I Was The Hero The Mountain Needed
I had a paladin once who always tried to “address the people”.
He was one of the leaders in a group of survivors, gathered together after the elven forces began taking over the continent with an army of elementals. My paladin and the other PCs were more or less the final hope for these people, and we managed to hold up in a mountain on the southern tip of the continent. It was there we made our final stand against the elves.
From time to time my paladin, when not being pestered by the goblin cleric in our party to convert to his religion, would talk to the people. Problem is, I’m a terrible speaker, so most of my “speeches” would be nothing more than repeated ramblings about perseverance in the face of danger, reassurances on reclaimed land, and one botched eulogy for the goblin cleric PC mentioned earlier.
Perhaps the most memorable speech was regarding one of our new party members.
After our first major victory against the elves, we recruited a young boy who literally fell out of the sky at the end of the previous session. This boy was no more than 13 or 14 years old. He was a timid kid who carried a crossbow with him as his primary weapon. Now, the thing about him was that he was possessed by the spirit of his dead mother, who was evil to the core and was prone to taking over her son’s body whenever he was in trouble (or she just wanted to throw down). Our group was aware of this, and we it came time to bring this frightened child into the mountain, we felt it best to let everyone know up front.
During the introduction of the kid to the people, and letting everyone know about his unique situation, someone in the crowd asked: “So…is he evil, or what?”
I looked over to the kid and used Detect Evil. Sighing, I turned back to the crowd.
“All I see is evil”.
After recovering from the laughter the other PCs and I had over that terrible choice of words, I quickly tried to salvaged the situation with something to the accord of “Hey, this spell of mine only detects evil! It doesn’t detect good or like, muffins.”
My group tried to stop me from making too many speeches after that.
