they thought the six year old kid was a villian in disguise or something when infact it was a banished god of justice with memory loss, and since it lost its powers they just oblitorated it without a second thought and went on their way unaware of the fact that npc was the central point of the story, everything revolved around them figuring that out, defeating the corrupt god that banished it and restoring the justice god to power, literally the next encounter wouldnt of worked without this npc so i distracted them with bandit combat for the rest of the session but i have no clue what to do now please help
Well, since the kid is a banished god it gives you a lot of leeway in terms of supernatural, god-like power. What if, farther into their journey, the kid shows up again - same kid, just fine with no memory of them having killed him. Rinse and repeat if they keep killing him until they figure out that it's not going to work and there must be something else they need to do.
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"...at worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Seems unlikely the godly power would die with the mortal body. Xavier Windswallow has a good idea. I’ll throw out another one. Whoever landed the killing blow on the kid has become a vessel for the god. Not in the sense of possession, just the god is along for the ride, talking to the PC. (Maybe they occasionally take over and say something to everyone.) Of course, a mortal body can’t contain a god’s power for long, and the god will explain they’re on a deadline to find a new, more appropriate vessel before the character explodes, taking a good chunk of the countryside with them
First, never make a game that revolves around one NPC or a specific thing the PCs need to do. The players will end up not trusting the npc or avoiding the event. I would alter the story. Id have the PCs run into a mother missing her son. Depending on why the PCs believed he was possessed, work that in somehow. Maybe the justice god is taking possession of people. Killing the god allows it to be free to possess someone else.
Important note, the PCs need to learn more about the God and what is going on before they encounter it again. Otherwise they are not going to trust it. The more it looks like you are railroading the PCs the more likely they are to push back.
Definitely want the party to find out the kid was innocent.
I like the idea of the child reappearing but I also like the idea of the mother searching for her son. So, I would enlist the adventurers to help the mother find her son. She leads them to the last place she saw him. The party searches for clues that hint to this god, walking the lands in the body of a mortal child.
They follow the clues to the battleground/accident site where this god lost his memory. Maybe even find a hidden passage to a dungeon underneath an old shrine to this god.
Or maybe encountering a cleric of this god or something. There's like a million ways around this.
Revenge arc for the injustice of killing a child (corrupt god and banished god possibly team up or not)
or change the story to a prequel where they fail the justice gods test upon murdering their vessel/messenger and now they end up helping the corrupt god to banish the justice god, then cycle back to original story idea with corrupt god laughing at them
Changing the story is probably what I would recommend, but that's not really the way I would look at it. My style of DMing is very emergent when it comes to story. I set up situations instead of plots and let the players interact with with them to write the story themselves. This takes a lot of the pressure off of key NPCs or MacGuffins surviving an interaction with your murd- I mean, PCs.
Nothing in your story is canon until it happens at the table. The players killed the child - that's canon. The god of justice is dead, what happens to the world now? Can they come back? What does the corrupt god do now that there are no obstacles to their plan? What moves do the enemy forces make, and how do those ripples reach the players? That's the story you plan for next.
Of course, that's just my style, it's not the "right" way to play. My advice isn't law, but I hope you find something useful in it anyway. Good luck!
Honestly sounds perfect. A god of justice killed extra judicially for something they didn't do. They still need to defeat the god of injustice and find a way to restore or replace the dead god but now the injustice god is empowered by what was essentially a divine sacrifice in their name.
There are allot of ways to deal with it. One is to have the god have multiple aspects that were split up for justice this could be.
Innocence in the form of a child .
Punishment in the form of a warrior, judge or something similar
Redemption, in the form of a repentant sinner
The death of innocence may mess with the other two for example with punishment now unable to see any one as truly innocent.
Another ione is the loss of justice may influence the after life. Spirits may be unable to move on to their respective after lives or the decision may now be left to a god of injustice which sends ghosts of criminals to harass the families of victims or something similar .
The point is , adapt, improvise and over come. This death is an opportunity its often very difficult to get players to do something evil like this so you get story telling opportunities many dms never get. You also probably don't need to change as much as you think just think about how the things you planned will work without the kid.
I don't like to overcomplicate my plots - there is no way the group killed a god. Have the child reappear imo with no memory of the last encounter easy peasy - if they kill it again have it happen again sooner or later they will start doing all the right checks so you can take the story in the broad strokes direction you want.
Hell if they kill him again as soon as combat is over and they walk 5 min in game you can have the child reappear again - granted that is making it super obvious but sometimes what is obvious to the DM is not obvious to the players so you need to be sure they get the hint.
I think you need to ask yourself if the characters are evil. Choosing to kill a child without proof or clear indications of any sort that the child could be anything more than the child they appear is not an action of good characters. It might be an action of meta gaming players trying to guess the DMs plot line and getting it wrong but it doesn't sound like an action of a party of characters with even remote interest in restoring a god of justice.
So, your first question - is the campaign idea appropriate for the group that is playing it and do you want to change it to accommodate the party you have rather than the party you wish you had?
And no ... there is no justification for the party to murder what appears to be a child no matter what they might suspect.
In terms of where to take it from here ...
1) A god can't be killed even if their current mortal form is destroyed. If the god could be killed the corrupt god that put them in the form of a child would just slaughter the vulnerable god and get it over with. Since they didn't do that, it means they can't, which probably means that it can't be killed in this form but can be kept out of the way while the corrupt god does what it likes unopposed.
So ... since it can't be killed ... you have lots of choices.
- the god could reform in a different body at the next dawn or after some period of time (I like dawn since it is the start of a new day and could be associated with the rise of justice).
- the god could reform in the same body - the child's body may be representative of the lack of knowledge and power - as the god regains abilities - the form it takes becomes older. Perhaps being killed triggered regaining some knowledge or ability and the god reforms in a slightly older version of the body.
- the god could be possessing a suitable child - I don't think that fits with a god of justice but in this case you could have the mom show up looking for her missing son leading to the party perhaps realizing their mistake. I would personally make them feel as bad as possible for such an unjustified role playing decision but then again maybe they won't care and that might be in character too.
Personally, I would go with it reforming in a new body each day if it is killed. Up to you what it remembers of events.
2) The players don't know any of this. Unless you have hinted or foreshadowed, you are the only one who knows what you had in mind and you can CHANGE it.
There are different philosophies about world building and campaign design and personally I prefer just adjudicating the party interaction with the world and adjusting the state of the world in response to their actions but if you don't like the god being reborn every day or other ways it would come back then I would simply change the plot line.
How you change it is up to you but since the players don't know about any of it, none of it actually exists anywhere in your game world except in your head .. so if you need to change the plot line to fit the party you have rather than the party you'd like to have and the revised plot line would play better for this group ... then go ahead and change it.
I don't like to overcomplicate my plots - there is no way the group killed a god. Have the child reappear imo with no memory of the last encounter easy peasy - if they kill it again have it happen again sooner or later they will start doing all the right checks so you can take the story in the broad strokes direction you want.
Hell if they kill him again as soon as combat is over and they walk 5 min in game you can have the child reappear again - granted that is making it super obvious but sometimes what is obvious to the DM is not obvious to the players so you need to be sure they get the hint.
Honestly on the third time id kill the kid on principal every time we met him because the DM was railroading that way too much.
I would say that the party sounds quite selfishly driven and not prone to investigation - they basically shot first then neglected to ask questions, by the sound of it.
I like the idea of having the God transfer to the one who killed the child, and explain that if they want to survive they'd better get cracking on this quest. The god can (quite rightly) be very annoyed at them, and they may have to seek redemption first. Have the god explain that only compatible souls can integrate, so the innocent good of the child allowed the god to hide within, whereas the selfish evil of the character means the god is entirely separate inside of them now. The use of a child was a cruel trick fro mthe evil god to imprison the good god, but now they are in an evil body they can talk to them and get help in fixing the problem.
I agree with David42. If the party killed a child with basically no evidence of wrong doing, then they aren't the kind of party to be motivated to restore the god of justice to the world. So yes your overall campaign plot is broken. So you have a choice:
(1) Are you interested in DMing a chaotic/evil campaign? if so you can adapt the story so that the corrupt god is now interested in the party and will try to recruit them to help unleash chaos on the world and kill all the overbearing gods of law & order.
(2) You talk to players and ask them if they want to play a good/heroic campaign and explain that they can't do that if they go around killing kids for no reason.
There are many ways to rectify this, as this thread shows, but the one popping out at me is followers eventually find out about the murder and, through the fact that gods cannot die, is informed about what happened and is ordered to find and capture the characters (this isn’t weird because assuming this is a god of goodness and they probably wouldn’t just slaughter people).They would then be incentivized to try to explain how their actions were actually in the pursuit of good and justice and this was just a misunderstanding. The players would learn from in the future and have the god as an ally again.
A question no one has asked: why did your players think the child was a villain in disguise?
Yes, there might be evidence you have some murderhobos on your hands, but this also could very easily be a case of DM descriptions not communicating what you intend, and the party jumping to conclusions based on misinterpretation.
I find that sometimes even the most seasoned DMs can attempt to make an NPC seem special or mysterious and accidentally come across as threatening or jerkwad-y. Players tend to overreact in these scenarios and often choose violence. If this happened once, it could happen again, so it helps to be mindful of how you narrate and how your players internalize that narration. Giving passive insight to players, using other NPCs to call them out on their assumptions, and even having meta conversations about plot points can help with this.
As others have said, nothing is set in stone until you reveal it. Only you know the child was a god's vessel. Why not lean into the party's theories? Maybe the villain in disguise gambit was real, and now his underlings are after the party for killing their boss. The god of justice can show up later, or in a dream, or as the slain child's identical twin to warn the party. Sometimes players make decisions that screw everything up, but sometimes their ideas are better than ours were. Plus, when player hunches turn out to be true, they feel amazing and get super invested in the story. It can be a win-win, if you let it.
they thought the six year old kid was a villian in disguise or something when infact it was a banished god of justice with memory loss, and since it lost its powers they just oblitorated it without a second thought and went on their way unaware of the fact that npc was the central point of the story, everything revolved around them figuring that out, defeating the corrupt god that banished it and restoring the justice god to power, literally the next encounter wouldnt of worked without this npc so i distracted them with bandit combat for the rest of the session but i have no clue what to do now please help
Well, since the kid is a banished god it gives you a lot of leeway in terms of supernatural, god-like power. What if, farther into their journey, the kid shows up again - same kid, just fine with no memory of them having killed him. Rinse and repeat if they keep killing him until they figure out that it's not going to work and there must be something else they need to do.
"...at worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Seems unlikely the godly power would die with the mortal body. Xavier Windswallow has a good idea. I’ll throw out another one.
Whoever landed the killing blow on the kid has become a vessel for the god. Not in the sense of possession, just the god is along for the ride, talking to the PC. (Maybe they occasionally take over and say something to everyone.) Of course, a mortal body can’t contain a god’s power for long, and the god will explain they’re on a deadline to find a new, more appropriate vessel before the character explodes, taking a good chunk of the countryside with them
First, never make a game that revolves around one NPC or a specific thing the PCs need to do. The players will end up not trusting the npc or avoiding the event. I would alter the story. Id have the PCs run into a mother missing her son. Depending on why the PCs believed he was possessed, work that in somehow. Maybe the justice god is taking possession of people. Killing the god allows it to be free to possess someone else.
Important note, the PCs need to learn more about the God and what is going on before they encounter it again. Otherwise they are not going to trust it. The more it looks like you are railroading the PCs the more likely they are to push back.
Definitely want the party to find out the kid was innocent.
I like the idea of the child reappearing but I also like the idea of the mother searching for her son. So, I would enlist the adventurers to help the mother find her son. She leads them to the last place she saw him. The party searches for clues that hint to this god, walking the lands in the body of a mortal child.
They follow the clues to the battleground/accident site where this god lost his memory. Maybe even find a hidden passage to a dungeon underneath an old shrine to this god.
Or maybe encountering a cleric of this god or something. There's like a million ways around this.
Personally would either go with a:
Revenge arc for the injustice of killing a child (corrupt god and banished god possibly team up or not)
or change the story to a prequel where they fail the justice gods test upon murdering their vessel/messenger and now they end up helping the corrupt god to banish the justice god, then cycle back to original story idea with corrupt god laughing at them
Changing the story is probably what I would recommend, but that's not really the way I would look at it. My style of DMing is very emergent when it comes to story. I set up situations instead of plots and let the players interact with with them to write the story themselves. This takes a lot of the pressure off of key NPCs or MacGuffins surviving an interaction with your murd- I mean, PCs.
Nothing in your story is canon until it happens at the table. The players killed the child - that's canon. The god of justice is dead, what happens to the world now? Can they come back? What does the corrupt god do now that there are no obstacles to their plan? What moves do the enemy forces make, and how do those ripples reach the players? That's the story you plan for next.
Of course, that's just my style, it's not the "right" way to play. My advice isn't law, but I hope you find something useful in it anyway. Good luck!
Honestly sounds perfect. A god of justice killed extra judicially for something they didn't do. They still need to defeat the god of injustice and find a way to restore or replace the dead god but now the injustice god is empowered by what was essentially a divine sacrifice in their name.
There are allot of ways to deal with it. One is to have the god have multiple aspects that were split up for justice this could be.
The death of innocence may mess with the other two for example with punishment now unable to see any one as truly innocent.
Another ione is the loss of justice may influence the after life. Spirits may be unable to move on to their respective after lives or the decision may now be left to a god of injustice which sends ghosts of criminals to harass the families of victims or something similar .
The point is , adapt, improvise and over come. This death is an opportunity its often very difficult to get players to do something evil like this so you get story telling opportunities many dms never get. You also probably don't need to change as much as you think just think about how the things you planned will work without the kid.
I don't like to overcomplicate my plots - there is no way the group killed a god. Have the child reappear imo with no memory of the last encounter easy peasy - if they kill it again have it happen again sooner or later they will start doing all the right checks so you can take the story in the broad strokes direction you want.
Hell if they kill him again as soon as combat is over and they walk 5 min in game you can have the child reappear again - granted that is making it super obvious but sometimes what is obvious to the DM is not obvious to the players so you need to be sure they get the hint.
I think you need to ask yourself if the characters are evil. Choosing to kill a child without proof or clear indications of any sort that the child could be anything more than the child they appear is not an action of good characters. It might be an action of meta gaming players trying to guess the DMs plot line and getting it wrong but it doesn't sound like an action of a party of characters with even remote interest in restoring a god of justice.
So, your first question - is the campaign idea appropriate for the group that is playing it and do you want to change it to accommodate the party you have rather than the party you wish you had?
And no ... there is no justification for the party to murder what appears to be a child no matter what they might suspect.
In terms of where to take it from here ...
1) A god can't be killed even if their current mortal form is destroyed. If the god could be killed the corrupt god that put them in the form of a child would just slaughter the vulnerable god and get it over with. Since they didn't do that, it means they can't, which probably means that it can't be killed in this form but can be kept out of the way while the corrupt god does what it likes unopposed.
So ... since it can't be killed ... you have lots of choices.
- the god could reform in a different body at the next dawn or after some period of time (I like dawn since it is the start of a new day and could be associated with the rise of justice).
- the god could reform in the same body - the child's body may be representative of the lack of knowledge and power - as the god regains abilities - the form it takes becomes older. Perhaps being killed triggered regaining some knowledge or ability and the god reforms in a slightly older version of the body.
- the god could be possessing a suitable child - I don't think that fits with a god of justice but in this case you could have the mom show up looking for her missing son leading to the party perhaps realizing their mistake. I would personally make them feel as bad as possible for such an unjustified role playing decision but then again maybe they won't care and that might be in character too.
Personally, I would go with it reforming in a new body each day if it is killed. Up to you what it remembers of events.
2) The players don't know any of this. Unless you have hinted or foreshadowed, you are the only one who knows what you had in mind and you can CHANGE it.
There are different philosophies about world building and campaign design and personally I prefer just adjudicating the party interaction with the world and adjusting the state of the world in response to their actions but if you don't like the god being reborn every day or other ways it would come back then I would simply change the plot line.
How you change it is up to you but since the players don't know about any of it, none of it actually exists anywhere in your game world except in your head .. so if you need to change the plot line to fit the party you have rather than the party you'd like to have and the revised plot line would play better for this group ... then go ahead and change it.
Honestly on the third time id kill the kid on principal every time we met him because the DM was railroading that way too much.
I would say that the party sounds quite selfishly driven and not prone to investigation - they basically shot first then neglected to ask questions, by the sound of it.
I like the idea of having the God transfer to the one who killed the child, and explain that if they want to survive they'd better get cracking on this quest. The god can (quite rightly) be very annoyed at them, and they may have to seek redemption first. Have the god explain that only compatible souls can integrate, so the innocent good of the child allowed the god to hide within, whereas the selfish evil of the character means the god is entirely separate inside of them now. The use of a child was a cruel trick fro mthe evil god to imprison the good god, but now they are in an evil body they can talk to them and get help in fixing the problem.
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I agree with David42. If the party killed a child with basically no evidence of wrong doing, then they aren't the kind of party to be motivated to restore the god of justice to the world. So yes your overall campaign plot is broken. So you have a choice:
(1) Are you interested in DMing a chaotic/evil campaign? if so you can adapt the story so that the corrupt god is now interested in the party and will try to recruit them to help unleash chaos on the world and kill all the overbearing gods of law & order.
(2) You talk to players and ask them if they want to play a good/heroic campaign and explain that they can't do that if they go around killing kids for no reason.
There are many ways to rectify this, as this thread shows, but the one popping out at me is followers eventually find out about the murder and, through the fact that gods cannot die, is informed about what happened and is ordered to find and capture the characters (this isn’t weird because assuming this is a god of goodness and they probably wouldn’t just slaughter people).They would then be incentivized to try to explain how their actions were actually in the pursuit of good and justice and this was just a misunderstanding. The players would learn from in the future and have the god as an ally again.
A question no one has asked: why did your players think the child was a villain in disguise?
Yes, there might be evidence you have some murderhobos on your hands, but this also could very easily be a case of DM descriptions not communicating what you intend, and the party jumping to conclusions based on misinterpretation.
I find that sometimes even the most seasoned DMs can attempt to make an NPC seem special or mysterious and accidentally come across as threatening or jerkwad-y. Players tend to overreact in these scenarios and often choose violence. If this happened once, it could happen again, so it helps to be mindful of how you narrate and how your players internalize that narration. Giving passive insight to players, using other NPCs to call them out on their assumptions, and even having meta conversations about plot points can help with this.
As others have said, nothing is set in stone until you reveal it. Only you know the child was a god's vessel. Why not lean into the party's theories? Maybe the villain in disguise gambit was real, and now his underlings are after the party for killing their boss. The god of justice can show up later, or in a dream, or as the slain child's identical twin to warn the party. Sometimes players make decisions that screw everything up, but sometimes their ideas are better than ours were. Plus, when player hunches turn out to be true, they feel amazing and get super invested in the story. It can be a win-win, if you let it.