Stunning Revelation
We all know Fighter. He is a simple creature of the hack ‘n slash variety. More of a ball of hit points and violence than a fully realized character. The list of important people in his backstory is conveniently truncated. I mean sure, he somehow has a silver dragon as a brother, but we’ll just chalk that up to a meta gag. It’s not like the guy has some hidden history of ancient artifacts, guardian blades, and strange forces unleashed. I mean, a fleshed-out PC would have long-standing rivalries, complex relationships, and discernible ties to other characters. A character like that could even carry a whole-ass romantic subplot in some kind of erotic semi-canon companion piece.
What I’m saying is that after 925 comics, this is still the same murderhobo we’ve known and loved all along. But I like to think that Fighter has somehow become a little more than that as well.
It’s the same with every character. Just as true for the bare-bones character character sheet as the ones with 10-page backstories and overflowing character questionnaires. We all start out as an idea, but grow to become our characters through the act of play. This is the essence of “emergent narrative.” It is also the essence of Slap-Happy Jack, if y’all prefer the cliff’s notes version. As campaigns unfurl and and new decision points crop up, our heroes construct themselves one dice roll at a time.
In that sense, it’s not just that GMs will inevitably turn the narrative spotlight onto you. Sure you might find out you’ve been assigned an evil twin, a secret lineage, or some kind of “chosen one” narrative. But if you game long enough, the early sessions become your backstory. To play is to discover. And that is, I think, the strongest magic of all.
Question of the day then! What is the best character twist you’ve encountered? Is it something you came up with, or did a GM invent it? Tell us your tales of startling revelations, dark origins, and plots unmasked down in the comments!
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Oh, no. o_o
Fighter may not care for backstory, but BBEG must have a doozy of a one.
o_o indeed
I think the best character twist I’ve seen was on one of my characters, a Tiefling with a tragically dead mother and a father who had abandoned her, where it was eventually revealed, after she tracked her father down that the mother had abandoned her, and that her father, using illusions had raised her.
What were the illusions? Why not just raise her himself?
Because he was a Devil, and not local to the town. The town was somewhat racist. The character in question ended up becoming an adventurer after the town tried to kill her and her magic awakened.
The illusion was that he was pretending to be the mother, who was local to the town.
Oof. That’s gotta mess you up. Pretending to be your own dead partner? Big psychological yikes.
At the time of the impersonation the mother was still alive, she’d just left town. Still probably not good for him, but not that bad.
Hilt looks a little short, is that a bastard sword or a bastardly sword ? 😉
Mr. Stabby has been a bastard since Comic #03.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-03
That my wizard was technically nobility. They started going by their birth name to hide their identity from someone they didn’t trust in one of the towns, which led to them actually saying their birth name more than once, and then most of the town went “wait, silversong? Like… *silversong* silversong?” And then either helping or sending assassins. Campaign got cancelled before things went too far but I think it was great.
“Help” or “assassins” is a hell of a mixed bag, lol.
Robert Morvain, my longest run character. The campaign started with him having essentially very little back story. He was designed as a mechanic focused character. I wanted to play an acrobatic duelist, something akin to Dread Pirate Roberts or Zorro. The plan was for him to be an orphan, adopted and raised by a childless noble of the back country to be his heir so he could run with the raised to noble society but not really a part of it story beats. Finer details were left to DM discretion and I had fun genuinely playing the I don’t know my past character.
Session 1 – Mentor dies, assassins strike, and he has to clear his name from suspicion of killing his mentor to inherit his title. After all, he has not family and so is suspect.
1 IRL year of adventuring later, the party has accrued renown, the young noble has started to prove his worth to his peers and is a rising star. He has recruited an assassin body-guard of his own to prevent a recurrence of session 1 played by another player. They’ve even gained the attention of the king himself who is coming to pay them a visit!
Realization: The King is being cameoed by on of our old friends from college showing up special for this session.
Realization: This player is infamous for his villains
This is not good . . .
Turns out . . . my plucky little orphan is a bastard . . . of the late king. The current monarch has found out, and decided that he wants no rivals for power, especially one who is a rising star amongst the young nobility.
Dramatic and exciting tone shifting session ensues with many great moments that turns the entire campaign from rising-star-adventurers to something written by Alexander Dumas as now whether he likes it or not, Robert must make a play for the throne or flee to another land, as the king has left him no other choice.
There is one more twist though . . .
Another IRL year of gaming later. The campaign is nearing conclusion, there have been wars, sieges, slightly over half-the kingdom is now supporting Robert. He never stopped looking for the assassin who killed his mentor. Whenever they captured an enemy officer or stronghold, he would search for clues to see if he could pickup any more leads. Scattered breadcrumbs had been found previously, so he knew that the original assassin was supposed to kill them both, but had messed up and only gotten the mentor.
Well, he finally found the proof he needed. The name of the original assassin hired for the job. The very assassin who was now acting as his bodyguard, who had served with him and save each others lives countless times over 2 IRL years of gaming. He had decided not to kill the kid, but pretended to have gotten them both, having been hired by the king to tie up loose ends in the very beginning. His act of mercy started this whole furball.
Robert paid him the promised sum for finding the man who killed his mentor as agreed.
Then we rolled initiative.
Great ending. I hope it was a worthy duel.
Character had an “auntie” back in his hometown, who had always been very close to him and his family. She was also the head of a group of retired adventurers, something he didn’t know. So when he was ready to head off to his own adventures, she “gifted” him a massive heavy warhorse.
Now the warhorse was actually a friend of hers and she was doing him a favor as he was doing her a favor. He was a shape changed silver dragon, who had just lost his infant child to dragon hunters. Though he and his mate had killed the hunters, his mate, in her grief, wanted nothing to do with him. So him going along to protect his friends “nephew” got him out of the cave and gave him something to do.
The character was totally oblivious to this and just thought he had a wonderful horse. The party thief though saw the horse change and take out a group of thugs that were about to enter the alley where he was fighting of a group of muggers that were threatening what looked like a helpless female (actually an shape changed elemental who was imprisoned in that form and part of that particular story line) and gave me my favorite player/NPC interaction that whole story arc. The thief waited until the “horse” was by himself and said, “What will you give me to not tell “other character” what I saw.” My reply was, “Your life.” The player was absolutely speechless for a good minute and that’s the first time I’ve ever actually seen someone’s jaw drop. He then came back with, “But he’s lawful good!”. Answer, “Dragon law is not the same as human law.”
He stayed salty about that and managed to get me back later in the story line, but it was still fun.
Hey, that “dragon biz” is way back in the first monster manual. Gold dragons are lawful good, but they will still eat your disrespectful ass.
Yeah, when I first started playing the MM wasn’t out yet. The group that I started in ran their dragons that way though.
If Journey to the West is any indication, the horse probably didn’t do anything interesting for the rest of the story.
They ran into the abandoned lair of the current BBEG and found the gutted body of a baby gold dragon in his lab. Thief grabbed it, ran out to where the “horse” was and yelled, “LOOK WHAT SULLEZ HAD.” Cue, dragon shape shifting back and screaming “SULLEZ YOUR ASS IS MINE.” Remember he was currently grieving the lose of his first child. So after a bunch of behind the screen rolls, he went home, got wife, rounded up a group of his mates and proceed to slag the large castle where the BBEG and his cohorts were planning out the coming race war (evil human kingdoms vs just about everyone else in the local area). So the guy playing the thief managed to single handedly scupper one major storyline that I was setting up. So yeah…nothing interesting.
That was supposed to be “loss”
And I realize I switched colors on the dragon there. It was over 40 years ago and my old mind does that. It was actually a gold and not silver dragon.
I remember a line from a Heinlein novel: “Two things equal to the same thing are never equal to each other.” The GM in our pseudo-Victorian Steampunk campaign brought this line to life quite adroitly.
Doktor Krauss hated his anarchist brother-in-law Michael with an incandescent passion; he and Michael each blamed the other for the current brain-in-a-jar status of Krauss’s wife (and Michael’s sister) Leah. Krauss despised another anarchist, who we all called Scarf Girl because she was WAY too slick to let us discover her real name, for a completely different set of reasons.
Yet when Michael and Scarf Girl announced their impending wedding, somehow it made absolute sense that Krauss, and our whole party, would lay down our lives to protect them. They each infuriated us in such different ways that, as a pair, they came off as wholesome and endearing…
(And it eventually turned out that Leah, who was still a brain in a jar but had woken up and become a behind-the-scenes manipulator, had helped engineer the whole threat and subsequent reconciliation.)
Only one sure-fire way to dispose of a brain in a jar:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7595xo3HA1qbg6fto1_400.jpg
One of the players in my current campaign (which has only just finished session 0) has given me a backstory that basically boils down to “I just think adventuring to help people the way I was helped would be really cool.”
I am now thinking up a plotline for him involving his interest in prosthetics, a potential curse of “replacement” (or something along those lines, it loses the nuance in the translation from Abyssal), and an artifact that could graft him with a bit of Cthulhu and force it to see what the world looks like if you’re seeing in only four dimensions. I mean, it all depends on what hooks the rest of the party gives me in play, but that’s just off the top of my head.
Moral of the story, either give me hooks or I will install them in your character.
Heh. Driving old ones mad by exposing them to human consciousness? That’s a reversal I’d never actually thought about. Neat!
I knew we’d get Mr. Stabby’s backstory one of these days.
Happy to finally pay it off. 😀
I had a character with a classic amnesia backstory (sort of, more “broken memories” meets such long life that forgot their own past kind of thing) and using that my DM created an entire backstory for me that led to my character being inhabited by a lich that would take me over under certain circumstances (also partly a mechanic we had worked out before the campaign started where if I failed a Wisdom Save after rolling Initiative, I would enter a sort of “friend/foe only” combat mode where I sort of went berserk and tried to kill anyone near me… it got more complex as the campaign continued).
By the time the lich was revealed to only me, the party was already becoming suspicious of my changes and we were on a path to getting my character fixed before the big reveal to the rest of the party of the secret lich inside.
I had a lot of fun essentially playing two characters, even if it was relatively short lived overall, and the DM had fun creating that aspect, so overall we all had a lot of fun with the concept.
Oh, and we still have the potential of a post campaign follow up micro story involving the lich since when it was excised from me it didn’t get destroyed and we never encountered it again 😀
Love me a slow-played curse. Reminds me of this business:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/curses
As a DM, the less backstory you give me, the more I can play around with it. Warforged: “Yeah, some adventurers found me deactivated in some ruins, and sold me to the party’s patron. I only recently activated.”
Me: Welp, turns out all Warforged were made by the ancient empire the villain is looting research from by transferring the souls of multiple people into them. Here’s the documentation on all the people you were.”
Then the villain attempted a factory-reset code on them. Thankfully they made their Charisma save.
Alester the dragonfolk (homebrew race, basically dragonborn with wings and breath weapon) is an exiled prince wrongfully accused of murder. He was the illegitimate son of the king and his older brother was afraid Alester would take the throne instead of him. Didn’t matter that Alester was like 8th in line. So he murdered Alester’s lover and framed him for it. The king decided to exile him instead of execution. Now Alester is traveling and learning all he can so he can one day go home and clear his name.
There’s also my sibling group of characters. They share the same dad but have different mothers and all of them are different planar-touched race. The parents are part of a cult that was planning to sacrifice the kids when they reached a certain age. The kids found out and ran away to grow up in the woods.