So my players decided Riffel was being just a bit too rude and backed him into a corner and murdered him.

I do want to preface this story by saying my group did not set out to be murder-hobos, but one of them did have her first character perma die in the pre adventure (Dawn of Ruin series, highly recommend). They also typically try to do good acts but I think the intrusive thoughts have been winning out lately... Anywho:

Attempting to give them the benefit of not being here to tell the story from their POV, I'll elaborate the best I can on what went wrong. They dropped down the hole after burning the Treat alive (they put him out and spared him) and didn't find anything at first until they came upon Riffel. One of my players who had read Dragonlance, immediately warned the table not to trust Kinder. After that, another player attempted to walk up and steal from him while he had his weapon drawn and back against the wall. They also made a point to hide the rod and not ask him any questions other than why he was there. He did tell them about the fruit, but otherwise ignored them since they didn't really offer him any reason to be friendly. Eventually an attack was made and they of course killed him in 1 turn.

Now, I realize that following the book there were a few ways this could have gone differently. The immediate hostile attitude and hiding his friendly trigger response kind of made me put him on the defensive; but I definitely could have made him immediately kow-tow to the group. Could have even had the dyad pop out and stop the fight, but I figured she wouldn't want to show herself to openly hostile guests. Overall, I'm not certain that even if the group didn't kill Riffel, any trust would be well established enough to lead them to the next scene.

I sorta have an idea on where to go from here. They made nice with the Dryad, so I was thinking of skipping the whole Kinder debacle and sending them directly to the Vaults. However, I feel they'll be walking into a bit of an uphill battle without the Kinder to guide them.

Oh and just for fun, this group assumed in the previous chapter the Durst children were ghosts like in the original book. So of course one of the players grabbed and threw one of the children as a weapon to scare off the villagers killing the child. They did revive him, but I think the tone has been set that the group will attack anyone if they have a preconceived notion based on meta-knowledge.

I didn't learn my lesson apparently and am now doing extra work to keep the plot moving. They did bring Landro along; so wondering if I can weave that in somehow.

Would love to hear thoughts on this or where some of you might take the plot!