Years before the start of the game, one of the princes of the Human Kingdom wandered into elf-controlled parts of a forest while hunting, and was slain by the xenophobic elves. This resulted in the human king declaring war on the elves, personally leading attacks on Elvish land.
Or...at least, this was the story the party was told. In reality, all those "xenophobic elves" stories were just propaganda. The elves were actually peaceful, kind, and great artisans. What had actually happened was that the prince had fallen from his horse and broken several bones. The elves had taken him in and healed him. He had lived with them for the past few years, and was in a gay relationship with the eladrin captain of the Elvish Royal Guard, homosexuality being perfectly fine with elves, though not with humans. The real villains in this story were the humans, who were hidebound greedy warmongers.
The human king hired the party, consisting of a human illusionist wizard (OP), a half-orc ranger, twin Dwarven brothers (a bard and a fighter), a Tiefling swordmage, and a human artificer, as a strike force against the elves. While in elven lands, they were captured by the elves, who told them the truth about the situation. It became their job to bring back the Prince to the human kingdoms, which would stop the war. Of course, this didn't go quite as planned.
The illusionist wizard, OP, decided that he didn't want the war to end. After all, it was great for the economy and had brought on a surge of patriotism (and, OOC, he didn't like the DM's elf favoritism). That, and the Prince had shamed his family by being the uke to an eladrin (not to mention that the the DM attempted to pressure his character into a homosexual threesome with the prince and Royal Guard). So he plotted to kill the prince and frame his lover, the Royal Guard.
Step 1 was casting an illusion on himself and his fellow conspirator the Half-Orc, making them look like the prince and his lover, while the real deal were engaged elsewhere. They took a walk in the garden, and made sure that they were seen having a quarrel, which ended with the "Prince" striking the "Royal Guard" across the face. OP got the DM to go along with it by saying that it was all part of an elaborate plot to draw out potential enemies of the prince.
Step 2 was to go to a party and pretend to pass out drunk. The "drunk OP" in this case was actually OP's familiar, made to look like him with an illusion. He made sure that the Half-Orc, whom he trusted, carried "his" sleeping form into his room. Meanwhile, OP disguised himself as a servant and carried drugged wine to the lovers. When they were both sound asleep, OP used a spell to create a phantom warrior shaped like the Royal Guard and kill the Prince with it. This worked because the Prince was very weak (the DM wanted his big, strong Elvish lover to save him). OP then put the sword, soaked in the Prince's blood, into the Royal Guard's hands.
After killing the Prince, OP returned to his room and drank himself to sleep, so that he could truthfully say 'I drank too much wine and passed out' if questioned. The next day, the bodies were found, and OP, along with the other humans, needed to be forcibly restrained. OP demanded the arrest of the Royal Guard, and despite some initial hesitance from the guards, they eventually complied.
The Tiefling, who had missed the last session* and was furious with OP when he was filled in on what happened, and outright accused OP of the crime, with his justification being that OP had hated them for being in love. He didn't get very far, though, as the other players pointed out that OP had no apparent motive for the crime and also had a solid alibi for the murder night. Though all the evidence implicated the Royal Guard, the elves venerated all life, so there would be a trial, and before that, a period of investigation.
The party were responsible for holding the Royal Guard until the trial, partially because they're semi-official ambassadors and partially because elves have so little crime that they don't have prisons. OP was responsible for making sure the Royal Guard could not escape. His method of imprisoning the Royal Guard was as follows:
The Royal Guard was placed in a corner of Party's manor's cleared-out wine cellar. He was blindfolded, and his arms were locked behind his back in a metal sleeve to prevent him from removing the blindfold. A large Magic Circle Against Fey was placed in the wine cellar, and a smaller one was around the Royal Guard. Also, just in case the Tiefling attempted to free the Royal Guard, he used an Eye of Warning ritual to sound the alarm if the Tiefling went anywhere near the prisoner.
Elvish guards there to secure the scene decided to question everyone on their alibis. OP's came into question, but he was able to dodge suspicion. The Half-Orc was asked if, after dropping OP off at his room, she'd gone straight to her own and remained there all night. She said that she had, and the cleric acting as a Living Lie Detector noticed that she was lying. She was pressed on the issue (after all, if she'd left her room after dropping OP off, it left her with no alibi), and finally admitted that she had slept with OP, who knew nothing about this. She didn't roll bluff, and Discern Lies showed that she was telling the truth. It turned out, the Half-Orc had told the DM that she intended to get OP drunk and then bed him, and the DM agreed because "[OP] needed to loosen up". When OP returned to his room after the murder and drunk himself to sleep, the Half-Orc followed him and raped him in his sleep. In an aside, OP, while relieved that the Half-Orc had an alibi and didn't blow their cover, was more than a little disturbed at how casually the DM blew off a female party member outright admitting to raping a male party member.
The rest of the investigations went smoothly, though with the Dwarven brothers telling outrageous lies to mess with the cleric casting Discern Lies. One brother, a Spoony Bard, had high enough charisma to fool the spell and would make up an outrageous story, and the other brother, who had very low charisma, would confirm it. Meanwhile, the Tiefling did his very best to make OP look bad. Because the party was making sure that everyone was rolling honestly, he got caught in a few lies when he claimed that OP had been "sneaking off".
While on his way to visit the imprisoned Royal Guard, he feels a pull towards the gardens, where he sees the following: " an ancient tree in the center of the garden. A blistering, festering hole burned at around chest height on one side, seeming to extend inward, and deep downward, as if the earth was spitting out the thing within through the tree's gullet." In the hole was a brown/green orb, with hints of ochre and violet. It was the Eye of Blight, a sentient magical artifact.
OP, of course, promptly buried the thing, reasoning that any sentient magical item that can exert a psychic pull over people and calls itself the Eye of Blight cannot be good for anyone, especially the wielder.
With that over with, OP got on with his actual plot: killing the Royal Guard. The Royal Guard represented a possible hole in his plan, as he could provide evidence that OP's simulated argument never happened. Therefore, he needed to be killed. OP had spent a lot of time wracking his brains about how to kill him so OP could not possibly be implicated, but later came to a realization:
It didn't matter if he was seen killing the Royal Guard, as long as it looked like he had a good reason for doing so.
With that in mind, he got on with his plan. The party took it in shifts to guard their prisoner, and the order was OP- Half-Orc- Tiefling. OP's shift passed without incident, and he handed it over to the Half-Orc. OP returned to his room and spent some time reading there, witnessed by the dwarf brothers, and took advantage of a Hallucinatory Creature to make a copy of himself passed out drunk on his bed, while he cast invisibility on himself and went down to the cellar. He didn't leave his disguised Familiar because he needed her for the next part.
In the cellar, he cast the Silence ritual and killed the Royal Guard while he was still helpless. He then dispelled the Silence, transferred the corpse (which was in several pieces) to his Handy Haversack, and then used an illusion to disguise both himself and his familiar as the Royal Guard. He then took the Royal Guard's place, while the familiar hid. The Half-Orc's shift ended and the Tiefling's shift began. After the Tiefling had checked on OP-as-Royal-Guard and gone to his post, OP had his familiar scuff the smaller magic circle around the Royal Guard (in a place where the Tiefling would have seen from the door, so he couldn't claim that the Half-Orc did it), breaking it.
Once the Tiefling had gone, OP removed the (unlocked) restraints, regained his invisibility, and went to his room to dispel the Hallucinatory Creature. But before he left, he gave his familiar a button from his coat cuffs. The familiar broke the larger magical circle and then swallowed the button, which set off the Eyes of Warning, because earlier, OP had designated 'my familiar when it has not swallowed a button' as a non-intruder who would not set off the Eyes. The disguised familiar fled the cellar.
The next part of OP's plan relied on a bit of D&D rules on familiars- specifically, if it gets more than 20 squares away, it teleports back to you (OP had previously had to carefully coordinate his plans with his familiar). The Royal Guard was an Eladrin and a Swordmage, both of which are known for teleportation abilities. After the familiar got a certain distance away from OP, it teleported back. "The Royal Guard" appeared in front of OP in front of the Dwarves as witnesses and attacks him. "The Royal Guard" missed and went out the window, with OP following.
Once they were outside, OP staged a fight with his familiar, using vision-obscuring spells and his illusions to convince everyone that an epic battle was going on. While this was happening, he scattered the pieces of the Royal Guard on the ground, and then killed his familiar with an attack that would, as he described it, slice a foe to pieces.
Unfortunately, this is where the story ends for us, as OP stopped updating on /tg/ not long after. Still, it should be (and has been) noted that practically all of OP's short-term goals were met, those being the murder of the prince as retribution for his forbidden relationship with the Royal Guard, said murder being done so in a way to motivate the human empire to continue if not escalate the war by framing the Royal Guard himself, and finally, the elimination of the Royal Guard as the sole loose end who could unveil his machinations. Assuming the rest of the session followed the plot, a continued war against the elves is all but guaranteed, and at the very least the entire event is a massive diplomatic incident that could unravel any political good will between the two sides anyways.
