Killing a PC for a good cause

[Eucariota]

Dear giants,

First of all I wanna thank you for all the good advices and great inspiration I found by reading on your posts.
Im a noob DM, this is my first campaign and I´ve allowed my PCs to choose every alignement they want (bad decision), the result is that I have an evil cleric, a good ranger and a neutral barbarian. In my third session the party set free a lost temple from an evil God, leaving it free to the evil God of the evil cleric, as a result, the city it is been infested by a disease, the only way to stop this disease is to either kill the demon in the temple (which the evil cleric I assume wont accept) or killing the evil cleric. I´ve though in three possible scenarios:

1- The evil cleric is slayed by the others PC, allowing the player to create a new PC with the same level (not evil this time)
2- The evil cleric is not slayed and the other two PCs turn to evil aligment.
3- The evil cleric is somehow turn into a neutral cleric or an ex-cleric.

What do you guys think? Do you have in mind other solution? What is in your opinion the best choice? Your opinions are much apreciatted.

Thank you for your help.

Diego

[nedz]

It's the player's decision.

Now it is often wise to consider how you will handle the various different scenarios the players could choose, but then, in my experience, they will often do something you haven't even thought of.

[Geddy2112]

There are plenty of other options-what if the pc's simply say screw it and go somewhere else? There might be pvp,but they are mature enough, they can handle a potential PvP event horizon. If PvP will tear the group apart then I would step in and fiat something out, and force the group to play similar alignments/goals whatever. Otherwise, let the players figure it out.

[daremetoidareyo]

Throw a bigger evil into the mix that requires the good guy to ally with the evil cleric and his god. Hard times making strange bedfellows or something like that...


In this case, the bigger evil is likely something that both good and evil tend to unite on hating: Chaos. Grab a death slaad from one of the books, advance it to god status.


Throw in a backstory about it travelling the planes, secretly killing off members of the pantheon; one god at a time.

And that the evil god, as vain as he was, wasn't willing to be honest about being hopelessly outmatched by this invader to his followers. So he petitioned his clerics to release him on the prime.

Then the death slaad stopped targetting just the neutral and good gods, and then the first evil god was murdered on his own plane.

So the evil god that your PC cleric worships, was pushing his devout cleric to release him on the Prime material plane, where he did his kindof evil thing killing folks off. Where some humans die, big deal. Humans die all the time. The thing is, being an evil god, you have to HAVE TO kill a bunch of folks when you arrive in flesh form. Otherwise, you'll lose your followers. And then you'll weaken. This evil god figured one big kill would cover his bases. He was controlling himself.

If this death slaad goes unchecked however, everything will die...

So this god, is now willing to admit, now that he is here, in relative safety and untrackable for the time being, is that he may very well be one of the only survivors of all of the gods available on this prime world.

He wants to take back the divine realm but he needs allies.

Luckily, being evil, he has access to all those sweet death and rebirth necromancy type stuffs. He needs his followers and their friends (the PCs) to travel to the astral to collect the dead bodies of all the dead gods that have been lost to this divine death slaad. From there, he might, might be able to resurrect some of them. He actually wants some of the more powerful gods of good because 1. they'll owe him one and 2.) they are powerful, and working together is the only way to figure out how to do this stuff.

Resurrecting them will require [add more mcguffins.]

The Evil god will just chill on the Prime and build an army. He will not continue to rampage, as was his first impulse on entering the prime realm. He just couldn't help himself on the way that prime reality affected him (e.g. it's like a drug).

So the Evil god is now the quest giver, and he, for the time being isn't actively destructively evil. Now your PCs are on the same team. And they have to either play by this god's rules, or figure out a different way to get at the solution.

Seeing as how gods draw power from beliefs in some sort of solipsistic representational democracy, that means that there are sentient beings on this world, and a ton of them, who worship this death slaad and have thus imbued him with so much power. Who the chaos cult consists of is up to you, but having various slaad having implanted all the mind flayers and drow of the underdark seems like an obvious start. Maybe some lame underdark denizen planar bound some slaad but lost control of them and things got real nasty down there, festering for a century or two, eliminated from the view of the above world. The only people who will be able to really report on this will be dwarves...Some of whom have begun becoming slaad brood.

The alternative solution, wherein there would be only a single god in the universe, (and it is the evil god of your cleric), is to wage a war of genocide on the 3rd and 4th generations of underdark slaad that worship and supply soul power to this death slaad. If you render them extinct, the relative power of the death slaad and the evil god will roughly equilibrate.

Soooo...your campaign is off the rails, but you won't be stepping on any of the autonomy of the PCs.

[John Longarrow]

OP
Two questions,
1) Why is a Good Ranger traveling with an Evil Cleric? I'm assuming there is some in character justification for it.
2) What else is floating around in your game that may want to come shut down the 'Evil God' that just got out and about?

Early on, there is ALWAYS something bigger and nastier around that will shut you down if you make too much noise. Let that come to town and see what your Cleric is willing to do to avoid it.

[Eucariota]

Thank you for posting! I really like the idea of adding a bigger threat to the mixture.

Answering the questions:
1- In my homebrew world there is some kind of cult for making Zon- kuthon (God of pain) change the plane he usually inhabit for the plane the PCs are. In this cult every Evil God and their fellows have join except one: Urgathoa(God of the dead), the deity of my evil cleric.
2- The temple they clean was Zon-Kuthon worshippers and now is Urgathoas, leaving the NPC Larissa(also worshipper of urgathoa) guarding it. She has been transformed into a daughter of Urgathoa in order to keep the temple for her deity, she died in battle and Urgathoa herself appear in a spectral form to witness the ritual, in this ritual the evil cleric had to had sexual intercouse with the almost dead body of Larissa in order to make her a daughter of Urgathoa. The evil cleric blames the ranger for the death of her colleague and his actions are impulsive and full of rancor against him.

I think because your advice I should make Zon -kuthon a real threat in the game maybe he has been bringing minor or mayor demons to this Isle. On the other hand, the kind of disease Urgathoa is spreading is turning the inhabitants of the isle undead, maybe that is too much, should I make a sickening disease instead?

I also like the idea of introducing the drows as enemy, I think they suit very well in the idea of pain Zon-kuthon offers.

Thanks for the tips!

[daremetoidareyo]

Beautiful. A conflict between pain vs. Death. Make the plague that turns people undead slow. Have the god of the dead explain the situation as a gift to save them from pain. The undead can't feel pain anymore, after all. The dead, Coming back to life after the plague hits them, come back not as mindless undead, but something like necropolitans. Undead type- but acts like a human, who they were, minus the need for sex and food. Whorehouse owners and wealthy farming landowners start allying with the god of pain. Revolting peasants then choose necropolitan death as freedom from oppression

[Eucariota]

Whoah! I've never thought from thats perspective, for sure i'll include that kind of conflict. :D

[Randomthom]

Also consider an alternative; The God could change alignment.

In FR lore, the god of the dead is Kelemvor who tried to be a bit too nice and let the faithless who had led good lives enter the 'nice' areas of the city of dead while those who had led evil lives were sent to less desirable afterlives. The other deities did not like this as it gave less incentive for mortals to be faithful to a deity as the fate of the faithless wasn't bad enough to scare them into worshipping a one of the deities.

Long story cut short, Kelemvor changed his mind and created the wall of the faithless, a wall made of the spirits of the dead faithless.

Basically, gods can change their mind, change the way they do things and even change alignment. Kelemvor essentially moved from a NG to a LN more-or-less.

[Ettina]

Talk to the players about your concerns.

Easiest solution might be to convince the ranger's player to switch alignments, since rangers don't lose anything for changing alignment, and reading between the lines I'm guessing the ranger may not have been acting good anyway. A neutral-to-evil party can mesh quite well, though the damage to NPCs may be pretty horrific.

[BWR]

Long story cut short, Kelemvor changed his mind and created the wall of the faithless, a wall made of the spirits of the dead faithless.

Myrkul made it, not Kelemvor.

[Sian]

And that, dear audience, is why you shouldn't let players make their characters in a complete vacuum ... They should either have some guidelines (Alignment limits, fluffy requirements asking for a reason why they are in X doing Y etc), or sit together making them as to make sure they complement each other

[daremetoidareyo]

And that, dear audience, is why you shouldn't let players make their characters in a complete vacuum ... They should either have some guidelines (Alignment limits, fluffy requirements asking for a reason why they are in X doing Y etc), or sit together making them as to make sure they complement each other

It depends on the campaign, but I have totally given the following as a stipulation, particularly when running a campaign at a game store:

1.) Your PCs can be of any alignment, starting at level 1.

2.) Your PCs all know and like each other and have decided to work together as an entrepreneurial group. You will have to come up with a name for your company and design a flag that represents something about your combined efforts. You are committed to working together and have taken an oath in front of the mystical eternal symbolic thingy. Voluntarily (by Player decision) breaking that oath will remove you from the group and game. So Work together and communicate during character creation.

3.) X is banned, Y is Banned, Z, if desired, requires a gentleman's agreement between you and the DM and should that agreement be broken, you shall encounter an enemy who does the same thing but is maximized at doing it better than you, and they will find a way to make you their enemy.

4.) Some NPCs will be way out of your league and you will probably die if you engage them head on. DM is not obligated to tell you who has what power level, although your characters can figure it out. This means that you must consider running away once in a while.

5.) You get 1 metagame warning per game. If it continues, I, the DM, will metagame as well, and I have copies of your character sheets, whereas you don't have copies of my homebrew monsters or the broad outline of my planned adventure.

6.) Ranger favorite enemies suggestions: probable most likely monster occurrence 1._____ 2._____, Note: PC decisions may require you to retrain your favorite enemies if you take me too far off the rails.

[Sheogoroth]

Let them square off if they want to.

But prepare for the eventuality when the Cleric kills his peers and THEY get to re-roll characters(Evil this time.)

[GreyBlack]

Dear giants,

First of all I wanna thank you for all the good advices and great inspiration I found by reading on your posts.
Im a noob DM, this is my first campaign and I´ve allowed my PCs to choose every alignement they want (bad decision), the result is that I have an evil cleric, a good ranger and a neutral barbarian. In my third session the party set free a lost temple from an evil God, leaving it free to the evil God of the evil cleric, as a result, the city it is been infested by a disease, the only way to stop this disease is to either kill the demon in the temple (which the evil cleric I assume wont accept) or killing the evil cleric. I´ve though in three possible scenarios:

1- The evil cleric is slayed by the others PC, allowing the player to create a new PC with the same level (not evil this time)
2- The evil cleric is not slayed and the other two PCs turn to evil aligment.
3- The evil cleric is somehow turn into a neutral cleric or an ex-cleric.

What do you guys think? Do you have in mind other solution? What is in your opinion the best choice? Your opinions are much apreciatted.

Thank you for your help.

Diego

Honestly? Talk to your player. Tell him that this is how you see things going and that you made a mistake telling him he could pick any aligment and are regretting it. Would he mind rolling a new character? Would he want to play through a redemption arc? There's power in telling a player, "Hey, I messed up, I'm sorry, but if you play along with me, you'll be rewarded." If he agrees to let himself be killed off, make an absolutely epic last stand for him that will open up plot threads in the future (maybe his god now has an established foot hold on the material plane and can begin enacting his plans, putting the PCs in charge of uniting a broken world, for example?).