O Wintry Song of Agony

[wmasters]

Hi guys,

My group is soon going to reach O Wintry song of Agony, and I'm hitting a slight snag - they failed to recover the coded book. That's with Leska now (or possibly Kreven).

I can another route to give them information on the Scourge, using divinations and information from Plius, for example but equally I don't want their failure to be without consequence. Does anyone have any bright ideas on how this could affect things? Not letting them find out about the obelisk is another possiblity, but may be damning for the end of the campaign if they don't have a chance to destroy it.

Thanks

 

[RangerWickett]

You could just make it so that, since the resistance doesn't know about the Obelisk, Kreven has more time to get it operational. Y'know, a "fully armed and operational battle station" and all that. Maybe have some allies they're fond of get wiped out by an initial attack by the Obelisk, so the PCs have to go in with fewer reinforcements.

 

[buzzgunner]

So, here it is, five years later and I'm only just now getting around to "O, Wintry Song of Agony". I'm just having one MAJOR problem with it as published; the map of the pit/oubliette and the description of them make almost no sense at all. It's like the text was written for a different map!

Did anyone else have this problem? If so, how did you deal with it? I'm stumped!

 

[RangerWickett]

In the 3.5 version, page 30 says: " Layout. The prison’s general shape is a giant ring, with the pit for new arrivals along the northwest arc. The tunnel of the main ring is 20-ft. wide by 10-ft. high. Along the edge of the ring, every forty feet a 10-ft. wide hallway extends outward 80 ft., with 5-ft. deep alcoves cut into the walls for prisoners to sleep. However, there are no beds or furnishings. Three long access tunnels cross the interior of the ring. One hallway leads inward from the ring, toward the whisper hole and the oubliette, detailed below. "

And page 35 has a map, with a large focus on the center of the map, and an overview of the whole area in the bottom right.

What's confusing you?

 

[buzzgunner]

On the page that shows the map to the oubliette, the right is on the right and an enlarged version of the central passage is on the (upper) left. If the pit is along the northwest arc of the ring, where does the area in the right-hand diagram marked "Entrance to oubliette" go? Further down, I assume, but to what? What's an the bottom of that pit isn't detailed, save for some suggestive but confusing text. Beyond the "whisper hole" (in the room where Guthwulf lives), the descriptions don't make sense (to me.) The text makes it sound like it's just a room containing Agony and Etinifi, but the illustration looks like a shaft going down. If the latter, what's at the bottom?

 

[RangerWickett]

Oh, ok.

There's the top level of the facility. In the antimagic 'clean room' there's a pit. That pit leads to the northwest part of the ring that makes up the lower level. Then if you go to the center of that lower level, there's the tunnel that has the whisper hole, and then the room where Etinifi is chained up. In the center of that room there's a hole that leads to the oubliette -- which is also a pit -- containing Agony.

I can see why it could be confusing.

 

[buzzgunner]

OK, finally, that description makes sense with regard to the layout of the map. THANK YOU!!!!