Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="random user" data-source="post: 1569588" data-attributes="member: 16581">Here are my initial thoughts on this:- if you have players like my players, you need to think through the assassination thoroughly.  Even if they don't now have the access to the information, there is a very good chance at some point they will get the opportunity to learn about it (either through questioning people or consulting divinations etc), and it's very important that you don't have inconsistancies because your players will latch onto those.  Also it needs to be believable once it's fully known.  Assassinating a king is no easy business.  With the help of the advisor I can see it happening, but you should have an outline of all the trickery the advisor needed to do to accomplish this (like disabling/avoiding traps, knowing where the guards are, etc etc).- I would have a hard time seeing how a warrior would be able to kill the king and his royal guard, unless the guard was merely ceremonial, which doesn't make a lot of sense either unless maybe the land has had 500 years of peace and no one thinks of violence.  More likely would be something like the PrC Assassin using poison, perhaps with some levels of fighter too.- you need a way for speak with dead, raise dead, and other such things to not work (isn't there a spell somewhere that makes stone talk?) or at least don't blow open the conspiracy.- what happened to stonecutter? If he was killed, there needs to be a logical reason how he could have killed the king and his guard but then succumb to whatever he died to.  If he didn't die, then there needs to be some reason why divination spells can't reach him.  Also if he died, the corpse needs to be disposed of somehow, or else speak with dead could be problematic here too.- it seems that if you are in a trusted position, leaving that trusted position isn't the wisest course of action, unless they believe that both kingdoms can be neutralized quickly by another party.  Having one kingdom win would be (I assume) counter to their objective.  Regardless, there should be a logical reason why both of these advisors have decided to leave their high-power and trusted positions where they probably could have sown a lot more seeds of discord.Those are some things I would make sure to have an answer for.   Going forward, here are some thoughts:- how x-filesy do you want to make it? One thought is to conceal the truth in a lie.  After the party hears that there is a conspiracy, the king (well his representative) sends for the party.  It turns out there is some talk of a conspiracy, which the king knows is not true, but he has to make a show of dealing with it.  That's where the party comes in.  The party is to try and uncover the conspiracy (which the king will again reinterate doesn't exist) and to report back.Of course the party will find evidence... but the king will have other explanations, but keep them on to discover more as he doesn't think politically he can dismiss them anymore.- work the other side: a member of the conspiracy will contact the party members letting them in on one secret part (not the whole thing of course).  He will say that he's secretly working in the interests of the king, and ask them to do something.  They'll work for the wrong side for a while before realizing that they are being duped.  After that, hopefully they'll have incentive to really find out what's going on.- cookie crumbs.  Have them get plot hooked into various things, all seemingly innocuous by themselves.  Perhaps they hear about the conspiracy but then don't do anything about it.  Maybe they will then go on an adventure near where the assassin lived and they find out random stuff about that.  Maybe another adventure will take them somewhere where else and foil something the conspiracy was working on and they get some information.  If they are smart if you give them enough crumbs, eventually they'll make a cookie for you.Umm... well those are some thoughts at least.  Hope it helps, or at least gets you thinking in a new direction.</blockquote>

Verification