Wednesday, August 10, 2016

RPGaDay 2016 #10 What Is The Largest In-Game Surprise You Have Experienced?

That would have to be the time the party very nearly got pwned by a bard. Yes, a bard. And yes, he pwned the entire party.

Nor in a straight fight or anything like that. When we actually got to fighting him, it was denouement rather than climax.

We first encountered him as Sir Meriweather, a paladin who was leading a rival band of adventurers. Nobody suspected that he was a bard. Every detail that we could perceive said paladin. Including the fact that he was sort of a pain in everyone's neck.

Our party was exploring a megadungeon. His party was exploring the same megadungeon. We decided  that our adventurer's guild/club needed a guildhall/clubhouse. He decided that he should build a church. We were constantly fighting over the same resources. But we couldn't just fight him, because he was a paladin. No matter how much we hated him, we worked from the assumption that he was doing it all for a good cause.

Matters came to a head when he tricked our party's wizard into making an amulet of undetectable alignment in the shape of the paladin's holy symbol. The wizard's black market contacts conveyed the request without telling him where the request was coming from ("The less you know, the safer you are" and so on). We later discovered that exact amulet being carried by Sir Meriweather.

That's when we stopped assuming his paladin-hood and started trying to figure out who he really was. We were unable to pinpoint exactly what character class he was, but we did discover that the church project was a scam to embezzle from the community. Once he knew his plot had been foiled, he ran. We tracked him onto a ship in port.

As we investigated Sir Meriweather's background, we managed to make contact with the god that he had claimed to serve. He gave us a minor artifact to smite the false paladin with. While my memory says that my character was the one who did that final smiting, my wife also insists that her character did it.

We never did discover in-character exactly what was going on, but once the smiting was done, the GM gave us the rundown. And when he told us that our nemesis was a bard, we were absolutely gobsmacked.

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