan and he murdered all the orphans. I really didn't expect that to happen and it was exceptionally dark. It was the first time the group's failure had had such dire consequences, and really built up tension for the finale.

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Eeeeep! Did they end up encountering Ekossigan in the complex later?

I feel like one of those threads is bound to end in failure - terrorists cause a lot of murder, Ekossigan kills a lot of orphans, or the B-Team are all brutally murdered / mutilated by Kell.

Karma Kollapse said:

Eeeeep! Did they end up encountering Ekossigan in the complex later?

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Yes, he was staggering towards them, with a piece of Quital shrapnel imbedded in his face, crying out for his defeated minions and being harried by Obscurati assassins.

Karma Kollapse said:

I feel like one of those threads is bound to end in failure - terrorists cause a lot of murder, Ekossigan kills a lot of orphans, or the B-Team are all brutally murdered / mutilated by Kell.

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Absolutely. Better that way. I have a large group so I upped the ante and added a quest to find one of the bronze golem's eyes to bypass Ob security. (A quest mentioned in the campaign guide but later cut from the story for space reasons, I'm guessing.)