Changes to Cauldron Born - An Overview
I’m making a few alterations to
Cauldron Born that I thought it best to outline up front – firstly because if I don’t my session reports won’t make sense, unless I explain the changes as I go, which would be much more clumsy; secondly, because it helps to get my disparate thoughts in some sort of order; and thirdly because if I’ve made any major errors, someone out there (RangerWickett?) might be kind enough to point them out.
There are a number of reasons behind these changes. The most important is that I want to personalise the adventure, and weave in at least two PC subplots, which has a knock-on effect and necessitates altering other elements. Another reason is that there are things in the Campaign Guide that I really liked the sound of which ended up not being implemented in the final draft (for practical reasons), so I just went ahead and put them back in. And finally, with this episode more than any other, I had a clear vision of how I wanted things to play out even before the adventure was released. A couple of things jarred with my sensibilities, so I’ve changed them too. (Please note, this isn’t a criticism, any more than saying that my favourite colour is green is a criticism of the colour red.)
Major alterations
- The primary foe in the Cauldron Hill installation is an eladrin enchantress called Lavanya, not Lorcan Kell. Lavanya is a figure from Leon’s past. She will be accompanied by Conquo, her fey golem creation (who once adventured with the group before disappearing in the Dreaming).
- I have reintroduced the Golem Eye thread, requiring the unit to track down the second eye of the bronze golem that houses Alexander Grappa. The eye contains the second half of a set of codes that enable the golem to pass through Tinker Oddcog’s defences unharmed, and enabled Grappa and Kasvarina to escape in the first place.
These two changes have a lot of ramifications and there are other minor twists in addition.
The players will start out thinking they have until the end of the whole peace conference (20
th) to work things out – at least as far as Kell is concerned. The sudden culmination of one thread after another on or around 13
th/14
th will hopefully come as a surprise, and they should be all the more unsettled by a chain of events that propels them, unprepared, into the Cauldron Hill compound well before they expected any kind of ‘finale’. So a slightly different take on the ‘countdown’ scenario.
I also wanted to lengthen the amount of time it takes to take down Kell: I want his organisation to feel more resilient, and for the operation to take more effort and time to achieve. So the initiative will be more slow and steady, beginning before the adventure starts, with a sudden push involving more officers from 9
th onwards (following the meeting with the King). Unit B will have been nibbling away at the Kell Guild for weeks, and Korrigan’s crew will have been on the case for one or two weeks
before In Media Res. I’m simply going to increase the amount of time it takes for them to complete each action. And although they will begin the adventure with an effective head-start, their efforts will be disrupted by not two but three other threads.
Kell is a nasty piece of work, a great villain, and my players hate him, as he already killed their specially assembled strike-force, who they were quite attached to (and for that reason I probably won’t have him go after unit B; haven’t decided yet). But I still don’t want him to be elevated to BBEG status. To my mind he’s a mere hireling, and a thug, and it works out better for my campaign for him to be dealt with ahead of time, perhaps even in an anticlimactic way. If the players don’t get to him in time and he flees, using his
gatecrasher charm, then he dies because the Ob don’t provide him with protective magic – a betrayal organised by Stanfield himself. (The players will be warned about this ahead of time, so they will know what has happened to him if/when he vanishes.) Whether he is killed in this manner, or by the party, or surrenders or is captured, both he and Quentin Augst know how to use the canal route to get into the Bleak Gate. That’s the principle route the players will be taking (unless they side with Ekossigan). If they have Augst, he won’t talk until Kell is taken out for fear of reprisals.
Augst is not an initial target of the ‘Get Kell’ initiative as he is ‘only’ his lawyer; but there will be a number of pieces of evidence that point in his direction, until Unit B finally witnesses him implicate himself in
Sunset Beach. If they don’t hear what he says to Norm (about getting rid of Kell and taking over the organisation himself) then other evidence will point towards him and lead to his arrest (or to his untimely death at the hands of either the Ob or Kell if the RHC doesn’t move fast enough). Augst knows about the wands needed to fix a target in the Bleak Gate; Kell doesn’t. Augst knows that the Ob’s plan is to let Kell flee using his
gatecrasher charm and then leave him to flounder until he dies. (What he doesn’t know is that the Ob also want rid of him as they have no further use for the guild whatsoever, and now they know Kell has trusted him with almost all of their secrets, Augst is a liability too.)
Whether they have Kell or Augst or both, the players will most likely be taking the canal. The number of troops they have with them will depend on how prepared they were and how fast they react to the sudden turn of events; I’m not going to impose a physical limit. There may be an opportunity for them to take a smaller advanced force using the Wayfarer’s Lamp and any functioning amulets they have collected (perhaps using Uru’s garden as a starting point), and this will be the fall-back option if they don’t capture either Augst
or Kell. I don’t want Aodhan to hold the key to getting the group into the Bleak Gate. He already has the trump card to play against Borne, and I like to give as much agency to my players as possible. Aodhan will have the means to protect a limited number of his servants in the Bleak Gate (should they need it), but not to get them in there. So his absolute deadline for finding out what the Ob are up to in Flint is the 20
th as he wants to keep the Danorans occupied while the unit take down the Ob, hopefully with enough time to establish if Lya Jierre is connected to or aware of the operation in Flint. The unit should have all the pieces in place on the 13
th, and be organising their assault when they receive their surprise invite to the opening dinner, meaning they aren’t in position and ready to roll when Asrabey bursts in and blurts out their plan in front of the Jierres.
Speaking of Asrabey, I didn’t want him to burst in to speak to the King twice, so I changed his introduction into the adventure. Instead, I decided that he would come to talk with the Vekeshi at the start of the adventure – specifically, to Leon, thanks to the cachet he recently earned with the Unseen Court. To begin with Asrabey believes that Ekossigan has come to disrupt the peace conference (just to muddy the waters a little) and wants his help to dispose of Ekossigan with the minimum of fuss. Later, when he learns about Kasvarina from Ekossigan, I plan to have him turn
against the party and help Ekossigan, thereby winning the
Spring Returns to Winter encounter. I have not yet decided whether this will be a choice for Asrabey, or some sort of enchantment by Ekossigan made possible thanks to Asrabey’s distress on learning of Kasvarina’s ‘imprisonment’. This will, of course, be a very dangerous encounter for the party as they may feel compelled to fight to the bitter end to save the children, so I will have to handle this change carefully to avoid a TPK.
Assuming Asrabey and Ekossigan win, unless the players accompany the fey (which I doubt they will, but you never know) the fey army will be destroyed (thanks to the extremely effective defences of the Cauldron Hill facility), leaving Asrabey to stagger back to the peace conference, and burst in at just the wrong moment, demanding aid from the King under terms which the King cannot refuse, despite his outrage at Asrabey’s actions. Hopefully the slaughter of the fey will leave the players feeling properly unnerved at the prospect of assailing the Ob stronghold, and the death of the orphan children will leave them conflicted about accepting Asrabey’s help.
Just how worried they are will depend upon whether they have managed to get hold of the golem eye. Without saying so directly (as it would break the terms of his geas), Alexander Grappa will ask them to locate it. I may even decide that he can actually
see through the detached eye, giving them a clue as to where to start looking. Grappa wants the eye because it makes a set that enables the golem to bypass all of the tricky defences Quital had Tinker Oddcog install. (Tinker might have been hoping that Grappa would take him along when he escaped, who knows?) I have beefed these defences up somewhat, anticipating that they will be bypassed by one of various means; even if the unit don’t get the eye, they can always send Uru in through the ventilation system (which he discovered during his solo adventure into the Bleak Gate).
After the bits and pieces of the golem (minus the eye) were collected by Carlao, Serena et al, the remaining eye was scooped up by intelligent fey spiders that work for the Trash Heap, and comb the city for interesting bits and pieces. She gave/sold/traded the eye with a being known as The Clockwork King, knowing his abiding interest in all things technological. The Clockwork King is an artificial intelligence created prior to his involvement with the Ob by none other than Tinker Oddcog. Having been abandoned by its creator (who does not even know that his invention survives), the creature has created a body for itself, and a small network of influence throughout the backstreets, sewers and warehouses of Flint. Knowing that Tinker used the Godmind Urn to give it life, it now seeks Tinker and the Urn, and immediately recognises the provenance and function of the golem eye. The Clockwork King is clever and will try to find out where the second eye is to be found, and how to get to Tinker. He can reprogram other machines to do his bidding, and has sent his cohorts out to alter the coded instructions of a number of constructs, golems and gearmen throughout the city. Exactly how this will all pan out remains to be seen, as does whether The Clockwork King will emerge as a foe or an ally (or first one, then the other). But diplomacy is the likely outcome of this additional thread.
With or without the eye, and with or without back-up, the unit will eventually arrive at the Cauldron Hill facility, where they will encounter Tinker before he flees, tangle with Leone (whose powers will be used in the first few rounds of combat to frightening effect before he is removed from play by whatever means is expedient, most likely Alexander Grappa), and come face-to-face with Leon’s beloved Lavanya and her bodyguard Conquo.
I have kept the details of Leon’s past and the precise nature of his relationship with Lavanya sketchy up to this point, partly because I hadn’t decided exactly who she was, aside from being a dreamlike female archetype – the beautiful nursemaid who restored the dying Leon to health, and convinced him through her kindness that the fey are not as wicked and beneath contempt as he has been brought up to believe. For the first few levels of the campaign Leon did not even know if Lavanya was still alive (and nor did I).
Another reason for keeping Lavanya on the back-burner, even when I did decide to weave her into the main plot, was because I learned a long time ago that it is a mistake to make the backstory of a single player central to the campaign from the very beginning. If that player leaves or his character dies, that element of the story is of much less interest to the rest of the group. Now, fingers crossed, we are close enough to the finale of heroic tier for me to take the risk!
So here’s the deal: Lavanya is now a member of the Obscurati. Haven’t decided yet whether she was all along, and that doesn’t really matter right now. What matters is that, during the period she spent nursing Leon back to health, she used her mastery of memory and mind magic to remove certain memories that he wanted to lose. When the Ob forces that were sent to silence Leon finally tracked him down to Lavanya’s hideout on Axis Island, he escaped and she was captured (a fact Leon has felt guilty about ever since). Unbeknownst to Leon, Lavanya then came to work for the Obscurati in Flint, though her methods and talents only became vital once Kasvarina and Borne were disabled by Alexander Grappa. Leone has had her working on the golem’s mind, and on controlling it, though with little real success. Since Grappa’s escape, security has been much tighter. Before then she was able to leave to do research, which is how the unit heard rumours of her passing through the Dreaming from the dragon Tatzel (who also helped Conquo to reunite with her).
During the final encounter, Lavanya will try to encourage Leon to switch sides, and offer to return his missing memories to him: they are stored in a memento he left in her possession: his Obscurati Golden Cell ring! When Leon gets his ring back, the restored memories will reveal that Han Jierre is a member of the Obscurati and that Leon once was too! He wanted these memories gone so that the Ob would not be intent on pursuing him. Effectively, Lavanya has removed every piece of his mind that is connected to the Obscurati geas, along with the geas itself. (This links in to another change – that Brakken of Heffinata cannot mind-read Han. He will be able to tell the players only that Lya knew nothing of the Cauldron Hill facility and that a messenger has been sent from the Danoran suite with an urgent message for the Ob hidden there.) If Leon regains these memories, unless he handles it very carefully, he will be subject to the geas again and unable to reveal what he knows. Also, Han Jierre will learn exactly who Leon really is.
When Borne is activated, Lavanya will scramble aboard and attempt to control him. So his actions will be focused and therefore much more dangerous until the unit clambers onto the golem too (possibly with Gale’s help) and succeeds in dispatching Lavanya.
So there you have it: a few personal twists to the published adventure. Some other minor additions worth mentioning are: Uru has already been approached by Ellik, on behalf of Ekossigan, and is very angry at having had to abandon his membership of the Unseen Court as a result. He has also witnessed the Ob’s activities in the Bleak Gate first hand, and made it possible for Justin Rollins to put the bronze golem back together. Several members of the Rumschatology sect (including Azon, Thered, Thangir and Kvarti) have defected to the cause of Grundon Zubov, taking 10000gp and murdering the sect’s treasurer in the process, so Rumdoom will encounter some old friends as they pursue that thread. Also, with Kvarti being so much more familiar to the party (and having a lot more to answer for) I may have him approach the party ahead of time, rather than waiting for them to follow up the first lead. Korrigan will be rewarded for helping Asrabey with the means to free his wife from her fey bargain. And Malthusius’ ongoing friendship with Governor Stanfield is going to make it very hard indeed for the unit to take the Obscurati by surprise…
