aniki

Some of this (okay, a lot of this) is fairly technical, but as an overview of how the TotK team thought about and solved a whole bunch of issues during development is fascinating - especially the audio stuff.

The players finally engaged with the cult stuff propertly in this week's Dragonbane session, but are starting to second-guess their enthusiasm for helping the "paladin" hanging out in the town bar after her religious fervour came out full-force in an extremely quick (and maybe too brutal?) battle.

Spoiler - click to showAfter capturing a cultist last time, the Mallard Bard let slip to the paladin that there was a cultist in the town jail. The paladin headed immediately to the jail to execute the captive, but was followed by another cultist who attempted (along with his mates) to ambush the paladin when she came out (having failed to convince the sheriff's deputy to allow the execution). The bard and thief tried to stop the mugging, but I'd underestimated how powerful this knight is; she shrugged off the cultists' attacks and decapitated one in a single hit. To avoid her rendering the players useless, she continued to beat the corpse on her next turn while the mallards dealt with the second mugger.

The paladin has now been arrested for attempting to murder a fourth (officially only "suspected") cultist in front of the deputy. Next session I want to emphasise that she's one of the more reasonable ones, and have her superior arrive to complicate things even further.

They're still on the fence about the precise alignment of their would-be employer – is she part of the cult, or just doing things that happen to align with their wishes? – so I'm trying to figure out how to manoeuvre her so that they can't get a firm grip just yet.

Yeah, it's good - that's how I play with the kid, so we don't have to worry about other players starting anything. There's reduced rewards, but if you're just wanting to chill out and explore it's grand.

I haven't even managed ot save up enough gold to captain a sloop, so I am currently guild-less.

Sunday's Dragonbane session surprised me a bit – not because of anything in particular, but I felt pretty low-energy going in and didn't really have a whole lot planned as a result.

The party had more or less agreed to draw a line under their exploration of the Riddermound after seeing an orcish expedition getting absolutely wrecked by a barrow wight, so after a brief relitigation of the arguments for and against letting one of the bards go back down the hole, they headed back to the main village in the area.

On the road back, I rolled a random encounter – something I hadn't been doing regularly, and had been using as inspiration more than something that actually happens, but something inspired me to dig out a battle map suitable for this and they found some cultists around a summoning circle.\

The fight was quick and brutal (the mage dropped to 0hp, but the cultists were dispatched with extreme efficiency), but most importantly – and unexpectedly – it seems to have lit a fire under the players with regards to finally figuring out what the cult is up to, something I'd been unsure about pressing them on.

Additionally, they've kinda adopted an NPC goblin they found in the barrow, and have successfully convinced him that the group he'd been travelling with were, in fact, traitors to the Orcish cause. He's keen to get back to his bosses and report in, which is also giving them a direct link to the orc clans and pushing them to engage with that part of the plot as well.

And finally, one of the bards got to flirting with a mysterious paladin type in the tavern, linking them to the third faction in the area.

So we've gone from me worrying about how to manoeuvre the story into their way, to an entirely-accidental personal connection to three of the major questlines.