My group has been making their way through the Netherdeep, bit by bit. Now that they’ve realized secret doors exist, they extensively search every room. When they first arrived they thought it was a simple go in and there’s the Apotheon. They have now realized the vastness of the place. It’s been good, and has lots of different types of challenges. My players are still doing the opposite of their usual tendencies about half the time, which is still amusing to me. They are terrified of the Death’s Embrace, even though they could just leave them alone, they attack every time. It’s a good time for me.
The Rivals, on the other hand, have been a strange experience for me. My party, of course, made friends with them way back at the festival. Unfortunately, for backstory plot reasons and group size reasons, I introduced a couple of unsavory characters to the mix. A spy and an assassin, from two of the players’ backstories. The assassin was pretty obvious, but I’m not sure if anyone has figured out the spy, yet. Maybe the one who found her book in the Bone Garden, if not the character, the Player might have an idea. So, despite all my party’s efforts, there is both friendliness and conflict between the groups.
They are set at cross purposes in the final chapter, and I rolled to see how corrupted they’ve all become and how it was affecting them. I worked that into their stated attitudes, and events that have happened in the city. The one with the assassin after him called on the Hand of Ord to find and detain him at one point. I had set the confrontation for session twenty-four, but the key character was absent, so I had to move it to session twenty-five. This ended up putting it outside the rift, as both groups attempted to go back in after resting. Enter the Bard and Calm Emotions, making half of the Rivals indifferent to the party when they were supposed to be fighting. Three, too far gone with corruption to be calmed, attacked the bard, including the assassin. He, countered with a Sanctuary, and telling the party not to hurt them.
The RP was very good. The rivals needed to complete their mission to pay for a resurrection for the missing party member – my group promised to cover the costs. The bard provided the means to send the still fighting (non-assassin) members to the ethereal plane for an hour, after one of them got disarmed. The assassin, sobbing over the death of his son, could not succeed the Sanctuary save to hit the bard again. A strange confrontation, to be sure, but I think it went really well, given my party’s proclivities.
It just makes me even more eager to see the final confrontation through.