A couple of months ago I
posted about a social-only 4e session that I ran.
This post is a follow-up to that one.
The social-only session culminated in the PCs taunting their enemy into a fight (via success in a skill challenge). The next few sessions involved that fight, plus some fighting with cultists and a catoblepas (which involved a memorable use of Twist of Space to teleport the catoblepas into the air so that it dropped onto the cultists), and then some exploration of their defeated enemy's apartments, and some more fighting in the streets outside those apartments.
Anyway, the upshot was that the PCs took as prisoner a cleric of Torog, whom they had fought once before, when she was part of a hobgoblin raid on a village. Although the PCs won that earlier battle, the cleric managed to escape - the PCs tried to chase her down on a behemoth captured from the hobgoblins, but the players failed the skill challenge and the PCs therefore found themselves thrown from the beast when it had trouble negotiating a steep ridge.
The capturing of the cleric took place some time after midnight. The PCs had to meet the Baron of the town at dawn. The PCs wanted to interrogate their cleric captive before that meeting, and had a few hours in which to do so. They decided to conduct the interrogation in the beer cellar of the inn in which their (now defeated and dead) enemy had his apartments - no openings for the cleric to teleport out of (and they knew she could teleport from the two times that they had fought her).
The party's "social" team consists of a drow sorcerer/demonskin adept with very strong Bluff and good Intimidate, a tiefling paladin of the Raven Queen with good Diplomacy and Intimidate, and a wizard/divine philosopher (who serves Erathis, Ioun, probably Vecna although it's a bit amiguous, and in the past at least has served the Raven Queen) - this last character has reasonable Diplomacy, and has a 1x/enc "Charm Person" cantrip that lets him use Arcana in place of a Bluff check.
There are two other PCs. One is a ranger/cleric who has good perception, zero social skills, and whose player is interstate on sabbatical - so that character was given the job of guarding the stairs. The other is a dwarven fighter/warpriest of Moradin, who has poor social skills but who (due to the way previous events have played out) is the "leader" of the party in the town they are in - he is "Lord Derrik", "Lord of the Dwarfholme of the East" who is accepted by the Baron as a peer.
As the interrogation began in the beer cellar, Lord Derrik was sent upstairs, to the enemy's apartments, to do a thorough search and also to drag all the furninture in the rooms over the top of a teleportation circle that they had found (to stop bad things teleporting in). In over 20 years of GMing, this is the first time I remember the players doing the whole "send the paladin (or in this case, the fighter/cleric of Moradin) to another room while we interrogate the prisoners" thing.
But anyway, it worked. With the sorcerer taking the lead (with Bluff), the (actual) paladin offering support (with Intimidate and a bit of Diplomacy) and the wizard joining in too (using Diplomacy, and Charm Person to make one crucial Bluff role), they managed to persuade the captive cleric to talk. I ran the persuasion as a skill challenge (requiring 8 successes before 3 failure), the idea being that once they had persuaded her then she would answer whatever questions she could without any more rolls being required from the players. (The rationale for this was that persuading her, and the way that played out and the consequences of it, was likely to be interesting - but that once the persuasion itself was sorted out, I was very happy to just let the players have a whole lot of fairly central plot information, that they've been trying to figure out now for many months of play.)
The crux of the attempt to persuade her was that she had no objection to suffering (being a cleric of Torog) but that she didn't want to die; but also if she
did die, she was very confident that her soul would not go to the Raven Queen but straight to her divine master. At first the captive tried to bargain for a safe passage in return for providing information; and she indicated that she would be willing to swear oaths not to return to her life of warfare and consorting with hobgoblins, as part of a deal to spare her life. But it became clear fairly quickly that the PCs - particularly the paladin of the Raven Queen, who is fairly fanatical about exacting vengeance for the deaths of innocent villagers caused by the cleric and her raiding hobgoblins - were not prepared to agree to this.
The wizard threatened her with death and resurrection as an undead corpse which he would then interrogate at his leisure (and he showed her some documents detailing necromantic rituals to back up this threat), but the force of this threat was a little blunted by the objections coming from the paladin of the Raven Queen.
The captive herself then started insisting that Lord Derrik (whom she, like everyone else in the town, was treating as the leader of the party) guarantee that the Baron would not execute her. (The grounds on which she might be executed were many - levying war against the town would be the most obvious one.) The drow sorcerer, through subtle manipulation (and an excellent Bluff check) managed to persuade her that this would be done, although no such actual promise was given - it was more that he worded things in such a way that gave her the impression that the undertaking was understood by all to have been given. And neither the wizard nor the paladin did anything to contradict the impression that had been created on her part. And thus she started spilling the beans - of which she had many to spill.
And then at about this time the player playing Derrik decided he had had enough of watching the others go at it, and so decided that Derrik had finished sorting out the furniture upstairs and was coming back downstairs to see how things were going. The ranger on guard had been instructed to try and dissuade Derrik from coming down, and he made a half-hearted attempt, but a PC whose player is absent is never going to persuade a PC whose player is present and wants to get in on the action! So Derrik came in.
He was very pleased to see the captive talking, and being so cooperative. And she was very pleased to see him, explaining that she was glad that he (through his agents) had promised to persuade the Baron to spare his life. At which point Derrik almost started pulling out his beard in frustration (and I think the player might not have been following all that was going on also - the session was a couple of weeks ago and my memory is a bit hazy, but I think Derrik's player may have been doing some child wrangling while Derrik was not in the action - and so he was a bit surprised and frustrated also!). But being a warpriest of Moradin, and a dwarf of his word (even if given carelessly by others!) he could not go back on a deal that she had so obviously been made to believe had been struck, and had relied upon in exchange for giving up her information.
Derrik did try to weasel out of things a bit by saying "he would do his best to persuade the Baron to spare her life", but the captive pointed out that the Baron owed his life and his town to Derrik, and Derrik was therefore in a position to extract the guarantee of mercy, not merely ask for it. And so when the PCs then met up with the Baron at dawn, the first thing Derrik did after pleasantries had been exchanged was to hand over the prisoner while explaining that he had promised to her that her life would be spared. And as she had foreseen, the Baron had no choice but to comply with Derrik's request.
So Derrik (and Derrik's player, at least somewhat) was upset that a prisoner had been spared whom he thought ought to be tried and justly punished - because the interrogators had been careless in making promises that they shouldn't have. The drow was upset that Derrik had instructed him to lead an interrogation, and then come in and mucked it up before it had reached its conclusion (which I think the drow envisaged being a swift execution so that Derrik need never know of the duplicitous means used to extract the information). The paladin was upset that someone who deserved death, and who had brough death to so many undeserving, was being spared. I'm not sure what the wizard thinks of the situation.
As GM, I felt obliged to compound the situation by reminding the players that Torog is also the god of jailers, and hence that the prisoner was likely to have a reasonably good time in prison, or even a good prospect of getting herself out of prison. This just made everyone even more upset!
This is not the first time in this campaign that the PCs have had conflicting moral opinions that have been relevant to the action of the game. But it is the first time (as best I recall) that the conflict beteen those moral opinions has itself been a key driver of the action in the game - producing a situation that everyone wanted (they got the information they needed) but also that no one wanted (everyone wanted the prisoner to be dead, whether by murder or by execution). Naturally, therefore, a very satisfying session for me as GM, and as best I can tell one that the players enjoyed also.
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