Fria Ligans forum

Hello everyone,
I am going to start The Silver of the Sea.
I see that it is too straightforward for my tastes: warehouse infiltration and/or Amudson dinner -> Orval chat -> final confrontation...
Did you add locations, complications, sidequests or NPCs to enrich it?

Kindest regards
Roberto

Its been a long time since I ran through it, but the Mystery doesn't easily lend itself to sidequests and distractions, because of the countdown to the new moon and the fact that the players are racing against time to intervene in a series of events involving Uddgren and the Amundsens.

This story does borrow a fair bit from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and since my players had all read that, and Orvar is basically "info dump" Zadok Allen, I removed him and added a subplot involving an investigator from the Gauthiod company looking into the disappearance of a vessel they had insured, which led to evidence that wrecking and piracy were still taking place in the region. Recovery of the ship's log and a bit of investigation found that lights on Devil's...um...Deep Reef had drawn the ship off course.

I then built up legends and sinister tales around Deep Reef itself from the locals, which they could get once they'd learned of the place, and had Justina mention that there was gossip, never repeated in Abela's earshot, that Zacharias had been found there as a child. (A rumour she learned from Lura on a rare meeting with her).

One other thing I did was to play up the "godless" nature of the Isle in Uddgren's initial communications, and his suspicions of deviltry, because there isn't actually any evidence of Vaessen involvement in the priest's death, and there didn't seem to be a good reason for the Society to be involved in the first place.

I recommend partly rewriting the initial letter from the priest, to add something about people going missing on the island once a month.
Otherwise perhaps add some stray kids looking for a missing friend, a cabin boy, on the island.

The idea with an insurance investigator snooping around is a good idea (planting the wrecking and Deep Reef-connection, perhaps even let the players run into him/her when themselves are breaking and entering somewhere...) and then letting him/her disappear and be the next victim.

I have also suggested to add a ghastly vision of drowned sailors appearing to add some horror/tragedy "redeem us... save our souls...".