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I was in a campaign some years back that involved time travel in its later half. Early in the campaign, before time travel became known to us, one of our first big triumphs was to collect a bounty by killing an old war criminal that had escaped justice. He was a guy called the Butcher of Bracken Ridge who had ordered his troops to massacre thousands of prisoners of war rather than let them go.
Much later on in the campaign we discovered time travel and in one of our flubbed attempts at a targeted hop we wound up in the vicinity of Bracken Ridge, the day before the atrocity was supposed to occur. The way time travel worked you could go into the past and participate in the things going on but if you changed history in a way that interfered with your own personal timeline bad things would happen.
So my character used Disguise Self to disguise herself as the Butcher of Bracken Ridge, went to the PoW camp a day early, and ordered half of the PoWs to be massacred. The other half escaped in the confusion. The next day the "real" Butcher of Bracken Ridge arrived to find the camp deserted and that he was now a wanted war criminal.
It was kind of messed up. I was able to save half the PoW's lives without screwing up the timeline, which was nice, but I also was responsible for massacring half of them. And also, it meant that the old war criminal we'd killed earlier in the campaign was innocent.
I think on the balance it was a good use of disguise self. But really makes you wonder.
We don't even know if the Butcher even intended to kill any of the prisoners!
It's a typical sci-fi "pre-crime" morality puzzle. In this case we know that he would have killed those prisoners, if he had been given the opportunity. He probably was going to that PoW camp with the intent to do so, there wasn't any other reason for him to go there. But as it turns out he never had the opportunity, when he got there the camp was empty. So we're left consoling ourselves that "attempted mass murder" is probably still worthy of us killing him in the end.
The morality puzzle sort of got eclipsed even later in the campaign when it turned out this was merely a dry run for a bigger version. One of the "big bads" of the campaign was a 1500-year-old immortal naga who had ruled an evil empire that whole time (the Butcher of Bracken Ridge had been in her military). She was an immortal naga because 1500 years ago she'd used a powerful wish-granting artifact to turn herself into one, making herself completely unkillable. The way we ultimately defeated her was to travel 1500 years into the past to right before she made that wish and assassinate her then when she was still a mortal human.
Then my character took the artifact and made the wish instead, becoming the Serpent Queen. The rest of the party time-travelled back to the present, and my character took the "long way around" by living through history and making all the same choices the original Serpent Queen had made. Once she got back to the present and met back up with the rest of the party she rejoined them, bringing the resources of the entire Empire of Endless Flowers along at her command. It was the most efficient way we've ever defeated a boss monster - it turned out she'd been secretly a party member the whole time.
But disguise self played a much smaller role in that particular gambit.
So your character spent 1,500 as an immortal Serpent Queen making all the same decisions (including, I presume, some pretty horrendous ones) and they were just happy to change back to their original form?
Nah, she kept the immortal serpent body. And the Empire. She did what she could throughout history to "tweak" it into a less evil empire without making it seem less evil, and then once she reached the "present" she was fully free to get down to fixing its social ills much more fully. And it was very useful having an empire's resources to help us deal with the other big bads, especially the omnicidal faction that was trying to destroy reality altogether.
It's fortunate that throughout the whole campaign my character kept facing challenges to her fanatical devotion to her personal philosophy and coming through them more confident and grounded in it than ever. That preparation allowed her to remain steadfast to her goal throughout those 1500 years.
Oh, she did occasionally use a variant of disguise self to pass as her original pre-Serpent Queen self from time to time after that, to stay on the thread's topic. But as I recall we had to houserule it a bit because I don't think disguise self can normally make a size-large serpent look like a size-medium humanoid.
we know that he would have killed those prisoners, if he had been given the opportunity
No we don't, all that we can guess is...
He probably was going to that PoW camp with the intent to do so
Yes, we do. We have time travel and came from a timeline where he had indeed done exactly that, and the point of divergence we introduced came only a very short time before he would have done that.
It's like if someone has a gun that they think is loaded, and they go put it to someone's head and pull the trigger. The fact that it was not actually loaded doesn't absolve him.
I see, didn't realize you were the original commenter in the campaign, I thought this was someones speculation.
Just go back again as the guards and fake the deaths of half of the POWs you slaughter
Then go back as the Butcher and pretend you've been killed by the party! You're much higher level now, you can take and fake a beating
Wait, I feel like I've seen something like this in an anime before
By the end of the campaign several of the major characters we'd met along the way turned out to be my character in disguise. One of the factions we were fighting with also had access to time travel and they didn't care about the integrity of the timestream (they were trying to destroy existence entirely) so they'd go back in time and try to interfere with our history to erase us by killing important questgivers and whatnot. I'd have to go back in time and impersonate them, giving ourselves those quests to ensure that our history continued playing out as it always had.
I was the party member with the best deception skill so I was the designated historical figure stand-in of the party.
Damn!! it's stories like this why I always click on these threads even though I don't play.
And this is why the dnd movie was so great, it took stories like this and wove them in to the main story, sometimes it contributed to the momentemum and sometimes it was just this like... dumb thing that accomplished nothing! I loved that! Damn I am ready for that to be our "next cinematic universe" and take a break from super heros. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy those too and usually it's always at least a good time. I think audiences need the break though and a good cliffhanger with intrigue along with it.
Oh yeah sorry I can ramble. Thanks for your story I really enjoyed it!
This is why you need Time Cops, to prevent the time FaceDeer murdered a bunch of POWs and framed the guy coming to release them.