Tabletop Tuesday — A Tale of Traitors (Part One)

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, I’ve been thinking about traitorous garbage people lately, and it occurred to me that I have two stories—and maybe a bonus semi-third—from a TTRPG point of view about weaving traitorous characters into campaigns as the narrator, and that it could be fun to talk about them.

To be clear, this is not something I suggest doing often—and especially only with major hesitation and everyone’s awareness if we’re talking about a player character—I’m not sure I’d even suggest doing a player traitor at all, frankly, but now and then? Well.

Treachery from within can make for a compelling game.

The First… Time.

My first occasion where I intended a long-arc of a traitorous character goes back to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Second Edition (I know, I’m basically dust in a humanoid shape, like a mephit), and a group of players I had over summer before the start of university year. I had an idea for a D&D Campaign where the players were part of a prophecy (I know, groundbreaking), but the reveal was going to be that someone was forcing this prophecy, guiding and nudging the players to fulfil it (again, I know, groundbreaking), and all because said individual was aware of the price if they failed because he’d been there when they did—and then ended up in the past, thanks to a massive magical eruption caused (in part) by their failure. This prophecy dude took everything he’d learned and tried to leave clues and advice to the future heroes—ones that hadn’t even been born yet—knowing he’d die of old age before they’d come of age. I made him a bard, and his songs, poems, and tales were a central part of the plot.

Oh, also? They were all orphans. (I know, groundbreaking.)

Then I got the group together and asked them to make characters. What’s important here is one of them was intending to go away at the end of summer, but he asked if he could join in, and said the magical words that would change my plan—”I don’t mind playing a character you’re intending to turn into an NPC.”

Thus Emit Half-Elven was born. (Yes, I’ll acknowledge here that at the time, pretty much every half-elf was called “Name Half-Elven” because of Tanis, and Dragonlance, and did I mention I’m made of dust in a humanoid shape?) A transmuter (a specialist in alteration magic) with a flare and penchant for boosts and buffs more than ka-blammo-type magic, Emit was created to be a character the players would later rely on when they needed magical aid (no one ever wanted to be a wizard in this group), and an NPC I could bring in and—yes—he was a traitor. I’d decided that from the start, but I thought it would definitely help lay the foundation for the players to never consider him being a someone who’d turn on them if our good pal played him first.

We played all summer, my friend had fun for the first time with a wizard character (partly because of the lack of ka-blammo, in fact—it turned out he liked using the spells that mostly changed or nudged the usual rules for the players), and after an incident with some objects that belonged to the Bard who put together the prophecies in question, Emit started having visions—glimpses of places, or people, or things, many of them having not happened yet. He turned his magical research towards divinations and temporal magics, and then, at the end of summer—Emit’s player decided not to go to university in Vancouver after all, and ended up staying local.

So, my plan was suddenly very derailed. I’d intended to have Emit send the group on various adventures while he tried to figure out his new magical abilities, pushed boundaries with temporal magics, and basically was off-scene while the players pieced together more and more of these prophecies: including how they appeared to be the ones identified by the bard to be the best shot at stopping a big evil that was definitely coming—an already old and powerful dark wizard already rumoured to exist elsewhere, biding his time.

Now, here’s the thing eagle-eyed readers (or just people who know me and my penchant for anagrams well) likely already noticed: Emit is just “time” backwards. He’s literally the big villain of the story, only he doesn’t know it, and that big explosion didn’t just toss the bard back in time, it tossed the villain back in time, too—and, because it was temporal magics—it also de-aged him back to a kid, including rewinding his memories. Which it had done to all the players, too. This was why they were orphans with no families: their families in some cases hadn’t been born yet (Of note, this was only possible because no one played an elf, and the dwarf said he wanted to be very young without me prompting. I got lucky).

But now I had Emit’s player… wanting to keep playing. I rolled with it (though I had a few sleepless nights trying to figure it out) and it became a recurring gag among the players that they were “The Chosen Five—plus Emit.” In fact, they’d meta-game laugh about how him staying had created this “extra” character, and I’d chuckle and play along, and they’d say how cool it was I’d managed to fold him into the story and make his weird visions the instigating factor for their adventures and dungeon crawls for all these artefacts they believed the evil wizard was hunting for.

And then it happened. During one of the dungeon crawls, the players found the object in question (in this case it was an old spellbook that Emit’s visions had him believing was going to be important to the big bad evil wizard), and he got another vision, and this one had built on another vision from another session—One of Emit’s chronomancy spells had gone a bit wobbly and I’d had the party cleric’s holy symbol get cracked, I think, and the cleric had decided to leave it that way as a sign that faith didn’t have to be perfect to be strong, something like that—and in the spellbook were some drawings, and I described them—including symbols for each of the “prophesied heroes” and mentioned a “little wiggly line” through the symbol for the cleric.

Apparently, that did it. “The little wiggly line is the crack, right?” Emit’s player waited until after the gaming session, hanging back. “Am I the bad guy?”

I’m the Bad Guy? Just look at that nerd. I loved my Enigma t-shirt. This is roughly the right time period; I’m not flush with photographs.

I admitted it, told him what the original plan had been, how he’d derailed it—kinda—and that now… Well, now I guess we had to decide what to do? I told him we could make this a heroic arc instead if he wanted to: after all, the “other” version of him was already an old half-elf, starting to research the temporal magic that would allow him to “steal” years of life from other people by aging them and start his long fall into further and further evil, but if Emit realized this was his future, maybe he could work to stop it?

And this wonderful, friendly, super-cool friend who was always the guy who picked up extra pizza or brought candy, turned to me and said, “Oh hell no, I wanna go all evil.”

Now, looking back, I was really lucky was everyone involved was super-mature about things, really loved the story we’d made together, and the ultimate reveal—which we held onto for a few more sessions of Emit slyly manipulating the players into getting his most powerful scattered objects lost across the time-explosion—was nice and dramatic. Emit found “the staff of shards,” got a massive leap in power, and when the staff gave him a make-over that included mystic runes all over his left hand and arm that the players had read about over-and-over-and-over in the various bard songs as “the first sign of his evil” they were floored.

Also, then Emit froze them in time, thanked them for giving him “the head start he needed to get it right this time,” and walked away. He told them he wouldn’t kill them—not this time—but they already knew it would be pointless to try and stop him—he is a master of time itself—so they should do themselves a favour and leave him to his work. This was their only warning.

It went over like gangbusters. They loved it. Emit’s player got to do this major dramatic monolog—his girlfriend was so jealous that he got to be the villain, which was one of the funniest parts to me—and he retired the character to NPC status (though I did let him guide me when the group faced down against him way later at the height of the campaign). He picked up another character—I have no memory of who that character was—joined the group, and despite the setback, ultimately they ended up triumphing (they realized their best option was to face down the older version of Emit, because if he was stopped, the younger, time-tossed Emit might not even exist—or something like that—they realized they needed to stop the staff of shards from ever being made. It was a whole time-magic thing, but in the end they were right and Emit’s player got to do a “no, no, no!” scene as he faded away and the staff of shards just sort of unexisted. It was cool.)

But Seriously, It’s Not a Good Idea

Emit Half-Elven ended up as the character of that gaming group. I haven’t seen most of those people in years—oh, God, I think I can say decades now—but the last time I bumped into one of them, when they came at random into the bookstore where I was working, the first thing they said to me was, “I still think about that Emit campaign.”

It was great.

I don’t think I’d do it again.

I’m not against inter-player conflict, but when I look back at Emit, that could have gone so wrong. I really, really caution letting one player screw over the others, especially if it’s going to be some big reveal. I realize I just spent a whole blog-post talking about how cool it was and now I’m saying “but don’t do it!” but it’s more that I think you need to make sure everyone would be on board with the possibility. These days, I’m pretty careful to chat back and forth with players before a game about what they’re looking for, what sort of tone they’d like—there are whole guides out there about Session Zeros—and I’m down with that.

So why did Emit fly so well? In Emit’s particular case, I think the reason it worked so well was because Emit wasn’t screwing over the other players from the start, or even for most of the time he was played (or, well, he kind of was, in the sense that Emit’s visions were leading him to the power he’d need to become the villain, but neither he nor his player knew it).

Also? I’d intended him to be an NPC before he got too consciously down that path—and had to change plans. No one involved set out to have a player turn on the other players. That trust wasn’t broken from the start.

You wouldn’t want to break player trust in each other.

Leave that to your NPCs. Which will bring me to next week’s story about a Trill Geneticist…