HorseCover
2013-02-15, 02:07 PM
Ok Playgrounders, I messed up.
CHARLIE, IF YOU'RE READING THIS, STOP
This is a Pathfinder game, with all of DSP's Psionic material
Spoilered, as I am long winded.
The Set-up:
The PCs (who come from floating psionic islands) have to scale a giant clockwork tower to rescue a senator who is under house arrest and feels that an assassin may be coming to kill him. They spent a day in the city (which is a sprawling mechanical metropolis), seeking out information on the tower, and hiring a wizard who can get them the spells they need to execute their plan, which involves flying to the Senators home from another tower, and getting teleported out once they save/kidnap him.
They expect to have all kinds of resistance, as this is a luxury apartment with all kinds of defenses against magic and mundane intrusion. When they arrive, the anti-magic field they were expecting to activate is curiously not present. They peek in the house, and notice that the guards have been knocked out (or killed) and one of the PCs, an assassin path Psychic Warrior, sees a red cape go around a corner. The assassin is in the building! Oh noes!
The assassin is an Inquisitor of Wee Jas (I borrowed 3.5 deities to spare having to learn a new pantheon), who has come to bring the senator to justice. Why, you might ask? Well that's what I wanted the characters to ask themselves. So, a fight ensues, the PCs do pretty well, despite the Inquisitor making pretty awesome will saves against about everything they were trying to do. Eventually, they wore her down and it was time for her to make her grand escape...and the PCs threw all of their resources into a huge push to take her out while she is in free fall.
I realize, I could have easily just said, well, you hit her but she is still standing (falling). But they put so much into it that I felt they needed to be rewarded. And so, they got her awesome equipment, which isn't going to really unbalance anything since they spent so much of their wealth getting to the tower. They even sold quite a bit of their equipment to pay for the means to fly there. (They could have simply climbed, and they would have seen that it is easy to climb if they had just examined the tower personally, which I suggested three times. That would have lead to an awesome encounter with the clockwork spiders I had made to guard the tower, but PCs, right?)
The trick is, the PCs captured one of my plot device NPCs, and took her to a colony of psionics to interrogate her. She doesn't know enough to unravel the whole plot, but she has a vital piece of information that is going to keep my PCs from figuring out everything on their own, something that I think will be extremely rewarding for them, and will (should) be a piece of cake to do after the next adventure.
My question is two fold:
1: How should I play this interrogation? Should I let the PCs just view it, so I can have more control over the results, or should I let the PCs be involved, so they don't end up feeling left out?
2: How do I go about having her give the PCs useful information, without giving away the big secret, which will be the one thing they will really want to know? (Why did she want to kill the senator?)
CHARLIE, IF YOU'RE READING THIS, STOP
This is a Pathfinder game, with all of DSP's Psionic material
Spoilered, as I am long winded.
The Set-up:
The PCs (who come from floating psionic islands) have to scale a giant clockwork tower to rescue a senator who is under house arrest and feels that an assassin may be coming to kill him. They spent a day in the city (which is a sprawling mechanical metropolis), seeking out information on the tower, and hiring a wizard who can get them the spells they need to execute their plan, which involves flying to the Senators home from another tower, and getting teleported out once they save/kidnap him.
They expect to have all kinds of resistance, as this is a luxury apartment with all kinds of defenses against magic and mundane intrusion. When they arrive, the anti-magic field they were expecting to activate is curiously not present. They peek in the house, and notice that the guards have been knocked out (or killed) and one of the PCs, an assassin path Psychic Warrior, sees a red cape go around a corner. The assassin is in the building! Oh noes!
The assassin is an Inquisitor of Wee Jas (I borrowed 3.5 deities to spare having to learn a new pantheon), who has come to bring the senator to justice. Why, you might ask? Well that's what I wanted the characters to ask themselves. So, a fight ensues, the PCs do pretty well, despite the Inquisitor making pretty awesome will saves against about everything they were trying to do. Eventually, they wore her down and it was time for her to make her grand escape...and the PCs threw all of their resources into a huge push to take her out while she is in free fall.
I realize, I could have easily just said, well, you hit her but she is still standing (falling). But they put so much into it that I felt they needed to be rewarded. And so, they got her awesome equipment, which isn't going to really unbalance anything since they spent so much of their wealth getting to the tower. They even sold quite a bit of their equipment to pay for the means to fly there. (They could have simply climbed, and they would have seen that it is easy to climb if they had just examined the tower personally, which I suggested three times. That would have lead to an awesome encounter with the clockwork spiders I had made to guard the tower, but PCs, right?)
The trick is, the PCs captured one of my plot device NPCs, and took her to a colony of psionics to interrogate her. She doesn't know enough to unravel the whole plot, but she has a vital piece of information that is going to keep my PCs from figuring out everything on their own, something that I think will be extremely rewarding for them, and will (should) be a piece of cake to do after the next adventure.
My question is two fold:
1: How should I play this interrogation? Should I let the PCs just view it, so I can have more control over the results, or should I let the PCs be involved, so they don't end up feeling left out?
2: How do I go about having her give the PCs useful information, without giving away the big secret, which will be the one thing they will really want to know? (Why did she want to kill the senator?)