DM changed my character and made him evil without my permission
Hi! I had a previous post (link) where I mentioned this D&D campaign in a couple of replies, and I thought it would be interesting to tell this story, too. This one takes place before the previous post, and happens when we were in high school together. It is the same DM and the same players.
There is a TL;DR at the bottom. :)
This is the story:
Our DM is the only guy in our friend group, and all of the players, including me, are girls. We were about to start a campaign, and the DM tells us to create a character and lets us have any magic item. He didn’t care about how good it was or what it did, and even allowed the players to make custom magic items.
I created my first male character: a blue dragonborn cleric, Zenith, strongly based on a character I was obsessed with at the time. I admittedly did not play the personality of this character well, but it was because I didn't prepare, and because the inspiration character was a lot more extroverted than I was comfortable with at the time. In Zenith’s backstory, he had two very close dragonborn friends that they grew up with, one of which was a wizard who was studying in a library in the astral plane. The other was a blacksmith that lived with Zenith. The 3 of them had known each other for about 20 years. The magical item I gave Zenith was a necklace that allowed him to communicate with his friend in the astral plane, while also allowing him to summon a few small ghostly fiend creatures that would attack enemies for him. It was a gift the wizard friend had given both Zenith and the blacksmith while they were away. It thought it was a good magic item that had pretty reasonable abilities, and the DM accepted it. The backstory characters were only going to establish why the character has this magic item and to make this character very similar to his inspiration. At least, that's what I planned.
The campaign starts, revealing that the only reason the DM gave us any magic item was because he was going to take it away right at the start to get the characters all in the same place. It was a good idea. For all of the players, there was a clue left behind that would point them towards the city we had to be at. For Zenith, however, there was more than just a little thievery. The DM decided to fake-kill the blacksmith friend (which I figured out when a spell didn’t work) and kidnap them. I guess it was more incentive, but I felt it was a little much, especially because none of the other players got something like that. Now, Zenith's motive was a lot different from the other characters.
Anyways, the party gets to the city, and classic D&D shenanigans ensue with lore and basements and taverns and some classic fun. Then, the party meets the Big Bad, a demon who runs a cult, and who also was the culprit that stole our magic items (and Zenith's best friend). The Demon was very upfront about stealing our stuff, and even treated us to some food and a meeting, where he told us something along the lines of “I distributed all of these magic items with other Lords and Ladies of the city, so you'll have to go to all of them.”
This Demon Lord had Zenith’s item and, as I had found out through some snooping, both the blacksmith and wizard friend. He knew that Zenith had found out about him kidnapping the friends and allowed Zenith to speak with them. But the DM played them very out-of-character. They were cagey and wouldn’t tell Zenith anything. I get that maybe the DM just didn't know these characters, but he could have asked me a little about their personalities, and maybe considered that best friends of more than 20 years would act differently.
After learning about the Demon Lord's cult/religion, which was actually pretty reasonable and less “evil” than what it had seemed. Zenith, being a cleric and wanting to do anything to save his friends, offered to join the Demon Lord's religion if it meant that his friends would be released. The Demon Lord was actually a reasonable guy (and bound to his word, I believe), and agreed, on terms that Zenith had to rise in the ranks of the religion and perform certain tasks. It was a fair deal.
Changing religions, however, meant that Zenith had forsaken his former religion and chose a more “evil” one, so the DM gave him the death domain from the DM's guide. It was pretty cool, and a show of how my character cares more about these friends than anything else. Eventually, Zenith was able to free his friends, but they, for some reason, hated him? Which was definitely not making sense, or how these characters would act.
Then, the bad stuff happened. Zenith, sometime in the midpoint of the campaign, suddenly was overtaken by the ancestry of his mother, a black and purple evil dragon and became evil and had to fight the party. The DM and I had never talked about this. I didn't know that my character had this mother. I didn't know that I was going to randomly be evil. And I didn't want to fight the party.
When this was revealed, I was just as surprised as everyone else, and I even straight up told my DM right then that I did not want to be evil and fight the party. He told me that he could play my character instead, but I thought that would be worse and even less fun. The session was ending right there, however, so I had until the next session to think about it. I was pretty salty at the start of the next session, but I was a pretty big people pleaser back then, so I still went along with being a villain, and played Zenith myself.
I ended up damaging the party a lot, and I couldn't tell if just the party hated Zenith, or if the players hated me too. My character ended up being defeated, and the “magic of his mother” or something was removed from him and sealed in a bottle, which made Zenith not evil again.
The campaign continued, but the party didn't really trust Zenith anymore, and the players kept bringing up how I attacked them, more focused on the fact that I did it instead of the fact that it was out of my control in both cases. I didn't like it, but I continued the campaign with the other players, and ended up finishing it as intended. Zenith got a cleric domain centered around friendship, and the other players got new custom subclasses. The rest of the plot of the campaign was cool, but that surprise evil arc bothered me the whole time.
A few other weird stuff happened with my characters afterwards, but it was just more of the DM playing Zenith's friends weirdly.
I wouldn't call this one worse than the Aegis situation, but it was definitely a red flag that I should have noticed and acted on sooner.
TL;DR
The DM traumatizes my character, kidnaps backstory NPCs and plays them wrong, then gives my character another backstory, turns them evil, and forces them to fight the party, all without talking to me about it before it happened.
A few clarifications:
Yes, I am still playing with this DM. I am in the middle of a campaign right now, but once it ends, I will not be joining another one DMed by him.
The reason that I have tolerated this for so long is because he is my close friend, the players are all my close friends, and also I have been a pretty bad pushover (until recently). We were very young, and still are, so we didn’t really know how to deal with all of this.
Despite the weird DM stuff, I want to end on good terms, and have a good time with the players (who are closer to me than the DM) before we part ways.