The GM Railroaded the Lawful Good Paladin to Kill the Bard/Cleric HE Tricked Into Aligning With a Chaotic Evil God

Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster and all that. This is a long one, so strap in! Most of us are still playing this game, though there’s definitely some hurt feelings over many things that have happened. All of the names have been changed in this story.

So, our story starts with our chaotic neutral (CN) Bard of Whispers (let’s call her Mary, for the sake of this) asking the GM (Simon) if they’d be cool with a bard/cleric multiclass. Simon agreed, pretty enthusiastically! Mary asked if he would be alright with introducing the Norse pantheon into the game. She wanted to be a war cleric that worshipped Odin, as she had been reading up on Norse mythology and had a cool idea of becoming a Valkyrie of sorts. Again, Simon agreed, so Mary started looking for signs in game that Odin wanted to bring her into the fold.

This is where the nightmare begins.

On one occasion, Mary sees an old man surrounded by grackles while we’re out adventuring, and he speaks to her. If you know of the myth, this is a decent interpretation of Odin. Mary has a couple of dreams where the same old man surrounded by grackles appears and speaks to her there as well. In one of the dreams, the old man requests that she make a sacrifice with alcohol, fire, and a body. At this point, some of you may realize what’s going on, but Mary’s new to D&D and this request doesn’t sound out of place for a Norse god. There were a couple more experienced players with us at the time, including myself, and none of us thought twice about it, either.

We go to the local bar, buy some liquor, make our way out to the desert, run into a creature that then attacks us, and decide that body will be good enough. Mary pours the liquor on the body and sets it ablaze, as per the instructions of the old man.

We play the game for a bit as it takes a while for us to get to the next level, and when Mary levels up, she wakes up with a holy symbol on her chest! A holy symbol depicting black antlers. A holy symbol of the CE god, Beshaba.

Mary’s confused at this point, as Odin typically isn’t depicted by black antlers in most any myth. Beshaba always appeared to her as an old man surrounded by grackles and Beshaba is… well, a young, curvy woman with large breasts and a great ass. Pretty much the polar opposite of what Odin would look like.

There was no way, in game, for Beshaba to have known the specifics of what Mary wanted and it makes no sense for Beshaba to appear to her in this fashion without Simon using his meta knowledge of what Mary wanted to manipulate her into making that decision. Had Beshaba just appeared in her true form, Mary never would have gone for it, so Simon had to actively trick her into it.

My Barbarian character and Mary go to a couple of temples to see if they know anything about the holy symbol, and more or less get ran out of both. Mary makes a donation to a Lawful Good (LG) god, and ends up taking damage because her holy symbol burns her in response.

Now, we all roleplay pretty hard; there’s been times at the table where my character has been upset and I’ve cried, and I’m not the only one. In this instance, our LG paladin, Mike, turned into “that guy”. Once he found out that Mary was tricked into following Beshaba, his first response was “If she’s worshipping an evil god and giving them power, I can’t let that slide. I'll have to kill her. Out of respect for her being my friend, I’ll give her a head start.” Oh boy.

Another player at the table, Samantha, is a really experienced player and GM, and decides to go to the temple of Pelor to beg for him to do something, and she ends up tearing out her fake eye to do so, rendering herself unconscious. Someone then rushes into the temple, stabs Samantha several times while she’s unconscious, and kills her. Due to her backstory and some other convoluted stuff, we end up teleporting to the feywild to get her back.

This is the first time Mike and Mary have seen each other since we found out