Phebius
Explorer
So in the mentioned Sir Keegan adventure, the girl who played the Tiefling Paladin couldn’t make it, so we worked out the following bit with her character ahead of time, which would give an in-story opportunity to redo her character as a hybrid, as she was unhappy with her character as it was. (She was unhappy about a lot of things, but I digress)
Keegan showed up in a flurry of “Who dares disturb the sanctity of” and what not, but was clearly going through an internal struggle of some sort. She recognized the dragonborn as a worshipper of Bahamut due to the holy symbol she was wearing, and was struggling to let that calm her, but before that could happen, I had to really scare the crap out of everyone, by having the Paladin up and attack Keegan, who responded by graphically one-shot killing her.
This got everyone’s full attention.
A series of skill challenge type stuff and some amazing roleplaying by pretty much everyone led to the Dragonborn agreeing to accept knighthood and accept a quest to destroy that which had corrupted keegan in exchange for passage to it. Passage was granted across space and time…
To the Caves of Chaos.
One of the players got the biggest kick out of this, and his enthusiasm was contagious. And it was a blast for me to revisit what was the location where I learned how to DM in the first place. I dropped them in the Temple of Evil Chaos series of caves, and they had some fun battles with some acolytes and undead, with some great roleplaying involved. (The newly knighted one was getting a rather big kick out of things during interrogations: “Where is the coward that fears a straight up fight to the point that he flees back in time?” As well as the rogue: “So, essentially if I b ring this stuff back, I’ve cornered the market on mint condition antiques, right? The session ended with them outside the door of the penultimate battle.
After the session, the tiefling paladin’s player and I roleplayed time in the afterlife in which she made a completely reasonable deal with Asmodeus, in which she received power and assistance if she agreed to eliminate the leader of a cult of Vecna. Since the character was a refugee from this very cult and wanted very much to do just that, it was a fairly easy sell, particularly since a provision in the agreement stated that nothing in the agreement implies transfer of possession of her soul, and the fact that Ioun told her that nothing in the agreement went against their association, per se, but that “It’s the stupidest decision you’ve yet made and this will be apparent in the very core of your being from now on.” She asked me what I meant by this, and I said that the new version of her character. (hybrid Paladin/Warlock) had an intelligence score two points less than her earlier character. I’s so funny.
Keegan showed up in a flurry of “Who dares disturb the sanctity of” and what not, but was clearly going through an internal struggle of some sort. She recognized the dragonborn as a worshipper of Bahamut due to the holy symbol she was wearing, and was struggling to let that calm her, but before that could happen, I had to really scare the crap out of everyone, by having the Paladin up and attack Keegan, who responded by graphically one-shot killing her.
This got everyone’s full attention.
A series of skill challenge type stuff and some amazing roleplaying by pretty much everyone led to the Dragonborn agreeing to accept knighthood and accept a quest to destroy that which had corrupted keegan in exchange for passage to it. Passage was granted across space and time…
To the Caves of Chaos.
One of the players got the biggest kick out of this, and his enthusiasm was contagious. And it was a blast for me to revisit what was the location where I learned how to DM in the first place. I dropped them in the Temple of Evil Chaos series of caves, and they had some fun battles with some acolytes and undead, with some great roleplaying involved. (The newly knighted one was getting a rather big kick out of things during interrogations: “Where is the coward that fears a straight up fight to the point that he flees back in time?” As well as the rogue: “So, essentially if I b ring this stuff back, I’ve cornered the market on mint condition antiques, right? The session ended with them outside the door of the penultimate battle.
After the session, the tiefling paladin’s player and I roleplayed time in the afterlife in which she made a completely reasonable deal with Asmodeus, in which she received power and assistance if she agreed to eliminate the leader of a cult of Vecna. Since the character was a refugee from this very cult and wanted very much to do just that, it was a fairly easy sell, particularly since a provision in the agreement stated that nothing in the agreement implies transfer of possession of her soul, and the fact that Ioun told her that nothing in the agreement went against their association, per se, but that “It’s the stupidest decision you’ve yet made and this will be apparent in the very core of your being from now on.” She asked me what I meant by this, and I said that the new version of her character. (hybrid Paladin/Warlock) had an intelligence score two points less than her earlier character. I’s so funny.