Shahalesti spionage

[Daven]

I just started DMing the War of the Burning Sky campaign. I did not read the entire campaign, so maybe I do not know some crucial info about the Shahalesti.
The fact is that after the scene in the depository, my players began to not trust the resistence, because of the two times in which the informations in the hands of the resistance (the secret meeting at Poisoned Apple Pub and the location of Rivereye Badgerface) were also in the hands of the Black Horses and of the Shahalesti respectively.
In particulare, if the Black Horses could follow just the pc and not Torrent, in the second time, they did not imagine how the Shahalesti could know about Rivereye, if not by spionage in the resistance.
So my question as DM is: how Shealis and Larion knew about the gnome? Through Peppin Tallman interrogation? And if so, why Larion acted like he did not know about Peppin? Or, if not through Peppin, how deep is the spionage of the Shahalesti into the resistance?
Are my players right to not blindly trust the resistance?
For now they accepted to go to the Safe House, because they know that even if not so efficient is the resistance, that Safe House could be really safe for that night.
In future I fear that the campaign could go through strange ways because of the initial apparent resistance inefficiency...

 

[RangerWickett]

I hate to resort to a cheap hand-wave, but the answer is magic. The Shahalesti have access to a lot more resources than the Gate Pass resistance, and as soon as word got out that something valuable had been stolen from the inquisitors, they used divinations to figure out where it would be, then sent Larion and Shealis to recover it.

As for the Black Horse, they were just trying to track down and collect bounties on spellcasters. Somehow in the prelude of the adventure, someone let slip there was going to be a meeting at the Poison Apple Pub, and so Kathor was able to stake the place out.

Their second appearance, on the road to the fire forest, is because they were there laying an ambush for anyone who happened by. The main bulk of the Ragesian army was covering the other, more well-traveled paths, so the bounty hunters were counting on the longshot that someone might be crazy enough to try to flee through the forest.

And if your party thinks the resistance is ineffectual, well, it sort of has precedent. In the game I ran years ago that inspired the design of WotBS, my players thought the resistance was pretty much incompetent. They liked individual NPCs, but kept on assuming that their own problems were the only problems going on in the world. So they wondered why all these people weren't able to help them. I tried, in WotBS, to make a point that there are a lot of dangers going on in the background, so the rest of their allies are busy with other things.

The scene in adventure 3, when Seaquen mages burst in to save the party from being assassinated by a devil, was included specifically to show that their allies are useful.

 

[Daven]

Understood.
So is it good to go through pc mistrust, even letting single npcs, like Torrent, help the party here and there, to let pc think that they are not alone against the Empire. I have to read all the adventures yet, but your answer bringed me some clearness.
Maybe I'll skip the encounter in the crypts of the Safe House, so it will be really Safe in pc minds. Resistance has to improve their efforts next days...
Thank you, I hope you could help me in future.

 

[Daven]

A not very important question: who did kill Peppin Tallman? I think it is not important for characters, but for me DM it is useful to have the answer in mind.

 

[RangerWickett]

Hehe. Well, the canon answer is "I have no idea." It was probably Larion or another Shahalesti operative, but we never specify.

A more meta answer is that in one of my games a player's character had died, and he made a really obnoxious mage called Peppin the Tall, who within one session betrayed the party to Pilus, and then was killed by Pilus since he didn't need the man anymore. I just really didn't like that character.