As much as I like the format of Rough Night at Three Feathers, I am starting to doubt whether it is that easy to transfer the formula of seven parallel plots, a single timeline and long-term impacts onto any situation. It feels like there is a number of details in It's Your Funeral that make it much more difficult on the GM and might possibly cause frustration for the players. Here is what I am struggling with:
1. Instead of an isolated social situation with clear boundaries and a manageable cast of characters (a couple of patrons, one night, one smallish inn) here we have a large, somewhat unspecified crowd in a spatious public space in daylight, not farther than about 5 minutes away from a bustling smaller city or a large town. This presents a much more porous social situation where anybody can come and go, all kinds of external resources can be brought to bear ("hold on for 10 minutes and I am back with ...") and there is always an anonymous crowd present in the background.
2. This is also tied to lack of character motivation. It is just assumed that characters will just stand around somewhere and witness stuff going on - until the frustration and boredom with finding themselves on a choo choo train results in the players taking hold of their agency and interfering with the stuff. The problem is that this situation is much less believable than a tavern. First of all, a tavern is spatially structured in such a way that it is clear where you are, what you are able to see and hear and what is going on. You have the main room, door, staircase, corridor, your room. Here some of the stuff is going on on the road towards the graveyard or at its gates, some in the central altar area and some in numerous other interspersed locations. Management of where the group is and what of all the events they are able to witness might become tiresome. Second, spending time in an inn, with nowhere to go in the night and far away from any help or external resources and fearing for your life, makes you involved. In this adventure there is nothing of such immediacy that would prevent players from just amusingly standing on the sidelines until they grow bored and either leave or mess with the sitation. An added problem: If the group stays together, they might miss a number of clues. If they do not, how and when will they cooperate and piece the info together? And given their lack of motivation for being there in the first place I am wondering how anybody running the adventure managed.
3. And then there is a number of strange details that mess with the fiction and which are hardly understandable and playable.
Spoiler
For example, the priest is poisoned and it is up to the players saving his life - while there is a whole friggin physician guild present on spot! Another example: While there is a tussle going on between two funeral processions with wagons, caskets etc. at the gate to the graveyard, someone is supposed to exchange two caskets (one of which is at this moment still loaded on one of the wagon!), and to do so on the altar (at least 30 yards away!) with crowds of people watching but no one noticing (!). Yet another example: A creepy and unsettling Amethyst wizard, looking like a necromant, is supposed to investigate suspicions of necromancy in a crowd of jumpy townspeople while all kinds of suspicious stuff is going on! Or an assassin that starts killing random people from the crowd just so?!
Thanks!