by Lord Ewen » Thu Dec 29, 2005 5:38 pm
I looked back at the official account of Bevan's previous visit to Jarop (Session 23 notes) and saw no indication that she revealed her affiliation with the crown, but my private notes (albeit a bit cryptic) seem to suggest that she strongly intimated it. Jarop's response to Bevan's numerous questions seems unlikely without her having established some bona fides along those lines. Does anyone recall specifically?
At any rate, I certainly don't see the need to provide more information about ourselves; simply present to Jarop along the lines of: we're back for a similar interview as last time. Which is true enough, although Dave's reference to our last interview recalls to the mind Jarop's emphasis last time about gaining information about Rahel: I strongly suspect that he'll bring this up, as we never came across with any info and he's likely to use this against us in any bartering now.
As for your other questions, I should think using Sir Peten's name is alright, although I'm uncertain whether we want to come clean about the son. While it might be wholly unnecessary to vouchsafe such information, we tend to agree that, as far as Golotha is concerned, Jarop has a fairly sophisticated web of intelligence. A frank, straight-forward approach accompanied by significant silver worked the first time with Jarop, so I would vote for proceeding along those lines. This would suggest a few rules of thumb: don't lie to the man (he's got enough info that he'll eventually detect this, and any working relationship between him and us will be soured), but don't volunteer anything unless asked (he would hardly respect us if we did otherwise). And, use any information we have (which he doesn't already know) as a commodity in the bargaining, because that's the nature of the game. Finally, don't tread upon his LK turf without nodding to his right to exact a fee or other toll.
Which is a long way of suggesting that we don't mention Koltho at all, but come clean if he probes about it. But remember, he clearly had significant gaps in his knowledge when Bevan met him last time: Among other things, he didn't know about the Baron being ambushed, didn't know who killed Sir Felkar, didn't know who knifed Slakka, didn't connect Rahel's men riding out with the Baron, and didn't know what he wanted to know about Rahel's operation in general. So I wouldn't expect sudden omniscience, in spite of the warranted respect we give him. Who knows, he might not know about Valgari either.
Come to think of it, we may also need to consider: he might revisit those above topics, and wish to know what we have found out. We should consider how we would handle that as well.