Switch-a-Roo
It looks like Angie, our pally-pal from Dungeons & Doodles: Tales from the Tables, had to follow up on some unfinished business. Can’t say I blame her. Last time she hung out with Vengeance, our former antipaladin seemed to be of dubious moral character. Now ol’ hothead has shiny armor AND a puppy. And that means however much Angie’s smiting fingers might itch, she’s got to remain calm. Trying as that is for a paladin, I think it’s Vengeance who has it worse.
Let me once again dip into the well of my E6-West-Marches-PF1e-Hex-Crawl-in-the-Weird-West game (henceforth known as Scattershot to save characters), to illustrate why.
The character in question is named Blackheart (which is a pretty good clue as to his nature). Dude is a conman, swindler, thief, and out-and-out rogue. In the pre-campaign writeup, Blackheart checked into our bard’s family saloon with the express intent of robbing them blind. One or two text-based rolls later, and he was lying half-conscious on the dusty street, having lost his pants and fallen from a roof while trying to escape out a second story window. TLDR: Our own Thief is in good company when it comes to the luck department.
So now my I-like-to-roll-Evil-PCs buddy is making a valiant effort to RP the rogue with a heart of gold archetype. It’s tough for the PC, but it’s great for the player. And for my money, that’s largely due to the supporting cast.
When you’re going for this type of turning-over-a-new-leaf character, you need a foil. You need other players and NPCs that treat you like scum. And you need this because, more than traps or monsters or locked chests, that distrust is your real antagonist. And characters like Blackheart or Vengeance work best when they’re doing their best despite the harsh opinions of others.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we trade stories of bad guys trying to do good? Why were you so mistrusted? How did you make right? And was it a positive experience as a player? Tell us all about your antiheroes, long-suffering protagonists, and heel-face-turns 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.
I think the closest I came to this was in a WoD-game, where I played as an Azlu.
But hang on, sportsfriends! When the game started, my character and a bunch of other critters woke up in a human laboratory, where the researchers had run some exciting experiments which had wiped or at least suppressed our memories.
My Azlu was lost and confused. So were the werewolves. So was the mage. So we stuck together, forming a pack. My Azlu actually enjoyed the cameraderie.
So when his original personality started talking in the back of his mind, my Azlu freaked. He was repulsed by what Azlu normally did, and when outsider Uratha started showing up, he kept a low profile. But – he stuck with the pack and made himself useful. He fought enemies, used his thread to bind wounds and change the dimensions of out-of-control portal to the spirit realm. (He also looked for religion, hoping to expunge or at least suppress the evil spirit in him.)
My Azlu was a genuinely kind and gentle character, but his original persona and Host were anything but. In spite of this, I think the pack appreciated him. They defended him from those outsider Uratha, in any case.
The memory thing is intriguing. Just had a guest speaker for my class named Kyle Ott. Dude wrote a game with a similar premise:
https://www.desksanddorks.org/after-the-rain
Interesting to see what people will become when stripped of their formative experiences.
That puppy just keeps saving Vengeance, doesn’t (s)he? 😀
Marvelous.
It’s always a good idea to let the one with the highest Charisma Stat handle the diplomacy.
What do you reckon Snuggles the Undrowned has for CHA? I mean, a blink dog only has 11 in PF1e.
Oh, yay! He’s been named! ^_^
There was a vote and everything. See hover text. 🙂
Puppies have a special ability: one that lowers the resistance to social persuasion checks other creatures normally have when interacting with them. ^_^
In one campaign I DM, one player’s wizard has developed a bad reputation because she doesn’t shy away from casting necromancy. She doesn’t animate corpses (that would be gross and illegal), but she is fond of debuffs like Ray of Enfeeblement and Touch of Idiocy.
It seems that no matter how much work (and money) she puts into improving the village, at the end of the day she is still a wizard in purple robes with a tower, a creepy magic staff that strikes sparks on the pavement, and a talking snake and infernal parrot as a familiars.
Consequently, the authorities (in the form of the Mages in Sable [M.I.S.]) keep poking around her business nearly every time she levels up, looking for evidence of malfeasance but failing to find anything more than some questionable aesthetic choices.
Much as the PCs hate the profiling, negative attention, and insinuations of wrongdoing, the players love it, and so I drop hints of ongoing investigations from time to time or use the threat of government intervention as a means of dissuading repeat visits to older dungeons.
(Funnily enough, other PC groups in the same campaign world have entirely positive interactions with the same government agencies and black-robed Lawful Good wizards.)
That definitely sounds interesting!
The idea of being persecuted is always attractive. It’s the same “doing the right thing for a community that hates me” trope that so ennobled Eddie Munson over in Stranger Things. Really good GMing there. 🙂
Huh, I started to think about what my characters have as their “Dark Side” flaw, like which ones stand out in a “Vengeance” sort of way… and then I realized they all have that to a degree and I tried to remember when I’d ever played a Big Damn Hero*… and I’m not sure I’ve ever played the squeaky clean good guy. Like there is always something violent, dark, insane, or ‘outsider’ about them. They’re always on the outside of respectful society in some manner.
Hobo Elven Sage is drunk and led his prior expeditions to their death, so he’s got a bit of an Odysseus reputation. Also he’s just a wee bit impulsive and doesn’t consider the danger of the situations he’s in…
Ogress Barbarian with a nudist streak… is an Ogress and a legit barbarian. She is not fit for polite society or even most civilized locales.
Conman Cleric is actually chosen by his god, but not in the mercantilism aspect like he claims, but the thief/trickster/conman aspect. So he’s always kinda up to something shady…
Space Colony Frontier Marshal is a Marshal, but she’s perfectly willing to execute someone if they become too much of a hassle to actually drag back to civilization to stand trial. Yes, she even whacked someone over a matter of five space-dollars, but look, he was slippery, hard to track down, and the local land baron was really pushy about having him put on trial over that five dollars, so when Slippery Jim tried to escape again, she just shot him in the head instead of the leg and called it a day.
I think the last and only Good Guy I’ve played was back when I was 12, a Cleric of the Good Gods… but I didn’t stick with her. It was just not fun I geuss? I don’t remember really. I’ve mostly played Anti-heroes and villians, that’s my schtick.
Unless I’m GMing, I’ve run a few GOOD GUY NPCs. But then that’s in short spurts, not for long plays. You get teh difference.
* Yes, I know the OG Big Damn Heroes weren’t really black and white “good guys” either, they were ‘our’ good guys, our heroes, but they weren’t like Superman/Boyscout level of good guys. They were definitely Robin Hood level heroes though.
Not so much a bad guy trying to be good, but a cultural misunderstanding between a Lawful Evil character and the standard LG Paladin aboot what is “Justice”.
So I was playing a Hobgoblin Artificer. His Hobgoblin legion was led by a (secretly) blind guy who had a magical dagger that granted him blindsight. Said dagger was stolen by a group of Duergar. We ended up killing the leader, but had we captured her, my character was planning to carve out her eyes. Exactly proportionate justice in his LE mind. When he told this to the Paladin she was rightfully disgusted with him, because that’s the product of a very fucked up worldview.
Ludwig Krauss had never been, by nature, a good man. A military surgeon for the ruthlessly efficient and worryingly expansionist Kreigerian Empire, Doktor Krauss had obsessively honed his medical and scientific acumen, not out of compassion for his patients, but simply because it is better to be skilled than unskilled.
His wife Leah, though his match in brilliance and arguably in madness, was otherwise his opposite in nearly every way. The pair had bonded almost immediately over their shared drive for scientific discovery, and Ludwig had quickly and correctly concluded that his new lover was a far better person than he would ever be. Rather than learn to be a good man himself, Doktor Krauss had found it more efficient to simply outsource all ethical questions to Leah, who was clearly more qualified in that field. If this made him a pariah in the Empire — for Leah was a rebel sympathizer and champion of the downtrodden — then Krauss had no regrets. He could enumerate his own priorities with razor-sharp precision. Loyalty to the Empire remained, in theory, quite high on this hierarchy, but Leah was unshakably at the top.
But that was years ago. As the campaign opened, Doktor Krauss was an exiled ex-felon, fresh from a lengthy sentence of hard labor in an Imperial prison camp. Leah was, by all official records, long dead, killed in the same disastrous clash between rival anarchist movements that had cost her husband his freedom. And though seemingly a ruined man, Krauss remained as driven and determined as ever, for by the Two, he had a Cause: to defy all accepted principles of neuroalchemy, and construct a new cloned body for Leah’s alchemically-suspended brain, which he had managed to preserve in the chaotic last hours before his capture.
By demeanor and by inclination, Krauss was the classic Amoral Mad Scientist, mistrusted on every side. His family loathed him as a disgrace to their name. The Empire despised him, of course, but so did their enemies, for Krauss never thought to hide the accent, mannerisms, or behavior of his homeland. A few of Leah’s closest former comrades would claim Ludwig as a lifelong friend, but more of them found him suspect at best. His medical skills were as sharp as ever — or more so, now that he had abandoned all restraint in his methods — but his bedside manner was atrocious.
Nonetheless, Doktor Krauss’s actual track record was closer to heroic than villainous. As long as Leah was alive — and anyone who dared to suggest that she was NOT still alive would see Krauss’s cold logic give way to white-hot fury — he viewed himself as her primary agent in the world. He still had no real moral compass of his own, but he did not need one: the only relevant moral question was ‘What Would Leah Do?’ And when she awoke — which she WOULD, whatever the cost to his health, sanity, or soul — he did not intend his actions on her behalf to cause her unnecessary grief.
Early on in their adventuring career my players, through no fault of their own, got mixed up with/mistaken for a group that had stolen a Holy Relic of the Church and slaughtered the caravan carrying said Relic back to the temple after it’s rediscovery in an old ruin.
The party had stumbled upon the sacked caravan and piles of dead bodies, and did what any self respecting adventurer would do, and began rifling through pockets and assorted containers looking for loot.
So when a group of Holy Templars from said temple showed up, they naturally assumed the party was responsible for the massacre of their dead priests, and a few failed Diplomacy rolls later, they had been cast as Enemies of the Church.
This would dog them through the rest of the campaign as they tried to prove their innocence, but of course this somehow never worked, or went horribly wrong. Hard to be diplomatic when you get attacked on sight by the military arm of said church, who want to arrest you and bring you in for a good interrogation Spanish Inquisition style, and the player natural reluctance to submit to said questioning.
The players actually leaned into the whole thing, helping to uncover some corruption in said church, plus a Cabal of church members who wanted to take full control of the local Gov’t, for the Good of all of course, and a fun time was had by all.
I’m working on a new character for Gubat Banwa, a very stylish game inspired by Southeast Asian mythology. Anyway, the character is a demon who is seeking enlightenment. More specifically, his/her (genderfluid) defeat at the hands of an adventurer has convinced Kabalin that he/she needs a Conviction, something to believe in to inspire passion and drive his/her actions. So now, Kabalin is travelling with the band, looking for something to believe in, and under orders (and magical bindings) to play nice (no more eating mortal flesh, for instance).
The other idea I have for this character is using him/her as an NPC (so if you’re one of my friends, stop reading here or risk getting spoilered). Kabalin would realize that one of the heroes who just rescued him/her from another demon is actually his/her child… questing specifically to kill Kabalin… but without a description or current name. Now Kabalin has to balance keeping the kid safe, teaching them, hiding his/her own identity, still letting the party experience challenges so they will grow, and figuring out why in the hells his/her lover would send their child to kill “The God Eater” (a name Kabalin hasn’t used since before meeting her) with extensive training in dealing with demons but no specific description.