[spoilers] Digging for Lies timeline error?

[hirou]

My group may have found a seemingly glaring error in the timeline of Digging for Lies. Well, it's 3am, so I can be missing something, but it goes like this:
-Staff of the Ancients must find its way to McBannin, so Stewart can steal it afterwards.
-Staff of the Ancients must be removed from the ziggurat AFTER the seal is opened, so it's overcharged with Apet energy
-seal is opened about 45th Summer, McBannin is likely arrested by 7th Summer
-...
-my mind is broken.

The main question is: who delivered the staff to Bergeron and, in turn, to McBannin? The only logically possible answer is Bergeron's second team, which arrived after the seal was opened, but it happened AFTER McBannin's fall!
It doesn't help that by complete accident and unrelated personal side-quest Xambria seems to remember PC A from somewhere and she has exactlly the same Reading Spectacles as PC B. The group theorizes that they will somehow travel to the time of The Ziggurat Incident, PC A will save Xambria from death and then whole group will perish, with Xambria claiming PC B's glasses as memento.
Help me, the collective mind, for if I don't craft an explanation, time-travel hilarity will ensue.

 

[hirou]

In addition, I don't understand how Rock Rackus could have acquired a dagger charged with Apet energy. It's not like he was on site of Apet ziggurat, and it's specifically stated in the adventure that Apet was specifically sealed from interplanar travel, even though it's "inside" the greater seal, so even summons from/to this plane are very rare or impossible.

 

[hirou]

The most probably explanation I've come up with is that Xambria actually somehow partially triggered the seal opening in the Spring, perhaps using a staff as an implement to decipher the ritual on the seal. She managed to reverse the process (and called for Bergeron's specialists afterwards), but the staff was overcharged with Apet energy as a result.

 

[RangerWickett]

The timeline goes like this:

The three Ancient artifacts had tons of Apet energy already in them, because they were wielded by folks who guarded the Apet seal.

Months ago, Rock Rackus works for the Ob at the ziggurat of Jiese. After the seal is opened and he helps kill some fire monsters, he takes a dagger. There's a bit of Apet energy on it because as 'the distant plane,' i.e. the plane of space, Apet energy shows up in any sort of plane-hopping magic. Plus Rock teleports a lot.

In the spring, Xambria excavates the ziggurat. She discovers the golden seal room and, per instructions by Caius, stops exploring and returns to Flint. She hands over various relics she found, which Caius passes along to Macbannin for examination.

In early summer, Caius sends her back with some specialists who will open the seal. Shortly thereafter Macbannin gets taken out. Gun-summoner chick whose name I always forget nicks some items she thinks she can sell as she flees.

After what they think are sufficient preparations, Caius's experts open the seal. Things go wrong, and only Xambria survives. She returns with amnesia.

The staff already had Apet energy from being in the ziggurat for a long time. Plus it's damage because it's old, which is why its magic futzes up and sometimes summons monsters from Apet.

 

[hirou]

Thank you for the response! Still, Page 246 of combined Act 1 pdf, "Planar trails":
Pardwight Museum. None of the relics of the Ancients on display possess any energy from Apet except the staff of the Ancients. The staff is overcharged with energy and risks summoning monsters when used, but the other two relics the PCs recovered in Act One were removed from the ziggurat before the seal was opened.

I guess this phrase is a mistake then, and all three relics have approximately the same amount of energy.

 

[RangerWickett]

Hm. Yeah, that's an error. The staff's energy signature would make sense since it's damaged, though. Perhaps the other two aren't leaking the same way.

 

[hirou]

Thanks again, this fixes the problem. While we're at it, a couple of other mistakes I noticed in Act 1 compilation, just in case you'll have a moment to release an errata document:
-Seal of Apet is referenced as "disk" in Xambria's recollection of events (p. 232), but the description of False seal room (which is presumed to be at least similar to real seal) says "rectangular indentation in the wall" (p.242) and campaign illustration (on the front page and once again with Thing from Beyond on p. 275) has it as rectangular gold plate;
-in Cauldron-born p.344 lists B-team as "4th level", whereas Appendix J lists them as 7th level. This can make an encounter with Lorcan Kell very, very different.
Edit: cleared the second question by myself. Apparently, B-team is level 4 in PF version, so that should be a typo...