Once again, a ship sailed into the port of Gemiscare - the second time I had run this particular little adventure, the first writeup being here. We were slower to start than last time, because I wanted to give people a bit more time to discuss character and at least pick their own playstyle and hindrances. I ended up with three wizards - one wizard/falconer, one Hanau with electric bolt powers, and one young noble with a bit of book learning and abilities with arrow deflection and sword empowering.
In any case, the players slowly made their way into town, met Henio at the Bullhorns, and then went up and tried to see the Town Council. They tried to overawe the guard by reading his dreams, which entirely freaked him out, then the falconer turned into a hawk and splashed into the pool in Serragane's bathing and entertaining room, which needless to say caused some surprise among Nevro and Tabaloro who were bathing at the time. Serragane pointed them to the recent shipwreck, and they headed out through the lime groves and olive farms and so on. The falconer-mage's skills let them negotiate to some extent with, and then to semi-tame one of, the Greymarnes eating the corpse on the ship. They managed to ascertain that the man had been murdered, returned through the vineyards, failed to mind read or work out the ruses of Cassadri, the scheming farm owner, and returned to raise the alarm. Serragane engaged them to investigate further, and as it was getting late in the day they went into town and rested. So far, so similar to the previous party, for the most part.
Having rested, they lost some time, but not a huge amount in the sweep of the adventure, and then had to choose what to do next. They split the party, which slowed me down a bit as I had to work between both groups, relying on following the falconer's birds for reconvening later. I struggled a bit to keep track of the players all doing different things in different places that morning. Trying to keep track of the falconer's animals in different places took time, and I wasn't doing the dialogues very sharply. What was even trickier for me was that they ended up splitting the day, when they needed to do the investigation and then get out towards the island, between the town and the forest. As such, the players in town got as far as talking to Tabaloro and ascertaining that there was unrest in the town, but didn't follow that up, which could have ultimately led them to arrest Cassadri and discover the whole scheme, and they also didn't go straight to the goblins, at which point they'd have had more time to get the goblins to investigate where the humans had gone and had the goblin alchemist help theorise about the Onodyne (this was a change from the previous adventure where she
didn't have any capacity to work things out about that, but unfortunately it didn't happen).
As such, they ended up in the forest as the rain started, and so I moved the Goblin Alchemist to meet them and usher them towards the tracks of the humans, and then cross the sea to the small island. Once there, the battle started as per usual. This time it was a pretty good fight overall. The players, even after knowing about what was going on in the cave, didn't put much urgency into stopping it. The hanau's goblin battle-partner had snuck into the cave several rounds before the rest got there and could have actually gone for the magician at a much earlier stage. The battle swung nicely, with the hanau in particular managing a few small zaps and then suddenly a whopping 26 damage electric crater, the sword wizard giving a decent account of himself, and the bird squad doing quite a lot of damage. Once they eventually killed the magician, the tidal wave was nearly complete and did a lot of damage to the town, which was where the adventure ended.
This run of the adventure went far slower than the rapid five hour run I managed last time, taking more like seven hours plus a stop for food. This was longer than I'd planned, I think I was flagging at the start let alone the end which probably wasn't helpful for me. Knowing Gemiscare a bit better I'm not sure was helpful - I could get wrapped up in letting the players talk to NPCs who knew absolutely nothing useful, more of the time, and generally needed to speed up my plot hooks and make them a bit more obvious. I think I should probably also have restricted the PCs skill use a bit more - there was a strong tendency for them to get very wrapped up in skill use, especially using the birds in improbably effective ways and trying to mind read just about every NPC to double check their motives, which I think actually put them off finding stuff out (as it felt like every character was being interviewed twice, rather than just trying to talk to more characters in total).
So, to improve for next time:
- Clearer plot and plot hooks
- Restrict skill uses more
- Find more plot ways to discourage party splitting