Suss Puss
This is my absolute favorite thing about shapeshifters. I mean sure, there’s plenty to be said for functional invisibility, the power of flight, and getting a boatload of hit points tacked onto your suddenly-furry butt. But when my dude is the one suffering from a case of polymorphamory, it’s the thrill of the doppelganger that I sign up for. I’m talking about those shenanigan-rich sessions where you actually impersonate another character, trying to fool your enemies into thinking that you’re the real Krarg Bloodnut, and that the feared war leader of Clan Killstuff is suddenly more interested in trading with the humie scum than murdering them.
“Me write new treatise. It called The Wealth of Nations. Here, let Krarg tell about invisible hand.”
My favorite example of this mess happened in an Exalted 2e game. It was a lunar game, and so everyone was shapeshifters. The target was this Immaculate temple, which was guilty of starving the province by forbidding worship of a local harvest god. The abbess was this badass kung-fu master, and she commanded an unassailable number of similarly badass kung fu masters.
“Ha-ha!” said I to myself. “They cannot attempt the usual frontal assault! Let’s see if they can get by on their wits!”
Oh boy did they.
First they went small, entering incognito mode as pigeons or stray cats. They all converged on the abbess’s office, and there they went very large very quickly. It’s hard to charge up your super kung-fu attack when you’re pounced out of nowhere by a room full of dinosaurs, and so the fight ended without an alarm. But then, once they’d packed the unconscious abbess into a crate and shipped her off to a distant corner of the empire, the tricksiest member of the group took on the form of the abbess herself.
Weeks passed, and the abbess took up drinking. More weeks passed, and she stopped bathing. Rumors began to circulate about this devout warrior-monk performing unnatural acts with ponies in her off hours, helped along by other players turning into strangely perfumed equines. And when at last it came time to add heresy to the repertoire, the other monks split into factions. Some defended the abbess, others tried to depose her, and a crazy kung fu civil war began. The monastery tore itself apart while the players sat back and watched. The plan was a smashing success. If memory serves, the last man standing left in disgust when an unusually well-coiffed pony snuggled up to the abbess amidst the piles of bodies.
So what about the rest of you guys? Have you ever enjoyed an impersonation caper? Did you get away with it, or were you spotted by suspicious enemies? Let’s hear all about your best shapeshifting shenanigans down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Thrice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
Weirdly I have not. It seems like every time I have a character capable of it, the game dies too quickly for me to use such abilities or fails to even get off the ground in the first place.
Though I’d probably still not have as crazy and amusing a tale as that. So, as always, thanks for sharing. =)
My most recent escapades of this variety were with a bunch of duergar. My warlock had the mask of many faces invocations…
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Warlock#toc_31
…So the physical disguise was solid. Unfortunately, I didn’t know dwarven. I wound up having to pretend that “those weird gnomes” (read: the party) had “done something to my brain,” so I could only speak Undercommon. Speech impediment duergar successfully snuck into the enemy camp though, and that’s what matters.
For my money, it’s all about forcing the issue. If you’re willing to do the audacious thing, you can make this kind of moment happen.
Good luck getting a longer-running game soon!
Once spent a good few months pretending to be a daiklave. Homebrew exalted lunar, they were attempting to make another artifact similar to Death at the Root, except without his permission.. turns out not being a willing participant instead led to him just ending up a sentient weapon instead.
Promptly got left out in the wyld after the usurpation and went a wee bit insane and chimeric.. kinda Soul Edgey, could change from a daiklave to a grand daiklave via DBT and so forth
For the first few months the party thought my character was just the dragonblood who happened to be currently wielding him
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Another fun one was a kitsune sorceress, I never really ended up using the shapechanging much like I originally planned, but the party only ever thought she was a human, as that was the form she was always in.. during chargen some unfortunate rolls led to her being all of 4 foot tall and like 90 pounds or something ridiculous.. along with her 6 str.. so I just figured her real form was child sized in figure, and so she always preferred her grown up human form instead, being kinda miffed about being so small otherwise. She figured that was how kitsune looked (taken by slavers as a small child, raised by elves.. the kitsunes had sorta disappeared)
DM surprised me when about years later, after finally meeting up with the hidden kitsunes (who all looked adult), she asked about why the hell her kitsune form was so small. They were all “Well, how long have you spent in other shapes? Your real form doesn’t age unless you’re in it you know”
Cue “… … ohhhhh.. well damn”
So you’re functionally immortal if you don’t look like you? That’s interesting. I bet the oldest shapeshifters have spent years as all the popular races, and are now down to the dregs like kobolds and bugbears and such.
For the normal kitsune, I think it was about 3 times the normal life length. They got to age in their kitsune form, human form (of which they get one) and fox form seperately.. so could combine those up I spose
My character has a feat that lets her change into anyone she’s met though.. no clue how that interacts with that. Probably not going to matter, as existence is due to end in about 2 years
That’s quite the melodramatic way of saying “the campaign will end.” 😛
I feel like not enough people appreciate the Druid as the party’s Sneak. There are ways to be stealthy besides rolling stealth. (Metal Gear style) There’s also using forgery kits to have the paperwork to walk in, (Bureaucrat style) disguise kits/disguise spells and having a solid Deception score (Hitman style) and of course there’s the fact mice don’t need to roll stealth. (Druid style)
Is evil noble gonna be a recurring character?
Not if I’ve got to write up a character bio for her she’s not. 😛
For serious though, check this mess out:
http://www.adagio.com/images2/custom_blends/111924.jpg
The setting is the selling point, but the lunars themselves are a pretty cool take on the shapeshifting trope.
Man Kistune witch are great for this. Back when I still played Pathfinder I had loads of fun using the altered kitsune racial feature that left me take on the humanoid form of any creature I saw. Evil Eye Slumber my target, take their face, and live their life for the duration of our job. All we ever needed to do was make sure to know secret passcodes and such, which I could BS convincingly thanks to bluff proficiency.
Biggest accomplishment I’ve ever pulled off was taking on the guise of a big wig casino boss during an important stock meeting. Of course the boss wa in cahoots with some real bad guys so we killed him already, but if word got out he was dead new, more evil management would take over and be much harder to deal with. So of course I disguised myself as the boss, copied his signature swagger, and renegotiated the deal to make it more beneficial to myself and the organization I work with. With my party’s help I e also culled off the more evil but traitorous members of the mob and eventually we suberveted the entire operation once we made sure our friends could clean up the mess. And I didn’t have to kill anyone but the old mob boss himself.
I had half a mind to take over operations, I almost convinced my party to join me, but we were hired by corporate and I had a policy to not renge on my contracts once I’ve been rewarded.
A kitsune with a sense of honor? That is a novel concept. :3
You’re the second person to mention kitsune in conjunction with shapeshifting though. Makes me wonder if Druid and Arcane Archer know each other.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/named-arrow
Well we were playing more traditional mercenary types, guns for hire, killing for the highest bidder type of crew. I just didn’t want to be that type of merc who could t be trusted because he’d betray a contract if his enemies were paying more. IC and OoC I felt that just made me an untrustworthy contractor if I’d subvert our deals out of greed. If word got out that I do that, I’d get less work except by unsavory folk who likely intend to betray me in the end, or have to turn to banditry since no one would be willing to pay “higher” for someone of my level.
Plus mercs already have a bad reputation of doing that regardless if I personally did or not. Stereotypes you know? The way I explained it was like this: for someone of my Kristine’s level and ability, to hire me to fight a gang and kill their boss would be 300 GP. That would be the normal and commonly accepted street price. But if I get the job but later renge on the contract because I got paid 400 by my target, than I’m no longer being charging the street price. My target survives, my client finds out, and now word on the street is that my dude is a greedy bastard who wants more than he’s worth. Sure, a lot of people are, but now they know I am. Next time I do a job by any competently informed organization they’ll know about my subverted contract. They know 300 GP won’t garuntee my loyalty. And why should they pay anymore than that for an untrustworthy merc who couldn’t even do his job?
So they won’t hire me. I gotta either look for poor pay dealing with guys who can’t or won’t bother to try and buy me off (these are usually dangerous pest control jobs like clearing out slimes or goblins but it could also be as a hired goon for extortion stuff) or I simply don’t do contract work anymore and have to do dungeon raids or just operate my own heists, which was the backstory reason for why I ended up in jail in the first place. In the end, while being stingy with money and asking for more payment is always a good thing, never let greed get the better of you. You could always get more money, but you can’t buy trust.
I do have a question for you though, since you seem to have a lot of direct experience with this style of play. What kind of opposition did you encounter during your identity-stealing escapades? Did anyone ever get suspicious? I ask because I find that it’s hard for GMs to balance “the party gets away with murder without ever rolling dice” and “every stupid guard is automatically suspicious of flies and pigeons.” Did you ever run into that problem?
Oh yeah, in the one instance I was the mob boss, there was a lot of bluff checks to be had. DM threw a lot of personal question stuff from underlings to the boss, as well as cronies asking him about advise or guidance or illegal dealings I didn’t even know about until I was asked. Didn’t take me long to figure that he was trying to put my disguise by giving me a series of questions that the real casino boss would’ve known but I didn’t. Again though, I was able to bluff my way pass or otherwise go beneath suspicion for a while.
That being said that was one of my better shapeshifting escapades, and unfortunately I have had That Guy of a GM who made up poor excuses to pierce through my shapeshifting. With the same kitsune I was using, the party was put into the “you all meet in prison” shtick with all of our gear taken away. This was suppose to ensure wizards and such can’t use their magic either, cept kitsune shapeshifting don’t need any component’s. What I wanted to do was steal a guard uniform (easy since the prisoners have to wash them) and disguise myself as one of the many guards I’ve seen. But what ticked me off was that right after I did it the DM rolled a die and shortly said that the guards take me away and start interrogating me. I’m just like… What? How? Why? His explanation is that they have magical security watching everyone so they saw me do it, which I feel is BS just because we also had a plot NPC who’s suppose to help use escape via smuggled tools and weapons, and he doesn’t get spotted even though he operated in the commons area. It just reeked of railroading since the rest of the party weren’t magical races who could do much without their equipment, so if my planned had worked I’d be the only one who could do anything outside of plot NPC stuff.
That GM retired ad my group found a new one eventually, but I still remember that moment simply because of how little of an explanation I received for why my idea just didn’t work. Then my character got slapped on some anti magic ability cuffs so I could t use my shapeshifting or my hexes, even though the other wizard in the group could still cast spells if he found their material components.
It’s tough when you’re a GM and a player has a silver bullet solution to your clever puzzle. The trick is to want the PCs to succeed rather than struggle pointlessly. I hope the dude learned from his railroading error!
So there I was as a master of many forms, I spoke with the dm in advance and was spying on the party as the party’s horse.As we had traveled we apparently passed through a barrier that caused shapeshifters to revert back to normal, the area was suffering from werewolves apparently. So as we passed by the barrier to my surprise I am snapped out of my horse form and into a human form .
“Why am I a human?”
“Well you’re normal form is a human so you were turned into a human”
“No I mean why am I a human right now I was supposed to be a horse.”
“Oh you passed by a magic barrier”
“I see”
Suffice to say my attempts at espionage on this newly formed party failed.
Ouch. What were your plans for the big reveal?
Shapeshifting is one of my favorite powers, i am still a darkness-nut but i really like the versatility of changing the form of your shape. Changelings, Lunars, Fair Folk, i really like them all. Unburden by shape, gender or identity you can make lots of funny things. For example seducing some guards, or the town mayor, or an other man that can have valuable information helps a lot. Sowing confusion is also good. Shapeshifting helps a lot when you play a trickster like pc. One trick my group does is for my pc to change shape, if he has that power, to look like some bounty hunter and then turn the rest of the party to the evil guys. That way i can study the evil guy and then change into him and start giving orders. Once i fact i help resolve the problems in a town without using violence 🙁 Our GM give us the mission to help to improve the living conditions in a town. To do that he explicit says that we needed to change the heart of the town’s mayor, and he pointed we could not take his hearts and put another in his chest, he know us very well. My wizard haven’t the power to change shape but one spell that can do that to other person. So the rest of the party grab the rouge, we strip him naked, just for fun, and i turn him into the town’s mayor wife. She was the only thing he loved, the only piece of goodness in his life and our entry point to corrupt him to goodness. The party new rougette then goes and start trying for him to have a change of heart. He was useless. The mayor’s wife turned overnight into a fouled mouth, hungry, angry and very rude women when she usually was very sweet and caring. She kicked kids on the streets for asking for candies, drinks lots of beer and started to see the other women in a lustful way improper of a lady of his standing. And then when we think a failure of the mission the mayor goes to see his wife and tell her that he have a change of heart, that he is seeing what he is doing wrong in the town and how that is a affecting her, that he will change and improve to be a better mayor husband and father and all that. Mission accomplished and our new rougette asking all the time for me to turn her into a guy again, only for me to say that she looks better that way before offering her some nuts if she like them 🙂
I guess Wizard isn’t the only one dealing with gender bending shenanigans.
Well, Wizard choose to change gender. Wizard is the poster-child of the transgender community of web-comics characters, probably. The party rouge-ette, choose nothing we made the choice for him, after striping naked in male form and leaving him naked when we turned her female. It was one of our first games together so the almost sociopathic tendencies are just beginner mistakes, we have since then refined our depravity 🙂
On a side note i have played, lots of shapeshifters, still i remember back in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood a duel that Alphonse, the corpse-less armor and Envy have. In it Envy changed one of his arms into a snake and the other into a sword to stab her enemies. Still in games that kind of shapeshifting is rare. One of the big problem of this power is the stat changes and calculation. More bookkeeping than the material components 🙁
Just saw a neat take on his in a minis game. The mutant warrior would roll each combat to see what their strength, weapon skill, and # of attacks was. It’s a bit abstract, but still struck me as a mice way of modeling “creative” shapeshifting.
Sort of.
My goblin rogue was paranoid about being killed for the crime of being small and green, so when we had to go to a royal masquerade, he went wearing multiple disguises. First, he used a mundane disguise kit to look like a gnome. Then he used shapechanging magic to be a gnome. Then he wore, over these two disguises, a rather rubbish goblin costume.
The idea was that magic that could see through the shapechange magic would have trouble with the mundane disguise, and naturally perceptive people who might see through the mundane disguises wouldn’t see through thr magic, and the rubbish goblin costume hid most of him anyways. The paper mache goblin head fit like a Deadmau5 helmet.
The end result was a goblin disguised as a gnome, turned into a gnome disguised as a goblin.
Did he get found out?
Sort of? The party got crashed by devils intent on eating our faces, so Snikkrot shed all the disguises to swap over to his alter ego, “that weird little dude in black who keeps shanking people and stealing their shoes.”
This puts me in mind of an NPC villain for my longest-running campaign. See, in 3.5E D&D, there was a thing called “racial substitution levels”, similar to racial archetypes in Pathfiner. Halfling druids had a racial substitution that gave them more skill points, with Climb, Hide, Jump and Move Silently as class skills, and reduced the sizes of animals they could wild shape into by one category, so a fifth level halfling druid could adopt Tiny and Small animal forms. At fifth level, a halfling druid could also have eight ranks of Hide and Move Silently, and four ranks of Disguise, qualifying a neutral evil druid for the Assassin prestige class, while gaining the ability to transform into a housecat.
The NPC in question was named Bloody-Claws-Of-Temple-Cat. It was a Stone Age setting with animal totems instead of gods, and, unbeknownst to the PCs, Temple Cat (aka housecat) had sold out his fellow cat spirits to join the evil empire that wanted to drown the world. She did a lot of sneaking around and spying on people in housecat form, and occasionally tearing out people’s throats.
My mental image of your character: https://media.giphy.com/media/94F78AUZ5b5Dy/giphy.gif
In a 3rd edition Forgotten Realms game I played in Maastricht, DM’d by a French exchange student, one of the other PCs went to the top of a cliff, was briefly out of view, and came back warning us of a big horde of enemies about to crest the ridge. It was a long time and lots of warning signs (“Psionics Handbook? Is your Cleric multiclassing or something?”) that the real PC showed up with new allies to kick the doppleganger’s ass.
This is the same game where I tanked a prompt to roll Fortitude saves while fighting an enemy priest who grew crocodile jaws and proptly forgot, only realising what had gone wrong by the time my PC got rejected for Harper membership by Storm Silverhand for being ‘not ready’ (=an effing lycanthrope.)
Sorry, I was already on a tangent just by reading the word ‘doppleganger’, and then veered off into my character’s case of Impostor Syndrome….
So one of the characters I play in one-offs when my usual group can’t get together is Forest the Firbolg Druid. (Firbolg don’t use names among each other so she had to come up with one on the fly and she’s not good at it.)
The lore on Firbolg is kind of lacking (In 5E they’re reclusive nature lovers as opposed to the Viking-themed giant-kin of older editions) so I decided to play them as basically Bigfoot. Like most Cryptids they avoid attention whenever possible. (I was roleplaying her 6 Charisma as a crippling social-awkwardness. This is why I love rolling for stats, as you get delightfully lopsided characters sometimes.)
Firbolg naturally can cast Disguise Self so she spends any time where there’ll be social interactions as the most non-descript woman you’ve ever met. (Whatever ethnicity is most prominent in the region. Not tall or short, skinny or fat, simply no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever) She spent all other time in civilization in some sort of animal form. She favored cats and pigeons when on her own, and ferrets when she could ride on a party member.
“Pro tip”. Erm, wouldn’t you need to be a professional evil heartless piece-of-scum villain to give a pro tip?
…what did you say your job was again, Colin?
I am in fact a GM. 😛
We had to steal a map from a very powerful Merchant Prince (Mob Boss) in this city run by such men. The map leads to the tomb of an ancient emperor, that is said to be full to the brim with treasure and magical artifacts of great power and wonder. The Merchant Prince just thinks it’s a very old map of the surrounding area, but he is a collector of the ancient and mysterious.
A professor friend of ours, also a collector of old junk, has a very old Yuan-Ti dagger, from when those people ruled a large part of the vast deserts where we currently find ourselves. We convince him to let us borrow it (he never saw it again) and we use it as a ruse to get the interest of said Merchant Prince. We hire a local dragonborn bard to pretend to be a merchant of antiquities and distract the Merchant Prince with this amazing find, while our fighter plays the part of his bodyguard. Three of us wait outside while the last member of our party, our druid, rides in on the fighter’s shoulder as a tiny little spider. Once they are in the fighter drops him by the stairs and goes off with the bard and the Merchant Prince to do a deal while the itsy bitsy spider cases the joint and finds the map.
Unfortunately everything then goes to hell as the Merchant Prince turns out to be a particularly aggressive negotiator, the bard fire-breaths him in the face and is later ripped in half by an ogre guard, the fighter has to rescue the mistress of the house and a gaggle of maids from a rampaging water elemental, the three of us outside rush inside to help with all the ruckus, and a ninja assassin we had been tracking from earlier gets to the map before we do.
All in all it turned out okay… for us. The bard died, the Merchant Prince died, the ninja died, the house burned down, a huge gap opened up in the heirarchy of that town. But we got the map and no regular party members died. So win!
That does indeed sound full of win. Expert shenanigans all round. Compliments and kudos to the lot of you!