Post by calithena on Jan 21, 2009 20:06:04 GMT -6
I had forgotten about this, but it just popped back into my head when I was browsing Dragonsfoot.
A friend of mine had a high-level assassin character, Saetryth Darksoul. One of her friends had died and she had become bitter and vengeful. Deciding that no mortal foe was worthy of her, she decided to slay a goddess - the White Huntress.
(As you might guess, this goddess was basically Artemis, but with more of a Good angle to her - a protector of the woodlands as well as an implacable virginal huntress.)
We played it totally straight. The bet was, you win, you become a goddess yourself; you lose, and you become her priestess (and an NPC, effectively). The player stalked the Huntress through the outer planes, set up an effective ambush, and actually did a stunning amount of damage (over 100 hp) in the first couple of rounds.
But gods and goddesses, while not invincible, were still pretty tough back in those days, and ultimately the Huntress broke free, scored with some arrows, and brought Saetryth down.
That was it for that character. She was healed of her soul-scars in the pool of the goddess, and became a defender of the Huntress' sacred grove, and her mouthpiece in Oceania. (My home campaign is Advent, but I often ran in my friend's world of Oceania, just as he often ran in Advent. Shared worlds are cool.)
She showed up from time to time as an NPC but my friend never played her again, except for brief moments as DM when her advice was needed.
It occurs to me that the pathos of that adventure was substantially amplified by the fact that this was a character which the player had a prior history in play.
A friend of mine had a high-level assassin character, Saetryth Darksoul. One of her friends had died and she had become bitter and vengeful. Deciding that no mortal foe was worthy of her, she decided to slay a goddess - the White Huntress.
(As you might guess, this goddess was basically Artemis, but with more of a Good angle to her - a protector of the woodlands as well as an implacable virginal huntress.)
We played it totally straight. The bet was, you win, you become a goddess yourself; you lose, and you become her priestess (and an NPC, effectively). The player stalked the Huntress through the outer planes, set up an effective ambush, and actually did a stunning amount of damage (over 100 hp) in the first couple of rounds.
But gods and goddesses, while not invincible, were still pretty tough back in those days, and ultimately the Huntress broke free, scored with some arrows, and brought Saetryth down.
That was it for that character. She was healed of her soul-scars in the pool of the goddess, and became a defender of the Huntress' sacred grove, and her mouthpiece in Oceania. (My home campaign is Advent, but I often ran in my friend's world of Oceania, just as he often ran in Advent. Shared worlds are cool.)
She showed up from time to time as an NPC but my friend never played her again, except for brief moments as DM when her advice was needed.
It occurs to me that the pathos of that adventure was substantially amplified by the fact that this was a character which the player had a prior history in play.