Exchange of Realities

Yesterday’s post was on characters hiding secrets, whether major or minor. It’s a quality I’m rather fond of in characters; as my players tend to realize, just about everyone they meet is either actively hiding something or just plain not telling them something. Every now and then, though, I get the opportunity to let them in on one of my secrets.

So it was with Olathe. She was one of my typical “planned well in advance” plot-revelations. (Okay, to be fair, one of the main reasons I’m known for planning well in advance is because things go slow in this game; I get an idea, and end up not being able to kick it in until three weeks later at the very earliest. Having our sessions end early because of one player and start late because of my new job doesn’t exactly help. But I digress.) In her case, it was a very long planning session; I got the idea one summer, started seeding the hints the following autumn/winter, and kept doing so over about a year, until near the end of last December. Pretty long-term, don’t you think?

Olathe herself was originally introduced as a potential ally (if very suspicious) for the group. She had political power, and a near-obsessive grudge against a common enemy of hers and the group’s. In addition, she was almost as fanatical about protecting her subordinates, very prone to sticking to the rules, and known for having realized this enemy was a problem long before her compatriots did (resulting in having spent about a year as something of a Cassandra on the topic).

And then there were the little detaily bits. The fact that when four different people at a party the group was throwing showed up in costumes relating to the common enemy in question (including herself accidentally, a bit of foreshadowing of my own), she actually recognized one, and only one. The long-forgotten detail (revealed to only one of the PCs; to be fair, I thought he’d share it long before it actually came up, or at least not jump to the conclusion he ended up jumping to) that she had been mysteriously missing for a little while before her training should have started. The fact (and this was what actually gave it away, in the end) that she knew a very obscure fighting style—that would have gone mostly unnoticed if one of the PCs with a slightly different history hadn’t recognized it. All of which, when taken with the other information, was supposed to hint at the idea that she herself, long ago, had had a rather extended run-in with one of said enemies, and that that had colored just about everything else about her characterization.

Part of it showed through. I even had one player who was of the opinion that she had to have been hiding something because she was just too by-the-book and noncorrupt. (Which, given her surroundings, did rather make sense.) But not all of it came together until after the fighting style incident, and even then I had to push a couple of the players to get them to make the connection. (The fact that it’s not something she’d be willing to admit to herself didn’t help matters at all.)

Now, granted, this would have been easier if my players were better at comparing notes, or if I hadn’t had two people leave and another two join while I was trying to establish her, or if people reread their logs every now and then. But I like to think there was at least some “It makes sense in retrospect”, and that’s what matters here.