#tocosar delvaren

[kyanve]

Tocosar Delvaren, Plan-Ruining Lawful Good Assassin Extraordinaire

So the previous story of Toc probably gave a pretty good idea how much of a creep my old stalker was trying to be, even if it completely failed. He also was not very bright at following things that didn’t fit normal patterns, like grasping how a Lawful Good character functioned. And that led to the second time Tocosar Delvaren foiled his best laid plans. These plans, thankfully, were less fetish-fuel, and more just him trying to go for melodramatic angst. Toc didn't foil them by being Too Queer And Ace For His Bullshit this time, but by being too Lawful Good. It probably would’ve worked, too, if he’d thought more about the party composition and who he wanted to target.

So as mentioned before, Toc was an assassin build rogue. Toc was also Lawful Good. Toc’s background, before the party found them, was that Toc had worked for an organization that tried to protect the citizens of a city by dealing with threats with as little collateral damage as possible, which usually meant "Quick, fast, and the target doesn't see it coming". (I'm going to give old anime geeks a minute to get any Weiss Kreuz jokes out of their system.) Now, obviously, this is a position that could easily be abused, so there was a code and set of rules about valid targets; Toc had to either have enough evidence to be DAMN SURE the person was a threat to the general public, weak, and defenseless, or the target had to be in the act of threatening lives/etc., which did include a self-defense clause. Toc took their code incredibly seriously. Toc had ended up adventuring after getting sold out in political maneuvering by someone in power who was corrupt and didn't want to risk the city’s watchdogs coming after them, so this person framed Toc for some pretty serious crimes and got him shipped out, where he got grabbed by a powerful sorcerer intending to use him for experiments or something; the party bargained the sorcerer into handing Toc over, shortly before Toc ran into the magic trap mentioned in the first story. Toc was still incredibly committed to their ideals and code on sheer spite, reasoning that what'd happened just proved there was a need for people like him working to protect those who couldn't defend themselves, even if they were a little bit bitter and prone to sarcasm and being a little more cautious and suspicious of people's motives. It was generally known among the other players and rest of the party members in-character that Toc was actually the absolute hardest person in the party to provoke into violence and the safest one to be around. So the party comes into a town that’s having a string of brutal, horrifying, bloody murders that don't really follow rhyme or reason, committed by equally random townsfolk that just seemed to “go crazy” one day. (Look, if you think this guy was at all respectful of actual mental illness issues and how cringey that is, I’d like to redirect you to the first story and why Toc ended up turned into a fox to begin with.) With the main thrust of the party being good-aligned, naturally they hear about it and volunteer to help solve these horrifying killings and find out why they're happening. Not long after this starts, the DM starts passing notes. I found out later that everyone else got notes saying that nothing was going on and to disregard the note but not speak of it, while Toc was getting notes that various people around them seemed suspicious, and oh maybe that person was up to No Good, and this party member had been Acting Out lately. These notes got worse and worse in the Weird Suspicions category, with a list of “This person was around for this, maybe THEY'RE the mastermind” sort of things and encouragement toward violence. Every time, Toc would run down the mental list of what would be valid for someone to be a target, find a lack of anything that would work, and conclude that they needed to continue gathering evidence until they were sure they had their mark. The DM got increasingly frustrated as this plot progressed and turned into basically a very calm fantasy police procedural, with a weird lack of new killings while we were on the trail. Agreeing to not talk about the notes OOC did not mean there was any ban on IC conversation. After a particularly egregious case of Weird Murderous Intrusive Nonsense Thoughts, Toc turned to the (Chaotic Good) party cleric, and explained the entire litany of shit that'd been going on since they'd arrived, and that Toc suspected that it might be what'd happened to the people who turned murderer suddenly and “for no apparent reason”. The cleric did their own investigation with various detection spells, and the DM looked increasingly sour as yes, there was signs of outside influence because Brayden (the cleric) had VERY GOOD STATS for these checks and rolled very well with his spells. So we tracked the dark magics trying to manipulate Toc back to their source, finding signs of a small group worshiping an evil deity of slaughter and violence. Toc, knowing the evil priest had already gotten inroads to influence them, opted to wait in a secure location with one of the local guard while the party went in, in case the priest responsible tried to compromise them further. While waiting, as relayed by the GM, the Guard got antsy about being stuck with a Possible Murderer and attacked Toc; Toc struck back, and killed him, then realized after it'd been a very detailed illusion. The only way the priest of slaughter had been able to get Toc to compromise their code was a full sensory hijack illusion. The party managed to bring down the cult and get further proof of the manipulation, exhonerating the captured “killers” that were all alarmed, guilt-ridden, and confused as to why it'd seemed like a good idea; everyone in the party earned a decent reward, including Toc, who had been instrumental in identifying the problem. I spent a minute looking things up and checking, and announced that Toc’s share of the reward was going towards the local temple for a True Resurrection for the guard they’d been manipulating into killing. The DM stared at me. “Are you sure?” “Lawful. Good. Toc was manipulated into it, but that still makes Toc partly responsible, and Toc is going to set things right as fully as they can.” The townsfolk and the newly back from the dead guard expressed appreciation for the party’s efforts, and we moved on. Later, after game, the DM was sulking; he’d put a lot of work into planning that plot as a bloody psychological horror with the party getting set against each other. The entire rest of the party stared at him and tallied off their character’s alignments and occasional propensities for violence. Brayden was Chaotic Good and kind of reactive and didn't always think things through. Our mage was a Chaotic Good fire specialist prone to solving problems by burning things. We had a Chaotic Neutral aligned fighter who was often drunk and mostly just acted on impulse following the party because they got good loot and were a good gig. I just reminded him that Toc was Lawful Good with a strict code. After this tally, there was an almost in unison “AND YOU PICKED THE LAWFUL GOOD ONE WITH A CODE STRICTER THAN SOME PALADINS AND DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING?!” tangent from the other players. The DM sulked, and gave up on it, with occasional moments of mourning how “dramatic” it would have been if we'd cooperated; the rest of the party rolled their eyes. The campaign didn’t last very long after that, mostly due to the semester breaking for summer which meant we scattered to different places, and after that the whole “stalker” thing I'd mentioned came to a head which kind of killed involvement. If I sound casual about it, it’s been over ten years now away from him with some work at dealing with various rattles and trauma bits, so there’s a decent amount I can talk about fairly easily, and.... well, the D&D stories that he was involved in are often ridiculously dumb, whether he was DM’ing or a fellow player. Yes, I did have standards where there was never really any kind of relationship except in his head. Yes, he was often dumber than a box of rocks despite all of his pretentions of being “brilliant”. The group was wonderful and I’m still very attached to Toc, whose Gender was Honor and whose sexuality was Justice.

#d&d #tales from tabletop #tocosar delvaren #Too Lawful Good For That DM