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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merkuri" data-source="post: 3468164" data-attributes="member: 41321">Hmm, perhaps in his original quest to protect people he ended up becoming more and more tyrranical, taking away his people's freedoms in exchange for security.  It started out as something small, like making people get licenses to own weapons, but kept moving more and more towards a police state, like mandatory curfews or wizards on every street corner reading people's thoughts for a hint of inappropriate behavior.  One day he wakes up and realizes that he's made everyone miserable in an effort to keep them happy, but at this point it's gone too far.  All of the buerocracy and protections he's put in place are now beyond his control.  There's one weak spot, however.  There's a sentient eldritch machine that controls and powers his whole government/military/protection network/whathaveyou.  Since he is immortal, the best way he could think of to protect the machine was to tie it into his own life force.  If he dies, the machine is destroyed and the whole thing falls to pieces, freeing the nation again.  The rub is that the machine is so cloesly tied to him that it can read his thoughts and even control him if it desires.  Normally it doesn't care what he does, but if it detects any hint that he's planning on killing himself it will take away his free will and make him into a meat puppet to protect itself.  He's learned to hide some things from the machine, though, and he's very carefully trying to manipulate events to end in his own death, but he cannot seem like he wants to die and for all intents and purposes has to be the BBEG that everyone thinks he is, or the machine will lock him up in his own brain for eternity.At the very end of the campaign, as the party gets ready to face off against the BBEG, they realize that the friend and informer that got them here in the first place was the BBEG himself.  As they face off against him, they see in his eyes that he wants to die.  Just as they are about to strike the final blow the machine realizes what's happening and takes over, and suddenly they are fighing the REAL bad guy, but they have to take down their friend to end it for good.You know, I kinda like that.  I think I might use it in my own campaign some day.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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