(Spoilers for Paizo’s Carrion Crown adventure path, The Outsiders, and The Heart of Snow)
By this point I’ve played five major PCs (Player Characters) in our Pathfinder campaigns, and I’ve run/am running two of them, A Very Muppet Gigantomachy and The Ass of Ages. Steve and I’ve also played some non-Pathfinder stuff (Fiasco, Fate, etc.), so I’ve been regularly playing something since 2016. I feel very comfortable when it comes to the roleplay element of D&D. And outside of maybe one character in The Ass of Ages who took a few sessions to fully click, I’ve never really struggled to find a character’s voice, hero or villain.
Except for Santino Clifford.
Santino is my main PC for The Outsiders, our campaign using Paizo’s Carrion Crown adventure path. Taking place in the spooky, southern gothic-themed town of Ravengro, the adventure path follows the character as they try to solve the death of Professor Petrus Lorimor. A scientist of the occult who may have dabbled into thing too dark and disturbing to control…
It’s an adventure path that Steve had been wanting to run for a very long time, even before he and I met. The rest of us (Szo, Poldaran, and I) were given the go-ahead to make whatever kind of characters we wanted, though Steve recommended we lean towards the horror theme. Since by that point we’d only ever played The Heart of Snow, and I still didn’t know Pathfinder very well (both in terms of the mechanics and the lore) Poldaran offered to help me.
Some quick info on our group. Unless there’s a character concept or class that one player really wants to play, we usually approach things class-first. Think of it like building a magical sports team. You’ve got frontliners or tanks. Healers. Long-range damage dealers. Usually it’s first come first serve, with the rest of the players reacting to the first PC locked in. If I go tank, then Poldaran could go healer or damage dealer, with Szo and Steve then reacting to his decisions and looking at what this team would need to function and survive. Though Szo does sometimes throw this system out the window and makes ridiculous characters for shits and giggles, but that’s neither here nor there.
Going into character creation, I only knew one thing: I wanted to be the opposite of Terry Guiser, my very first PC. A rogue gunslinger, Terry is supposed to stay in the back and shoot everything dead. Simple. Eventually he got robots and bombs, but he’s never going to be a frontliner. As a result, I wanted my next character to be in the thick of battle. Someone-or something-who can take a hit.
As a character, Terry’s not overly complex, but his situation at the beginning of The Heart of Snow is. An adult mercenary trapped in the body of his preteen daughter, Emily, by a psychic dragon, Terry is narratively built around that one big secret and the drive to revive his daughter. That’s the only aspect where he and Santino are similar. Both characters are built around a secret, but we’ll get there.
So, one early morning, Poldaran and I get breakfast at a local Mexican place. I’d already told him that I wanted to play a melee-oriented character. My first pitch was, “How about a dog with a kid partner, who’s blind.” The dog would have been the PC, but because of how I phrased it, Poldaran thought I wanted it to be the blind kid. Having a blind PC would have been a pain, but he liked the dog concept. I decided to keep the dog and ditch the kid. This was going to be a horror campaign. I’ve always really liked werewolves, but I didn’t want play one straight (bitten, changes during a full moon, etc.) so what if I was a man who was experimented on and turned into a dog, not unlike the most depressing character in Fullmetal Alchemist.
OR he’s a dog turned into a man! And over the course of the story, he starts to devolve!
Poldaran took this one step further by saying, “What if he’s a devil, and the dog was turned into a host.”
Mind you, this breakfast happened back in 2017ish, so I can’t recall the exact details, but I do remember practically shouting, “That’s awesome! Let’s go with that!”
Now a couple of things about 2017-Barnaby. By this point I’ve only been playing D&D, specifically Pathfinder, for a little over a year. As far as Pathfinder lore pertaining to the magic, gods, and monsters go, I’m an elementary schooler while the guys are all in college. Part of Terry’s schtick was that he didn’t care about gods or magic, at least initially. And if he didn’t care, that means I didn’t have to, so there was little reason for me to do my homework.
As a result, all of the problems that follow originate from one simple fact: 2017-Barnaby doesn’t know the difference between a devil and a demon as written in Pathfinder lore.
In Pathfinder, devils are lawful evil. Think sadistic, but ironically fair businessmen. They make deals and, more often then not, they’ll honor the deal. They want repeat customers, and you can’t have that if you keep screwing over your customers. Bad for business. Some are bigger pricks than other, but the majority of devils operate on hard logic.
Demons don’t. There are definitely smart-even brilliant-demons, but every single one is driven by violent, sadistic id. Some are chaos incarnate, and deals made with them nearly always end badly.
That’s what I thought Santino was going to be. A sadistic, id-driven monster. The dog man from Hell. While Terry had been the definition of a murder hobo (before I knew what the term meant) I decided early on that I wanted Santino to be a villain. One motivated by lust and power, doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted just because he could.
Hell! His very first scene is him with a carboard box full of BABIES he’s just giving away because he got bored being their foster father! And then he abandons them to go off on an adventure!
When Poldaran uploaded this chapter up on Paizo this scene was-and maybe still is-the most commented scene across all of our adventure journals. People really wanted to know what happened to them babies.
But back to Santino, let’s get into the overall schtick that Steve and I decided on. In this adventure path it’s recommended that all PCs have some kind of connection to the late Petrus. In-universe, Petrus is a creepy dude. I latched onto him being a dabbler of the occult, on being a scientist specializing in most things monstrous. So, thanks to me Petrus went from a well-meaning, if creepy old guy, to a Frankenstein-esque mad scientist determined to create an army of supernatural soldiers to fight evil. He’s doing it by binding metaphysical creatures like devils, angels, or psychopomps into living hosts.
His daughter, Kendra’s, puppy, Jimminy, is one such host. Petrus bound a high-ranking devil to it, and it mutated into a man with the mannerisms of a dog and the hellish magic of a devil. Raised alongside Kendra as her foster brother, a heated argument with Petrus caused the hybrid, Santino, to leave town and wander the world for a decade or two. He only returns because his foster father is dead and to find the “heart” of Santino’s power Petrus had hidden somewhere in town.
Now, this is where the misalignment between Santino and I first showed its confused head. If you go back and reread some of the first The Outsiders chapters, Santino acts like he knows he’s a devil. He knows that most of his power has been locked away, and he needs the “heart” to unlock them. He acts like he knows exactly what Petrus did to him, and that he’s aware of his original identity as a devil.
(Something that I definitely didn’t know then.)
I played up the “bad boy who knows he’s bad, no fucks given, will sleep with anything with two legs” angle to the hilt. I was bad. I was eeeeeeeeeeviiiiiiiil.
And I was not having fun.
Me saying “Santino sucks” became a regular thing, much to the guys’ amusement. I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t having fun at all. Steve was doing a great job running the campaign. I was enjoying the story, basically being in a horror movie. Santino wasn’t a mechanically complex character, so I wasn’t struggling there. It’s either attack with a sword, claws, or teeth, or slow them down with magic. That and soak up damage that would kill another party member. So, mechanically, I was having fun playing the game.
Unlike The Heart of Snow, where Terry became fully fleshed out person, Santino was just a video game character. From levels 1 to 3 I’d hop in, kill monsters, get into trouble, and try to sleep with everyone. It was Grand Theft Auto: Ravengro, especially once I found my “heart” in the local graveyard and unlocked my magic. I (as both Barnaby and Santino) became aimless. I was throwing everything at the wall, hoping something would stick. This all culminated in the Burning Man Incident.
At the start of the second book of Carrion Crown, the party travels with a travelling circus to the city of Lepidstadt . There the populace is buzzing with excitement. Turns out that a monster nicknamed the Beast has been going around causing trouble, killing people, breaking into places. He’s been caught and is about to be put on trial. Once he’s found guilty, he’ll be placed inside the Burning Man. It’s a giant, man-shaped cage made up of flammable wood. The city folk are still in the process of finishing it up.
I hear Steve’s description and, as Santino, say, “Needs a dick.” Then, before anybody can stop me, I grab a big plank of wood and start climbing up the Burning Man.
THEN, before Poldaran, Szo, or Steve, can do anything, I think, To hell with it, now’s a good time, and describe Santino climbing up instead to the Burning Man’s head. He changes with a blast of hellfire that sets the Burning Man ablaze, leaving Santino as a monstrous mastiff-man howling at the moon as everyone, PCs included, look on in horror.
And that’s where the game session ended.
Poldaran was looking at me in horror, Szo was giggling, and Steve was exasperated. He pulled me aside after that and told me that, unless I came up with something, my chances of survival wasn’t looking good. If things kept going the way they were going, he wasn’t holding back. And if worst came to worst, we’d talk about me coming up with a new character. The party was in a new town, so it’d make sense for my new PC to live there or be there to investigate the Beast’s trial. He reassured me that neither he nor the guys were mad, more amused than anything, and they’d roll with whatever I wanted to do.
So I went home that night and thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to kill Santino. I became the D&D version of that farmer with the shotgun gazing down at his rabid dog. Just aim and shoot…
But you know who else likes to shoot a gun?
Terry.
I took a step back and asked, “Why did Terry work?”
And I realized that he worked because he had goals. He wanted to revive his daughter.
And he wanted to get revenge on the dragon who destroyed his family.
An enemy. He had an enemy to strive towards defeating. Even when The Heart of Snow’s party finally got Emily back and created a new body for Terry to use, Typhon (the dragon) was still out there.
With all that in mind, I took another look at my rabid devil dog and went to work on making the anti-Santino. I broke him down into little pieces and looked back across all the lore we’d already established in the story. Petrus had made him using Kendra’s dog. What if there were others? Other experiments. Other animals combined with supernatural creatures. And what if one of these creatures was actually on the side of the angels? Literally.
I ran the character I’d drafted up past Steve. Anti-Santino turned out to be an angelic/rabbit woman named Husk. Petrus had made her before Santino. While Santino claws, she kicks. While he’ll never shut up, she’s as stoic as a statue. Steve was all for Petrus having made more hybrids, but he initially thought Husk was going to be my new PC.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m sticking with Santino. I’ve got plans for him.”
But that plan required a hug retcon. I’d decided that Santino didn’t know he was a devil. He knew that he was adopted, that he had infernal power coursing through his veins, but that was about it. So when he’s up on the burning man, tearing his flesh off, regressing into a dog man, he’s just as confused and frightened as everyone else. And then (after getting his butt kicked by Husk) he gets trapped in his dog form, hell knights start showing up, looking for him, trying release their master and…Well, read The Outsiders to see what happens next.
Is Santino a pain in the ass? He can be. But now, with Husk out there and him trying to find out who his true self was, dog boy has purpose.
Also, I’m now a giant mastiff who can attack with fire, barbed chains, and will probably grow giant devil wings soon.
And that’s dope as hell!
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