Exchange of Realities

My prior posts weren’t too good for failure examples, so I’ll tell you about one of my old favorites: an example of how even player failure can turn out for the best.

The player in question: Luath, the group’s rather quirky Twilight crafter. He’d gone out on a mission with his mentor, and in the process heard some rumors about a “demon woman” out in the desert. The logic process behind “Who better to ask about a local demon woman than the local demon hunters” was good, but upon hearing the name of the young woman who was supposed to be dealing with people while the rest of them were out on patrol, he freaked out. For good reason: The individual in question was his older sister Irayo, who as far as he could tell was out to kill him for selling his soul to dark forces (the fact that he didn’t really being rather immaterial).

But being curious about this threat, and about how his sister was doing, he decided he needed to see for himself. So he took advantage of the fact that the local costume involved lots of veils to get himself a better disguise, and walked in.

And there was Irayo, not too different from how he’d remembered her, rather awkwardly attempting to console a local woman whose husband hadn’t returned to the city. Being himself, he couldn’t resist the urge to help, so he stepped in and delivered a nice consoling speech beginning with “I’ll admit my command of the local language is a little rusty, but…” Can anyone see the problem here?

Yep. Not the kind of costume you want to admit to not speaking the language well in. To give the player credit, after the moment it took him to realize what he had done he was finding it at least as amusing as I did. Though by that time the damage had been done, and Irayo was shooing the woman out of the building so she could confront him safely.

Which led to some of the best one on one conversations I think I’d seen. My inspiration for Irayo was the perpetually irritated older sister model; she’d seen her younger brother as a bit of a dork to begin with, and she’d never quite come to terms with his “decision” to sell out. She had a lot of the “Why me?” model going on, particularly since she’d been hiding Luath’s old history from those around her. Embarrassing enough that her brother had gone evil. Worse because he’d decided there was no way he was going to convince her otherwise, and instead was doing a very bad job of trying to seem appropriately demonic. “I value human life! …in tastiness, that is” and “Speaking of babies, you want some breakfast?” come to mind.

Why couldn’t she at least have gotten one of the properly evil ones, and not this dork poser Anathema? This was undignified!

So she snarked her way through his surrender, and his volunteering his assistance in finding her missing teammates. And then he decided to heroically save the lot of them from the demon woman, and got himself captured (kicking off one of my favorite unexpected plot arcs in the process, which was really fortunate given that the person I had been going to plot-hook when the game started up again quit)…

She ended up becoming a running character out of that; I had way too much fun playing her, and since she was the most logical witness, she got to be the vehicle by which I delivered the exposition to the rest of the group. (Discovering that she was dealing with a bunch of her brother’s friends didn’t exactly help matters, but she got talked into not being afraid, so she basically bullied them into dragging her off with them. She’s been lurking on the sidelines, getting snarkier by the day, ever since.)

And all this niftiness was because of one silly little mistake!