Betrayed party for Hextor... retrievable?

[MissGrim]

In one of the campaigns I'm playing in currently I've stumbled upon a bit of a plot/character dilemma and I'm hoping some of you may have a suggestion I hadn't yet considered for salvaging my situation, heh.

Brief background of the campaign to date is a group of neutral/good (1 neutral, 2 chaotic neutral, 2 chaotic good, 1 lawful good) adventurers steals a magic keep (standard shrinking variety, somewhat customized) from a favored group of Hextor followers (four brothers that happen to be very close). Of course this enrages the brothers and over the next few games three of the brothers are slain during multiple attempts to retrieve their property. Now, my character (chaotic neutral rogue) didn't object to the original theft, but the subsequent murdering of three of the brothers had been making me feel increasingly guilty. While I'm sure they would have killed me given a good opportunity, we *did* instigate the conflict and all of the subsequent battle was the immediate result of their smash-and-grab attempts. Also, being neutral and morally flexible my character doesn't see the brothers as automatic enemies like some of the good members of the party seem to. I also died in the last of these battles (after slaying two of the brothers myself) and was raised at the beginning of the last game.

In the last game Hextor imbued the remaining brother with all of the power lost in the demise of his siblings and he made a concentrated series of efforts to regain the keep (sneaking in, saying the command, etc.). At the same time that this was going on the party encountered an alignment-changing item which changed some of them radically but myself only moderately (chaotic neutral to lawful neutral). Since I'd already been feeling guilty about the "wrong" I considered we'd done to this family and had been playing it up even more following my recent brush with death, I didn't figure it was too great a leap that this switch to lawful would solidify my view that what we had done to them was completely wrong. Stealing doesn't go against my personal code of ethics, but murdering to keep stolen goods is another matter, and eradicating a close family to do so is reprehensible.

Therefore, when I was outside of the keep alone and was confronted with a vengeful warrior of Hextor, I didn't figure it was a stretch that my character would call out "I can return the keep to you!" before being shot. Of course when I came to I was tied down and faced with a slow death, and while I didn't really want to die I wasn't *completely* convinced I didn't have it coming. I babbled (honestly) that I thought we'd done him and his brothers a horrible wrong and that I would like nothing more than to help him retrieve the keep and do whatever I could to make reparation for his loss. He asked if I would swear to Hextor, and when I did so I was subsequently branded with some kind of magical symbol (Hextor's, to be precise) and given the ability to communicate with the warrior telepathically.

When I returned from scouting I waited until my watch and shrank the keep, blowing the signal whistle and barely giving my party time to evacuate. The warrior absconded with the keep and I acted as though he'd finally succeeded in shrinking it on his own. With the new alignments in the party, however, there was already dissent and mistrust (mostly neutral and evil now, remember).

Currently my character thinks that the item in question possibly *did* alter most of the party's personality in some way and is receiving strong urging from the warrior of Hextor that she'll be required to murder her party members in the near future. Using the party dissention as an excuse she split from the party for their own safety and is "coincidentally" traveling to the same big city that they are headed to.

Unfortunately, at this point I kind of feel hosed, hehe. We're low level (five) and my resources are limited. The mental link I share with the follower of Hextor grants him the ability to cause unbearable pain, which doesn't exactly inspire me to just ignore him. Also, my character isn't even opposed to the idea of furthering his goals to make up for the way he was wronged (in her opinion), but she *does* object to further betrayal of her own party. Being lawful neutral I'm positive I did wrong and feel it must be righted, but I can see the value of both sides here and would really like to continue with the adventuring companions I know and trust (and continue in the campaign without murdering them or rerolling, heh).

So far my only thought is to somehow let the party know why I distanced myself (I suspect the mage was not very different from his original self, he didn't act differently at all) through a message but that doesn't solve the Hextor difficulty or their alignment change. Since my suspicion of their change is *very* strong I pondered hiring a mage or cleric to track them down, investigate them, and take action as needed, but I only have 1500g and some minor items as far as resources go. I also thought of trying to convince the warrior that the goals of Hextor would be better served by my trying to subvert the party to his own ends rather than just mindlessly slaughter them. I wouldn't mind being a sort of double-agent for a while (at least until I feel my own personal debt to him has been paid).

Any ideas? I'll probably come up with something better on my own, but I haven't slept yet and I know that some of you are masters of the twisty plot, heh.

 

[MissGrim]

Well, I didn't actually come up with anything better, and apparently nobody is forthcoming with a more interesting suggestion, so I believe I am going to go with "Subvert the party to coincide with the goals of Hextor until I feel my debt is paid". After that I'll worry about being magically branded and otherwise-aligned, heh. Since I didn't originally intend to head down a lawful-neutral path (guided by evil, even) I haven't got a lot of relevant material... can anyone suggest some good deity-related sites? So far all I've found are the run-of-the-mill "This god has this symbol and these goals and the followers wear this color".

Also, fleshing out different aspects of a character are always easier for me if I can illustrate them, so I thought I'd share what I'd finished so far... an initial sketch of my character and another of the Hextor-following NPC:

Now that I've given it some thought I really am looking forward to the whole double agent/evil agenda plan... especially since I'm participating out of a sense of debt/duty rather than an actual inclination toward evil. It would have been easier to compromise my character's personality for the good of the party but this is going to be a lot more fun, I think. Hopefully someone that has experience with these (evil treacherous) things can point me in a useful direction, heh.

 

[Lorthanoth]

Great art esp. your PC!

 

[Sollir Furryfoot]

Edit-I re-read your post again, originally I wrote this thinking your character had more involvement with being aligned with the Hextor villain-on my 2nd readthrough it seems like its more your DM's fault, I'm gonna leave this up though, incase some part of it is of any use.

Pardon, it seems like I took your post initially the wrong way (I thought it could've been a troll of sorts) which is why I didn't respond. Seeing your art allowed me to get past this bias, making me realize that you care for your character and her story. From reading your story I get that you highly value character roleplaying and immersion, but there's something about D&D that can make it difficult for the style of play that you want. While your character's goals and emotions are important to roleplaying, D&D is very much a team-oriented game and I know with my group of players, a betrayal of the group without prompting from the DM or storyline can be fairly jarring, disrupting the fun for everyone. I guess it depends on how interested your group is in roleplaying, but subverting the party from within seems to me to go against the spirit of the game-you would be better off either roleplaying this particular character in a solo campaign or moving her to NPC status and playing a different character at this point (Unless you can find a reason to redeem her back from the Hextor), at least if you want to contribute to your group's success instead of hindering it.

It seems like you have a lot invested in her though so the above is not that useful for you. I would talk to your DM outside to see if there's a workaround to the problem and maybe even the other players (letting them know your character is betraying them but keeping this Metaknowledge, if they're mature enough), possibly (and this is assuming your character trusts the other ones) just telling them that if they go against him more you will work against them (stabbing them in the front is better than in the back), but if you can't get it resolved in a few D&D sessions I have a hard time seeing it working out well in the end.

 

[Sollir Furryfoot]

To answer your other question, if you have a chance to flip through the WotC book, Faiths and Pantheons, there's a Dogma section for each deity there. It's a Forgotten Realms book which isn't necessarily useless if you're playing another campaign-there's so many deities in the book you can almost always find one with a similar look to a campaign deity you see now and use the tenants and suggestions from that faith. There are several old Dragon magazine articles that focus on one particular deity that include details on what clerics, paladins, and worshippers of that deity are like-there's a nice article on St. Cuthbert that they did a few months ago (though unless you know someone who subscribed to the magazines this might be hard to find). Since a big part of D&D is "kill the badguys and take their stuff", many good-aligned religions have provisions for this sort of thing and are generally much more militant than real life religions.

 

[MissGrim]

I guess it depends on how interested your group is in roleplaying, but subverting the party from within seems to me to go against the spirit of the game-you would be better off either roleplaying this particular character in a solo campaign or moving her to NPC status and playing a different character at this point (Unless you can find a reason to redeem her back from the Hextor), at least if you want to contribute to your group's success instead of hindering it.

Thus the whole point of the "any creative ways that I'm not hosed?" post, heh (although I do understand that you didn't get that gist originally). When I say "subvert the party" in this instance what I actually mean is just to use my association with them to gain things / complete goals for the benefit of this NPC up until the point that I feel the debt is repaid. *Then* my character would feel comfortable (in my opinion) trying to remove the brand/link and going her own way. I don't actually mean that I would try to get the party to head down some murderous evil path for all eternity. I realize some very creative roleplaying might be in order here, but I've since spoken with the DM and the other players and I think I've convinced them to be at least mildly cooperative (player-wise) with incorporating this as a sub-plot for my character. I also thought that a more specific subplot would be attempting to raise the dead brothers (probably taking a wish-equivalent scenario) as a fairly just way to make amends. I also hoped that (character-wise) the rest of the party might be more forgiving after it becomes apparent that everyone is suffering from a magically-induced personality change (it's just chance that mine coincided with some issues I'd already been pondering, right?).

If I hadn't gotten myself into such a weird RP spot I wouldn't have even posted about it on a forum, but I kind of figured "Oh, crap, did I just turn myself into an NPC?" warranted looking for outside opinions, heh.