Adventures in Feather Falls

In 1987 the Forgotten Realms grey box was released.  As far as I know it was the first product to include a calendar and more importantly, for purposes of today’s story, a listing of “current events” that could be used as adventure seeds.  One of the events mentioned was the death of the wizard Cholandrothipe, the wizard of Feather Falls.    His murder was blamed on the Red Wizards of Thay.  But what motive did the Red Wizards have for this crime?  No “canon” answer has ever been provided so I would like to present the following scenario…

 

The Red Wizards killed Cholandrothipe – this is accepted as fact.  Again, we ask why.  What reason could they have had?

An investigation into the murder leads us to the first possibility once we look into what is known of the victim.  Cholandrothipe was a powerful magic-user.  We know this because he was able to cast spells allowing him to shrink riverboats down to a size small enough he could portage them around the waterfall in the pocket of his robe.  Second, the guardians and traps protecting his tower are still viable and the tower’s treasures are still believed to be intact.

But did the Red Wizards kill him to gain access to the boat-shrinking spell?  Why not simply pay Cholandrothipe to teach it to them?  And if the spell was the prime motivator behind the killing, then why is there no mention of any Red Wizard using the spell in the years following his death?

But what if the Red Wizards that killed Cholandrothipe weren’t really Red Wizards?

What if the murder was an elaborate frame job perpetrated by someone close to Cholandrothipe?  It wouldn’t be overly difficult to acquire some red robes and decorate someone’s head with elaborate yet temporary tattoos to make people suspect the “wicked Thayans” of such a heinous act (although it turns out the wizard wasn’t all that benevolent given the extensive and dungeon and hidden laboratories beneath his tower).  What if the murder was carried out for personal reasons?  What if a close friend or adventuring companion of the Feather Falls wizard was the murderer?  It could be that Cholandrothipe went too far pushing the boundaries of his experiments.  Or maybe the wizard was sleeping with the wife of a party member and the cuckolded husband decided to take revenge for the betrayal.  Maybe the wizard’s apprentices got hungry for the power they felt he was holding out from teaching them.  The possibilities are almost endless.

But I only told you all of that so I could present the following idea.

An adventuring priest of Gond the Wonderbringer, while passing through Feather Falls village notices the porters carrying cargo up and down the portage around the waterfall.  He decides that this is an incredibly inefficient way to conduct business.  He designs a set of locks that to permit river travel up and down the falls without the delay that loading and unloading cargo entails.  Each of the six locks is 50' long and 25' wide, allowing up to four river barges to pass through each section of lock at the same time.  Construction begins soon after but is plagued by delays. 

 

The work is opposed by the porters who do not wish to lose the jobs.  The local temple to Lathander opposes the construction because the high priest is worried that Gond will supplant the Morninglord as the village’s favored deity.  Creatures living in the temple beneath the falls are worried that the construction will weaken the roof of their cavern home and cause a cave-in.  Cholandrothipe’s murderers (whether the Red Wizards or not) oppose the construction because they don’t want “outsiders” poking around the village and uncovering the truth about what happened the night the wizard was killed.  All of these factions must be dealt with in one way or another if the work is to be completed.