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Message: <blockquote data-quote="efreund" data-source="post: 6855745" data-attributes="member: 6799797">First off, I never gave a return-receipt on this post.  Thank you.  The chaos around the manor was extremely well-received, and it was fun fighting a possessed Serena (whom one PC was dating) and rescuing a now-paraplegic Dima.  We even conducted a rescue operation through a crumbling manor and had a foreshadowy fight with a fleeing Kaja.  They ended up *very* ambivalent on Saxby.  I didn't pull off the Macbannin fight as well: they were just way too willing to help him avert the disaster, and my pivot to "and now I'll kill the witnesses!" was a bit too forced.  Oh well.  Water under the bridge.  We played out the courtroom scene afterwards, with wheelchair-bound Dima as one of the subpoenaed witnesses, who helped them understand the legal system.  Also got to introduce Attorney General Starke as a friendly face, laying some groundwork for the upcoming Radical Vekeshi Plot (his son being the whackjob).  Party feels like they really screwed up vis-a-vis Macbannin's jailcell death, convinced that someone had a small vial of witchoil nearby when they killed him in order to suck his soul out.Anyway, the real reason I return to this thread is this: the party has once again told Saxby too much.  Argh!!  They derail in the most delightful ways.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />After they got back from the ziggurat, they found a number of dirty gifts from Kell, designed to foul up the audit.  One PC in my group is really fashioned as the loyalist (my LG Dwarf Eschatologist, if you've followed my other threads), and Saxby has chartered him with finding out what the audit will produce ahead of time, so that she can be prepared.  Or, in other words, spy on his party members.Well, one of my PCs (our technologist) really got under Kell's skin, and his MacGyvering of his apartment got some of his agents killed, and so he's got some extra special love focused on him.  Cutting out a lot of details, Kell is triangulating in on this PC via his landlord, some crooked cops, and his personal contacts.   (Poor chap is also recently made into a VoR zombie, so he's having a real bad run right now.)  Just to make things extra spicy, I decided that this PC's landlord owns many buildings and is also Saxby's landlord (in my game, she has a penthouse suite apartment), so they know each other and look after each other to an extent.Anyway, rumors of the PCs' (Kell-forged) misdoings are making their way to Saxby, who has in turn put the screws into our Dwarf to come up with the beans ASAP.Parallel to all that, they're actually following the main questline too.  I screwed this up a little bit (so any advice on how the following makes sense would be nice), but they followed the planar trail from Xambria's dormroom, to Saxby's apartment, to the Silver Swan (and noticed that the trail attempted first the front door, then the backdoor), to the warehouse near the Canal with all the gore inside.  (This is a screwup on my part because Sijhen wouldn't know to go to Saxby's apartment until after eating Caius's brains.  I made it clear that the PCs couldn't tell which direction the planar trail flowed, so they are wondering if it started at the Canal and ended at Xambria's or vice-versa, but either way, it doesn't make sense.  Whoops.)Anyway, last time the PCs met Caius, he was pain in the ass, and they realized they wouldn't get anything out of him.  So after they realized that Xambria met him at the Silver Swan ... they did nothing.  They just assumed that he'd lie to them, or Saxby would deny them a warrant, or something.  They just ruled out going inside to investigate (where they would have found his dead body).  What they did do is set up an emergency meeting with Saxby (they met her late at night in the rain, very noir) where they said that they had dirt on her, and that's what the audit was really about.  The don't trust Saxby, and wanted to know what Xambria did at her apartment.  Other stuff related to the audit and politics went down, but the real upshot is that, in the process, they revealed that Xambria went straight from Saxby's to Caius's place.One PC remarked near the end of session: this campaign has gone from CSI to House of Cards.  The audit is getting very intense, and the party spends long stretches of time talking about the allegiances of Delft, Saxby, Price-Hill, Stanfield, Aodhan, and others.  It's fun, and it's starting to get a bit PvP actually, as they choose sides, etc., but that's offtopic.Here's my problem: I don't see how the following can't happen: Saxby realizes that Caius is at risk, and immediately dispatches agents (or goes herself) to the Silver Swan, finds him dead, and covers everything up.  Or at least swipes all the good evidence up.  My PCs did find the star map in the ziggurat, and saw the planar trail go out to sea, so they know where to go next, but, because Saxby can look at Caius's star map, she basically also knows that the PCs will eventually want to go out to sea, and therefore she will logically block any requests to use any boats or to otherwise leave town for an international jaunt.Now, as a practical matter to simply get a boat and get out of town, they could charter a vessel on their own dime, or otherwise sneak out of town.  But they know they are in hot hot water with the audit (and who knows whose house Kell will try to burn down while they're gone), so they are skittish to misbehave too badly.  There's also the strange metgame issue that they think that they "lost" Xambria and the golden plate, and that by it leaving town, it's effectively gone out of game.A few trump cards up my sleeve: one party member is dating Serena on team B.  (For example, I ran the whole Grappa's Golem scene as her secretly taking her boyfriend there, and making him swear to not tell Delft/Saxby she broke protocol.)  Also, if somehow the PCs mention to Price-Hill they need a boat, he might be able to overrule.  One of my PCs (Vekeshi) is interested in talking to Rock Rackus, who would maybe say enough about his work in the ziggurat of Jiese to motivate the PCs to take extreme actions.Anyway, to summarize: the party told Saxby that Caius is in trouble, so the logical thing for her to do would be to clean up his evidence, and to prevent the PCs from going to the ziggurat of Mavisha.(On the other hand, it's not the end of the world to just cut out the whole trip-to-Ber / Mavisha thing, and just stick around in Flint until the Gala of the Ancients.  Xambria will eventually get bored down there, eat Fiorina's brain, and come back in time to unleash the evil genius plan and the book's climax.  So as far as I'm concerned, I'm still on track to end the adventure properly.  It's just a question of whether or not we get our promised one-naval-battle-per-book, I guess.)</blockquote>

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