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#1 noneedforaname May 26, 2010 20:02:06

To my players, this thread contains spoilers.  I'm planning on running a short Vignette to show the causes of the Mourning for my players.  They are currently doing the Heart of the Forbidden Forge adventure published in Dungeon Magazine and when they've gotten through destroying all the wacky warforged prototypes they'll find journals that suck them into the memories of Cyre's final days.  They'll be able to choose from five characters of epic tier and have an encounter, followed by a mystery that they must solve that will give some information about the world.  My problem is that I haven't figured out how to go about the solving of the mystery.  My group aren't huge roleplayers (neither am I for that matter) and I don't want it to be a skill challenge because I sort of fall back on skill challenges too much and want this to be a really unique experience.  Here is the story: In the final days of Cyre the Cannith artificers at the creation forge where the adventure takes place were designing warforged based on necromantic arts, as well as new prototypes of traditional warforged.  The Forge Overseer,  Haestus d'Cannith was doing his necromancy experiments without explicit permission from House leaders in Maker.  When the war was escalating and so many outside forces were converging upon Cyre, the House wanted to take an inventory of what their forges were producing.  So they sent an auditor to the forge.  When the auditor saw the new necroforged he asked Haestus to come back to Maker to explain hisself.  Haestus agreed and takes a newly created Warforged Infiltrator to show them that he is doing good work other than his necromancy. In the meantime, the royal family were realizing that these may be the final days of Cyre and made preparations to secret their son Oargev out of the country and called on House Cannith to do it for them.  House Cannith had a secret railway that connected their Creation Forges in Maker with the location of the forge in the adventure that travelled through Khyber.  It was a dangerous experiment and the only people who knew of it's existence were senior members of House Cannith (and possibly Orien, I haven't decided if they were trying to shut out the other houses from this venture)  and the royal family.  Oargev ir'Wynarn is being accompanied by his most trusted bodyguard Corrigan.  I'll get to him later. The final character is a Silver Flame worshipper (We'll call him Zealot)who has travelled the planes and has had the truth about Warforged revealed to him.  The House Cannith artificers are drawing souls from (wherever dead people go) through a machine called The Source to bring thier Warforged to life.  This disgusts the Zealot and he (or she) goes on a quest to destroy this thing.  I'm thinking the Source is actually a aspect of the dragon Khyber somehow cloned and trapped inside the machine, its like a demigod enslaved (referred to hereafter as The Aspect). So the players will be able to choose from these characters:  Haestus (the Forge Overseer), Glaive (the Warforged Infiltrator), the Silver Flame Zealot, Prince Oergev, and his bodyguard Corrigan.  When the Vignette starts they'll get a bit of background on thier characters and they will then be thrown together in an encounter vs The Aspect of Khyber that was being held inside the Source.  This battle forces them to act together to stay alive and while the creature fights they can see the machines letting off great clouds of the same Mist that now covers Mournland.  Machines will be exploding, House Cannith Artificers will be getting killed and it should be an epic fight.  When it is over the whole place starts going to peices and the only escape route is the Khyber Rail.  So the party gets on board and has some time while in transit to figure out what happened. What happened is someone messed with The Source and the Aspect of Khyber was released, causing all of the ruckus.  One of the riders is guilty of setting it loose.  I want each of them to have a motive and each to have an alibi so that they have to deduce who the guilty person (or persons) is.  Each of them had access to the chamber where The Source was and each of them have clues on who was in there and when. Here is what I have so far for the characters: The Zealot has the most obvious motive, he wanted to destroy The Source because it was an affront to everything holy.  But he didn't do it.  He was in custody when the encounter began.    Haestus has been trying to circumvent The Source by using his own Necromancy for making warforged.  He is resentful that his superiors would want to hinder his research and destroying the Source could be one way to force them to acknowledge his brilliance.  But he was with the Auditor going to speak with his superiors when the Aspect escaped. Glaive has just come into this world but has already seen some of the worst things it has to offer.  Duplicitous people enslaving beings for unholy purposes.  In addition, he was in charge of guarding The Zealot who explained to him exactly where he comes from and just how wrong that is.  Before everything went wrong he stormed off to find Haestus to explain the truth to him.  Did he instead find The Source and decided to make things right, then and there? Prince Oargev is a prodegy of magic and has a yearning to understand artificing but his status as a royal prevents him from being a part of House Cannith.  His trip through the complex has been like a wonderland of knowledge and he had even found his way into The Source Chamber, when the House members were distracted by the discovery of The Zealot's intrusion.   Why would he sabatage the machine?  Well, he wouldn't intentionally, so he probably has the strongest alibi. Corrigan, his bodyguard is actually a changling operative of House Tarkannan who's job was to infiltrate the royal family's inner circle and await an order to assassinate the prince.  He has managed to go undiscovered because of his abberant dragonmark that prevents true seeing and thought reading and whatever else can be used to see through a changling's disguises.  The only person who knows the truth about him is Glaive, who's lack of understanding about the world prevents him from saying anything right away.  Did corrigan decide to fulfill his mission by setting up a catastrophe that would probably kill him.  Well, what only he knows is that in the time spent serving the Prince he has grown quite fond of him and is questioning whether he has the resolve to murder someone he cares about. The Solution:  The Prince was too enamoured by the genious of technology involved in keeping the Source going and decided to take some of it's amniotic fluid to study further when he had time.  I envision The Source to be a sort of life support machine for the Aspect of Khyber that sits inside of a huge fluid-filled, glass chamber with lots of hoses attached to various parts of its body.  This is how the machine somehow channels the souls of the dead into the Creation Forges to create the Warforged.   When the prince tampered with the machine he inadvertantly freed the Aspect and destroyed The Source.  As soon as the mystery is resolved the events of the Mourning will cause the Khyber Rail to crash.  I'll give the players a bit of info on what happens afterwords and the Vignette will end.  (Just so you know Haestus dies in the crash, The Prince escapes as with the help of Corrigan, Glaive goes on to become The Lord Of Blades, and the Zealots fate is a mystery.) I like this course of events and the idea of my players figuring out the mystery of who caused this horrible turn of events, but I'm not really sure how to go about the actual game of it.  I sort of think of it as a game of Clue where I give out cards to each player with hints about what the character saw and ways to exonerate themselves.  I'm a little worried that the person who decides to play the Prince will just confess everything and end the mystery right away, so I thought perhaps I'd give out bonus xp for figuring it out, or roleplaying the secret.  The players will all be getting xp anyway for the battle as well as the mystery, I'm just not sure how to handle it.  I'm also a little worried that once people have their clues they'll just clam up and we'll have a table full of people just staring at each other.  We play every other weekend and I'm going to be giving the players the choice of which character they want to play at the end of the next game so I have about a month to work out all of the details.  I'm sure I could come up with some kind of solution by then but I'd really appreciate any input you might have as to how I could run this, as well as your experience doing anything similar.  You can also give me any amounts of Eberron knowledge you feel is pertinent to the situation.  I'm not especially stringent about what's cannon and not, I tend to use source books as jumping off points for my own ideas (i also enjoy destroying other people's worlds for some perverse reason) but there's probably some bit of info in a sourcebook I haven't read yet that might help. For the record I'm playing 4e.  If you read your way through all of that your a trooper, but thanks.  I appreciate any feedback.