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Message: <blockquote data-quote="El Coro" data-source="post: 5329303" data-attributes="member: 87452">Humor is meant to be a big part of it, mostly because I don't agree with how most D&D games I've played in are all dead-serious downers - life is funny. I like having villains that aren't exactly comical (still dangerous, evil, etc.), but are clearly eccentric or crazy enough to act a little off and have their own personality and ideas - sometimes these come off as quite funny, though the content itself is serious: missing and/or dead children, and some artificer preying on a nearby community.I suppose I didn't state it clearly, but the idea is that Movasi moved out here to set up the secret shop away from everyone else. He isn't supposed to be in or near the village - more up in the mountains, in seclusion away from the prying eyes of greedy city-dwellers and opportunists. He doesn't think the lowly, uneducated peasants of Casai will bother him at all, so he doesn't mind them knowing he's there and since some of them seem interested, he makes a little profit on the side. My point being, the PCs shouldn't stumble upon the shop and then be forced to ignore it to enter Casai and be fed some story - they shouldn't even know the shop exists until the farmers tell them about it and where it is.As for fitting it in as a side quest, it really depends on your loyalty and adherence to D&D canon. Some people (me and my friends included) don't play in a specific campaign world and don't really care about something seeming a little out of place or too technological - though I could see that bothering others.For telling the story in a more subtle way, that's really up to the DM and how he/she feels out the players' intentions and knowledge as it's going on. I left out and changed quite a bit of this when I ran it for my own group, but I wanted to make sure all the info and tools were there if needed.For my group, my players were already heading through the outskirts of a kingdom, so I offered them a shortcut across the grassy plains, which they took. They stumbled upon the lions and the girl, then carried her to the town they saw in the distance. Once they talked to some of the farmers, they began looking for Movasi's shop, and I threw in a skill challenge for following clues across the plains to the nearby mountains to find its entrance. I explained away the technology as basically more-advanced warforged, and the players accepted it without much of a hassle - who doesn't love robots?! I also tossed in a short encounter between the 2nd and 3rd, where they had to make  their way down the defective robot area, where broken and legless robots tried to chase them as the players weaved in and out of moving machinery.The only hiccup I ran into was that the players were dead set on two things:1) Trying to trick Movasi into parlay so they could stab him in the back, so I had to make it a little more obvious that they weren't the first group of adventurers here by having them discover some older adventuring gear scattered about in one of the rooms.2) Detecting whether other farmers were robots with Arcana checks. As written in the adventure, they couldn't detect the arcane aura until the magical insides were ruptured or destroyed, so they didn't feel too cheated in the end - though a couple did exclaim that they knew it all along, which was fine.After killing Movasi and returning to the farmers and the broken robots, the players were a little pissed at being sent on a witch hunt by these peasants. They knew the city that the daughter ran away to, and withheld it from the farmers, burning the evidence so that she could escape their small and controlling world. When finished, the players resumed their original quest and headed back across the plains - seemed to fit in quite easily, though it was unexpected.Anyway, thanks a lot for your comments, Mesh! I wasn't sure that anyone was even reading these adventures, so I appreciate you taking the time to look one over. Let me know if you have more thoughts or comments on this or in general the kind of one-shot atmosphere you're looking for.</blockquote>

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