A Distant Shore: A possible tweak

[The Old Hack]

I really like this quest, but I have several times had an annoying thing happen. The quest is only completable if you have special quest items. Unfortunately, it is also so long that very often at least one player will give up/have to log due to time restraints/ragequit or whatever, and all too often this will be a character with one or more of the quest items. After that the players are stuck unless they can get DM intervention or the logged player returns.

To work around this, could the quest instead be rigged so the quest items become 'meta' in the sense that instead of one character carrying the item, finding each item will set a switch that indicates that the whole party is now 'carrying' the item and that once all of the items have been 'found' it then becomes possible to trigger the end condition? That would make the quest completable against this sort of occurrence.