ZEITGEIST Needed help with The Dying Skyseer. Plus advice for a Standalone adventure.

LeanAsc22

Villager
Hi! First of all I love the adventure. Its setting is great, same as the characters. I have some friends who wanted to play a relatively short campaign (15 sessions) so after checking out most of the PF adventures I ended up choosing this one. I enjoy mysteries and the investigator party. I decided to use The Dying Skyseer as a standalone adventure (from lvl 1 to 5) so I'll adapt encounters and everything, that's not the issue. My problem is that according to the book, and I quote:
When a factory producess something Quital needs for his colossus but which the owner is unwilling to part with, he is likely to find his house aflame, or his business ignited. An outsider will offer to buy the factory while it burns, after which firefighters rush to put out the blaze. These new owners—proxies of Lorcan Kell—are of course cooperative to Macbannin’s interests.
I have some questions about this.
  • 1) New owners: Would a distressed factory owner really take this shady offer? If this happened to me I would not accept it and report it to the authorities so they can open an investigation. Even if you accept, wouldn't the contract be invalidated due to lack of consent under a violent situation? And besides that, isn't Macbannin's plan too dangerous for the materials they need for the colossus? Setting a factory on fire could potentially lead to disaster if there are flammable materials, which would be common in a factory.
  • 2) Witchoil: Macbannin stashes witchoil flasks as an original test to see how witchoil worked using the souls of work accidents. I see the logic in that Macbannin wouldn't kill people just to get witchoil, he uses this flask method so he doesn't get his hands dirty. But are this stashed flasks the only supply? Because near the end of the adventure, it says that years ago Macbannin crafted the eldritch machine after slicing open the veil between the real world and the Bleak Gate in the laboratory to refine withoil and have an unlimited supply. Does this withoil already contains the souls of those who die? If it does, then why bother with the flasks in the factories? I tried to read it as if each flask combined with the Bleak Gate oil is so powerful as a fuel that they don't need that many souls. But then he has a crazy machine pumping it.
Standalone adventure:
If anyone wants to read a bit more, I could use some help or feedback with the changes I'm making so that the adventure is more interesting as a standalone version.
Since she won't appear later and there are already plenty of NPCs, I found no use for Gale. Nilasa is now the "fey terrorist" so she steals the documents and makes deals with Cippiano as in the book. I made it so that Nevard learns about the Bleak Gate events from a vision. The party still needs to help Nevard with the Cauldron Hill part because he says that spirits have a stronger connection to the material world on the hill due to the witches. He says that they could find the spirit of Nilasa on top of the hill and ask her questions. I don't have a medium player so he could help them with that. I'll only use the vision about the fire and maybe give some more clues.

I'm planning on making Lorkan Kell more important and take Quital's appearance out of the adventure. Lorkan knows about the operation (probably not the colossus but the witchoil and the stolen documents) and he would be the one who is at the church, he might have a caster with him to do the metal bar scene, or use a scroll. It would make sense for Lorkan to try to get the documents so that he gets a reward, besides extorting Wolfgang.

I found Macbannin being the villain too obvious. He is a rich district mayor with a mansion on top of a cursed hill (even if it's well known that he protects the city from the spirits). I have players smarter than me and I think they would be too suspicious. Maybe so much that they think that it's a red herring. I thought about making Cillian the real villian, but the buttler being the villain is even more cliché. So I came up with this idea. Cillian is not a spy buttler, but a business partner sent from Danor to supervise the operation. Macbannin eventually learns about the colossus, which changes his mind and wants to stop the laboratory. When the players go up the hill, Cillian kills Macbannin in a way that frames the players and plants false evidence so they have to go to the RHC, meanwhile Creed wants to tie loose ends and sends the dragonborn brothers to set the factory on fire. That way he is now in charge of the operation and doesn't have to worry about Heward. At the mansion they fight and possibly arrest him.

Thank you all for reading!
 

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SO more clarity on this then?
"Adapting the Adventure.
All the beginning Zeitgeist adventures assume the PCs are agents of the
Royal Homeland Constabulary. If your players are free agents, they might

be brought in as specialist investigators due to the tricky political nature
of a murder at the Danoran consulate. Alternately, a PC with the Docker
or Vekeshi Mystic theme feat might have known Nilasa and so have a
personal reason to solve the mystery.
If you’re using this adventure in a different setting and want to strip
out the technological elements, you need to keep a similar element of
simmering social unrest. You might replace factories with more old-
fashioned sweatshops making goods for a group of distrusted foreigners;
perhaps the workers blame some mysterious disease on those foreigners.
The mystery generally remains the same, with the emphasis on tracking
down people who have clues to secrets hidden in the Bleak Gate (or, more

traditionally, the Plane of Shadow), while another group tries to stop the
investigation. You’ll need a reason for Reed Macbannin to be refining
witchoil, particularly if you’re not planning to run the later adventures
"


Well, MacB's house is more like "base camp" than right at the top of the hill (where the Skyseer wants to go). C.H. is a BIG hill...

1) There are no real authority figures in the bit round the lake, The Nettles - apart from Mayor of Nettles MacB - the people who work there are pretty desperate to keep their jobs, if they have one at all. By the time the city authorities ever did anything, it would be too late: the factory would burn (Secchim is an exception to most other factory owners in this setting, as they are rich, don't live in that part of town and can hire more staff. There are always more staff)
a. You could Big up the two thugs doing all the fire-setting: it's possible they are going further than originally intended by whoever hired them. Maybe they decided to cut out the middleman?
OR
b.
There's a possibility that MacB knows about the oil but not what it's for, and is Unwittingly bottling it for someone else, because he thinks that getting rid of it will make the Hill less haunted and his job easier. Of course, he can't have the PCs find out he's helping whoever, before his temporary underground base is dismantled... otherwise He'd be out of a job...

2) Cauldron Hill is sat over a LAKE of witchoil, due to it being a weak spot between the Bleak Gate for having being used as a site of ritual gubbins by a bunch of witches until defeated by a bunch of couple hundred years ago PCs-now-background characters. The Flasks are just a way of making it portable for other "members" of the organisation MacB works for.
(Read Bonds of Forced Faith if you want more background on C.H. and what to sicc on them up the hill)
This is why a certain something/one is being built near there... and why if you aren't running further, then the bolded bit above is the crux of the adventure: Why does the Baddie need SoulJuice(tm)?
Sounds like (Fake) Philosopher Stone materials from FullMetal Alchemist if you want a one-off alternate reason... So... Alchemy instead of ArcanoTech

If you are only doing episode 2 in act 1, You may as well take Quital/Borne/Gnomes out of the picture period, but if your players ever want to pick up where they left off in another "short" campaign following on from this at some nebulous future date, consider your remaining throughlines into the next episode/act. Or by then you'll probably have enough character threads to work with, and take inspiration from the city setting as and when?
 

If you know this is a one-off, setting it during the last war might be interesting. The culprit could be stealing war supplies, sabotaging, etc. Would make the Danor embassy thing a bit more tense. Like relations need to be kept up, diplomats need to be there to handle POW swaps, or maybe there are ongoing peace talks happening. Would give you a lot of potential reasons behind things happening.
 

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