Winds of Chaos

I'm starting a new TEW campaign. Second time I'm going to; the first one was about ten years ago, and fizzled out somewhere after the PCs saved Middenheim.

Anyway, new try. Trying fourth edition this time. Starting differently, and I have a question for the public.

The campaign will start with the scenario "Luisa's curse". Originally a French scenario, published some twenty (?) years ago in Casus Belli, but translations can be found on the internet. We start in a small village, where the PCs all live and work. That way they already know each other.

The Kastor Lieberung of the campaign will actually be the brother of one of the PCs - that explains why that PC has a lookalike. The two don't get along, by the way - actually, they hate each other's guts.
Kastor has left the village some years ago to make his fortune in the big city (Altdorf), and has come back for the annual village feast. There he does some bad things and then runs away (see the adventure). This gives the PCs reason to chase him. They'll find his body somewhere by the side of the road, with the letters about the inheritance, and we can continue from there.

However ...
I'm not so fond of the bounty hunter plot in 'Mistaken Identity'. It looks like the PCs have no real agency here; strange things happen around them, people die around them, and finally they are trapped inside a house - but the guy who trapped them will be killed by a deus ex machina, and the PCs can escape at their leisure, without having an idea what has happened.
Is this really interesting? And would we miss a lot if I skipped the whole thing, and instead would have Kastor have a letter where he was to collect money from a Purple Hand supporter in Bögenhafen? By the time the PCs get there, thinking that they can get rich easily, they would find that the supporter has been killed, or something like that. Still mysterious, but a loose end that could perhaps be linked more easily to the Purple Hand thread later in the campaign.

Whymme wrote: Wed Sep 17, 2025 2:41 pmThe campaign will start with the scenario "Luisa's curse". Originally a French scenario, published some twenty (?) years ago in Casus Belli

November 1993
The original title is Luisa pleure de se voir si laide en son miroir, wrote by Tristan LHOMME for Casus Belli #78 (of the first series).

Whymme wrote: Wed Sep 17, 2025 2:41 pmThe Kastor Lieberung of the campaign will actually be the brother of one of the PCs - that explains why that PC has a lookalike.

It is one of the possibles (and the most common) explanation of looking alike someone else, because it raises the probability to share the significant genetic and cultural elements... but the significant genetic and cultural proximity could also be high enough to look alike and to be confused with someone else outside close family ties, especially if whomever will confuse you aren't close relatives.

See for example the work of François Brunelle:
http://www.francoisbrunelle.com/webn/e-project.html
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fran%C3%A7ois ... ges&t=ffab

Whymme wrote: Wed Sep 17, 2025 2:41 pmThe two don't get along, by the way - actually, they hate each other's guts.
Kastor has left the village some years ago to make his fortune in the big city (Altdorf), and has come back for the annual village feast. There he does some bad things and then runs away (see the adventure). This gives the PCs reason to chase him. They'll find his body somewhere by the side of the road, with the letters about the inheritance, and we can continue from there.

Theo Axner played with Kastor being a sibling of one of the player character. It may be that some elements of his campaign might offer some fruitful inspiration.
https://theenemywithinremixed.wordpress.com/

Yeah, I used Luisa’s Curse before. That campaign went south quickly, by the way, when early in DotR the PCs decided to attack the party boat with drunk nobles who wanted to search the PC’s boat for more booze. As a result most of that adventure was skipped, and instead the PCs had to break out of a prison.

But anyway, in the OP I meant to focus on the consequences of skipping the bounty hunter thing. I think that it doesn’t have a nice conclusion, and just leaves the players with lots of questions for which they don’t get an answer.

Which means that I have to get them to Bogenhafen in another way. But I was wondering if the bounty hunter thing comes back later in the campaign and I missed it somewhere.

I appreciate too that AK is no longer scripted to be eliminated without any exchange with the adventurers in the rewrite of the “MI”, but I am disappointed that it is so only to be scripted to be eliminated without any verbal exchange with the adventurer in the “SOB”.

I think it haves much to do with QF. The original authors of TEW didn't had any concrete enough thought on his role (and he is left unused and forgotten in all the later volumes).
The authors of the rewrite, probably were still not clear in their mind. It seems however, that they eventually gave a role to QF in the last volumes of the so called “director's cut” (that we know to not be a “director's cut”; not only because solely one -Davis- over the four main original authors -Bambra, Davis, Gallagher and Sargent- participated to the new edition, but also because Davis's cut was anyway rejected by Cubicle7...). I've not read it, so you'll have to check. I presume that it doesn't appears before the EIR... Albeit it seems that some notes are given on QF in the PBT's Companion:

Theo wrote: Fri Feb 26, 2021 4:04 am6. Familiar faces: Suggestions on having various NPCs from the previous adventures turn up again. Most interesting is the notes on Hieronymus Blitzen, Quintus Fassbinder and Alberich Hollzauber (the otherwise forgotten kidnapper of Elvyra from DotR, now identified with Ernst’s contact ‘Doctor Schmidt’ from the very start) which suggest something might be built up for The Horned Rat.

So skipping the narrative thread of AK and QF in the EIS and in the EIR, might be a possibility...
... or determining the exact and concrete aims and knowledge of QF, and why exactly does he employ AK, might allow to unscript the doom of AK... and to potentially let him have more satisfying behaviour and exchange with the adventurers, being able to become a recurring antagonist, to give them some clues, to eventually be convinced even that they are not the cultists he's looking for, &c., through regular role play and dices.