Black Hart

To Kill A King

DM's Notes: Chapter 10 - The Ball at Axewood Palace

Eloi's characterisation was quite interesting from the start here. He refuses to be catered to by the tailors, then choses to ignore the Ball for mingling with the Palace servants. I liked this idea, a good approach by Eloi. And again a reference to his underpants, not quite as innocent as mightbe thought at first, as we all-too-soon find out what he keeps down in his nether- regions!

As DM my role here became quite simple - introduce the characters to a number of people who were suspects, drop hints and clues, and a number of red herrings, then see what they did. Depending on how well they reacted they would slowly narrow their focus on a smaller number of suspects and eventually flush out the traitors.

Eloi's course of action in the cellar, wholly Stuart's idea' allowed me to introduce the secret passageways that are a feature of Axewood Palace, and have been used by Fimuth IMC before, when he was PC.

Darrak Thurnsyte, although not an NPC of note, is mentioned towards the end of this book, so look out for him.

Baron Arganass was a patsy of course, and was meant to be obvious as such.

I also began the idea of Fimuth's wife, Hanali, conducting an affair with Akhan here, and of course Akhan took to this. Fimuth's wife was long-suffering IMC previously, as Fimuth seemed to inherit the lecherous traits of his player. So far this has been a great sub-sub-plotline in Black Hart, prompting lots of characterisation and a good bit of realism on Colin/Akhan's part.

As Eloi watched the summoning, suddenly we were off-and-running, with all sorts of action happening. I was very happy with the way this came across, as the e-mail game can sometimes be soul-less, but I think the sense of horror and urgency at the unfolding situation came across well.

Of course my original intention was for the King to be killed here, and the players investigate his murder, but Stuart changed all that. I had anticipated that he would try to defeat the Pit Fiend, but to my surprise he took the more sensible approach and concentrated on the King. This was a good course of action which I later rewarded Eloi for, as you will see - but I was quite amused at how I did this. Eloi repeatedly thought of the reward he was going to get for his actions, so I decided to give him a great reward, but just not quite what he expected :-)

It is very difficult to run several players all running about in different locations doing different things, so it was a relief as I managed to get more and more of them together.

The clues were mounting up before the players - a 5' tall person with long blond hair, who knew the area baout Axewood well and could enter the Axewood and steal a magical book from Zarn's dwelling without setting off his protections. I was very disappointed that they did not guess it was Fimuth - Colin later had some gut feelings that it was, but these were likely just due to his association with Hanali, and he could not explain any good reason they should consider Fimuth.

The part where Hamman fired at Eloi, thinking he was an attacker kidnapping the King, was quite amusing. Less amusing was how quickly the Pit Fiend was killed - the Bone Devils made it a bit more interesting, but I think I should have chosen a stronger foe.

Of course, nobody else in the party knew about he 'Doors of Drawmji' (a creation of my own) which Eloi possesses, so they didn't have a clue what the massive golden doors were. All fun and games.