Advice with campaign; session had a pvp moment and left players unhappy
Hey guys, our Pathfinder campaign has hit of bit of a conundrum, and I was wondering if some outside opinions might help with some solutions. This campaign is over 2 years old now, so there will be a bit of explaining:
So, we are running a 5 player Pathfinder campaign. The overall narrative is that it is a sort of Witcher/Darkwood setting. A kind of survival horror-esc campaign where our characters have been mysteriously teleported to a land named Drustvar, a land recently cursed to be swallowed by the forest, where at night creepy Slavic-themed monsters come out and hunt people down. We are trapped in a village named Waycrest, and have to work with the people of the village to fend off this threat. Large factors of going into the campaign was moral grey-ness; the weight of choices and having to make shitty decisions.
For the most part the campaign has been fun and generally quite wacky, though there has been clashes now and then. The characters each player controls are:
Jaeger, a human fighter that lived in the forest. Primary goal is to keep Waycrest safe. Also, was secretly a werewolf.
Jonathan, a human Alchemist toxicologist, my own character. A psychopath who essentially is very focused on a 'means to an end' and loves to experiment on living things.
Seisen, a kobold cleric/necromancer. Has a powerful Necrodrake for a father that she is in frequent contact with. Sort of a bratty nepobaby who’s primary goal is to please her father, who is evil. She also wishes for necromancer and undead to be equals with the living.
King Rat, an Ysoki Summoner. Lived in the sewers of a city before recent events. Is a anxiety-driven morally grey survivalist.
Luka, a monster hunter. Wishes to save his wife from a curse that turned her into a doll, easygoing and generally morally good.
It’s quite a colourful collection of characters.
Long-term the campaign has been quite fun. There have been conundrums particularly with Seisen, where due to her father situation and the players generally assertiveness the story gets focused quite a bit on her at times. But this also means that her character come at odds a lot with our characters, particularly Jaeger. This is worth mentioning for later.
Eventually we decide that Waycrest is no longer sustainable, so we go to a city in the land named Novosk, gambling that if it is still alive, we can move everyone there. We split the villagers into a large group, and our own party into another, trusting that we could distract the monsters in our journey to keep the villagers safe in theirs. We make it to Novosk, which is still safe and flourishing. This starts some of the first issues of the campaign, as obviously a flourishing city is quite a tonal shift of our initial survival-horror theme. The other, larger issue, is that the GM has the governor reluctant to help us get the Waycrest villagers to safety unless we did errands for him, such as hunting down a vampire which took multiple sessions. This caused frustration, particularly with the Jaeger player, as obviously his goal is to get Waycrest to safety and we currently don’t know how they are faring in the forest.
The vampire hunt caused the first conflict. We finally found the vampire in the sewers, and the vampire knew Seisen’s father, and asked for her help. Seisen, seeing undead as equals and is naive herself, agreed and helped him escape. This caused frustration in both the characters and the party, particularly the player for Jaeger. Jaeger’s own goals have been further delayed, and he feels frustrated with Seisen’s character in general and doesn’t really like her. Whilst I understand the frustration I don’t think he dealt with it in a very good way, half-venting it as his character in front of Seisen, which made the Seisen player feel picked on and upset, as whilst she understands the Jaeger players frustration, this still feels like something Seisen would do.
Several sessions later, we have reached the main issue. We had to cross into a desolated part of the city that had been closed off, now haunted with monsters. A powerful druid was sent there by the governor and she has the power to help us with Waycrest, so we went there to help.
In an unlucky encounter, King Rat is killed on our journey from an unfortunate triple crit. The party presses on, and King Rat and the gm plan to revive him, which he eventually is after we find the druid, but under a shady deal with a mysterious entity according to the druid, and King Rat himself withholds.
Eventually the druid and her party say that she will help if we aid her in killing the enemy leader of the desolated land, a being called The Sovereign. We agree and follow her to a Cathedral, fighting enemies on the way. The druid cannot make it any further however as there is a hex that the Sovereign has woven that prevents her, so we keep going. This is basically where things fall apart.
We make it into the Cathedral and meet the Sovereign. She has several minions, but is not initially hostile. She is convinced that we will help her instead to kill the druid, and offers us a shop for morphs that Jonathan and Seisen are invested in. King Rat also secretly reveals that he is in league with the Sovereign as she revived him and has his life tied to hers.
Luka and Jaeger are convinced that the parties’ alignments are no longer secure, so leave the cathedral to discuss the situation with the druid. They and the druids party agree to help attack the Sovereign, and by killing her the druid can help out, choosing to gamble on who’s side the other three players take. They return to the cathedral, and the Sovereign asks if they have killed the druid, implyingly holding Jonathan hostage. Jaeger says no, the fight starts, and the session ends.
The gm basically says, next session will be a pvp session, and players are very likely, if not certain to die, and whoever won determined if the party would stay good or become evil. This was a surprise to most, but ultimately people felt optimistic, though anxious. Most agreed not to resort to killing other PC’s no matter the outcome. Ultimately though, I don’t think we had a lot of time to realise how bad this could be as due to a player being unavailable next week it was decided to start the next session the very next day instead.
The fight was pretty much a disaster. King Rat and Seisen took the bad side, whilst Luka and Jaeger took the good side. Jonathan stood on the sidelines before deciding to help the good side. Luka suffered a crit fail and was charmed, taking him out of the fight where he was eventually downed. Jaeger made a last attempt, and blew himself up with the Sovereign, potentially killing them both in a massive dramatic sacrifice. However, Seisen nonchalantly resurrected the Sovereign immediately after. Jonathan went to help Luka, and King Rat attacked him with an aoe, which ended up downing Jonathan and accidentally killing Luka, as he wasn’t paying attention to the death saves.
With that, the session largely ended. Jonathan and Jaeger were downed, Jaeger near death, but both barely saved by Seisen and King Rat, and Luka is dead. The evil side had won, and we would be shifting to a more evil route.
This of course did not go well. The ‘good side’, including me, were very unhappy with how things came out, and felt that if we went this direction we would be completely unable to play our characters. Jaeger and Luka were both ‘good’ characters and turning ‘evil’ betrays their entire character, purpose, and their own motives and secret plots. Luka is of course dead as well which added to the complication, and my own character, Jonathan, whilst was evil himself and a psychopath, part of the fun of him was that he was aligned with good and was forced to ‘behave’. Seisen’s player was pretty adamant that this was a good idea, whilst King Rat’s player was easygoing either way.
Eventually this caused a lot of argument on where the campaign should go. Especially because it was largely decided by a fight that we thought was just another ‘monster of the week’ scenario, and not something that would actually fracture the party like this. Eventually to give more context the GM reveal that there were long-term plans if evil won, that the Seisen player was unsatisfied with how things were and wanted to take an evil route, so the gm planned this out to satisfy it. He also assured us that taking the ‘evil route’ would not mean we betrayed our characters; he revealed that there were plans for Seisen to usurp the weakened Sovereign and create a faction that would likely help us. This calmed the situation down a bit and now I am not opposed to it, though Jaegers player is still unhappy and does not feel Jaeger would agree to this, as well as the fact the betrayal means Jaeger would hate everyone in the party. Luka’s player is unhappy that he died in such an accidental fashion, but if that is answered he is fine with either way.
Jaeger and Seisen’s player have been arguing a lot over it. Seisen assures that whilst she wants to go evil, she won’t be some wild murderhobo and there is plenty of nuance to it. It’s clear that this frustration has also been built up over time, and ultimately, I want everyone to be satisfied with whatever comes out; even if this ‘twist’ was poorly handled, it was created because Seisen’s player was unhappy with how things were going.
So now we are deciding if we are to go through with this, retcon (soft or hard) the whole thing and start again, or to trust the GM, who is still confident he can handle this, and keep going despite the complexities it has caused.
A lot to say, but would anyone have any advice on what might be the best way to push on from this to make everyone happy?
