Correct, Kesh. The guy wasn't a villain, and the only time he'd done anything bad against the PCs was when he thought they were working with the villains. It was a purely evil act, in my opinion, what the PC did. And most of the rest of the party was horrified by what he'd done.
I dunno. Maybe I didn't make things clear to the players, but he wasn't a bad guy. I was thrilled that everything else was going so well (they even figured out a cool way to beat the villain), and then the game ends with half the party angry at this one PC. It was a poor way to resolve the game, at least from an emotional perspective.
But hey, get this, here's how the villain got taken out:
The PC's name is Rhuarc, by the by. A rogue/ranger/shadowdancer/Genja Kesh prestige class (see below). The weapons he has are a magic scimitar his mother crafted for him when he was very young, and a mentally-activated gauntlet that has a pair of spring-loaded blades in it. With a thought he can pop out the blades as a surprise weapon.
The climax takes place in and around a large ritual chamber run by the bad guys (the Genja Kesh, sort of like Elvish Bolsheviks who want to take power), with a 10-ft. tall shard of black crystal in the middle, which my players came to call the "throbbing black phallic symbol," which was eerily appropriate. 150-ft. diameter room, with a 25-ft. ceiling and windows surrounding it from all sides from 10-ft. to 20-ft. up. The ritual involves the sacrifice of a bunch of other bad guys who got double-crossed by the villainess.
The villainess is a succubus-like demon, inhabiting the mortal body of the Rhuarc's mother, who he thought died when he was still a child. She had summoned a demon to try to take revenge on Marinus, and it had killed her, or so he thought. In truth, it possessed her, hid away, and has spent the past 15 years or so building up a power base to just screw with the mortals on this world. Long story short, the succubus has duped the Genja Kesh into performing a ritual that will animate all the corpses of those who have died in a recent war (which she incited).
So basically, stopping the ritual is important, and Rhuarc also definitely wants to kill the succubus who stole his mother from him. A big fight is raging in the ritual chamber, with the rest of the PCs (and Marinus) trying to get through the guards to disrupt the priests casting the ritual spell. Rhuarc, though, is a Shadowdancer, and manages to slip by to the center of the room, where his mother/succubus is floating in mid-air, directing the battle and casting her own offensive spells.
Rhuarc tries to sneak up, but she can easily see him, since his Shadowdancer powers are tied strangely to her, and thus she is able to react before he can attack. Supremely confident, she waits for him to climb to the top of the black crystal shard to be within striking distance, and then she holds him, so he can't move. No one else is able to get close enough to help, so she smirks at him, and draws him close for a kiss. He feels the life getting sucked out of him, and he cannot move, but when she moved close to kiss him, his arm ended up pressed against her chest. Mentally, he activates the gauntlet's spring blades, causing them to shoot out and impale her in the chest.
She loses her grip on him, and her hold spell ends abruptly as the two blades stab into her heart. Just as Rhuarc starts to fall off the top of the shard, he lashes out with his scimitar, and impales her in the belly. She screams a satisfying death cry, and then slumps back, falling off the blade and back onto the tip of the giant black shard. When she lands, the demoness is expelled from the body, disrupting the ritual. Lightning begins crackling through the room, striking all the priests involved in the spell, killing them, and stunning the rest of the Genja Kesh.
Rhuarc slumps and falls to the ground, looking up at his dead mother, while the rest of the group finishes off the stunned guards. One PC comes over to check to see if Rhuarc is alright, then rushes off to help some wounded in another room.
.
At this point, Marinus comes over, and the game could have ended with Rhuarc realizing that Marinus had simply made a mistake, and every time since then, any conflict he had had with Marinus had been because of the succubus's manipulation. There would still be the matters of the war to deal with, but it would have ended on a resolved note.
But it didn't. It came so close, and that makes the way it did end so much less satisfying.
