Evil Twins
This malarkey happened to me once. It wasn’t an evil twin, but it was my wizard’s morally questionable long-lost brother. My GM introduced him as this ne’er-do-well type figure. Shamed by his thieving ways, my parents had disowned him when I was young, and so I had never even heard of the guy until he came suddenly back into the plot, all out of breath and desperate.
“Brother! You’ve gotta help me. Evil cultists are after me!”
Long story short, he had stolen a valuable magic item from some lawful-creepy clerics. These guys happened to be high-muck-a-mucks in a rival kingdom’s court, so thief-bro needed me (his rich and famous adventurer sibling) to broker a sale without causing an international incident.
Here’s what makes this interesting to me. Shortly before that session, I had complained to my GM that my PC hadn’t seen much in the way of character development lately. My backstory was admittedly shallow, and I wanted something to add a little depth. What I got was a mirror image of myself.
Understand, this PC of mine was the quintessential fireball-slinging, loot-seeking, murder-hobo-with-a-wand type wizard. He was very much on the Chaotic end of the alignment chart, and just a hair’s breadth from being a full-blown thief himself. So when I asked for character depth, what did I get? A young adventurer who was skirting the law in the name of a quick buck.
This malarkey has been on my mind lately thanks to an an article I stumbled across by Stephen R. Donaldson. The whole thing’s worth a read, but this is the bit that stuck with me:
“Put simply, fantasy is a form of fiction in which the internal crises or conflicts or processes of the characters are dramatized as if they were external individuals or events.”
I had asked for character exploration, and I got an external expression of my internal conflict. Neat to see this theoretical stuff in practice.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever had a character who had to deal with some internal conflict in the form of an external threat? What did it look like? Did it have a goatee?
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Reminds me of Luke fighting the specter of Vader in the cave on Dagobah. 🙂
As for me, not in the sense you described, only in a meta sense. My characters end up externally acting out my own internal issues. I often don’t realize this until i’m well into playing the character.
That “Hero with a Thousand Faces,” Jungian shadow malarkey is EXACTLY what I’m talking about.
Well I’m gonna need some examples. 😀
Kay, we can get a bit personal then.
At level 20, my War Cleric became a Solar and ruled over a city forever more. Well, that was the end of the campaign, anyway. When I brought her in to an online D&D roleplaying server, suddenly I had to consider what that was like after several centuries.
My Cleric is a woman of action. Her role in life had become that of a bureaucrat. Sure, she would defend the city from threats, but what sort of threat is substantial enough to warrant a Solar? Angry flights of dragons only come along once every few centuries. Almost everyone she knew as a human was dead. Her time was increasingly spent dealing with local lords that grew ever more corrupt as peace turned to stagnation. She was bored, restless, and regretting her choices in life.
The discontent she feels with her job, I realized, mirrors my discontent with my own job, at which I have stayed for years despite growing boredom and frequent clashes with management. I’d love to just quit and move somewhere far from my current life and start over.
So, that’s exactly what she did. She quietly transitioned power, announced a short vacation, and then left permanently for another plane. Her new home is in a dangerous plane that is fairly constantly under threat, which has invigorated her and restored her sense of purpose.
Meanwhile, i’m still here, at the same job. Ah well, I can dream~
Oh snap! I was thinking in terms of the character’s internal issues rather than the player’s. Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to put you on the spot.
Yeesh… You’d think I could remember my own schtick about ego slipping into character: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/a-big-dwarf
No worries. =)
Are Evil Twin Fighter and Evil Twin Mr.Stabby super good like Cartman’s evil twin in that one Southpark episode
Are you implying that Fighter is something less than a paragon of virtue? That’s libel, Sir! You’ll be hearing from Cleric: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/rules-lawyer
I am somewhat surprised, and maybe disappointed, that Evil Twin Mister Stabby does not have a moustache…
http://i.imgur.com/ZqyRpKB.gif
I recently came across this comic a couple years after it was posted – but I’ve seen enough other necrothreads to figure “why not?”.
In a long running campaign my character was essentially a spiritualist / warrior with an angel teaching him various spirit-based abilities over the course of the game. (Homebrew system.) I deliberately had a background of not remembering anything at all about the character’s past – even his name. (It was almost a year in before he finally learned that from someone who knew him previously and felt like sharing.)
Eventually it came out that he had been a right bastard previously, to the point that he was stabbed in the back and I had a hard time blaming the one who did it – in or out of character – once the full details came out. (He was killed just after strangling his pregnant lover in the middle of a ritual to gain power – kind of justified, no?) So his lack of memory was part of his being sent back from the dead, as was the angel – who was as much cop as guide, it turns out.
One of the spirit warrior bits he learns is the ability to duo-locate – as in, be two places at the same time. If the system had flanking mechanics, he could literally flank someone all by himself. The second copy could also be hundreds of miles away, which is insanely useful for passing along messages and the like.
Which brings us to a point about three quarters of the way through the game, where we find out who the big bad guy really is: my character’s old personality, using that ability to go out and hook up with his old cohort, setting up obstacles that constantly had us wondering how the bad guys were staying a step ahead of us. This was revealed when the goddess of secrets split the two of us into two different individuals, with the side effect of blocking that particular ability from ever being used again. It also restored all memories of who he had been and what he had done – both before death, and before the two personalities were split. And lo, there was much “WTF?” (Not coincidentally, my character deliberately changed names not long after…)
As a side note, thanks to that whole setup and background, when I went to the GM and ask to see the main bad guy’s character sheet, he started to give the reflexive “yeah, right” – then realized that my character would legitimately know, at least up to the point of separation. (In classic evil counterpart fashion the bad guy was a different kind of spiritualist, one who was closer in concept to a puppet master controlling both spirits and people he had dominated.)
Huh. Maybe I should do a “necrothread” comic with Necromancer…. scribbles notes
Nice job with the character sheet thing. Always cool to see a player digest the fiction and then use it to their advantage. That’s exactly the moment when the world comes alive.
going randomly through archives I found TERRIBLE oversight.
Why does evil Mr. Stabby does NOT have mustache?
just noticed few posts above mine.
Consider me educated.
An evil twin party, but they are 4 levels lower than the party for an average encounter. 7.5% tpk.
An evil twin party, but they are 3 levels lower than the party for a challenging encounter. 10% tpk.
An evil twin party, but they are 2 levels lower than the party for a hard encounter. 15% tpk
An evil twin party, but they are 1 level lower than the party for a very hard encounter. 20% tpk.
An evil twin party, with identical stats for an overwhelming encounter. 30% tpk.
Target rate of total party kill is suggested for DM to not make the fight too easy with dumb monsters.