#anyway i love the setting so much and Mashall Kidd is my favorite character ive ever written hands down.

[arengnera]

@oz-gauze oooooh boy. Okay so

Tl;dr: they're exes because of the worst botched hiest/ghosting breakup and even though they both need closure they need such fundamentally different forms of it that nothing could ever repair anything they had.

Unskippable cut scene under the break

Let's start with Marshall Kidd. He's a kitsune outlaw in the main stretch of my campaign. (imagine a western set on a huge super structure which was left desolate by an apocalypse and only recently breached by human life again. Space western but steampunk level tech.)

This man is reserved and enigmatic and desperate. He runs the largest gang on The Ring and is the main force of structure in the desert. His main racket is getting protection money and supplies out of homesteaders in exchange for protection from other gangs and roaming monsters, and absolutely brutalizing the crown guard (fantasy British empire) any time they step out of civilization.

The players soon come to figure out that he's got a bit of a curse situation. Well get back to this later but the main thing to know is that he cannot make a promise without immediate and painful consequences if he breaks it. (This curse but with some more damage and spice suited to his level). It also becomes apperent that he's holding this gang together because of a promise he's already made.

This promise isn't nessicarily important to this story, but it is to the only other person who knows about his curse. A much worse outlaw who's been using it as leverage to make Kidd do what he wants. His name is Reeves his whole deal isn't that important just remember that we hate him.

From this it becomes increasingly obvious that Kidd is where he's at because he's a coward who can't stick to his word. He is sure that as soon as Reeves returns to the material plane he's a dead man no matter how the cards fall. Another important quirk they learn is that he's a deeply religious man. He's a sorcerer from a divine bloodline, and follows two gods, Pharasma (our lady of graves), and Daikitsu (the matron God of kitsune). As such he's deeply committed to putting every person he kills to proper rest, and purging the undead when he can. To the point where he carries a shovel with him everywhere he goes. He also has 0 tolerance for anyone who destroys or defaces farmland.

The players get an npc friend to find a few leads on who Kidd could have been before he became an outlaw, as the Ring has only been accessible for 20 years, and he is far older than that.

Okay put a pin in all of that because it's time to talk about Ford Darkstone.

At this point in the campaign, the players are forced to leave The Ring and take the space train to a little O'Neil cylinder about twice the size of New York city which houses 99% of this star system's population. Gremtol, it's a packed industrial cluster fuck ran by a monarchy (that only now really wants a piece of the ring now that people trying to escape them have proven its worth something.)

Ford is the best cat burglar in a little thieves union known as The Clockwork Hands. They're a small gang who have been plauged by bad luck for ages, but are on the mend, and have mostly survived by only taking jobs that won't get them properly noticed by The Crown. He's not in charge, but he's not happy with the new leader who inserted herself as an outsider and probably murdered the last leader. The players also want her dead for personal backstory reasons so they strike an allegiance with Ford. Its easy enough to do, he's a good man. Sure he lives in an old noble woman's house without her knowledge, but he also used her funds to send one of the other gang members through nursing school to be a live in nurse for her. Yes he might have murdered a man to cut him out of her will but that rich kid wasn't taking care of his ailing aunt anyway.

I'm not sure where to put this in such a condensed version, but The Clockwork Hands run a drag bar that's like, super haunted. Players didn't figure it out right away, but it's because it's built on an old graveyard, filled mostly with Kitsune. Over 100 years old, burying the dead became an antiquated practice long ago since the city is so tightly packed. By all practical standpoints that ground was going to waste. It's been so long that no one really remembers what's under there anymore.

Anyway the players get to talking with Ford, and bring up one of the names they were given as a lead to Kidds past identity. A man named Hitoshi who used to run with the clockwork hands 20 years ago.

Ford knows him. He knew him very well. They had something once. Hitoshi had been the one to help set up the hiest on the Royal Arcane Academy's museum gallery. They'd assembled a team, 5 of the best people in the gang. Ford hadn't been part of them, he'd wanted to but they'd chosen a different lockpick. Ford's task was to be a distraction, run a small hiest in some offices badly enough to draw security to the other side of campus and then disappear. But of course, no one showed up. He'd tripped through several alarm spells on purpose, been louder than he should have but he went unbothered.

Later he found out why. They'd been set up. Most of the team died, one of then was captured and later executed, but the only person who'd gone unaccounted for was Hitoshi. He'd just disappeared. The gang had to lay low after that for years, but Ford could never rationalize why they'd been betrayed like that. There were too many pieces missing. He thought he'd known Hitoshi. They'd been something. Lover was too strong of a word, but friend wasn't nearly strong enough.

So the players go back to the Ring. Reeves shows his ugly mug again, kills the undead sheriff (again) almost kills them, Kidd turns on him, and when the dust settles and it becomes very clear that the only reason Kidd isn't dead is because of the players intervention (only suffering pretty badly from breaking 3 promises) they bully more of the truth out of him.

He's quite a bit older than the train line to The Ring. 120, give or take. He grew up on Gremtol, where his family cared for a shrine to Daikitsu overlooking a graveyard. At this point, the burying of dead was falling out of fashion. Most of his family succumbed to a plauge, and by the time he was 17, it was just him and his mother, caring for an antiquated graveyard in a city that was rapidly outgrowing them.

At the time, clockwork hadn't yet reached the peak it is at today, and there existed a thieves guild by the monicure the Silver Hands. And they wanted the land. They had an inn to build, booze to sell and a brothel to run, just no where to put it. And so, when they found the mostly empty grave plot, ran by just a widow and her son, it was simple.

They killed her, and framed her son for the murder. With a couple greesed palms he was arrested and without enough gold to pay for a defense team, and a few false witnesses, he was behind bars within the year. Then it was a simple task of intimidating other auction goers, buying the land, and constructing.

Kidd (not his name at the time but if I use every name he's ever gone by this will be incomprehensible) was only imprisoned for a few years. It didn't take long for the need for revenge to consume him almost completely. He broke out, changed his name, and burned the first bar to the ground. It didn't matter they rebuilt. And so began what would be his life for the next 80 years.

He would change his name, integrate himself into the guild, then make sure they never prospered again. It started off small, but eventually he knew he would kill the man who masterminded his misery. The whole time he tried to satiate the ghost of his mother who still roamed the place, unable to move on. But he needed her remains, which had been cremated and sent to the newly built necropolis. It was formidable and warded heavily against grave robbers and necromancers. Perhaps if he wasn't wanted under his birth name he may have been able to do it legally. But every attempt he made over the following decades was a resounding failure that he barely escaped with his life.

And so Kidd became The Hand's curse. They made the slow transition to clockwork, and eventually started requiring amputation of the right hand to be replaced with the prosthetic. An attempt to rat out whatever mole was plaguing them. But Kidd was patient and singularly driven. Eventually he managed it. Their old leader died, but not before living almost a complete life where he managed to cause even more destruction. He'd been a powerful man and by the time Kidd was strong enough to face him, he was already practicly on his deathbed. By the time he managed it, old age was only a few steps behind the poison he'd used.

And so with his task complete, it didn't matter. He'd still failed to put that ghost to rest no matter how many times he placated her. With his purpose failed, he did the only thing he'd known for years. Continued to sabotage the Hands. Revenge wasn't fulfilling, but it was all he knew.

Then, he met Ford. No different from many of the people who find themselves in a life of crime, except for perhaps his dedication to gentleness. He didn't catch feelings on purpose, and when he did, he panicked. He resolved to expunge the Clockwork Hands entirely, set them up for a failure big enough for The Crown to remove them completely.

It didn't work. Nearly everyone who he got killed had been his friend. One of them had been a psychic. And with her last dying thoughts she saw through him. Saw that he'd worn nothing but masks for years and had said nothing but lies. And with her last breaths she cursed him. That he may never break an oath again, that he could never hide his kitsune nature, that until he was an honest man he could never find peace.

He fled to The Ring. A newly opened frontier where none of the ghosts of his past could find him. He had a contact, Reeves. A fence who was planning a similar move. A thaumatuge who could smell his fresh curse form a mile away. He'd promised he'd come back for his crew, and it was his first broken promise. Vowing that he owed Reeves his life for helping him to regenerate his missing hand locked him entirely into another gang, and another mask.

By the end of the full confrontation with Reeves, he was a mess, covered in the weeping open wounds of broken promises, but also at the most honest he's been for nearly a century.

The players promised him to help him find his mother's remains, so he could send her on to Pharasma for judgement and close that chapter of his life completely. But they also asked him to set things right with Ford.

More than anything else, Ford needs an explanation. He needs closure on why someone he thought he knew could turn on him so completely. He's a logical man, and a good judge of character, and the one person he could never understand still haunts him.

More than anything else, Kidd needs to be seen. To be understood as a full person that he's never been able to be because he's only ever worn a rotating facade of masks. He's carried a little tin type of the only person he's ever maybe loved for 20 years, knowing that that man never really knew him. Because no one has ever really known him.

So how could they reconcile? The man Ford love never existed. How could he possibly forgive Kidd, who really did stab them all in the back and leave them to die. How could Kidd, after all that time, ask Ford to get to know a totally different man, and expect to be forgiven for what he's done? He set out for revenge and since then hasn't stopped digging graves. In his own mind, Ford is already in one of them.

For deserves better. He deserves closure and to move on. To fully bury the only loose end he hasn't been able to tie up.

Kidd deserves nothing. He cannot expect forgiveness or kindness for the amount of carnage he has left behind him for a blood debt so old it should have been fully burried long ago. How could he ask this man to know him, when he doesn't even know himself?

So no they can't on purpose kiss because it so much more tragic if they never do. If the only thing they ever see in eachother are possibilities that have long since passed.

Do you think a suave cat bugler and a scruffy outlaw could on purpose kiss?

A couple npcs from my home game with some loosely leyendecker inspired rendering