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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Unwise" data-source="post: 6076073" data-attributes="member: 98008">I find ENWorld very enlightening sometimes. Especially with regards to what a DM must consult with players over. Before coming here I had never before encountered the idea of checking with players if it is OK that they get captured, gets lycanthropy, that their mentor turns out to be a bad guy or that their history is not what they think it was. The idea that these things are outside DM fiat is utterly new to me. It's an interesting perspective, if not one that I particularly agree with. Personally I only draw the line where a player will feel that their PC is 'ruined' now. Even then, I will utterly ruin PCs with the consequences of their actions, just not via railroaded plot.Regarding the OP, could you consider a curse or lycathropy rather than mental control? That could tie in well with the players heritage. Some options include: - The mother was a succubus, the father found out and tried to flee with the child. The mother is looking for the child and will stop and nothing to get him back. The random deaths that tended to happen in towns before they left were the mother or her henchmen tracking down the father.- Alternatively, the PC has the succubus bloodline, or half a soul or whatever and is sometimes overtaken by this dark side.- The father is a lycanthrope and found out that he passed this on to his son. So he took his son and fled, moving each time the lycanthrope manifest itself and something terrible happened.- There is a family curse, the father left the mother when he found out, to protect her. Now that he is dead, it has moved on to the son. The curse could control them on odd occassions.- The PC is possessed. His bloodline has taken on an oath to trap a powerful demon. The thing is, they do it inside themselves. The evil cult found out where the father was living so he had to leave and keep moving. The father always wanted to tell the son about this when he was ready, but died first. When he was killed, his journal was taken along with some odd family heirlooms. Maybe the curse passed down to the son fully then?- A dark wizard in the family line. He tries to re-enter the world by overtaking his decendants.- A dream-demon/wizard/being haunts the PC. When he sleeps he sometimes does not wake up properly and sleep walks trapped in nightmares.I think the player might prefer a curse or family heritage more than being straight out mental controlled.In my game, a changeling character had a backstory that said his parents were killed horribly by a group of adventurers. When he tracked them down, he found that they were seemingly righteous paladins. The players knew that changelings in the area were having false memories implanted into them to make them assassinate people, but never stopped to question this PCs mental stability because "that's what he wrote in his backstory". So they slaughter the paladins and do the BBEGs work for him. The PC then starts having his memories disolve into mist and is under a compulsion to "return to the black tower for debreifing". I get the impression that most DMs on enworld would not approve of that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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