The Paladin in my group really tries the capture and redeem tactic often and it started with Millnorn.
They managed to KO Millnorn without killing him and tied him up pretty good. He read as evil but the Paladin didn't care mostly because he was clearly insane and "we don't kill the mental invalids." This was the cause of some argument among the group.
They let him talk and since there's no back story. At first I had him blabbering on about how they were trying to steal his bedroll and how he knew they were actually deranged fairies.
After one session of this the Paladin decided to try and fix crazy. I started by having the Paladin roll a sense motive, of course the player rolls a 20. I'm good at crafting story on the fly so I say the dwarf was isolated for a long time and his cloths were tattered remains over 100 years old.
Deciding to push it the Paladin tries diplomacy and another Nat 20 is rolled. He gets the Dwarf to talk and learns the dwarf was captured and tormented by "sexy fairies" (Knowledge Planes check let the Paladin figure out it was actually Succubi.) After long torture they delivered him "back to Torag" where he encountered and fled from the heccuva. The earthquake actually opened this chamber and the dwarf was otherwise sealed in.
With all the good fortune and diplomacy work Millnorn is now CN on his way to CG. He'll always be crazy and perhaps a little on the comic relief side of things. Here's some highlights:
-He used a bluff roll to get some crazy cultists into a good position for a color spray, "Come'ere boyz I got somethin' in me sack for ye."
-Baddie goes invisible, Millnorn yells "Ow we think we're so kewl goin' invisible and stuff. I can do that too whatcha got next," and he cast invisibility.
-Really evil prisoner tied to a chair, Paladin gets distracted by another minion, looks back and Millnorn has coup-de-grased the guy pretty much everyone else in the party wanted dead. As way of explanation, "the other guys startled me an I fell forward with me dagger." Millnorn beat the paladins sense motive with a bluff.
-Millnorn likes to open combat by flinging animal poop at his foes...
I guess the point of this thread other then sharing how fun this NPC can be, is that I'm fairly sure Millnorn is going to survive to the end of the Grey garrison and I'm strongly considering making him mythic. Depending on what they pick and what they do I'm considering giving Millnorn either exposed to awfulness or chance encounter. He is ultimately going to become a rogue as well as wizard into arcane trickster. He has also adopted a skunk (switched his arcane bond) that was running around.
The player enjoy the character a great deal but I'm slightly worried about stepping. They do not have a rogue so I figure moving him off of caster helps with a problem. As players would you be annoyed if you had an npc ally with mythic tiers or would you appreciate your npc sidekick/comic relief had the power to keep up in the adventure?
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A few of my players have taken Leadership, and there were concerns that the cohorts wouldn't be able to keep up. So I came up with this solution:
Make them mythic, but it takes twice as many trials to advance to the enxt tier.
The cohorts should finish the game at around tier 6 or 7 (can't remember calcs precisely), which imo is a good spot for them - plenty of power to keep up, but not as much as the main PCs.
I like that.