And it didn't quite end the way I expected.
The two images above (made with Hero Forge and coloured by me in Photoshop) are both of my charlatan halfling paladin rogue... on the left as he was at the end of the game, and then on the right as he became 15 or so years later, a simple baker in a small town. In the space between those two images are the last ten minutes of the game where he managed to surprise me one last time.
He's done that a lot, young Peregrin Swiftfoot, formerly Obaris Beestinger, soon to be Peregrin Beestinger (it's a long story, but he walked away from his name and family, picked up and dropped names as he ran confidence scams up and down the coast, then found that he could be a better man and decided after the campaign that he'd grown enough to at least be a Beestinger again)... I would open my mouth on occasion and I wasn't the one talking, he was. I am so, so, so glad that I decided to play him in this campaign, he was so wonderfully complicated and complex and had more layers than I think any other character I've ever played. And he wouldn't have been any of those things in a different game.
He loved, he lied (oh, how he lied), he meddled (mostly in other people's love lives), he had enemies, he made a difference. And he made promises he didn't intend to keep, so many promises. But honestly, I realised a few games back that he actually had something of a deathwish, he didn't expect to actually get out of the final battle alive. He didn't think he deserved to. And it would also have meant he could have gotten out of all of those promises.
But that wasn't to be. He survived. So after we vanquished two of the most powerful of the demon lords of the abyss he pulled one final trick. Everyone was doing post game discussion, one of the antagonist NPCs he'd made a promise to came to gloat a little and remind him of his debt. And I opened my mouth to answer and Pery spoke instead. He said (slightly paraphrasing, I don't remember the exact wording) "You don't need to worry, Peregrin Swiftfoot will fulfil his promise". An oddly specific phrase, and given that Peregrin was only ever someone he was pretending to be, one of those wonderful weaselly phrases that has so many layers to it. I'd had the thought of what he could do earlier that afternoon, but I wasn't sure if I'd do it or not. That was when I knew.
A little bit after that I just said to the DM "I'm gunna walk away from the group". And then after some other back and forth I said that I was going to find one of the NPCs and get the package I left with him. It wasn't something I'd set up earlier, but I had laid in that NPC in a prior game, for other reasons.
It was when I said that I knew what he was going to do, the why came later, but the what was easy. He changed his gear from the flashy, eye-catching peacock of an outfit on the right to simple, stealthy garb. He left all his magical gear behind (well everything except his nightvision goggles), he left all his gear in fact, took his very full gold pouch and some diamonds and walked out of the camp, avoiding his friends.
Because of course he did. He'd been doing the same thing since he was 15. Running away when things went bad. He'd gotten in over his head, made promises he couldn't or wouldn't keep, and as I worked out later, was suffering from a massive case of impostor syndrome. He'd been pretending to be a better man, which had made him BE a better man, but now that was all coming to an end and he had no idea what to do next, no idea how to be the "hero" he'd been down in the Underdark once he was back in the real world. And he'd screwed up his relationship with the dwarven shield maiden in two different timelines, so much so that she left before the final battle without telling him.
So he ran.
Legitimately it was one of those moments when a character was so fully alive in my head that I didn't need to think about how he was going to do it all, I just knew.
I'd also written a "hey, I'm dead" letter to one of the players (because of course I did) which I ended up handing over because it was too good not to, and I also didn't have a "hey, I'm a shithead and I'm running" letter prepared. I think I threw him for a complete loop honestly, and I definitely need to have an in-character conversation with him at some point in the near future.
One of the other NPCs tracked me for a bit, but eventually I just asked her to give me an hour's head start, then bolted. And thanks to some interference from our cleric's god, I got sent to "a place Pery has felt at peace". Which is honestly a massive thought to process for that character, one I wasn't able to unpack until later. But he'd never felt at peace really. He'd spent his whole life gripping onto the edges of disaster by his fingernails, even when a con was going well, he knew that the whole thing could go south at a moment's notice, the wrong word, the wrong move and everything goes sour.
The only real times of late that he'd possibly been at peace were in the other timeline (yeah, we did just about everything in this campaign... demon slaying, multiple romance plotlines, visits to the library, alternate timelines and time travel) when he was with the dwarven shield maiden. But that proverbial ship had sailed, he screwed it up and she (probably, I need to check with the DM) died in that timeline, plus their relationship was never the same in this timeline.
So, in game I eventually came up with a place a couple of days journey from where he grew up, but I realised later that the god didn't send him to somewhere he had BEEN at peace, it sent him to somewhere he WOULD be at peace. To give him someone he could finally be completely honest with and who would love him even if he was a massive screw-up.
He ended up in that small town, literally crashing into (because that will happen if you go from riding a fey-horse at high speed to being teleported to another place) the half-elven owner of the tavern, who took one look at him, declared that Pery clearly needed a drink and took him in. Pery ended up telling him everything, something he normally wouldn't do, but definitely something he needed to do. They became friends, which transitioned into a easy relationship which transitioned into them getting married and adopting a young halfling boy after he lost his family. And Pery took his fistfuls of gold and renovated an old house in town into a bakery.
However when our DM asked where we were around 20 years after the end of the game, all I knew was that he would be married, working as a baker (he went a little crazy making bread in game around the same time I learned how to make bread IRL) in this little nowhere town, with fat muttonchop halfling sideburns, a little thicker around the middle (all that bread), showing off his original hair and eye colour... and happier than he had ever been in his life.
It wasn't until later I knew that he retained his paladin powers for the rest of his days, healed anyone in town who was injured, kept a diamond handy just in case of an accidental death, used his spells to defend the town, protect against disease or poison, was the one people came to to settle disputes, conducted weddings, naming ceremonies, was always good for an adventure story in the tavern of an evening, all that good small town stuff. And I gave him the zen circle tattoo because it's much harder to pretend to be someone else long term with a big chunk of black ink on your arm.
And so I retired him. Because there wasn't another option. For a character who started out face down in an alleyway with a knife in his back and inventing a whole new persona to escape, finding peace was the perfect end.
I'm gunna miss that charming, talkative, meddling, protective, lying little shit.
Current mood:
No comments:
Post a Comment