Have you ever used the "Evil Twins" trope?

What it says in the title: Have you ever seen the "Evil Twins" trope in a game? Have you ever used it yourself as a GM? And more importantly, is there any way to use such melodramatic shenanigans without earning a table-wide eye roll?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

Yes, a doppleganger is perfect for this, and I have used it. The situation is such that a doppleganger appears and imitates a player character, and the other player characters have no way to distinguish the doppleganger from the player character, so he must fight it alone. If you're merciful, you can say that the doppleganger has a difference that can be detected, like different color blood, or a lack of anatomically correct genitalia.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen / Rise of Tiamat plays with this briefly: a pair of dragons who share a lair but take pains to never be seen together. With the limited description, I could not think of a way to use it in the campaign, alas.

*Deleted by user*

I did it twice to my party in the same campaign.

The first time around was with the group's paladin, Mordor, back in 1E/2E. Mordor was already a powerful character, and the background we'd rolled up for him had him as the son of Baron (whose influence he'd use to great effect several times already). He'd hit 4th level and rolled on the mount table, earning him a Bronze Dragon mount. I wasn't about to have that sort of firepower just show up on the doorstep, so he had to go on a quest - culminating in a solo fight for the dragon against his evil twin, Rondor. His twin had beaten him to the dragon, but Mordor was eventually victorious, shoving his flying evil twin of the dragon's back. The body, of course, couldn't be found. A few game years later, when the party had reached about 14th level, Rondor showed back up again, having poisoned their father while Mordor was away (see the second paragraph for where he'd been) and having duped the Barony into believing he was Mordor. Again, Rondor was defeated, but his backstory was also revealed - his mother had made a deal with an evil wizard in order to bear the Baron an heir, but in return the Baron's wife was to give the second-born to the wizard. The Baron's wife had intended to cheat the wizard by bearing no more children after the first, but the magic the wizard had laid upon her caused her to have twins - one with all the good distilled into his essence (Mordor) and the other all the evil (Rondor). The wizard had taken Rondor, always with the intent to raise the child to usurp his father and be a puppet through which the wizard could manipulate the Barony.

In the second instance, my brother was playing an elvin fighter/wizard, named Link (yep...he did that). When the party hit about 9th level and he was slated to gain followers and a keep, he was instead approached by a elf dressed in strange clothing and speaking with a strange accent. The stranger, Finwe, startled the entire party by addressing Link as "Prince". To his shock, Link discovered that his true name was Allum (Prince) Al'Nakthon and this stranger was his twin brother's manservant who had come seeking him to help with a crisis, and learned about his past. As it turned out, elvin births are rare - and twins are almost unheard of. As such, the elvin rules of inheritance tend to break when twins are born, and Link was the son of the king of Elvin lands. Had his birth been revealed the many years ago, it would have caused havoc in the kingdom, so he was secreted out of the kingdom under the care of servants loyal to the king - taken half a continent away where his existence would never be known or acknowledged. Link's brother, Allum (Prince) Ga'thalon had been raised and groomed to rule, unaware of his brother's existence. But Ga'thalon had vanished, and with no apparent heir to replace him, the kingdom was in an even more tedious state. Finwe begged Link to return with him to the kingdom to act in his brother's stead until the fate of the twin could be discerned. After some coaxing, Link agreed - whereupon the party found themselves drawn into a political web of intrigue that eventually outed a drow plot to attempt to destabilize the kingdom. Link & Co. were able to unravel the plot and get to the heart of it, including a battle with his twin who'd been turned into a mindless sorcerer drider under Lolth's control. The party attempted to subdue and capture Ga'thalon in the hopes of transforming him back, but the party rogue (a Halfling named Roflon) had other plans, and killed the drider Ga'thalon with a soulstealer blade, making resurrection impossible. The rogue passed it off as an "accident" thinking he'd had another blade in hand, but he wanted Link/Al'Nakthon on the throne simply because he knew he could ask for favors from his adventuring cohort and would likely get them approved. After revealing the plot, Link remained as King of the Elves for about six months, before abdicating the throne to a cousin in return for a small keep and some men-at-arms, half a continent away and far away from the vicious politics and plots of the Elvin court.

I used a doppleganger recently, but it tried to behave as much as the person it was trying to copy. However, I foreshadowed it, by having the person that was being copied say stuff that would later be contradicted by the doppleganger, thus tipping the players off that something was amiss.

I have never used an evil twin though (or seen it in a game). I wouldn't use it, because I think that would insult the intelligence of my players. I tend to lean more towards characters that 'seem' evil, but turn out to have motives that are more in the gray.

I've never used actual evil twins, but I did use doppelgangers to good effect once. I did it for the duration of one adventure (in a campaign with 100 adventures all told), where three of my players were actually playing doppelgangers attempting to slay the fourth player's PC and they didn't know about it until towards the end of the adventure, when the time was appropriate for them to strike. Then each of the four got a personalized, page-long handout (the PC's was about background information; the doppelgangers' explained their actual status as doppelgangers and their mission to kill the PC) and the three doppelgangers turned on the sole PC, much to that player's surprise.

I posted a thread about it here, with a link to the Story Hour which contains that adventure's write-up: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?315231-I-Finally-Found-a-Way-to-Implement-the-Doppelganger-Gambit

Johnathan

I've put something similar in my Tomb of Annihilation campaign. There's an NPC that is a young wizard who prematurely aged on half of her body. I altered this to show that she is sharing her life essence with her grandmother, so the two personalities are in one body. So while the grandmother is in stasis, staving off old age and death, the other wizard's lifeforce is being leeched by the elder. Sometimes the other personality comes out.

Calithorne said:

Yes, a doppleganger is perfect for this, and I have used it.

Click to expand...

Me too, actually! It was my first-ever PC kill, and was super proud of the way it went down.

The paladin had gotten sucked up into a vacuum tube, and the rest of the party was futzing around with the trap trying to figure out whether or not they should follow. While the paladin was fighting for his life in another room, a doppelganger took on his appearance and ran back to the rest of the party. It looked all haggard and beat up and said, “Let’s not go that way guys. Trust me.”

I’d actually taken the player aside and told him the situation, so it was the paladin’s player convincing the rest of the party not to go and save his character. The dude’s a trooper.

Twist ending though, the paladin wound up surviving. It was our monk that just happened to catch a crit at the wrong time. Three doppelgangers vs. an APL 3 party is no joke, especially when they’re minus one set of shining armor and lay on hands.

I haven't used the "there is an evil twin of " trope, but now I have an idea for using the "Evil Twin Brothers/Sisters" like the Dragon note above. PC's fight one, defeat but not kill him/her, next time, it's the other one they face. Both are Evil, but going about it in different ways that don't intersect until both have been defeated and the pair join forces to try and take down the PC interlopers. And then you toss in the Triplet...