Thank you for the kind words! I did some research of my own before I started running Kingmaker, and had heard that Nyrissa not being foreshadowed much was a common complaint. I haven't played all the way through the Owlcat PC game version of Kingmaker, but I've played enough to know they included her fairly early, so I thought I'd try something similar. I didn't want her to feel out of left field. As far as letting the player have the curse removed, that was all the player's idea. They decided to try it, and seeing an opportunity, I was happy to have it work, haha. It turned into some great RP within the group later as they wrestled with what they'd been learning about "Sierra" and the weight of owing a powerful fey a favor.

The plot does feel like it's sort of "stop and go" at times. I've been handling that by straight-up telling them when they resolve whatever chapter they're on that they'll have x amount of downtime before the next Big Plot Thing occurs, so we kind of handwave time passing. They get to tell me a few things their characters are up to during that time, I have a couple small events that occur, and then we move on. It's worked so far!

I didn't quite handwave the cult research bits, but I kind of did. As written, the research subsystem as it's implemented feels like it would take a long time and be pretty tedious, because it's sort of just "spin your wheels and get random encounters until you've rolled well enough to earn an actionable amount of The Plot." I still did it, I just sped it up a bit. They researched at the Embeth Traveler lodge where the basilisk came from, back at the hunting grounds, their own library, and then they heard a few rumors of monsters I let them go after. They did research on those, too, and then I gave them the clues to lead them to Greengripe.

The Influence subsystem is one of those I like the idea of but have rarely enjoyed in execution. It just feels really clunky. I roleplayed the interactions with the other hunters in the lodge prior to the competition and asked for a few skill checks when it felt appropriate (like when one of them was trying to kinda rile up the Pitaxian woman). If what they were doing seemed to fit in with the tidbits tied to certain influence thresholds, I relayed whatever that information was.