Today’s theme is “Surprise.”
I don’t do surprises or plot twists very well in my own
games. My thinking is too straightforward to accommodate a lot of corkscrews.
But I have been subjected to some good surprises over my gaming career.
Sometimes, I’m playing with a GM that is better than me at plot twists, and
sometimes I’ll be running a game and a player throws me a curveball.
The greatest plot twist that I have ever experienced has to
be Sir Meriwether. I may have told this story before, but it’s a damned good
one.
The system was Third Edition D&D, revised (suck it,
3,5!) and the GM was Kris Newton running us through a megadungeon of his own
design. To make things interesting, he gave us a party of competing adventurers
led by Sir Meriwether. He might or might not have introduced himself as a
paladin, but everything Kris described to us matched what we expected a paladin
to be.
We found ourselves in almost constant competition with
Meriwether’s crew, each party trying to get to the good stuff hidden in the
dungeon before the other. But when we decided to pursue goals outside the
dungeon, Meriwether was there, too. When we decided to establish an
adventurer’s guild, he decided that his deity needed a church. And it seemed
like only one of us could get what we wanted. Sir Meriwether had a high
Charisma score and a decent investment in social skills, so he was a
significant challenge. And since we assumed that he was Lawful Good, like a
paladin should be, we assumed that no matter how hard he made our lives, he was
doing it for some Good (note the capital G) purpose.
Things finally came to a head when he tricked our party’s
wizard in to making an amulet of undetectable alignment that looked like his
holy symbol. Now we knew that he was not Lawful Good and no longer had the
ability to determine exactly what his alignment was. Our first guess was that
he was a fallen paladin, turned to the cause of evil.
It wasn’t until he was fully defeated (after trying to
escape with the funds for building his church) that Kris told us what he was. A
bard. Everything about his identity was a carefully constructed con. What was
even more surprising was that it made so much sense. It wasn’t just a bard
pretending to be a paladin like he might put on some disguise. He could use some
of his bard powers to mimic paladin powers.
This will go down in history as the time that the entire party was nearly pwned by a bard.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment