The culmination

Right, I don’t speak of my ongoing games enough (I have a blog post going on about my main character, but need character art) but I have something to discuss from this weeks game of Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I am a little half drunk in case this doesn’t make sense.
So early on my players tackled Good Mead, in fact one player had to exit the game and through a few good rolls, and a little luck that character ended up becoming mayor of the town as the group saw off the Zhentarim.

As the remaining two players made their way out of the town, they suffered an attack from an invisible Duregar.
In pursuit of information, the party proceeded to keep the fanatical dark dwarf from killing themselves (he wanted to bite his tongue off, a symbolic show of not speaking and killing himself), in full view of the townsfolk keeping them bound, helpless and causing.. discomfort, if the Duregar doesn’t share information.
I warned them at this point that the onlookers were not taking the experience well.

Then, here we are several months later, and for the first time in a long time they have returned to Good Mead.
They return to find people closing their doors, boarding up their windows, shying away from the group.
So of course the party find the towns cleric, who owes them her life and try to get answers.

“Everyone saw what you did, if they see me talking to you then I will be an outcast..”
It begins to dawn on them that there are consequences for what they did, so they want to visit the mayor and clear things up.
As their cart drives past, there’s a guard and a big lock on the door.
“Oh god, we left the body in there, with it’s tongue in the shirt pocket!” One player cries out.

Now when my games start I preface everything with “I won’t stop you making bad decisions, but I will make sure there are consequences”, if my players want to go full on alienating the town guard, I will allow them but they won’t get official work out of that town again.
So for my party, the bard is trying to argue that they found out about some plan the Duregar have going on, which is information that was found out from torture.
The bard doesn’t like that those in charge don’t consider “The ends justifies the means” to be an excuse.

I love seeing what my players can get up to, and I don’t want to stop them, I want to empower them.
But consequences..