Hi, this is a necromantic post, but for the records:
- My players hesitated a lot, finally they negociated with the witches that they could take the Abbot's treasures and will not disrupt the rituals. They killed the abbott and every threats to the ritual (without knowing it) - mainly Anna and the Abbott. Their negociatoins went very well, so the Knight didn't attack them, on Orelia's words and was there to kill Kyrkwood and its peasants. I houseruled some NPC vs NPC interactions on the fly (I rolled a few d6 equal to NPC 1's HD or level vs NPC 2's HD or level, and keeps the highest. The highest number wins. If equal, nobody wins).
- If some of the threats would have be there, the ritual could have been disrupted without the players knowing it.
- They are very cautious and lucky, we played Tales of the scarecrow, then No rest for the wicked, and now NSFW, and nobody's dead. They don't know if the ritual will work but they left the town and their only concern is "how to get the harpschicord from the farm", true adventurers.
Now I'm in a pause (so I can be player) for a moment, but I'll show some clues about how the ritual affect the region in future adventures. I will specifically avoid the "Quest giving NPCs" and will draw from England upturn'd. The St John vs Woolcott seems to be a nice option.
My plan is to do something like Better than Any Man : time pressure before Woolcott's domination (but with more time), random encounters expressing the changing world, and a few bounty against elites of the old world, but most of them will be regular humans (surely hidden in dungeons!). I think I'll throw a region map with the God that Crawls, a Seclusium of Orphones, and a few homebrown very small dungeons. I'm thinking about an hex map but won't have the energy/time to work on a full time. Then I'll build something up between sessions based on the encounters.
I will avoid any new "religions" from the Synode, but will see on the fly.
Strangely England Upturn'd writes about a hex map (something like "there is 1d3 farmstead by hex", but there's no hex map. Does somebody knows something about that?