slade357
Side quests in Diablo and bg3 are vaaaaastly different. They’re much more like Skyrim but that still hardly does it justice. In Diablo you find a burning building then the survivor says you need to find her sister in a different unrelated dungeon and you get a nice quest marker directing you there. In bg3 you find a burning building and if you make a skill check you might save the last survivor, then you can extort them for money or just kill them if you really want, then they mention their sister is trapped, you can ignore it or promise help or promise more of a reward, then you get a journal entry describing where you’re currently at in that quest and it’s up to you how you handle it from there.
Alright so I’m not great with established lore but I am great at improvisation. What I’m gathering is that you need a reason why this unconnected leader is suddenly helping this splinter of his own organization?
My immediate thought is politics, the actual head of this splinter has a problem (the party) and needs a way to solve it but since they’re a splinter they don’t have the resources. So through some political maneuvering they got szass to agree to help. Maybe he doesnt know they’re splintering and the party can use that to sow chaos and escape. Maybe he does know and the splinter leader used a really big bargaining chip to get szass’ help, then the party could do something for szass’ to get him to stop helping the leader.
There’s always the illusion idea, that wasn’t really szass but a way to scare the party and throw them off. At their level this may be difficult because they probably had ways to detect this.
There’s the intervention idea, someone investigating szass for unrelated reasons finds out where he is and launches a raid, giving the party a chance to escape. Then you get more time to figure out they why on everything.
Hey your explanation about the spoiler contains the spoiler. You can read that part from the front page so I’d recommend removing it