My second character (the secretly-a-walking-blasphemy one) has entered the airship campaign. So far the others have no idea what I am, and even their guesses as to what I can do are rather off-base. This is good, as there will be much subterfuge and deception in my future.
Long-term goal recap: Thanks to the meddlings of the wizard Sethos, the Material Plane has been cut off from the rest of the cosmos. This in turn, is causing creator deity Vateo to sicken and, if nothing is done, die. I couldn't give a damn about him personally (my Start of Darkness has given me a hatred of all gods and their devout), but if he dies, he will probably take the cosmos with him, and that puts a far more bitter taste in my mouth. Most everyone else is motivated to save Vateo by the goodness of their hearts, but I suppose the means justify the ends. Doing so requires us to retrieve the three orbs Sethos used to create the planar barrier. I have a nasty feeling that killing Sethos himself would also work and be faster; see below for why this feeling is nasty.
In the meantime, before the party picked me up from the tower where I had been asleep/in stasis for the last 500 years (starting just before Great Cataclysm), I had been researching vestiges (Vestiges are enigmatic beings who exist beyond the gods, and yet are near-powerless. they grant abilities to those who bind them in exchange for being able to re-experience existence vicariously. I make pacts with these vestiges and then cheat them out of their experience in order to enhance the spells I steal from the gods.) and had just discovered a new one by the name of Graz'zt. This piqued my curiosity: as far as I knew, Graz'zt was a powerful demon lord and not at all inconvenienced with vestige-dom. Summoning him up for a conversation before making the usual pact, I learned that he was now in this state due to a curse placed on him by Sethos, and he wanted me to join an expedition to find Sethos in order to convince him to lift the curse on him; in return, I would be given dominion over a layer of the Abyss (naturally, I knew better than to take Graz'zt at face value!). If Sethos could not be convinced to lift the curse voluntarily, killing him would also work.
Naturally, I see Graz'zt's potential freedom as detrimental to my well-being, but beyond that, he is rather more potent than most vestiges accessible to me (nearly all of them) due to the fact that I can conjure any one of three agents of his, all of whom are potent magic-users in their own right. Thus I have two reasons, one more selfish than the other, to keep Graz'zt confined.
Complication #1. If, as I suspect, killing Sethos will lift the planar barrier, the party may well attempt that instead of chasing down three MacGuffins.
Complication #2. If I explain to the party that killing Sethos will free Graz'zt, I risk revealing that I willingly maintain correspondence with a demon lord (as the cherry on the top of my hot fudge sundae of evil and lies).
Complication #3. When I bind Graz'zt, he still gets to experience the world through me, which includes hitching a ride on my senses (though not, most fortunately, my thoughts, which are nigh-impenetrable anyway). Thus, any actions toward ensuring that he never is freed must be undertaken when I do not have an ex-demon lord bound to me, and if I simply neglect him after our first two conversations, I will look very suspicious (sure, he can't do anything about it now, but if my betrayal falls through or is later undone, I will have a very angry Graz'zt coming after me). Fortunately, I have a means of kicking him out in a hurry, should I need to.
In short, while the rest of the party has to save the world, I have to save the world without letting the man responsible die, without alerting one of my greatest sources of power to the fact that I intend to stab it in the back, and without altering the party to the facts that I correspond with a demon lord, steal godly power on a regular basis, and am undead.
I will deceive the party while simultaneously assisting them, betray a demon lord while simultaneously exploiting him, and save a would-be deicide while simultaneously thwarting him, all on top of my daily routine of cheating half the individuals from whom I derive power and stealing my power outright from the other half, or I will die trying.
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