D&D General Positive Stories of Faith from Your Campaigns

[5ekyu]

So, in light of multiple threads about the many ways paladin code traps see play, I want to ask for the opposite.

Tell us about any times you had a player date to play a paladin with a code, a cleric or druid of a faith to a given divine or church, a warlock with a Patron or any character with strong ties to any guild or organization or fauth... where you made that a key aspect within the gameplay in positive ways, even if sometimes a mixed blessing.

Surely there are tales where the character's patron turned out to be on the same side, not the big evil in disguise and where the tasks required sometimes were challenging or problems but not betrayals of the character's soul, right?

Surely there are tales, wondrous ones, where even though there are good apples and bad apples in the church, it showed prominently in the gsme and as a boon more than a bane to the group and its members.

Right?

 

[Wiseblood]

Players went to hell to kill a rakshasa permanently because it was targeting them and their friends. They discovered the rakshasa had mortal prisoners. Plane shift could take everyone home except one. The reformed assassin volunteered to stay in hell until they could come back for her. Time flow differences they didn’t know how long she would be there. As a convert to the deity she and the cleric prayed for her safety. The deity sent a solar to get her out. They fully expected her to die in hell and be lost forever.

 

[Shiroiken]

Heh. In my old group, no one ever wanted me to play a cleric, druid, or paladin, because I would often proselytize to them character. My next character is a dwarf clerics, so we'll see how that goes

In a Thule campaign, I played a druid of the Nature gods, which are thousands of spirits in nature. I was also a soothsayer, so I could predict the future, as shown to me by the Nature gods. This created an interesting dynamic with the group, because there was a cleric of one of the City gods and half the party was rural and half urban. We had a lot of various conversations between the two (both gods and lifestyles), but eventually we had to rally barbarians to raid one of the corrupt cities to rescue an ally (along with all the slaves) and destroy a noble house that was trying to kill us. My faith was strong, and helped to rally the barbarian horde; my counterpart had to concede that even his City god would approve of our actions.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Heh. In my old group, no one ever wanted me to play a cleric, druid, or paladin, because I would often proselytize to them character. My next character is a dwarf clerics, so we'll see how that goes

So you entertained yourself in game by intentionally being irritating to the other players?

 

[Henry]

In our group’s Hell’s Rebels PF campaign from a few years ago, my character (an Oracle of the god of freedom), due to having survived the campaign almost through all six books and having been the mouthpiece and demagogue at key moments, basically became the martyr and rallying cry around which the revolution and then foundling nation was based. I was the Alamo in “Remember the Alamo.”

However, I had played him as (in private) supremely morose and wracked with survivor’s guilt after watching all of his family and friends die throughout the bloody revolution. (By the end of the campaign, every player but me had been through at least three characters.) At the time of his martyrdom, his faith in both his god and cause was the only thing he felt he had left to live for... To this day, he was perhaps my favorite character I’ve ever played.

 

[aco175]

"Tell them, I was awesome."

 

[Shiroiken]

So you entertained yourself in game by intentionally being irritating to the other players?

With my old group, yup. They had a couple of roll-players that hated roleplaying, despite the fact that they were in the minority of the group. They hated it when we "wasted time" with our roleplaying, and their constant complaining annoyed me, so I would intentionally annoy them with roleplaying my faith.

 

[Imaculata]

One of the players in my group plays a pirate captain and on his way to becoming a saint, which has been a wild ride. There have been several miraculous moments where he took upon him the role of some sort of religious savior, and it was fantastic. It lead to some of the most surprising, inspirational and heroic moments in our campaign.

He obtained a magic lamp with a genie, and chose to wish it away, saying that to him it was all about the journey, not about obtaining everything instantly from a genie. All he needed was a ship, a crew and the wide open sea.

He brought hope to hundreds of dwarves, and then as they kneeled before him, he walked by each and every one of them and touched their head.

He had his holy weapon (a harpoon, which his party members made for him) blessed by the god of storms to defeat a powerful nemesis, due to the druid in the party calling upon a most powerful storm.

He banished an undead pirate captain with the aid of a powerful lens.

He obtained the title of Lightbringer, and his tales were spread among the people by his party members.

He used a religious artifact of the dwarves to root out a great evil, and then returned the artifact to the leader of the dwarves.

And now he is trying to find a way to return the memories of the dwarves to them and rid them of their curse. If he succeeds, his journey into sainthood will be complete.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

With my old group, yup. They had a couple of roll-players that hated roleplaying, despite the fact that they were in the minority of the group. They hated it when we "wasted time" with our roleplaying, and their constant complaining annoyed me, so I would intentionally annoy them with roleplaying my faith.

I can see that being a no win situation for everyone. Some people are just waiting to be extra on critical role, while others basically see DnD as a smaller scale tabletop battlefield game.

It seems to rarely work out well when the two groups are mixed. Personally I think I would have enjoyed playing in your group.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm reluctant to tell stories about my players, but I'll give a brief summary of one of those times my players were awesome, though it's going to take some backstory.

The set up is that the party is on a long ocean voyage. They've boarded a privateer as passengers and part owners. Essentially, it's a pirate ship, but it's a respectable pirate ship. The party is being feted on the first day of the voyage with elaborate multicourse meal in which they are introduced to the ship's officers. The party has brought considerable baggage on with them, one item of which is a barrel of pickled eels.

Now the barrel of pickled eels has a backstory as well. In a previous adventure, the party rescued a town from a curse, and after having done so, one of the members of the party demanded from the town payment for their act of gallantry. The town mayor protested that they were a poor town that had suffered horribly, and they had no coin to spare for the heroes, but when the party members insisted and insulted the gratitude and hospitality of the town, the local Squire and landowner offered to take up a donation for the party. When donation arrived it consisted of homespun crafts, some young hunting dogs, food, barrels of beer, and other sundry items produced by the town. The party, even greediest of them, were delighted with this strange treasure. One of the items was a barrel of pickled eels - not something that the inland community would actually produce. What the party didn't know is that also in the town as part of a long running subplot, was a pair of Malenti assassins from the local version of 'Innsmouth' who were there on behalf of Nauti the Storm Lord to assassinate the party cleric. Having failed in this mission, the barrel of pickled eels tainted with blowfish poison was a parting shot at the PCs. The barrel stayed in the PC's supplies for months of game time and years of play time, until the party brought it aboard the ship and had it stowed away - only to be served up as a course in the very feast they were eating.

Also aboard the same ship was a Malenti high priest of Nauti, pretending to be a simple sailor. The priests mission aboard the ship was to turn some members of the crew to the worship of Nauti, and then acting with them consecrate one of the ship's bilge stones as an altar to Nauti, thus turning the ship into one of Nauti's temples - at which point Nauti would be free to directly intervene (and I mean directly) aboard the ship without fear of interference by other deities. The ship would effectively become his desmanse. Consecrating an alter to Nauti involves sacrificing the kidneys of a murdered man and ideally involves a congregation. So the mission essentially was spread dissent in the crew, and then murder some sailors and get away with it. Along the way, Nauti would send sea serpents, storms, and sauhaghin servants to assist. The plan seemed almost foolproof, and things got off to a great start.

The ship's cook rather innocently found the eels, and made a dish of them, resulting in poisoning all the PC's and officers. The PC's barely managed to save the lives of the officers and themselves, but even so most of them were incapacitated from the poison. The captain was embarrassed and furious. Someone had nearly murdered his guests and all his closest and dearest friends. He determined to make an example of someone, and the only one that could bare his rage was the hapless cook. Now everyone knew the cook was innocent, and the high priest was busy poisoning the minds of the crew by saying this sort of bad luck was a sure sign that they'd lost the favor of Nauti, and that the Captain was being a jerk (he was), and that this ill-advised voyage in hurricane season against the wind was sure to come to ruin.

Most of my players knew this was unjust but they figured there wasn't much they could do about it, and probably it would be best to just keep out of it. After all, they didn't want to turn any attention to themselves for their role in this. My paladin player saw injustice and decided that this couldn't stand. He had no idea what he was going to do to stop it, and he had no idea what was going on or that any of this had repercussions, but by golly he wasn't going to stand aside and let injustice be done. He wasn't even considering his oath to protect the innocent and give aid to travellers. That's just the way this guy thinks. So after an IC argument and a failed diplomacy check, the player just says, "Fine. If someone needs to be whipped, whip me. We brought the poison aboard, however unknowingly. We are to blame more than the cook. Whip me." And that's what happened. And the ship's crew were like, "Dude. That guys is basically Aravar the Traveller. Aravar the Traveller is watching out for us."

And the whole voyage, all 30 something days of it, across multiple sessions was basically like that. Every time there was a plot afoot, with no idea what sort of plot was afoot, the player acting on his own sense of justice, just intervened all the freaking time to the extent that it practically seemed supernatural. The player could well have been reading my mind. He never really figured out any of the clues as to what was going on in the background, but every single one of the dozens of things that Malenti priest tried to get support from the crew or quietly murder someone just failed. Surprise attack by Sahuaghin as cover for the Malenti priest getting his kidneys? Thwarted because the Paladin decided that night he needed to help stand watch with an NPC he felt compassion for. Not a single sailor died through all the plots and stratagems. No dead sailors, no harvestable kidneys. No harvestable kidneys, no consecrated alter to Nauti. The crew effectively had a guardian angel on full time service and he never knew it. Nauti did eventually show up in physical form and raised a hurricane against the ship, but he had no right to directly touch it. So the ship survived (with a small bit of divine aid from the good guys).

That's just typical of this player and his Paladin. He just does the right thing. He's frequently lawful stupid, often way more than he needs to be. But when he's in form, it's pretty awesome.