Hello everyone. A few months back I turned to the community for help making a paladin of Ragathiel. And it has been one hell of a ride in my campaign, and I wanted to share my trials and tribulations.
Note: My DM is great, but he take the source material as a starting point and moves from there. So our world is VERY different now from general Golarion. We all love it so please keep hate on new story elements to a min. And I wanted to get the communities thoughts on my most recent decision.
So the story so far.
Our group are all members of the Mendevian Crusade and were gathering resources to bring to the crusade in an area South of Ustalav. And as campaigns go things have gotten crazy.
Things that have happened:
The order of the crimson templar was found to be guilty of upsetting order and civilization by Abadar and have been purged (think Jedi in Star Wars). This has force my character into hiding as he tries to get vengeance for his order.
A cult of people worshipping "Shelyn" has taken to killing former Crimson templar to "protect beauty". We first met them after murdering an entire village of worshipers. As a paladin of vengeance I swore to bring them all to justice.
We catch up with the group as they took a castle town over. We sneaked in, rescued the former Countess. How this went down was amazing. We killed a guard dressed me up, and went to the castle where the Countess was being held. With the help of 2 natural 20's on deception (Yeah I'm the new guard for the countess, just sent to relieve you)I successfully got alone into her room and convinced the guards they had to go stop a prison breakout in the dungeon my comrades were causing.
But to the main point. I had personally vowed to kill the cults leader, so I hunted him down. Big boss fight later I reliee him of his head, and the cult members find themselves cut off from their patron (who we dont know) and shunned by the former god Shelyn.
We round up the survivors, and the Countess in gratitude asks me to pass judgement on the cultists. They seemed relatively benign now, no magic powers and lifted from the illusion that made them do such evil s!+%. And while their cult had done horribly stuff I had no proof of these specific cultists crimes.
But I tried to role play the paladin of vengeance, figuring leaving them without punishment was completely unwarranted. So I enacted decimation, killing every tenth cultist to punish the group, but randomly and dispassionately. Those that survived would be sent to Mendev to fight for the cause.
What do you guys think? Did I go to far, not far enough, or hit the sweet spot?
They were betrayed by an illusion and you randomly kill them, and you don't even know if they are guilty. Sounds like super chaotic evil to me.
Sorry for this answer, but you asked for it.
So the DM described it as the main leader was really persuasive, so illusion was probably not the best word for it in a world with actual magic. These people were really just convinced by him and his patron that he spoke for Shelyn.
And we know these people took over a city and massacred civilians and guards in the city. But it is true I dont know how many each surviving cultist has killed.
You might be right, at the time it felt right.