Werebat
Explorer
A friend of mine dropped by for our first session of OotA, and I let him play one of the NPC captives (Sarith the drow). All he knows about that character is that he was imprisoned for supposedly murdering another guard, but doesn't remember doing so, and thinks he was set up by a rival.
We did the demon attack and jailbreak thing, and the captives are about to take the plunge into the pool below (at Sarith's suggestion -- I told the player about the grey ooze and he reasoned that the more captives entered the pool, the less likely it would be that HE ran afoul of the ooze. He didn't mention the ooze to anyone else).
Anyway, now the friend wants to join the campaign and wants to continue playing Sarith, making him into a rogue/assassin. I can work with this, and with the number of players it would be good to pare back the NPCs a bit (only Ront has died so far), but I wonder how to handle Sarith's infection, madness, and potentially exploding head.
A couple ideas:
* Just ignore it. Sarith really WAS set up.
* Sarith is infected, but the party Warlock (a half-drow who chose Auramycos as a patron, using the Great Old One template, and is also a Hermit with proficiency in Medicine) can identify his spores and do something to keep the infection in check, or maybe even heal it. Stool already commented to the warlock that it didn't like Sarith's spores (It does not like, as Sarith captured it), that they were different from the warlock's spores. The player took this to be a curiosity of myconid phrasing, but there could be a different meaning, as both Sarith and the warlock are infected with the spores of Big Z and Auramycos, respectively.
* ???
We did the demon attack and jailbreak thing, and the captives are about to take the plunge into the pool below (at Sarith's suggestion -- I told the player about the grey ooze and he reasoned that the more captives entered the pool, the less likely it would be that HE ran afoul of the ooze. He didn't mention the ooze to anyone else).
Anyway, now the friend wants to join the campaign and wants to continue playing Sarith, making him into a rogue/assassin. I can work with this, and with the number of players it would be good to pare back the NPCs a bit (only Ront has died so far), but I wonder how to handle Sarith's infection, madness, and potentially exploding head.
A couple ideas:
* Just ignore it. Sarith really WAS set up.
* Sarith is infected, but the party Warlock (a half-drow who chose Auramycos as a patron, using the Great Old One template, and is also a Hermit with proficiency in Medicine) can identify his spores and do something to keep the infection in check, or maybe even heal it. Stool already commented to the warlock that it didn't like Sarith's spores (It does not like, as Sarith captured it), that they were different from the warlock's spores. The player took this to be a curiosity of myconid phrasing, but there could be a different meaning, as both Sarith and the warlock are infected with the spores of Big Z and Auramycos, respectively.
* ???