This went down about six weeks ago. Mildly long.
One of my players is playing a summoner in my Final Fantasy game, one of the last two survivors of an island of summoners that was butchered 15 years ago. She left when she was still a child, so she did not know the village well at all. Having lost her mother at a young age and then found out about her heritage, she took it upon herself to protect summoners -- protect those that did not know how to protect themselves. This became (and still is) her calling.
Another man, Eidel, apparently was doing the same thing. He built a stronghold for summoners, and was kidnapping them if necessary to keep them safe from the Destroyer, a being who wished death to all summoners and was known as The Fallen God, and training them to be able to stop the Destroyer and save their families from His terror. The leader of the followers of the Destroyer was an evil man named Lord Hades, who, along with six others, was controlling the Weapons in a bid to free the Destroyer from the Far Realm in order to unleash him on the "real" world.
They knew about him for a long time, and after about a year of gametime, decided the time had come to meet with Eidel. They didn't trust him -- enough of his practices concerned them, and their one link to him, a man named Stockholm, was a little untrustworthy. Still, she and another character (another summoner, the only two in the party) went to Eidel's stronghold.
Upon getting there, she learned about Stockholm's tragic past (family killed by cultists of the Destroyer, he'd been running with his summoner little sister ever since, and finally found a sanctuary for her), met the staff at this stronghold, and then was drafted to investigate a series of murders, murders that implicated Stockholm as the killer. She felt a desire to save him, even though she just recently got past the constant urge to punch him.
Aeons ran wild, they ventured out into the Far Realm where the Destroyer lurked, saved a lost child, and made good friends with the Headmaster, all during their search for the real killer. Finally, with enough proof (wrong amount of shots fired, two shell casings missing, four-legged footsteps), they burst into Eidel's chamber to tell him that Stockholm was innocent, to stop the execution.
I recorded a special cutscene for this, with music shifting from one theme into another.
"Eidel... the name comes from the Old World tonue. It means phantom... or illusion. Names have -such- meaning."
He turns around, removes the hood, and it's Lord Hades.
"Don't you think?"
Eidel wasn't training summoners to fight the Destroyer. He was gathering them in one place to feed to the Destroyer.
I have never seen tears of rage before, but that's what my player had. She promptly rolled three straight critical successes, knocked Lord Hades across the room, and led a frantic retreat just as the rest of the party showed up.
When I spoke to her later about it, she said it was a -brilliant- twist, that she had suspected he was evil from the beginning but had been coming around while helping everyone out there, and she had just gotten to the point of thinking that "Okay, now we can work together and really save everyone" when the truth came out. She wasn't mad at me, she just wanted him to really exist right then so she could belt him one.
Tears of real sadness could get a little weird and awkward, but I like it when people are in character and outraged. I also like when they know it's not -me- that's doing it, but the characters. Don't kill the messenger!
That's the only moment of tears we've had so far, other than the tears of laughter that seem to come around about once a month from something hilariously inappropriate or mis-timed.
