Goth Phase
Getting tempted by dark powers comes standard with levels in Wizard. Saruman was tempted by the One Ring, Raistlin was tempted by the Black Moon, and everyone’s favorite space wizard is pretty much the poster boy for temptation. It’s just one of those things that seems to happen to wizards. I know it happened to me.
This was in that same campaign we talked about in the last comic. You know…the one with the adorable group sketch? Well that behir was my wizard’s best buddy. He was a loyal cohort and a fearless bodyguard, and if you noticed the past tense there it’s bloody well intentional. One lucky crit from a random hill giant and it’s time for a save vs. massive damage. Of course the die said 1, and so my wizard had to say bye-bye behir. Despite my party’s attempts to cheer me up it was a traumatic event for the nerdy little spellslinger. Suddenly he was using unsavory magic, voting to show no quarter to enemies, and even advocating torture. My turn to the dark side was all about revenge, which is why I think it never went all the way. The bad guys, being bad guys, brought Kazaat the behir back from the dead so that we couldn’t resurrect him ourselves. That means we had to march straight into their trap, execute a daring rescue mission, and yadda yadda adventuring happened.
The point is that there’s nothing to avenge if your murdered buddy is miraculously alive again. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself now. I still wonder if it wasn’t a meta-decision on my part. We had a paladin in the group after all, and a full-blown turn towards Evil would have done all kinds of damage to party cohesion. Years later and I still think it was the right decision, but I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t have been a more interesting story if my guy had put on the black robes for realsies.
How about you guys? Have you ever experienced a sudden turn to the dark side? How did it affect the rest of the group? Did you have to retire the character? Sound off with your stories in the comments!
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I must say, Wizard you’re looking good here. Almost regal in a way. Scabby on the other hand… well, I read that expression as “perturbed”.
As for turning to the dark side… Well if you remember that homebrew Star Wars system I mentioned back in the comments before… we did that literally. We had a grand ol’ fall and when it was time for that moment of redemption or consequences we…. ran away, accomplished the campaign goals, and our characters went into hiding/secret planning and eventually took an option that wasn’t on the menu as far as light/dark side goes.
From the very start my longest lasting 3.5 character blurred the lines of the alignment system in such a way as to basically make labels meaningless as what really mattered was her own personal code of conduct and worldview. It’s pretty cool when the kingdom regards you as a hero even though your lands are guarded by a resident ghost and your main crop is poison.
Well of course he’s regal. As an elf PC he comes pre-packaged with the blood royal of some woodland realm or other. Plus the stars look suspiciously like Bishounen sparkles.
I love gray side stuff in Star Wars. More than Jar-Jar or little kids or too much CGI, I think that’s what hurt the prequels most: There’s no Han Solo figure in there, and so you just wound up with courtly melodrama with nobody to poke fun at it.
Out of curiosity though, how does one harvest poison? Is it a type of tuber?
I’m sure we could get very into “what hurt the prequels the most” and join an internet war that will never end. Though I actually enjoyed them, just not AS MUCH as the originals. Certainly more than most random movies you’d pick from a yearly lineup though.
I will agree that many movies (and tv shows) could use more diversity in morals and worldviews and just character types in general though.
As for harvesting poison. Nightshade, hemlock, all the usual stuff. And whatever seeds you can get from the Outer Planes. I wouldn’t be shocked to find a fiendish tuber that could be ground down and boiled into a nice DC 25 & 1/4th poison though.
I’ve not had any DND characters go evil if they started good or neutral, ( one went plane walking, but that’s a long story) but I’ve played lots of evil characters, mostly in Requiem, Forsaken and Awakening, and I’ve always thought they had far more interesting stories.
I guess Evil has more options open. When everything is permitted, the story can’t help but go in interesting (if unsavory) directions.
Unfortunately the game fell apart pretty quickly, but in a game I was once in one of the other PC’s grand plan was to Corrupt my Pally. I was personally neutral on the idea, Antipallies are cool but I wasn’t going to make it easy on them, and meanwhile the GM was against the other player having that much narrative control so it wound up being a duel between Player and GM over my Pally’s fate.
Interesting… Did the GM actually use the phrase “you don’t get that much narrative control?” What was his reasoning?
Nah, he just looked for legitimate places he could work against the plan, things like planning to throw in a Phylactery of Faithfulness at earliest opportunity, avoiding opportunities, that stuff. The phrasing of not wanting them to have that much narrative control actually came up in a random conversation we had after the game fell apart. I think his main reasoning was that the player is a notoriously hard-headed and controlling power gamer who could easily derail a game if they get too much control.
Really cool essay on the subject over here. It’s one of the central texts in an essay I’m working on:
https://books.google.com/books?id=4Gjs8uT6dxIC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=hammer+narrative+authority+role+playing&source=bl&ots=Fm584nsonz&sig=Z8rmUU1sUVkToGuyLcCh3wc0zhY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiftonTrMrPAhVI6GMKHe33AlwQ6AEIHjAB#v=onepage&q=hammer%20narrative%20authority%20role%20playing&f=false
In Storm King’s Thunder *SPOILER ALERT* There is a bit where a friendly Frost Giant named Harshnag dies protecting the party from a mature Blue Dragon in a temple. Shortly after, the party is visited by an airship full of cultists worshipping a red dragon named Klauth. The cultists command you to board the airship, as they take you to the next section of the module. *END SPOILER*
At least, that’s what was SUPPOSED to happen. However, the party was not in the mood to be messed with, not after losing our friend. Also, who in their right mind COMMANDS Chaotic PCs to do anything? Long story short, there was much murderhoboing upon the deck of said airship. Right before we crashed it into a cliff side.