When I saw your video about the player who was turned into the BBEG against his will, I had to share my tale too.
I had heard of D&D for the longest time, and I was eager to join any opportunity that came my way. So when my friend offered to DM his homebrew campaign, I immediately jumped at the offer. My DM friend is one of the most fun people I know to hang out with. He’s incredibly witty, and a great storyteller. Weeks before the campaign started, he told us tales of the previous incarnation of the homebrew campaign that he played in his hometown. It was a mishmash of all genres from high fantasy, comic books and sci-fi. You could easily get a drink from a bar tended to by a Slenderman, while waiting for your adventurer’s expense report from the guy with the flaming skull in accounting. Then heading out to an abandoned lab crawling with spider robots, to stumbling unto a derelict pirate ship haunted by phantoms of its former crew. You could wield any kind of weapon you wanted, from hi-powered sniper rifles to mentally controlled telekinetic chakrams. Despite the broken mess this campaign could have been, I had a blast in all combat encounters.
The DM had so much fun as a player back then that he wanted to get into that campaign again. The biggest twist back then was that one of his fellow players, named Omnitaku, had acquired the power of soul magic. If that sounded ominous, it’s because it was. Soul magic is the epitome of evil-dark-forbidden magic. Omnitaku had acquired a Soul Bow, and from that moment on, any living thing that died in his presence would have their soul sucked into the bow. The more souls you acquired, the more damage you dealt. If you launch an attack with one soul, you’d deal one die of extra damage. If you launch an attack with two souls, you deal two die of extra damage, and so on and so on. There was no limit to how many souls you could hold. Well, this turned Omnitaku into the worst TCG card game collector ever, but with souls. Wherever he went, whatever he did, it was for the sole purpose of collecting souls. Murdering creatures, NPCs that gave him a reason, searching out disaster areas so that he could collect the souls of all that died, all to feed his desire for power. And of course, all souls absorbed can never pass on to the afterlife, and once they’re launched in an attack, the soul is destroyed. Omnitaku had accumulated so much souls that he once launched a soul arrow into a city and utterly destroyed it, and the people that died in it ended up giving him more souls than he had lost.
Naturally, his teammates were worried as his behavior continued. At one point they confronted him… and he betrayed and killed them, adding their souls to his collection. That’s how that campaign ended, and now my DM friend intends to bring our PCs into that same world after all those events had unfolded.
So, there were four of us in total. Me, the DM, the DM’s girlfriend, and a mutual friend of ours. I basically played Infiltrator Shepard, with the ability to cloak, armed with a sniper rifle. The DM’s GF was a conjuror who summoned baby dragons and used fire magic. Our third friend played the basic noble frontline paladin with a sword and shield… and a sentient non-talking wrench.
The first few sessions went great. The DM brought us face-to-face with an arrogant, nasty sheriff that my character held an animosity for, and we were introduced to our home base; a humongous, abandoned library that served as a nexus leading to many different worlds. Which was how we could step into different genres if we wanted. Imagine our surprise when returning to the nexus after returning from an adventure… we bumped into Omnitaku himself. At this point, we had heard both in character and out of his exploits and deeds, that we were all paralyzed in fear. We were all low level, with barely a handful of abilities to our name. But fortunately, Omnitaku was not hostile. He regarded us with mild curiosity, like how a veteran marine would regard children playing war games.
I would like to inform you that I was a first-time player, and the most munchkin among my party. I had specced my character to basically land critical hits from far away and never taking any damage in return. My poor teammates had to endure the indignity of enemy counterattacks and injuries, while I backflipped and dodged like Agent Smith on steroids. So, yeah, I was the most power-hungry of the bunch. I steeled myself, and went up to talk to Omnitaku because I wanted to learn the secret of soul magic. I must have said something the DM liked, because Omnitaku then tossed me a Soul Dagger.
I suppose history must have repeated itself, because from that point on, my character was ready to reap. Any combat encounter I could find, I took. I loved dungeon crawls even more, because that meant harvest time. But I hardly used the Soul Dagger. For one thing, the DM kept throwing encounters with non-organic beings like robots and cyborgs, maybe a few animal creatures, but I hardly encountered living enemies. As a result, soul collection was very slow. I think after two years worth of sessions, I only collected about 27 souls.
Why didn’t I go full genocide and ax-crazy? Simply put, it’s not in my nature. I don’t like doing bad or nasty things, even in games. The Renegade options in Mass Effect don’t bring me joy. I don’t even like being evil in Fallout games! And believe it or not, I actually liked my friends and teammates. I wanted to collect souls, but I would do so the proper way, the right way. I was patient, I was willing to wait. But week after week, the DM just kept pitting us against non-organic enemies. I didn’t mind. The few times I did use the Soul Dagger on powerful enemies, the results had been spectacular. At one point, the DM gave me a Skull Scimitar. Once in every five attacks with this weapon, the scimitar would spawn a skeleton minion under my control. I immediately started amassing my private army. I think I had gathered like about 15-20 by the time the campaign ended, and I never sent them on the front lines. Only if any of the PCs downed an enemy, that’s when I sent my skeleton minions (with xylophone sound effects) to kick it to death. Even though the skeletons had weapons of their own, I specifically ordered them to kick and stomp the enemy en masse instead. Think the All-Out Attack from the Persona series.
At this point, I had all the makings of a BBEG. High crit rate and AC, soul magic and potentially hordes of undead minions. I even considered myself the benevolent version of the Evil Overlord. But turning on my teammates never occurred to me because of the fact I didn’t like being evil or being a jerk to my teammates. My teammates were wary of me. More than once they declared they’ll kill me if I became like Omnitaku. I may have pretended to act sinisterly, but I never once did anything evil or committed murder for the sake of power. I never had any intention of betraying them. Also personally, it would be a major kick in the teeth if someone abruptly PvPed me and destroyed the character I’ve been playing for months. I could imagine how crappy it would feel. Why would I inflict that on my friends? I certainly did not want to face the fallout in real life once it’s over. Well, soon enough, the campaign began to run out of steam. While the combat portion was incredibly fun, the roleplaying part and the plot was very less so. The plot had elements of time travel and multiverses, both things which are difficult to handle properly, even at the best of times. In the end, the DM said he had burnout, ended the campaign abruptly, alongside my character’s dreams of amassing an army and soul reserves.
Fast forward nearly five years later, I was hanging out with the DM and his now wife, and we started talking about our old sessions and war stories. That’s when he admitted that he had planned for me to be the next Omnitaku. That’s why he gave me those overpowered equipment. He planned for us to enter this epic clash of teammate vs teammate, with the odds heavily weighted on my side. He waited and waited for me to turn, but I didn’t. In the end, he burned out waiting, and let the campaign end in a whimper. The thing is, I would have embraced the role of a villain happily if I knew what he planned. The pieces were all there. I would have gleefully turned, if only I had permission. Unfortunately, the DM never broached the subject to me, not even in private, not even once. From the looks of it, the months and months of waiting for something that never came had drained the fun out of the campaign for the DM, which is a shame because I really loved his campaigns. If he had told me what he wanted, we could have done more to make everyone happy and avoid such a bad burnout. Please, DMs and players alike, communicate. You may not necessarily get what you want, but then again, maybe you would…
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