Stick to Guns, or Reward Guessing? [Ebb]

[Maeglin_Dubh]

In the Eberron campaing I'm co-DMing, the party has just entered, at the instigation of a minor noble of House Cannith, an experimental vault where an Artificer of theirs was working on a project. The adventure is based on the 5-Room Dungeon "The Living Vault", from Roleplayingtips.com.

No details were provided, but the Artificer in question was analyzing a Schema that the party had previously recovered for House Cannith (see the adventure in the back of the Setting Guide [3.5] for details).

My original idea was to have him working on golems disguised as warforged, to be used for infiltration (along the lines of Terminators, since Cannith seems to be Skynet for all intents and purposes). But upon seeing some of the 'experiments' in one portion of the facility, one of the players guessed that he was working on cyborgs. The experiments were trophies, actually, severed heads of a previous party that had stumbled onto the facility and were eliminated by the defenses, only to be 'scavenged' for parts (so yes, integrating organics and constructs were a part of the theme, but the main overarching scheme was indetectable constructs) and now I'm thinking that I like the cyborg idea better. Sure, the guess was OOC, but all the players think it, and the warforged druid of the party is starting to have some IC suspicions about the abominations he's encountering.

The plan (roughly) is that the next room is the primary defense hub, where the last group of intruders fell. One of them is still there, in the middle of the room. There's a clearing around him, and outside of that clearing, parts, small constructs and pieces of constructs, and whatever the defenses didn't salvage from the rest of the party lie scattered. The 'survivor' is actually just a shell animated by a colony of minor constructs, and will attack the party if disturbed. If he isn't disturbed, he will attack when the defenses are triggered, which is whenever the PC's attempt to interact with the animated lock sealing the door out of the chamber. During this combat sequence, the room itself will use abilities salvaged from the dead party (only weapons and arcane abilities. I decided that the research hadn't yet allowed access to divine or psionic abilities of the host body, due to the power source of the animation being arcane).

The last room is the research hub itself, where the Artificer has become part of the facility itself, almost GlaDOS style. Here the power source is housed, and here they will find (and hopefully recognize) the Schema they previously retrieved.

Not sure exactly how to handle the Artificer, or if I should stick to the construct/warforged idea, or just go with the 'House Cannith may or may not be officially or unofficially researching bio-arcane cyborgs.' If I go that route, any contacts they have in Cannith will insist that the artificer just went crazy with his experiments, and was in no way undergoing official Cannith research. I had also planned to have a 'hit squad' of modified Warforged Scouts with (artificed) Merciful Armbows ambush the party as they exit the facility in an attempt to retrieve the Schema. I haven't decided if they would be working for the LoB, House Cannith, or some other Warforged faction, but the idea is they don't want the Schema falling into anyone else's hands.

Comments or suggestions?