*blink* Really? Whoops! I've been trying to foreshadow it for months. Clearly, it doesn't hold together as well when strung out over lots and lots of posts, as opposed to a relatively few games. Drat - I was trying to avoid the feeling of total surprise, because I wanted to play fair and give the players clues that they could use to figure out what was happening.
Note that Imbindarla is the goddess of undeath and the Foul Things that Crawl in Darkness; Galanna, Tao's goddess, is the goddess of the hunt. I don't have Umberlee (the Forgotten Realms bitch-queen goddess of the sea) in my world, as cool as she is.
Here's a few of the lead-up bits:
1. Mara told her church superiors that someone or something was diverting divinations related to Saint Aleax. She believed it was divine interference.
2. When emerging from the null-time demiplane of Kodali's Retreat (where they trained), the group was confronted by an avatar of the sun god Aeos. He told them that Imbindarla had directly interfered with his church, that he had learned of it because of the Defenders, and a divine war had begun that would throw her from her divine throne.
3. The God War resulted in periods of utter darkness and periods of the sun standing still in the sky, along with horrible thunder. Velendo cast a selfless
miracle, donating 5000 xp for no other purpose but to help the good Gods win.
4. Silissa's prophecies are loaded with hints.
5. Tao woke up a week ago with a sore arm, a reverberation from Galanna's divine archery. The chest pain people all over the world (including the PCs) have experienced repeatedly is an echo of Imbindarla's suffering; likewise, the repeated vertigo experienced more than a dozen times by party members is an echo of the Goddess falling.
6. The white worms dropping from the ceiling, as well as the early beetle run, are the loathsome creatures of darkness responding to Imbindarla's death.
7. Stone Bear's spirits (Elder in particular) has been dropping hints.
8. Velendo's and Tao's communes have explicitly discussed an upcoming disaster.
9. The pit fiend alluded to upcoming problems with interplanar travel.
10. A
sending from the army of the sun mentioned bad omens and people dying from falling damage while they slept.
11. Nulloc (and the letter from Murliss) explicitly mentioned that the ghouls were terribly worried about omens, and didn't know how to interpret them.
12. I hinted that Tao suspected a goddess was going to die (note the speech by her gated-in solar), but she thought it would be Galanna, not Imbindarla.
There's more, but I think that's a pretty good cross-section. It may not have carried over enough in the story hour, but in-game I tried to give lots and lots of subtle omens and hints that something really horrible was about to happen. I also worked to give the warnings enough scope that it would be clear to someone who thought about it that it could
only be something divine, because nothing else could cause concurrent omens on that sort of a scale.
Clearly, no one walked up to the Defenders and said, "Hey, there's a mostly-dead goddess falling to earth! What the heck is up with that?" I figured the climactic moment would be a lot more powerful if they could figure it out and then experience it for themselves, instead of being told. There are also in-game reasons for no divine warning, but those are mostly rationalizations for making a cool surprise.
Don't assume that there was no response from the White Kingdom. They were certainly doing something - but exactly what is a great big spoiler, and it might not be what you'd expect them to do. Huh. You've got a good point; why weren't they doing something epic to save their dying goddess? That's an
excellent question, and it's one that my players haven't asked yet.
Anyways, did Imbindarla's death surprise other folks? Now I'm really curious if it came out of left field for everyone!
