Hello, I am looking for some ideas or inspiration from this community. It is about specific situation, in which one of my players happen to be now. This character in my game is wielding powerful holy weapon from good gods, which is dedicated to fight undead and fiends. He already have this for some time.
But, during last session, I offered to the group that one of the characters can sign a contract with devilish imp, which then become servant of that character. The imp will claim the soul of that characters after he dies as a payment for his service. At first, nobody wanted to sign this contract. But at the end this "holy warrior" character agreed to sign it and imp is now his servant. I am now wondering how to handle situation, that character dedicated to eradicate all undead and fiends have one of the fiends as servants. What would the good god, who entrusted him his holy weapon, say to this?
I feel that this god would not be happy. But I do not want to punish the player by somehow removing or weakening the weapon because of the unholy taint, or something like this. What I am looking for, is some interesting interaction between good and evil now residing in the character. I would like to enhance the gameplay with this, not to make the player unhappy because he chose to sign the contract with the fiend. Any ideas? :-)
Selling your soul away for a brief mastery over an imp seems like a really misguided action and rather short sighted, but it is what it now is I guess. I would imagine that yes, there may be some divine drama over a chosen servant so flippantly tossing away their immortal soul so loosely. Maybe there is a divine representative that arrives and offers a cleansing quest to erase the contract from existence. Maybe there is a greater game of godly chess being played here and the player doesn't know it yet, but they are a sacrificial piece, meant to lure a powerful demon into a risky move, and the tarnished soul was a calculated risk by their deity. This could all be revealed much later when the player has attracted a lot of demonic attention to a specific area and divine judgement in the form of archons and angels sweeps in to clean up as the party fights among the battlefield.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
I know you said you don't want to punish the player by weakening the word, but you are not. You are punishing the character. The player may still have fun with it. You are forcing the player to deal with the consequences of their choices. Sometimes those are going to be negative. But this will depend on the player and your table. Some players would actually love to have some negative impacts and to play through those and find a way to fix them. Unexpected choices like this, and dealing with the fallout from them, are why D&D is better than a video game.
For mechanics, you could do something like, the gods are angry, you take 1d4 radiant damage every time you wield the sword. Or, have the sword progressively lose powers (I know you said you didn't want to, but see above). Start with the biggest thing it does, and gradually peel them off over time until the character is left with a mundane sword. In either case, this can be reversed by atoning -- which will require a side quest where the character does something big (maybe they defeat a fiend singlehandedly without the sword, to prove they are still worthy. And defeat can mean a lot of different things; it doesn't have to be a fight.)
And after that (or before even, that works better), they find way out of the deal with the imp. Those good gods tend to be pretty binary: good or bad. They're not going to just sit around and accept someone trying to play for both sides.
There's also a pecking order in devils - this Imp just got a lovely future 'good' soul. I'm a bigger devil, well maybe I'll bully them up a bit / kill them and take on their contracts. No refunds. Could be fun to have bigger and biggerer devils picking up the contract...?
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RPGs from '83 - 03. A fair bit of LRP. A big gap. And now DMing again. Froth.
Is this a Paladin or a Cleric? With a Paladin you easily have Oathbreaker to lean upon. If it's a Cleric, I would think it's time to have a visit from a deity and a Domain shift. Oh, and this Holy Weapon? "It burrrrns!"
Here's what I would do: The "good gods" remove the holy weapon from the character. The character has betrayed them, they're not going to keep blessing him. If they don't take it outright then they'll remove the blessing and it turns into a mundane weapon. They absolutely do not want that holy power falling in to the hands of Asmodeus.
Since the character's soul is now owned by the Nine Hells, whichever Archfiend the imp works for replaces it with an unholy blessing of equivalent power. Maybe have the imp transform into another weapon on command? It depends on if you're allowing the imp to be a combatant or not.
Then you can get into the roleplay of tempting him. "See how the 'goodly' gods abandoned you? Just like they abandoned us to fight the Blood War. We're the ones that protect the Mortal Realm from the Abyss. Not them."
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Hello,
I am looking for some ideas or inspiration from this community. It is about specific situation, in which one of my players happen to be now.
This character in my game is wielding powerful holy weapon from good gods, which is dedicated to fight undead and fiends. He already have this for some time.
But, during last session, I offered to the group that one of the characters can sign a contract with devilish imp, which then become servant of that character. The imp will claim the soul of that characters after he dies as a payment for his service.
At first, nobody wanted to sign this contract. But at the end this "holy warrior" character agreed to sign it and imp is now his servant. I am now wondering how to handle situation, that character dedicated to eradicate all undead and fiends have one of the fiends as servants. What would the good god, who entrusted him his holy weapon, say to this?
I feel that this god would not be happy. But I do not want to punish the player by somehow removing or weakening the weapon because of the unholy taint, or something like this.
What I am looking for, is some interesting interaction between good and evil now residing in the character. I would like to enhance the gameplay with this, not to make the player unhappy because he chose to sign the contract with the fiend.
Any ideas? :-)
Selling your soul away for a brief mastery over an imp seems like a really misguided action and rather short sighted, but it is what it now is I guess. I would imagine that yes, there may be some divine drama over a chosen servant so flippantly tossing away their immortal soul so loosely. Maybe there is a divine representative that arrives and offers a cleansing quest to erase the contract from existence. Maybe there is a greater game of godly chess being played here and the player doesn't know it yet, but they are a sacrificial piece, meant to lure a powerful demon into a risky move, and the tarnished soul was a calculated risk by their deity. This could all be revealed much later when the player has attracted a lot of demonic attention to a specific area and divine judgement in the form of archons and angels sweeps in to clean up as the party fights among the battlefield.
I know you said you don't want to punish the player by weakening the word, but you are not. You are punishing the character. The player may still have fun with it. You are forcing the player to deal with the consequences of their choices. Sometimes those are going to be negative. But this will depend on the player and your table. Some players would actually love to have some negative impacts and to play through those and find a way to fix them. Unexpected choices like this, and dealing with the fallout from them, are why D&D is better than a video game.
For mechanics, you could do something like, the gods are angry, you take 1d4 radiant damage every time you wield the sword. Or, have the sword progressively lose powers (I know you said you didn't want to, but see above). Start with the biggest thing it does, and gradually peel them off over time until the character is left with a mundane sword. In either case, this can be reversed by atoning -- which will require a side quest where the character does something big (maybe they defeat a fiend singlehandedly without the sword, to prove they are still worthy. And defeat can mean a lot of different things; it doesn't have to be a fight.)
And after that (or before even, that works better), they find way out of the deal with the imp. Those good gods tend to be pretty binary: good or bad. They're not going to just sit around and accept someone trying to play for both sides.
There's also a pecking order in devils - this Imp just got a lovely future 'good' soul. I'm a bigger devil, well maybe I'll bully them up a bit / kill them and take on their contracts. No refunds. Could be fun to have bigger and biggerer devils picking up the contract...?
RPGs from '83 - 03. A fair bit of LRP. A big gap. And now DMing again. Froth.
Is this a Paladin or a Cleric? With a Paladin you easily have Oathbreaker to lean upon. If it's a Cleric, I would think it's time to have a visit from a deity and a Domain shift. Oh, and this Holy Weapon? "It burrrrns!"
Here's what I would do: The "good gods" remove the holy weapon from the character. The character has betrayed them, they're not going to keep blessing him. If they don't take it outright then they'll remove the blessing and it turns into a mundane weapon. They absolutely do not want that holy power falling in to the hands of Asmodeus.
Since the character's soul is now owned by the Nine Hells, whichever Archfiend the imp works for replaces it with an unholy blessing of equivalent power. Maybe have the imp transform into another weapon on command? It depends on if you're allowing the imp to be a combatant or not.
Then you can get into the roleplay of tempting him. "See how the 'goodly' gods abandoned you? Just like they abandoned us to fight the Blood War. We're the ones that protect the Mortal Realm from the Abyss. Not them."