Cauldron of Plenty Capers and Complications
Greetings, I'm looking for inspiration for how to play out an unexpected complication.
My players got the cauldron of plenty from Maud in the caverns during the Easthaven quest, and took it back to the speaker there, taking him up on his offer to buy it for a bunch of gems. I've made it clear spell component resources are fairly scarce in Icewind Dale, so I sort of enticed them by saying the gems they'd get can be left nebulous and be used for spells that require GP amount value of gems, so someone could use 50gp worth of the germs for the Chromatic Orb, someone could squirrell away 300gp worth for Revivify once they get Level 3 spells, etc.
Never in a million years did I expect they'd willingly leave the cauldron alone before they get paid, so they went to the inn to rest, and they woke up to find out about the theft. So now they're understandably gung ho about going to Targos to get the cauldron back from the Zhentarim. Only, I'm not fully sure how I should go about playing that out. The book doesn't give much info there, just that Targos' speaker won't easily give it up. I'd prefer not to have it devolve into a full on city war between Targos and Easthaven, and it feels like with them being level 2 characters, having them fight the regional Zhentarim leader also would either be a deadly combat.
Part of me is thinking about having him try to entice them to do a job for him, or come to some sort of mutual arrangement, which feels very Zhent. But this crew has been playing fairly heroically so I don't think they'll go too far into any sort of corrupting storyline.
Have any of you pulled on this particular plot thread and had any luck with it?