One of my players pitched me this idea for a spy (swashbuckler rogue, about to dip into hexblade) and I absolutely fell in love with the concept. Here's the tl;dr:
Character is the youngest sibling of a family who is actively in the cult of the dragon (I renamed it to the Five Banes for this campaign). Once you are in the Five Banes, there is no getting out as death is the only true way out, otherwise you could spill all the secrets if you were captured by any force. So character faked her death, adopted a new alias and now reports secretly to her family that wishes to get out of the cult but gets information on the outside from the character.
The character becomes enlisted in a spy organization that belongs to the King of a region. They are called the eyes of Erewin and they are essentially the medieval CIA. They operate in and outside of the Kingdom all for the benefit of the crown.
The character gets mixed up with the party, and has begun to see them as a tool to help her expand her agenda. She has already had one assassination attempt in the first session that almost killed her (poisoning from Midnight tears) but she managed to make the CON save and kill her attacker. The party has begun to get suspicious of her and she doesn't know whether she can trust them or not just yet, or trust anyone for that matter.
So she is essentially a triple agent at this point, probably could be whittled down to a double crosser in time. I really loved the complexity that this brings and the challenge of playing informational keep away. My question for you guys would be this:
I don't want to have her true identity come outright. I'd like to drag this out a bit longer instead of having something coming after them that just blurts out who she is to the party. How would you pace the encounters/hints throughout a long term campaign? What else would you do to manage something like this? I love the idea of mystery and subterfuge and making it work in a DnD game is a challenge, but its been fun so far.
So long as your players know that there could be either lite or heavy PVP as a result of this, then you should be good in that department. I'd also just caution against setting this character up as a Main Character with the rest of the PCs being their supporting cast.
That being said, having assassination attempt after attempt will get boring. If you can, try to create situations that bring tension into the game. Maybe when the party fights some members of the Five Fates, one recognizes her, maybe even calling out her name, and then tried to flee. Or perhaps the medieval CIA organization enlists the help of the party, because they believe that there's a member of the Five Fates hiding out somewhere. Make it such that she's not exposed necessarily, but can easily be done so depending on some roleplay cues or situations.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
Yes. I think keeping with the more subtle hints is a better idea. If you fall into the trap of making assassination attempt after assassination attempt on this character then you’re not likely to keep this a secret, and you’ll likely alienate your other players as you focus more on this character. Having one player have special things happening is fun when done right, and doing it right means involving every player a lot and making sure that they have agency and choices that matter. Maybe the organization is focusing on this player but realizes that another character has assets they want as well, and they realize this over time. Expand your focus and allow for flexibility. However, baddies calling her name or attempting to interact with her are both fantastic hints to drop, along with cryptic notes or threats.
Just as something to be aware of: inter-party suspicion is fun...for a very short period of time. D&D is predicated on the party working together, and if there's in-game suspicion of a party member and secrets that threaten party cohesion, things can break down very quickly and become unfun. I say this as someone whose current game survived that exact scenario only because we've been playing together for years and are good friends, and even we had to do reconstructive surgery on our characters and ask one of the players to roll up a new PC.
Discord within the party can work in the short term, but it gets frustrating and tiresome if it drags on. If you pursue this, I encourage you to keep a close eye on the players' enjoyment and have plans to pull the ripcord to unify the party once the suspicion loses its allure.
There’s some good stuff in this post. I agree as well. The issue with having inter-party politics is that it can destroy your fun. This is going on right now because we have one player who has developed main character syndrome and is a bit of a control freak with what we do. It’s made the game less fun because he is hiding secrets that could greatly affect our party but he refuses to reveal. The GM is also not doing anything about it, which is why I’m going to be speaking with him at our Friday session. The game, which used to be something I looked forward to, has become full and unfun as one player hogs the spotlight. Don’t do this to your players. I rescind my earlier statements. Do NOT hurt your players.
It is an interesting situation and can be fun as part of mixing character back stories into your storyline.
But ...
1) Are you doing something similar for the other characters? If not, what makes this character/player so special that the adventure starts to revolve around their backstory.
2) The assassin made a fun vignette but it has introduced some major story complications that you might have trouble resolving.
- the character was a member of the Five Banes
- presumably the assassin was supposed to be from the Five Banes? This is a problem. If the Five Banes have identified the location of the character, they know they are alive. They know they have to make an example of the character and quite possibly the character's family when they find out that the family knew the character was still alive. The Five Banes sounds like a powerful organization, it doesn't make sense that they would send novices to take care of this problem since maintaining the integrity of the cult and ruling through fear to deter others from leaving is such a strong element of their agenda. In fact, an intelligent organization would have staged simultaneous attacks on both the character and their family, likely with overwhelming force. They would take the family into custody and question them under a Zone of Truth or other similar method and then execute them all when they discover that they knew the character was alive and all wanted to leave the cult. Basically, the cult is too powerful for a low level character to survive unless they can somehow hide from their pursuers.
I think the character needs an Amulet of Proof against Detection and Location or else the cult will easily find them once they know they are alive. The cost of an intricate back story would be the use of an attunement slot to keep themselves safe. With this item, the character might be able to escape from the cult having found them once, but the issue with the family remains.
The alternative would be to have the assassin associated with the character's other life as a spy for the crown. This is much safer since foreign spy agencies may want the character dead but they may not have the same level of motivation to hunt the character and won't be going after the character's family.
3) In terms of "true identity", there is no way for the other characters to discover it unless they are told. I would leave it up to the player to tell the other players a story that incorporates some back story elements. The player could say something like "I may have done some work for the King of <place>. Which might have earned me a few enemies." to allay the suspicions of the party (though they may still decide that it is safer not to travel with a spy or ex-spy - why would adventurers choose a companion that puts them in greater danger unless there was a good reason to do so (or they are already friends)? The rest of the character backstory is not needed or even desired at this point unless you want the entire adventure revolving around this character and the Five Banes and what they have to do to survive ... why would ANY adventurer choose to get into something like that for a total stranger AND why would the DM create an adventure mostly about ONE player in the party?
4) Players react differently to these kinds of story elements. Most players are usually playing a character that wants to trust and rely on the other party members but this other character is making that more difficult by not being honest. Some players really object to other players having secrets. They may not mind character secrets but the player wants to know what is going on and may find it frustrating if the player and DM just smile knowingly and don't let the rest of the players (not necessarily the characters) in on the secret. It can create an us vs them atmosphere, split the group of players and DM into cliques with secrets from each other. It is worst when there is only one character with such secrets since everyone else might feel left out. Why is player X special? Why did the DM let them have a special backstory that affects the adventure so much? Why do they refuse to share any information with the rest of us? Are our characters just here to be supporting actors for the big hero special character with the cool story?
Often secrets in D&D don't work in real life unless everyone has some secrets so no one feels left out or the secrets are shared by the players so that the players know what is going on but the characters don't. In this case, it depends on how good the players are at role playing and separating player knowledge from character knowledge when making in game decisions.
Well that didn't last too long because the player was killed last session ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In a super condensed version, here's what went down:
Swashbuckler rogue got their hands on Gloves of thievery at lvl 3. Sleight of hand was at a +10
There was an ancient black dragon who is suffering from a curse of knowledge. The instinct to kill is still there, but they need knowledge, of any kind, to continue living. Its like breathing air. Killing the party, as interesting as they are, would cut off her supply of knowledge from a group of interesting people. But she wants to kill them. This was a way to narratively introduce one of many villains in the campaign at the lower levels without outright combat. She's itching to murder anyone or anything.
Swashbuckler rogue tried to sleight of hand an artifact from Ancient Black dragon when she was leaving an area after interacting with the party, basically revealing she has a way to break this curse and then she will come for them. Swashbuckler rolled like...a 23, but Ancient black dragons have a +16 perception. Ngl, it was really tight, but it was possible to pull this off
Black dragon stops, says she can afford to lose one source of knowledge, and full acid breaths the player. Killing her instantaneously. She was going to leave without harming them, but if anything attempts to touch a dragon's treasure, well...
Party is mortified, proceeds to mourn. They don't know that the person they were talking and interacting with was not actually her real name/identity
This character's actions are still a driving force of the plot and I have no regrets, but that's the end of that. But I did learn some valuable stuff from this experience as well as from these posts here.
To clarify in this player's defense, her eventual goal was to leave all organizations behind and join the party as she was beginning to trust them. It would just have to come out at some point or another that she is essentially a double/triple crosser. Everything she would need to do from then on out would need to be a proving ground, especially since her family is in the five banes (cult of the dragon) but are actively trying to find a safe way to leave the cult. Ultimately, neither her and her family wants to worship Tiamat, they've just made a mistake and are in too deep to back out. So a lot of her journey would be to find a way to get her family out and away from the cultists' harm and the wrath of the law. Which I think is a really cool dynamic narrative that I wanted to explore.
Just as something to be aware of: inter-party suspicion is fun...for a very short period of time. D&D is predicated on the party working together, and if there's in-game suspicion of a party member and secrets that threaten party cohesion, things can break down very quickly and become unfun. I say this as someone whose current game survived that exact scenario only because we've been playing together for years and are good friends, and even we had to do reconstructive surgery on our characters and ask one of the players to roll up a new PC.
Discord within the party can work in the short term, but it gets frustrating and tiresome if it drags on. If you pursue this, I encourage you to keep a close eye on the players' enjoyment and have plans to pull the ripcord to unify the party once the suspicion loses its allure.
There’s some good stuff in this post. I agree as well. The issue with having inter-party politics is that it can destroy your fun. This is going on right now because we have one player who has developed main character syndrome and is a bit of a control freak with what we do. It’s made the game less fun because he is hiding secrets that could greatly affect our party but he refuses to reveal. The GM is also not doing anything about it, which is why I’m going to be speaking with him at our Friday session. The game, which used to be something I looked forward to, has become full and unfun as one player hogs the spotlight. Don’t do this to your players. I rescind my earlier statements. Do NOT hurt your players.
And it would've tied into this. It would have come out sooner or later that she was who she was, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. I do agree with the idea of withholding information like this for the long term. Unless everyone is super cool with it and doesn't mind playing among us, I could see it being a thing for a long term game. But there would need to be consent from everyone. If its a power play to withhold information like in the previous example and the DM is on it, that just kind of sucks.
- presumably the assassin was supposed to be from the Five Banes? This is a problem. If the Five Banes have identified the location of the character, they know they are alive. They know they have to make an example of the character and quite possibly the character's family when they find out that the family knew the character was still alive. The Five Banes sounds like a powerful organization, it doesn't make sense that they would send novices to take care of this problem since maintaining the integrity of the cult and ruling through fear to deter others from leaving is such a strong element of their agenda. In fact, an intelligent organization would have staged simultaneous attacks on both the character and their family, likely with overwhelming force. They would take the family into custody and question them under a Zone of Truth or other similar method and then execute them all when they discover that they knew the character was alive and all wanted to leave the cult. Basically, the cult is too powerful for a low level character to survive unless they can somehow hide from their pursuers.
As of now, her family is in extreme danger. The current situation is that the PC had used her resources to jail a rival family's member inside of the five banes. That rival family member has been ousted and is spilling the beans on everything. The entire situation was going to come crashing down on her, if it were not for one thing. Now that the medieval CIA is aware of this cult and the cult is aware that the medieval CIA knows about them, both are playing a game of chess at this point. They are trying to make things as subvert as possible, which is why the very first assassination attempt was done so overtly (poisoning from a drink from someone you'd never suspect). Had they gone hard and sent everything after the PC, the Kingdom would respond to this, not only jailing the PC but also making a full frontal attack on whatever agents the cult had sent.
The five banes storyline is something running in the background compared to other events around the world too. They are reactive to the players' actions as they choose to work on another plotline that the game had originally opened with. The game is full sandbox and there's multiple plotlines running that the characters can plan, coordinate, and commit to at their discretion.
The cult may never summon Tiamat, depending on the party, and unlike the Tiamat module the cult does not possess much resources in terms of dragon masks or forces at the start of the campaign. Point is, I can see narrative setups that can inadvertently make this player into the main character, and I'm acting as the floodgate to make sure it doesn't spill over, but I could see how it can if the DM (me) and the player are both in on it. But she's dead now so there's no more secrets to keep between me and the player and the party may uncover things over time which just adds to the narrative
tl;dr I'm not opposed to the idea of having a complex character like this, but I think seeing the posts here and reflecting on my past experiences as a player have helped me re-shift my perspective on this. my original goal was to balance this in such a way that this doesn't force someone to become the main character, because that's never fun. But it looks like some extra steps are still needed in order to find that balance if this character is ever resurrected in the future and/or if another character concept like this comes up at some point in any of my games.
I think you managed this quite well in the end. I’m very impressed and I see a few ideas worth stealing. As a final note here are some ideas going forth:
Having the character dead presents a great chance to make her central to the storyline. Finding things on the body (if they survived) or having some Tiamat cultists or even her family approach or attack them about her can create closer links to the storyline.
Also, throwing her family into this with some contact with the players (I recommend Dream) can create interesting NPCs with many layers. Do they trust them? Maybe. They are family of our friend. But they also are part of our foes… A great dilemma.
On an unrelated note, I love the knowledge curse! A fantastic concept I will be taking for my games. This is a creative approach to a tired concept (entering a BBEG or even a mini BBEG early without much conflict).
Overall, congrats! Someone died, but it somehow feels fitting. Like (SPOILERS AHEAD) Bertrand Bell in Campaign 3 of Critical Role.
<snip> I do agree with the idea of withholding information like this for the long term. Unless everyone is super cool with it and doesn't mind playing among us, I could see it being a thing for a long term game. But there would need to be consent from everyone.
Speaking again from experience, I've tried this as a DM with RP-loving groups and have enthusiastically agreed to this as an RP-loving player in an RP-loving group and it ended terribly both times. D&D doesn't sustain inter-party strife well in the long run, and suspicion among PCs ends up being more fun in theory than in practice. Maybe there's a group out there that can turn Among Us into a fulfilling D&D game, but I bet that's pretty rare to come by.
Regardless, it does sound like you're interested in making a gaming environment that's fun for everyone, and that impulse will serve you well. Far too many DMs have tunnel vision or aren't good at creating a welcoming and collaborative game, so good on you for thinking along those lines. :-)
<snip> I do agree with the idea of withholding information like this for the long term. Unless everyone is super cool with it and doesn't mind playing among us, I could see it being a thing for a long term game. But there would need to be consent from everyone.
Speaking again from experience, I've tried this as a DM with RP-loving groups and have enthusiastically agreed to this as an RP-loving player in an RP-loving group and it ended terribly both times. D&D doesn't sustain inter-party strife well in the long run, and suspicion among PCs ends up being more fun in theory than in practice. Maybe there's a group out there that can turn Among Us into a fulfilling D&D game, but I bet that's pretty rare to come by.
Regardless, it does sound like you're interested in making a gaming environment that's fun for everyone, and that impulse will serve you well. Far too many DMs have tunnel vision or aren't good at creating a welcoming and collaborative game, so good on you for thinking along those lines. :-)
I've been on the receiving end as a player and it's not fun. Sometimes there's an impulse to take a big idea like this one and make it as cinematic as possible for the best possible effect but that comes at the expense of other players. Some types of storytelling dont work with dnd. This is a collaborative storytelling medium after all.
I still believe this idea could have worked had the character stayed alive, but the truth would have needed to come out sooner than later in order for it to work. But oh well! I learned a bunch from this very short experience and I'm going to apply it into my future games
I think you managed this quite well in the end. I’m very impressed and I see a few ideas worth stealing. As a final note here are some ideas going forth:
Having the character dead presents a great chance to make her central to the storyline. Finding things on the body (if they survived) or having some Tiamat cultists or even her family approach or attack them about her can create closer links to the storyline.
Also, throwing her family into this with some contact with the players (I recommend Dream) can create interesting NPCs with many layers. Do they trust them? Maybe. They are family of our friend. But they also are part of our foes… A great dilemma.
On an unrelated note, I love the knowledge curse! A fantastic concept I will be taking for my games. This is a creative approach to a tired concept (entering a BBEG or even a mini BBEG early without much conflict).
Overall, congrats! Someone died, but it somehow feels fitting. Like (SPOILERS AHEAD) Bertrand Bell in Campaign 3 of Critical Role.
Thanks! Her death is integral to the plot at this point. her family was planned heavily to come into play now as they are desperate for help, and the party, the last people to know her, are the only ones they believe they can can turn to before the medieval CIA and the five banes come for them. They may actually have to spill their guts, something they have never done in their lives.
One of my players pitched me this idea for a spy (swashbuckler rogue, about to dip into hexblade) and I absolutely fell in love with the concept. Here's the tl;dr:
So she is essentially a triple agent at this point, probably could be whittled down to a double crosser in time. I really loved the complexity that this brings and the challenge of playing informational keep away. My question for you guys would be this:
I don't want to have her true identity come outright. I'd like to drag this out a bit longer instead of having something coming after them that just blurts out who she is to the party. How would you pace the encounters/hints throughout a long term campaign? What else would you do to manage something like this? I love the idea of mystery and subterfuge and making it work in a DnD game is a challenge, but its been fun so far.
So long as your players know that there could be either lite or heavy PVP as a result of this, then you should be good in that department. I'd also just caution against setting this character up as a Main Character with the rest of the PCs being their supporting cast.
That being said, having assassination attempt after attempt will get boring. If you can, try to create situations that bring tension into the game. Maybe when the party fights some members of the Five Fates, one recognizes her, maybe even calling out her name, and then tried to flee. Or perhaps the medieval CIA organization enlists the help of the party, because they believe that there's a member of the Five Fates hiding out somewhere. Make it such that she's not exposed necessarily, but can easily be done so depending on some roleplay cues or situations.
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
Yes. I think keeping with the more subtle hints is a better idea. If you fall into the trap of making assassination attempt after assassination attempt on this character then you’re not likely to keep this a secret, and you’ll likely alienate your other players as you focus more on this character. Having one player have special things happening is fun when done right, and doing it right means involving every player a lot and making sure that they have agency and choices that matter. Maybe the organization is focusing on this player but realizes that another character has assets they want as well, and they realize this over time. Expand your focus and allow for flexibility. However, baddies calling her name or attempting to interact with her are both fantastic hints to drop, along with cryptic notes or threats.
Just as something to be aware of: inter-party suspicion is fun...for a very short period of time. D&D is predicated on the party working together, and if there's in-game suspicion of a party member and secrets that threaten party cohesion, things can break down very quickly and become unfun. I say this as someone whose current game survived that exact scenario only because we've been playing together for years and are good friends, and even we had to do reconstructive surgery on our characters and ask one of the players to roll up a new PC.
Discord within the party can work in the short term, but it gets frustrating and tiresome if it drags on. If you pursue this, I encourage you to keep a close eye on the players' enjoyment and have plans to pull the ripcord to unify the party once the suspicion loses its allure.
There’s some good stuff in this post. I agree as well. The issue with having inter-party politics is that it can destroy your fun. This is going on right now because we have one player who has developed main character syndrome and is a bit of a control freak with what we do. It’s made the game less fun because he is hiding secrets that could greatly affect our party but he refuses to reveal. The GM is also not doing anything about it, which is why I’m going to be speaking with him at our Friday session. The game, which used to be something I looked forward to, has become full and unfun as one player hogs the spotlight. Don’t do this to your players. I rescind my earlier statements. Do NOT hurt your players.
It is an interesting situation and can be fun as part of mixing character back stories into your storyline.
But ...
1) Are you doing something similar for the other characters? If not, what makes this character/player so special that the adventure starts to revolve around their backstory.
2) The assassin made a fun vignette but it has introduced some major story complications that you might have trouble resolving.
- the character was a member of the Five Banes
- presumably the assassin was supposed to be from the Five Banes? This is a problem. If the Five Banes have identified the location of the character, they know they are alive. They know they have to make an example of the character and quite possibly the character's family when they find out that the family knew the character was still alive. The Five Banes sounds like a powerful organization, it doesn't make sense that they would send novices to take care of this problem since maintaining the integrity of the cult and ruling through fear to deter others from leaving is such a strong element of their agenda. In fact, an intelligent organization would have staged simultaneous attacks on both the character and their family, likely with overwhelming force. They would take the family into custody and question them under a Zone of Truth or other similar method and then execute them all when they discover that they knew the character was alive and all wanted to leave the cult. Basically, the cult is too powerful for a low level character to survive unless they can somehow hide from their pursuers.
I think the character needs an Amulet of Proof against Detection and Location or else the cult will easily find them once they know they are alive. The cost of an intricate back story would be the use of an attunement slot to keep themselves safe. With this item, the character might be able to escape from the cult having found them once, but the issue with the family remains.
The alternative would be to have the assassin associated with the character's other life as a spy for the crown. This is much safer since foreign spy agencies may want the character dead but they may not have the same level of motivation to hunt the character and won't be going after the character's family.
3) In terms of "true identity", there is no way for the other characters to discover it unless they are told. I would leave it up to the player to tell the other players a story that incorporates some back story elements. The player could say something like "I may have done some work for the King of <place>. Which might have earned me a few enemies." to allay the suspicions of the party (though they may still decide that it is safer not to travel with a spy or ex-spy - why would adventurers choose a companion that puts them in greater danger unless there was a good reason to do so (or they are already friends)? The rest of the character backstory is not needed or even desired at this point unless you want the entire adventure revolving around this character and the Five Banes and what they have to do to survive ... why would ANY adventurer choose to get into something like that for a total stranger AND why would the DM create an adventure mostly about ONE player in the party?
4) Players react differently to these kinds of story elements. Most players are usually playing a character that wants to trust and rely on the other party members but this other character is making that more difficult by not being honest. Some players really object to other players having secrets. They may not mind character secrets but the player wants to know what is going on and may find it frustrating if the player and DM just smile knowingly and don't let the rest of the players (not necessarily the characters) in on the secret. It can create an us vs them atmosphere, split the group of players and DM into cliques with secrets from each other. It is worst when there is only one character with such secrets since everyone else might feel left out. Why is player X special? Why did the DM let them have a special backstory that affects the adventure so much? Why do they refuse to share any information with the rest of us? Are our characters just here to be supporting actors for the big hero special character with the cool story?
Often secrets in D&D don't work in real life unless everyone has some secrets so no one feels left out or the secrets are shared by the players so that the players know what is going on but the characters don't. In this case, it depends on how good the players are at role playing and separating player knowledge from character knowledge when making in game decisions.
Well that didn't last too long because the player was killed last session ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In a super condensed version, here's what went down:
This character's actions are still a driving force of the plot and I have no regrets, but that's the end of that. But I did learn some valuable stuff from this experience as well as from these posts here.
To clarify in this player's defense, her eventual goal was to leave all organizations behind and join the party as she was beginning to trust them. It would just have to come out at some point or another that she is essentially a double/triple crosser. Everything she would need to do from then on out would need to be a proving ground, especially since her family is in the five banes (cult of the dragon) but are actively trying to find a safe way to leave the cult. Ultimately, neither her and her family wants to worship Tiamat, they've just made a mistake and are in too deep to back out. So a lot of her journey would be to find a way to get her family out and away from the cultists' harm and the wrath of the law. Which I think is a really cool dynamic narrative that I wanted to explore.
And it would've tied into this. It would have come out sooner or later that she was who she was, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. I do agree with the idea of withholding information like this for the long term. Unless everyone is super cool with it and doesn't mind playing among us, I could see it being a thing for a long term game. But there would need to be consent from everyone. If its a power play to withhold information like in the previous example and the DM is on it, that just kind of sucks.
As of now, her family is in extreme danger. The current situation is that the PC had used her resources to jail a rival family's member inside of the five banes. That rival family member has been ousted and is spilling the beans on everything. The entire situation was going to come crashing down on her, if it were not for one thing. Now that the medieval CIA is aware of this cult and the cult is aware that the medieval CIA knows about them, both are playing a game of chess at this point. They are trying to make things as subvert as possible, which is why the very first assassination attempt was done so overtly (poisoning from a drink from someone you'd never suspect). Had they gone hard and sent everything after the PC, the Kingdom would respond to this, not only jailing the PC but also making a full frontal attack on whatever agents the cult had sent.
The five banes storyline is something running in the background compared to other events around the world too. They are reactive to the players' actions as they choose to work on another plotline that the game had originally opened with. The game is full sandbox and there's multiple plotlines running that the characters can plan, coordinate, and commit to at their discretion.
The cult may never summon Tiamat, depending on the party, and unlike the Tiamat module the cult does not possess much resources in terms of dragon masks or forces at the start of the campaign. Point is, I can see narrative setups that can inadvertently make this player into the main character, and I'm acting as the floodgate to make sure it doesn't spill over, but I could see how it can if the DM (me) and the player are both in on it. But she's dead now so there's no more secrets to keep between me and the player and the party may uncover things over time which just adds to the narrative
tl;dr I'm not opposed to the idea of having a complex character like this, but I think seeing the posts here and reflecting on my past experiences as a player have helped me re-shift my perspective on this. my original goal was to balance this in such a way that this doesn't force someone to become the main character, because that's never fun. But it looks like some extra steps are still needed in order to find that balance if this character is ever resurrected in the future and/or if another character concept like this comes up at some point in any of my games.
I think you managed this quite well in the end. I’m very impressed and I see a few ideas worth stealing. As a final note here are some ideas going forth:
Having the character dead presents a great chance to make her central to the storyline. Finding things on the body (if they survived) or having some Tiamat cultists or even her family approach or attack them about her can create closer links to the storyline.
Also, throwing her family into this with some contact with the players (I recommend Dream) can create interesting NPCs with many layers. Do they trust them? Maybe. They are family of our friend. But they also are part of our foes… A great dilemma.
On an unrelated note, I love the knowledge curse! A fantastic concept I will be taking for my games. This is a creative approach to a tired concept (entering a BBEG or even a mini BBEG early without much conflict).
Overall, congrats! Someone died, but it somehow feels fitting. Like (SPOILERS AHEAD) Bertrand Bell in Campaign 3 of Critical Role.
Speaking again from experience, I've tried this as a DM with RP-loving groups and have enthusiastically agreed to this as an RP-loving player in an RP-loving group and it ended terribly both times. D&D doesn't sustain inter-party strife well in the long run, and suspicion among PCs ends up being more fun in theory than in practice. Maybe there's a group out there that can turn Among Us into a fulfilling D&D game, but I bet that's pretty rare to come by.
Regardless, it does sound like you're interested in making a gaming environment that's fun for everyone, and that impulse will serve you well. Far too many DMs have tunnel vision or aren't good at creating a welcoming and collaborative game, so good on you for thinking along those lines. :-)
I've been on the receiving end as a player and it's not fun. Sometimes there's an impulse to take a big idea like this one and make it as cinematic as possible for the best possible effect but that comes at the expense of other players. Some types of storytelling dont work with dnd. This is a collaborative storytelling medium after all.
I still believe this idea could have worked had the character stayed alive, but the truth would have needed to come out sooner than later in order for it to work. But oh well! I learned a bunch from this very short experience and I'm going to apply it into my future games
Thanks! Her death is integral to the plot at this point. her family was planned heavily to come into play now as they are desperate for help, and the party, the last people to know her, are the only ones they believe they can can turn to before the medieval CIA and the five banes come for them. They may actually have to spill their guts, something they have never done in their lives.