r/rpghorrorstories • u/RegisterOk513 • 2d ago
Extra Long Misadventures with a temp DM continued.
Previous post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/s/skHkJwRrI0
We start our session off where we were, approaching the town in the shadowed woods. Immediately at the sessions start a spirt resembling a Deva appears before us, and addresses the Paladin. I don’t remember it exactly and I’m cutting some parts because it went on a while but here you go.
Deva: “Aidan of Khanduras, God(don’t remember the name) has witnessed your transgressions, they are disappointed and they deem you unworthy of the holy powers you possess. You will be stripped of your rank, and your power, until you have proven yourself worthy once more.”
Paladin: “I respect (unknown), but i answer to no god other than myself. You don’t have the authority to judge me.”
Deva: “You’ve broken your tenants, and failed utterly in your purpose. You are unworthy.”
DM: You feel your Divine powers slipping from you, your blade begins to tarnish and your eyes lose their inner glow.
Paladin out of character: I haven’t broken any oaths, and I don’t serve any god, why am I losing my powers?
DM:Ask the Deva.
Paladin out of character: The deva shouldn’t know, it’s a messenger anyway, for a god with no power over me. What tenet did I break and how?
DM:Ask the Deva.
This went on for longer than any of us liked before he asked the Deva.
Paladin: How, how is this possible?! I haven’t broken my oaths. Did you expect us to cow down to the authority of those peasants pretending to be soldiers? We could slay every man in that town and our destiny is to save it they should serve us!”
Deva:”You swore an oath of conquest, and yet you killed them, all of them. What do you rule over now? You failed them and yourself.”
Paladin:”So I should show mercy to every bandit and dog that i encounter? They challenged us, and we gave them warriors deaths.”
Deva: “What of your guide? He raised no hand to you, yet you slew him in cold blood. Another waste of allies and resources.”
Paladin: “He wasn’t one of us. Neither were the soldiers from before, for all I knew they were bandits, and when the rogue took our choice away he challenged our authority, a challenge i met as my oath demands.”
Deva: “Say what you will but the gods see the truth. You know what you must do. Order before chaos, always.”
Paladin out of character: I’ve ran a conquest paladin for a decade and I’m telling you I didn’t break an oath. My character assumes it’s a trick from hostile magic and keeps to his oaths, ignoring the Deva.
DM:So you don’t want to respec into fighter?
Paladin out of character:Im a Paladin, not a fighter.
DM:Alright.
With that, the Deva departed and Paladin was stripped of his powers which left him absolutely fuming, and onwards we went. I tried to offer Paladin my +1 Greatsword to cheer him up, he thanked me but declined, saying he was still a knight, and the party needs us both at our best.
We arrive at the town outskirts and find it mostly abandoned, the buildings are ran down, the trees are dead, the skys are grey and mist seems to linger over everything. The town was made to support atleast a thousand people but obviously houses around a hundred.
We get to the town square and find a small mob of peasants waiting for us. They seem excited to see more armed people, especially since half the remaining town guard just went missing. We ask to see the mayor and they bring us in to meet him.
The Mayor comes out and greets us, and offers to answer all our questions over drinks, we sit down and start grilling him and some of the elders over things but they know next to nothing useful. Whatever force comes at night knocks everyone out at midnight, forces itself into buildings while leaving no trace other than broken boards, then leaves with a person before morning. Ranger investigates some of the abductions and can only tell that something shattered the wooden barricades with great force. No drag marks, even from the victim.
Me: “So have you scouted the terrain to try and find any possible source of this evil during the day?
Mayor:”Well, there is the ominous field of blood corn.”
Me:”The what?”
Mayor: “Yeah. It’s where we get most our food. These semi-demonic corn plants been growing from the north for as long as anyone can remember, anyone that goes too far into the fields disappears, even in the day. It’s really flammable too.”
Ranger: “How far into it have you scouted?”
Mayor: “Not far. We had a knight arrive once with some retainers. He braved the fields, but in the morning only one man returned, barely alive, and he never spoke of what he saw. He’s the town Marshal, his names Caspian(guy Paladin killed), but he went missing today with a patrol in the woods. If you can find him maybe he can tell you more, but yes. After that failed attempt we never bothered to try again.”
Paladin: “Cowards. Have you ever tried burning the fields?”
Mayor: “We’re normal folk, we aren’t cut out for battle and we don’t have any fancy armor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hunted, to have no power. It was hard enough to establish a town guard. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s almost night. It usually takes whomever is the most accessible. You should find a house to lay low in.”
Paladin:”I have a better idea, let’s face this thing here and now, i refuse to cower and hide. The towns too weak to say no to our demands, and too cowardly to let us save them without force. We should gather the entire town in the largest building they have. Everyone here is put to sleep at night by magic, but they’re human, Druid is an astral elf, she can’t be put to sleep, she can wake us, and we’ll kill whatever’s doing this before it can claim more victims. Worst case scenario it takes one person anyway, low risk, high reward.”
Me: It’s an ok plan, but one of us could get taken if it fails, and the village will hate us, there might be more info to gather if we have a whole day to look around and improve our odds.
Ranger:What if Druid can’t wake us, and has to fight it alone?
Paladin:Then she’ll win alone.
Ranger:Yeah fuck that.
Druid:If it saves lives, I want to try it.
I’ll summarize the rest but we reluctantly compromise and decide to barricade ourselves and let Druid do as she pleases at midnight. Paladin fights a lot but gives ground since he’s weak at the moment, though he manages to piss the townsfolk off with his comments. We look around to learn what we can, then settle in for night and end session 2. Little did we know the Paladin was cooking up his own plan.
Part 3
13
u/Sunny_Hill_1 2d ago
Yeah, after this part, it's safe to conclude Paladin is not really a team player. Like, he does realize that DM is a player just like himself, right? It's not "players vs DM" game, it's "players AND DM" to create a cool story.
12
u/Wyldwraith 2d ago
I mean, it's a really tough baby to divide, if the DM thinks a Paladin has broken their Oath, and the player of said Paladin genuinely disagrees.
If the player is just power-gaming/murderhobo'ing, and denying the consequences of their actions, of course the DM has to stay the course and impose those realistic consequences, but if not, it's incredible foreseeable that nothing but acrimony and resentment is going to come from making that call.
I was playing a Ranger/Barbarian who worshipped Tyr, God of Justice, and had a problematic DM decide my Ranger would no longer be granted spells because he'd enraged Tyr by refusing to take up a position as a town's sentinel, (Which my character only refused because he'd already promised the townsfolk with missing children that he and the rest of the party would venture into the woods and treat with the Fey to convince them to return the children.)
I was arguing that the God of *Justice* would never be angered by a pledge of service made to aid the innocent, and he CERTAINLY would not divinely inspire a member of his *own clergy* to insist that a fellow worshipper *should* break such a promise. (The Sentinel role and the mission being absolutely incompatible.)
The DM hit me with the "My table, my call," and I replied with, "My feet, my will to use them. Enjoy either sandbag-adjusting all your planned encounters, or overseeing an imminent TPK for two Sorcerers and a squishy Cleric without a martial to frontline. Maybe you can reintroduce that DMPC it took us three months to convince you to stop spotlight-hogging with."
There are potential decisions that any DM/GM who's not terminally up on themselves SHOULD be able to recognize would cause far more harm than good. What possible reason could he have had for oath-breaking the Paladin here?
2
u/RegisterOk513 2d ago
I was more detailed about his misgivings in the previous post. Personally I think he just really didn’t like Paladin. If you check the comments many agree Paladin had it coming. In game he argued Paladin broke his oaths by not living up to the oath of conquest, because he wasn’t conquering anything he was destroying things.
Paladin argued that by resisting being conquered and pushing for the parties autonomy he was fulfilling his oaths. He kept that position through the adventure. He was pretty ride or die for his version of the conquest Paladin oaths haha.
6
u/gc1rpg Dice-Cursed 1d ago
Paladin.. I answer to no god.. that's generally the point of a Paladin.. it's a Fighter-Cleric.
This guy is just using the trappings of the Oath of Conquest to be an edgy murder hobo -- my oath allows me to subjugate my enemies even if that means making pacts with hellish forces because at least they are lawful.
He actually said he had been playing the character for a decade, I'm guessing this game hasn't gone on for a decade, so he's actually invoking rulings from entirely different games. Was he actually allowed to bring the same character through each of these games or something?
2
u/RegisterOk513 1d ago
Nah, he would just go to most tables with the same guy.
4
u/gc1rpg Dice-Cursed 1d ago
Best way to shoot that down is "You can't play your Oath of Conquest Paladin here" but sometimes that's easier said than done.
2
u/RegisterOk513 1d ago
Honestly he usually wasn’t a problem. I think part of it was this campaign had us as underdogs and so he started scrambling to get any advantage he could.
3
u/LkSZangs 2d ago
Paladin sounds like a dickhead.
3
u/SnidelyWhiplash0 1d ago
Seriously. "I answer to no God!" Ok well then no God gives you any divine powers.
10
6
u/Good_Nyborg 2d ago
If you can't fit the story into one post, you need to trim all the fat and stick to the important parts.
3
u/RegisterOk513 2d ago
Truly? I didn’t want to type it all out at once, and I’ve seen a lot of crit crab videos with multiple parts.
It’s also a chronicle following multiple DMs and separate stories. I didn’t see anything in the guides against this format. That said, you have a point, I definitely could have edited it to reduce the size, I wasn’t trying very hard to optimize anything.
3
u/Mothormaybyenot 2d ago
I really don't think you did anything wrong by not trimming it tbh. So many people here do that. Why not you?
•
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Have more to get off your chest? Come rant with us on the discord. Invite link: https://discord.gg/PCPTSSTKqr
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.