@Carnival: You're right about the sewers, and I only have one nugget to offer concerning that:<div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote"><a href="https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=188971.msg9157942#msg9157942">Quote from: Calrond on 07-11-2013, 00:52:11</a></div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote">Wren and Ghaazala head out to discover new information. Wren finds out through her contacts that the guildmaster of the Cellarers' and Plumbers' Guild, Hilithiimm Turnstone, has been trying to resolve a strike among his guild members who refuse to enter the sewers to make routine repairs because they claim they're being watched by something just outside of the lantern light. Ghaazala is able to gather from her sources that people occasionally hear the manholes slide open at night, and that the people who are still around to tell about it run the other way. People who don't scatter or don't seem to hear it are among those who disappear.<br/></blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div>People who would otherwise take a detour through there are sufficiently creeped out that they are refraining from doing so, and using the surface instead.<br/><br/>@greenknight: No problem, we'll NPC you or have you on another mission during that time. I've run PbPs for years before, and although the holidays do slow down the posting, it also gives us a chance to come back refreshed, though I don't know if business trips provide that same opportunity.<br/><br/>@Blinkin and Everyone Else: I didn't mean to imply by a lack of detail that there were no rats or flies in the sewers except for the dead rats that the group spotted. That was my fault for letting that assumption happen. There were rats and flies in the sewers, certainly, but I didn't consider them noteworthy until the group came across the dead ones. I'll try to be more detailed in the future.<br/><br/>@Everyone: Let me take just a moment to point out just what the empathic link with a familiar entails. "The master has an empathic link with his familiar out to a distance of up to 1 mile. The master cannot see through the familiar’s eyes, but they can communicate empathically. Because of the limited nature of the link, only general emotional content can be communicated." Adrian can get the impression that his familiar saw<em>something</em>, but the familiar can't broadcast back along the empathic link what it was that it found. Adrian can infer from the distance approximately where the familiar spotted something, and can then investigate. If Adrian were to get to within speaking distance with his familiar, it could tell him explicitly what it saw thanks to its ability to speak with its master (which it receives after the wizard is 5th level or higher). So it wasn't that the familiar didn't know what the<em>something</em>was, just that it couldn't relay that to Adrian via the empathic link. (Of course, your characters may not know this, and in some cases probably wouldn't know this, but Adrian definitely would.)