Character Derailment / Tabletop Games

• In most everything related to her, the Raven Queen from Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition is portrayed as a Kelemvor Expy who's True Neutral invoked and represents death as a natural part of life and its inevitable end. Except for one sidebar in Divine Power, where she's suddenly a cacklingly evil madwoman who killed Nerull to take his place and was only forced into her current role by the other gods... who she wishes to overthrow so she can become a true Nerull Expy, seemingly for absolutely no other reason except that a goddess of death must be evil.
  • Gnolls are a sort of species-wide example. At first, while still usually treated as Always Chaotic Evil like Orcs, they were mostly just a bunch of lazy hyena-men who tended to ambush travelers, all clearly individuals. Some of them turned to demon worship since their own god generally neglected them. By Fifth Edition, they were turned into a Hive Mind of technically living zombies under the command of the Demon Lord Yeenoghu. The exception is in Eberron, where they tend to be disciplined and reasonable, if not very nice, individuals. (Pathfinder also seems to be making them less evil every time they show up. Some of them can be slavers but still pull an Enemy Mine, while the new bestiary notes that many tribes are just isolationist.)
  • Jander Sunstar, once a well-regarded deep cut character with a devoted fanbase from the Ravenloft campaign setting, makes a cameo in Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus... in Hell, crucified and tortured for eternity, having been responsible for Big Bad Zariel's damnation due to a sudden act of total cowardice as rank as it is ill-explained, then committing Suicide by Sunlight. Neither his fans nor the writer of his novels were amused.
• Warhammer 40,000 codex fluff has somewhat turned to this.
  • In the Grey Knights 5e Codex story "The Bloodtide Returns", the Grey Knights kill a coven of Sisters of Battle and then coating their armor in the latter's blood (something usually reserved for Khornate worshippers) to make wards to stave off daemon corruption despite their whole shtick being "they're marines literally designed to kill daemons and no sell them" and thus not even need the blood wards. This is in large part due to GW's new trend of Retconning old fluff rather than moving the plot forward. However, plotwise the fluff has already reached the literal last few minutes of the 41st millenium (the Medusa Campaign, taking place almost 5 real-life years ago, was said to have ended on the last year of the 41st millenium) and it would be hard to keep calling it "in the 41st millenium" when it's already 41,001, so it might be justified.
  • Similarly, many people took issue with a background event in the Blood Angels codex where the Blood Angels made a temporary alliance with the Necron army they were fighting to fend off a Tyranid assault. The Blood Angels then let the Necrons go as a Worthy Opponent (an OOC moment for both), foreshadowing the massive Retcon in Necron goals and philosophy (they used to be mindless killbots, now they're Tomb Kings IN SPACE!, and the fanbase continues debating whether or not this is a good thing).
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • A rare In-Universe example for Tezzeret in Between Agents of Artifice and Test of Metal, his characterization changes drastically, suddenly, and without explanation, to the point that he and the other characters notice it and speculate about what caused it.
  • For most of the time, Elesh Norn is a stoic and cunning mastermind of a New Phyrexian Praetor who desires nothing short of harmony and perfection in the form of the nightmarish Phyrexian compleation of the Multiverse. In March of the Machines however, she suddenly goes out of character to torture and execute Shelodred and Urabrask over their dissent and undergoes a horrific Villainous Breakdown against Elspeth and Jin-Gitaxias moments before she dies, making it look like as if she didn't really believe whatever she was espousing and only took over the multiverse to satisfy her ego.
  • Norn's colleague, Jin-Gitaxias isn't any better. Just like his partner in-crime, up until March of the Machines, he's shown to be intelligent and rather forgiving for a New Phyrexian Preator. All sounds promising until Elesh Norn's Villainous Breakdown where he inexplicably goes into a massive Idiot Ball and starts a mutiny that would cause him to drop into a vat of Newts he brought against Norn, killing him.
• This occurs sometimes in the shadowtalk sections of Shadowrun sourcebooks. It's somewhat inevitable, given the huge cast of characters featured in those sections (though the number of different characters has gone down in 4th Edition). The sourcebook Cyberpirates was especially bad for this, turning the poster Dr. Bones from a dwarf computer company CEO with a Star Trek-themed handle to an actual medical doctor who made excuses and defended the racist, experimenting-on-metahumans corporation that trained him. The poster Truthseeker was also altered from an anti-meta racist who thought there was a grand metahuman conspiracy to a pro-meta conspiracy theorist. Fortunately, the derailment of those two characters seemed to begin and end with that book.
• The Legend of the Five Rings story has numerous examples, often as a result of the card game tournaments that guide the metaplot. Some examples:
  • During the Clan Wars, the Crab Champion decides to ally with the Shadowlands against the other Clans. This is despite the Crab Clan having spent over a thousand years protecting Rokugan against the Shadowlands, and despite the dangers of rampaging oni and Shadowlands Taint.
  • When it comes time to assassinate the Emperor for being possessed by Fu Leng, who else would get the duty besides the Scorpion Clan, who value loyalty to the Emperor above all else?
    • Even worse, it was the assassination attempt itself that allowed Fu Leng to possess the Emperor. Had they not poisoned him, Fu Leng would not have been able to overcome his willpower.
  • Rokugan places high value on omens and portents, obtained from the mystical observations of the shugenja, and good or bad omens can shape public policy and major economic decisions. However, when the birth of Hantei XVI was presaged by horrible portents unseen since Iuchiban, all of the shugenja of Rokugan just decided to ignore the signs and let him take the throne anyway. Guess how that turned out.

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