Character secrets

[Wombat]

In my current campaign, I have given one of the players the task of secretly being an agent planted in their midst by the government of the district. He is to look for incriminating evidence that could be used to shut down the organization. So, yes, in many ways his character is actively working to destroy the party he is in. So far this has worked out very well -- he has kept his cover beautifully and the others have no notion what is going on, other than the fact that the government seems to know about their movements pretty well.

In another campaign (Ars Magica), I had a character fall under the sway of a demon-possessed magical item, again setting the worm in the cheese. That played out staggeringly well, with an eventual showdown and PCs turning on PCs. Everyone thought that this was one of the best and most dramatic short-run campaigns (ran 10 episodes) that they had ever been in.

 

[Raflar]

I'm playing a character you had several secrets that he (I) knew (Human Father was a Xvimist Warmage in Mintar and he was raised to hate all Elves - my character is a half elf scout/warmage) but all these were eventually found out through role playing...

However... unknown to ME is another secret... my character has been getting strange powers lately for unknown reasons and I'm trying to figure out the cause... (Vampiric Touch 1/day & Fly - so far at least)

In my background history I wrote that a rival Xvimist cursed my father and his descendants after my father died but these powers are not curses.. although the other PCs are horrified with the Vampiric Touch as it was discovered by accident when I touched the party's fighter and sucked part of his life away...

I like having secrets I need to discover, really helps with character development I think.

 

[ARandomGod]

I don't allow evil PCs, so while the PCs have their secrets, none of them are "I am the villain" type things.

OK, how about this. My character's secret (in your campaign) will be 'I'm NOT the villain." You must make a special announcement that you're relaxing a standard game rule for this character, and leave occasional ominous clues that seem to point to my character. He'll be good, of course, and not the villian at all... just things will happen that make him look suspicious. To the players only, of course, not the PC's...

heheheh....

 

[Honse_Gaming]

My current character, a warlock named Calukris, until recently, was just another Triton to the rest of the party. About two sessions ago, Calukris decided he trusted the rest of the party to reveal that he was framed and executed in his home village for the murder of his own sister. The only reason he's "alive" now is because it was part of his contract with his genie patron, Arrasu. Now that Calukris is conversing with more otherworldly beings and not just Arrasu, Arrasu is getting bitter and, little by little, undoing the glamour effect that makes Calukris look alive, until he looks like the walking corpse he is

 

[Ulfgeir]

In the Tianxia-game I am playing in, one of the other characters who was a noble lady/exorcist turned out to have been a traitor.

The magical ritual she performed turned out to attract huge amounts of demons, instead of protecting the city from them as she claimed... And she killed off some 100+ horses while we visited an old Temple hours away from the city together with the governor, and some other powerful enemies before leaving us there in the very old weather. She had also been an agent for an evil martial arts gang.

Amazed that the player manage to keep it a secret, as he normally can't keep a secret for a single session...

 

[Richards]

Some of the various PC secrets over the past few campaigns:

1. In an AD&D 2E game, my son initially ran a hengeyokai PC solely as a human, keeping his ability to physically transform into a falcon a secret until he needed to do so to save his life.

2. In a recent 3.5 campaign run by that same son, I ran a human fighter who, unbeknownst to the other players, had been married and widowed when his wife died in childbirth. The baby, the granddaughter of a notorious crime lord, was placed anonymously in an orphanage so the crime lord's enemies wouldn't use her against him. (Midway through the campaign the secret came out and by the end of the campaign it was safe for my fighter to retire and start raising her himself.)

3. I once ran an adventure in which three of the players were secretly running doppelgangers - a fact that nobody but I knew until the big reveal at the end of the adventure.

4. I secretly made the half-orc barbarian PC run by my co-worker's son the bastard son of the queen of a small country who had been captured by a band of orcs. By the end of that campaign, he assumed leadership of that country and ruled it throughout the follow-on campaign as an NPC.

5. My next PC in a campaign we'll be starting up soon has a secret even he won't know: he's a sorcerer but has no idea how he's doing the weird stuff that keeps happening around him. Over the first couple of levels he'll have to figure out how to deliberately cast spells, realize that irritating grackle that keeps following him around is actually his familiar, and so on.

Johnathan

 

[Blue]

My current character is a female fighter named Cairi.

To the rest of the players in my group, she is a young boy named Thomas. She fled home to avoid an arranged marriage, and has been posing as a young boy named Thomas, whom they hired as a mercenary recently, and know very little about. (hopefully none of them read these forums, I don't think they do). It'll be neat to see how long I can keep up the charade.

This is amusing, because I played very much the same concept a while back. It was inspired by a mini a friend painted for me (and a kickbutt job) that had a chainmail veil across the face. I'm like "who's want that", then it occured to me someone who didn't even want the contours of their face visible.

So I played a female, on the run from an arranged marriage (and a husband-to-be who demanded favors), hiding from both her family and his. She wore bulky armor, and wouldn't let anyone in the party touch her, not even shaking her hand. That broke down after a few sessions as the sworn-to-secrecy female cleric of Sharess was allowed to touch her to deliver healing spells. (AD&D 2nd required a cleric and magical healing.

Things came to a head when she dropped and was bleeding to death (back then you died at -10 HPs, and once you were at negatives you would bleed 1 HP per round until you received bandaging or healing), and the (very) male paladin did lay-on-hands to save her.

Onto current secrets - one interesting bit of "start the campaign" that DM who runs for us does is that at camapign start (or when introducing a new PC) the others have heard rumors of us and has us do the "two true and one false" rumors.

Another recent DM running Curse of Strahd wanted each of us to have a fatal flaw, that he then linked to a boon. (We all started the campaign dead.) Each of the characters ended up with a secret, and some of them I still don't know even though the campaign ended. Mine was that the (far in the boonies) sect to the moon goddess that my paladin belonged to injected us with lycanthrope blood to awaken our paladin gifts, and this gave us rages and such, especially around the full moon, that we had to learn to control in order to prove our devotion and control. My character - hadn't. He had an incident where he killed attackers and then turned on the innocents he was supposed to protect and had to be put down by his mentor.

Oh yeah, that was great RP when it came out.

 

[Blue]

A minor secret. I joined a game that had been in progress and was up to 3rd level. I was playing a Jillian Briarfoot, a halfling bard with the courtier background. When I joined, one of the PCs was sincerely introduced as Barian, King of Pal. To Jillian, whom knew there was no such place as Pal, he was either a con-man or deluded. But he was a powerful warrior and the rest of the party seemed to believe it. So Jillian became his herald, his secret that he never really believed in Pal.

(Oh, and in the end it was a lost kingdom - the PLAYER of Barian Pal thought his character deluded, the DM made it real.)

 

[Blue]

In our last game, it was impossible to have secrets b/c one of the players demanded that everyone be up-front about everything. Essentially, there were no secrets.

I don't understand - it's easily possible for your character to have secrets from the other characters even if the players know about it. Just have to keep IC and OOC separate. Why would this prevent secrets?

Or was it in-character, that their character insissted the other characters have no secrets. At that point my response would either be "nope, have none" or "when you earn my trust, I may tell you".