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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jkason" data-source="post: 5634443" data-attributes="member: 2710">Murder's Mystery RevealedYou were all right to note that that the deaths of Ryall and Roug were a big shift in the tone of the adventure. As my own jokes admitted, it was designed as a bit of a Scooby-Doo plot, where the villain's elaborate scheme probably cost more than he'd ever make with it.  While both men were meant to exit the adventure at the point when the party split from them (I didn't want you guys to have to spend every encounter worrying about their safety), my original proposal let them live happily ever after, with Gabbiano even covering their expenses to replace the lost house(s). Heck, I briefly toyed with having them share the house when all was said and done.What changed was the adventure playing out in practice differently than it had in theory. Being new, I was doing a pretty straightforward matchup of treasure to encounter. The end result, as several characters noted, was that the party had found more than enough funds to replace the house a couple times over before you'd even left Roug's little plot of land. It was pretty clear to me that there was little motivation to continue beyond the fact that I could OOC tell you that there were more encounters and XP to be had. So then Relic and Daylily gave me a bit of inspiration. Relic suggested to both Ryall and Roug that the person behind this mess seemed to want to hurt them specifically, sending all these critters to attack. In context, he was suggesting that one or both of them might be 'in on it,' and trying to shake the truth out of them, but the suggestion that Caan would try to cover his tracks with lethal force wasn't out of character for him.Then Daylily threw all that raw meat on the back of the Ryall's cart. I knew there was a wolf encounter coming up, and my first thought was: well, what if they stopped to eat first? That evolved to Caan deliberately sending the wolves to kill the men with the hope that the pig carcass would make it seem like a natural-but-unfortunate attack. It robbed Ryall and Roug of their happy ending, the poor sods, but I thought it fit into the logic of what had been building in-game and (I hoped) provided a new motivation for the party to endeavor to track down the house-stealer and finish the adventure.</blockquote>

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