Weakened Avilona: Why? [contains spoilers, nuts]
I figure some things of mythical significance should not be clearly explicable.
True! I guess this is one of those things where my nerdy lust for detail gets into a fight with my desire to have things feel appropriately mythic. I'm sure if you dig in the right parts of the internet, you can find some rant I wrote about how [content creator] ruined [setting detail] by spelling it out rather than being all spooky and mysterious.
I see the abstract point, but I don't really think it applies here. This isn't just mythic background stuff. This is a mystery campaign, and the borking of Avilona is an important part of that mystery. Then in Act 3, this becomes a fiddly bit that the PCs are asked to make a major decision over. And the GM needs the ability to adjudicate that fiddly decision. It's always risky when the PCs know more than the GM (for example, a PC has played WotBS and the GM hasn't), and then the GM has to decide the setting-impact of the PC's decision. (In this case, binding the now-dead Avilona to the cosmology, this time maybe without Jiese.) Maybe what happened in WotBS doesn't "really matter" in the designer's intent, but it does in the PC's expectation, and then you get weird disappointment or mismatched expectations, because the PC thought the GM understood what was "really going on."
For example, what if a group, on a philosophical level, decides the most ethical thing to do is to put the universe back together again as close to the original setup as possible? (Yea, I know, Reida is gone, and Av is smashed.) Is Avilona dead? Or is the pillar the problem, and *any* plane they try to connect will end up borked? (Remember, when they restored flight, it came from Badon, which was *not* in the air pillar.) I'd like slightly crisper answers to these sorts of things.
I mean, I read the material super-closely, and after a bunch of looking and forum-posts, I figured it out, and filled in the gaps with my own theories. But I could have easily have been blindsided by this at the table. Again, because it's a fiddly-bit under PC-control, I think it needs a bit of explanation.
EDIT: I say all of this because I am super-excited about the reality-hacking in this campaign (adv7 plus adv12/adv13 are just so awesome!!) and I can't get over how mindblowing-cool it is. So please excuse my passion for the subject.
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SanjMerchant
Explorer
You win major props for taking time out of your vacation to fix stuff like this.
My fanon is that, as a Cavalier, she's best at mounted combat and leading groups: the former is useless on a boat and the latter is only useful if the boat is boarded and is something the captain of the Coaltongue can handle. (I think, I can't remember the character's name, which makes looking up stats harder.) If a simple shakedown cruise somehow gets so dire that neither the ship's weaponry nor the ship's crew can handle it, then King Aodhan is far safer with a Wizard who can teleport him out of dodge than a knight who can just... command the ship to sink faster?
I'd headcanon that she is in Flint on the day of the Coaltongue's launch, but that, due to the nature of the event, she and Harkover switch roles for the day (ie he protects the King's person, she attends to doing things on his behalf, when normally it's the reverse).
Heck, next time you run Zeitgeist, throw her into the entourage that arrives at the boat, even if she doesn't board.
I see the abstract point, but I don't really think it applies here. This isn't just mythic background stuff. This is a mystery campaign, and the borking of Avilona is an important part of that mystery. Then in Act 3, this becomes a fiddly bit that the PCs are asked to make a major decision over. And the GM needs the ability to adjudicate that fiddly decision. It's always risky when the PCs know more than the GM (for example, a PC has played WotBS and the GM hasn't), and then the GM has to decide the setting-impact of the PC's decision. (In this case, binding the now-dead Avilona to the cosmology, this time maybe without Jiese.) Maybe what happened in WotBS doesn't "really matter" in the designer's intent, but it does in the PC's expectation, and then you get weird disappointment or mismatched expectations, because the PC thought the GM understood what was "really going on."
For example, what if a group, on a philosophical level, decides the most ethical thing to do is to put the universe back together again as close to the original setup as possible? (Yea, I know, Reida is gone, and Av is smashed.) Is Avilona dead? Or is the pillar the problem, and *any* plane they try to connect will end up borked? (Remember, when they restored flight, it came from Badon, which was *not* in the air pillar.) I'd like slightly crisper answers to these sorts of things.
I mean, I read the material super-closely, and after a bunch of looking and forum-posts, I figured it out, and filled in the gaps with my own theories. But I could have easily have been blindsided by this at the table. Again, because it's a fiddly-bit under PC-control, I think it needs a bit of explanation.
EDIT: I say all of this because I am super-excited about the reality-hacking in this campaign (adv7 plus adv12/adv13 are just so awesome!!) and I can't get over how mindblowing-cool it is. So please excuse my passion for the subject.
Now that I've thought about it, I actually think the exact metaphysics aren't necessarily that relevant. I mean, there's some subtle implication that the Axis Seal was going to be undone once whatever on Reida designates the present progressed to the gap. It may not be the totally and obviously scripted fate of the Watchmaker proposal, but under Reida the world might not have had perfect free will either. Was Nicky acting of his own free will, or had he fallen into a groove on Reida and was no being pushed along by the needle (yes, Reida's a vinyl record in this analogy for some reason)? Is it even possible to know? If the party does rebind the world to Reida, is there going to be a Zeitgeist II campaign some ten thousand years in the future? Will a major catastrophy nearly wipe out a civilization in 9,500 years?
Nicky missed out on a few bits of fine print (lingering Gidim presence or Ratios, that some things would be immune to the Regulus/Patricalus/Jiquus combo), and he had spent nearly 500 years studying the subject.
I dunno, when you put the potential to turn the world into a Dia de los Muertos-themed musical into the players' hands, it's kinda hard to find the right balance between over- and under-explaining, I guess.
