ZEITGEIST Zeitgeist DM question Chapter 1-2

[CommissarCain]

Hey guys! I just finished DMing chapter 1 of Zeitgeist after wrapping up a years-long WotBS campaign a while back. Are the players supposed to be able to keep the Golden Icons they found in the sea cave/mine? They are pretty powerful artifacts and important on a worldwide scale, so I assumed Danor would demand them back when the island was given back to them, but I was wondering what everyone else did.

 

[efreund]

Danor shouldn't necessarily know about them. Nicholas Dupier had just found some, and hadn't necessarily reported it back yet. Nor should Danor know the PCs have them.

They're not that powerful. I mean, they're useful, and my PCs kept them and have continued to make use of them. But they don't "break" anything.

I'm mildly in favor of letting the PCs keep them, on the basis that having them in the party and in-use will keep the planar plotline fresh in their minds, and aid in learning the names & aspects of the planes, which will become important much later. If you take away the toys, the party is likely to forget about those planes names&aspects. Also, the campaign hands out a 4th icon in adv3. This can start to give the PCs the sense that these things exist to be collected, and then they can be on the look out for them. (Note: there aren't actually any more handed out after that.)

Either way.

 

[RangerWickett]

Yeah, I wonder if we should have found an excuse to drop some other golden icons. At one point I'd planned a book that compiled ziggurat dungeons for all the planes, but by the time I was supposed to work on it, I mostly just wanted to wrap up the main plot, not add more side quests.

So, where to add more icons? Avilona and Urim in adventure 1, Apet in 3?

So we could have put a Nem icon in the Crypta Hereticarum in 4.

Maybe Rock Rackus is wearing a Jiese icon as jewelry in 5.

In 6, perhaps some Beran archaeologist is giving a private lesson to Cavallo de Guerra's kids, and he has an icon of Mavisha, recovered from the archaeological dig the PCs visited by ship in 3.

In 7, well, the Ob could have several newly made ones that aren't quite up to snuff because they're intended to only last for the few days of the convocation.

During 8, the group gets the Lost Arc of Reida. I'd probably have a 'past' copy of the golden icon of Reida be in Nicodemus's possession during one of the memory events, where he's showing off a discovery to Kasvarina as part of an argument that there is an ideal moment - around the year 500 - when it'll be easiest to alter the Axis Seal ritual. The PCs would have to wrest the icon from him and then will it into existence when the memory event collapses.

Then the golden icon of Av should be in Thistle Palace in 9, a gift from some previous monarch of Risur.

Importantly, there's more than one icon for any given plane, and they're not that hard to make, so the Ob would clearly have spares.

 

[CommissarCain]

Ok! Thanks guys that’s great. Dupier (the man you fight and then rescue in the cave), told the party that the coins were “Of strategic importance” to Danor High Command and that’s why he tried to protect them. I’m just gonna have him have been lying about that and his superiors only consider them curios, he was just trying to get them to give them back to him.