1)The man is doing us a favor in coming down to take a look.
Dont set preconditions on how he does that
You offer payment; if he refuses, you mark it down and repay it in some other manner.
This is not a favor. This is a business transaction. Now, yes, Harry is our friend, I hope. But this is business.
2)Dont make promises about our future AP expenditure in a stunt.
We have already committed one third of our AP next turn to Shih martial arts.
That's fair. I'll modify it like this:
[X] Fetch Harry for a second opinion
-[X] Occult (to work together with Harry on solving the issue( and Empathy (to get Harry to accept payment) excellencies
-[x]
Insist on paying him. This isn't save the world stuff. It's help Molly with her project stuff.
-[X] [STUNT] Walking once more into Harry's dimly lit apartment, the traditional bag of fast food in one hand (chicken sandwiches and waffle fries this time, for variety) with a cardboard tray holding a trio of strawberry shakes in the other, you prepare a list of arguments to convince Harry that his time is valuable: "So, I actually have an exciting non-threatening magical problem that I want to consult with you on, for a change. Will you take cash or shall we barter?"
While you can get a familiar, or the opportunity to recruit a familar in game?
Most familiars do not have the narrative heft to be the focus of one or more story arcs around recruiting and training/learning to work with them. And I have very little interest in spending significant chunks of a story arc around recruiting familiars.
Too large a menagerie is impractical anyway. Still, that's fair if you are not interested. I am, at least in some such quests. Looking for Mouse's litter mates, finding an egg of some mystical bird, etc, all seems like a good activities.
And often, Backgrounds with no XP backing have no plot protection.
Existence of plot shields is speculative at best. It certainly shouldn't be used as an argument.
This might be exploitable for us in the future.
We don't have any other dragon nest equivalents, but we can make custom least gods with some mortal help on the ritual or the special crafting charm.
Presumably there's some thematic elements about the nature of the nest that change the effect, but if we could design the god involved we could potentially manipulate how it interacts with the essence flow and therefore the properties of the will sensitive field that interaction generates.
It'd be neat if we could ward dragon nests in a way that generates a utility field to assist with anything we do inside of them or something.
Indeed. If (when) we buy Essence-Dissecting Stare we should check the whole of Chicago and nearby areas to locate all Dragon Nests. Then do a project where we map all underwater Dragon Nests in the world. I am fairly sure such a map would be invaluable.
