I'll swallow your soul!

The evil campaign had its first session today. The rest of the party was imprisoned on Carceri (and I had been there for several years but only just escaped captivity) for various crimes back on Earth (ranging from killing an orphanage to causing an entire island to die via drug addiction and overdose), but they were otherwise given relative freedom to wander the plane. Their first thought: find a way off! They found one of the long-term inhabitants and press-ganged him into serving as a guide. On the way to one of the few cities around, they noticed a group of mutated, long-legged humanoids approaching from a distance (these were abyssal ghouls, with me following them). The "ranger" fired a pair of arrows at the one with slightly different skin coloration. That was me. Since I wanted to help Mommy (the elf child beguiler), who was in the party, I promptly went into stealth mode, as did the ghouls. We eventually closed on the party, and combat ensued. The warlock's ooze companion killed several ghouls, the beguiler turned another against it companions, I slashed at one of the ghouls rather ineffectively (my powers are only very effective against the living) while screaming, "DON'T HURT MOMMY!", the warlord and druid teamed up to do a lot of smashing and slashing of undead, and the "ranger" used some hideously powered-up arrows to kill the big ghoul instantly.

Aside: I should probably explain my backstory. Eight years ago I was kidnapped by a few of the fiends who live on this plane as a test subject to see how much stress and alteration a mortal's essence could undergo without becomeing something fundamentally different (or dying). These experiments ultimately gave me my soul-eating powers as well as a strong affinity for shadow, but they also gave me massive amounts of brain damage. I escaped from the lab and wandered the plane for some time. Just before the campaign started I saw the others being escorted to prison and, in my insane, brain-damaged state, imprinted to a slavish degree on the elf (hence the whole Mommy thing).

Anyhoo. Battle over. During the fight, the "ranger" had read my thoughts and gotten a good sense of me in general. Sensing that I was not immediately hostile, he took me aside and (we started at a rather high level) cast a spell to heal my insanity and put a circlet on me to counteract the mental retardation. In-character reaction: "Gods below, THANK YOU." Out-of-character reaction: "So much for how I was planning to roleplay him." (Interestingly, due to how I wrote up my backstory I am now the least evil of the party by a significant margin.) The other said they were looking for a way off the plane. I did too (eight year of cross-planar torture is no fun), so I joined them. When we reached the city, we found it totally deserted, with the exception of two people. The first was an old man who in formed us that if were wanted off, the mayor of the city (his employer: he was tasked with watching over the city in general) would be the best person to talk to. The second was the mayor himself, who happened to be a very powerful barbarian. He told us of a wizard who lived on the plane, would be our best bet for getting off-plane, and was not a nice person to deal with at all. Before we left, the elf, wanting a lackey now that my loyalty was skewed toward the "ranger," hit the mayor with a dominate person and used several class abilities to make it even harder to resist. The mayor's save? Natural 20. The elf tried a few more spells but was thwarted by consistently high rolls.

Aside #2. When we had a moment, the "ranger" took me aside and explained a few things: he was not a ranger in the service of Her Elven Majesty, he was a part-doppelganger with a very well-established base on the Astral Plane (in fact, the one in the party was a magical duplicate of him; the real guy was at his base), and he was working to prevent an elder evil called The Not from reaching and devouring our world. I could work with/for him and be compensated nicely, or I could say "no" and remain in the party with a few mental modifications. My response: "How could I refuse?"

Also, the DMs were pleased that we were not all trying to kill each other yet.

On a non-D&D-related note, I just saw Serenity.