When I showed up for the first session of HoTDQ, I literally had no idea what I would be playing. I generally tend to play several classes, which are monk, Paladin, Fighter, Cleric but a lot of it depends on what the party make-up is and what I think it's missing. So in that sense, I didn't really have a lot of backstory planned or anything for Lomeyo. I just saw that we were missing tank + healz so I decided to go with a paladin for the old tank+healz combo. And after that it was really rolling a bunch of dice to decide my characters backstory, as per the new 5e rules.
As it is, turns out Lomeyo's a noble who's all for helping the common people, but if someone slights him, he'll burn the guys house down while hearing the lamentations of his women as they're driven before him. He's basically Conan the Barbarian as a Paladin. Even better, he's got some deep dark secret that he can't reveal to anyone either. I decided he would be well educated in Dwarvish and Orcish, as well as Common because I like being able to speak multiple languages.
In the first few sessions, I played Lomeyo pretty straight. There really wasn't much to roleplay as we had to fend off some kobold army that was invading a town. The extent of the RP in those sessions was the Governor asking us to defend his town and us having no real choice but to agree. Even then, signs of Lomeyo's true character was starting to show up, with him agreeing to perform certain tasks for the governor in return for influence or affidavits testifying that Lomeyo was of use to the governor and spoke with his authority. Needless to say, this didn't really impact the sessions much because quite frankly, they were pretty railroaded in the beginning, but it was small bits of Roleplaying starting to shine through. I think the best part of this period was when Lomeyo managed to lie his way through an entire kobold army camp, rescue a prisoner and escape. All without fighting.
Then Lomeyo got his Paladin defining feature, his Oath of Vengeance. Which really boils down to 'screw bad guys over'. So he ended up turning more into a 'shoot first, kill everyone then ask questions' type of person. The oath; I felt, would mean that Lomeyo was more than willing to raze an entire village of bad guys to the ground if he needed to. And in this case, he actually did so near the end of the campaign. Although by then his definition of bad guys had really come to mean 'people associated with the Cult of the Dragon'.
At some point, Lomeyo decided he needed to organise his own army to fight against the Cult of the Dragon. Some brainstorming was done among the group and eventually....HYDRA was formed. His first NPC recruit was an Assassin that he had spared. (And seriously, what is WITH this encounter in HoTDQ?? Htf are level 4 characters supposed to take on 4 level 8 Assassins and WIN? Other than super random luckstacking) His 2nd recruit was a Hobgoblin that he thusly renamed Hoby. (Which made it funnier when Lomeyo gave Hoby clothes and one of the characters remarked 'Master has given Hoby clothes! Hoby is now a free hobgoblin'.) Needless to say, Lomeyo wasn't the most inventive namer around.
However, despite recruiting mostly stereotyped evil races/classes, Lomeyo still had standards. He was given a chance to recruit a wizard who could make flesh golems, but ended up killing the guy because the person would not stop in his quest of perfecting his flesh golems by using the body part of murdered innocents. This was right after Lomeyo refused to kill someone just to get a fresh female heart and instead began beating the crap out of the quest giver. (Btw, our DM got pretty tired of us just beating up quest/info givers cause we didn't like them. Didn't help that we kept winning too)
Despite his ruthless exterior, Lomeyo was still reluctant to hurt innocents, which was probably the last remaining vestige of his paladin training left in him. It was also part of his noble background, that he would protect the common folk. Unless they were cultists, at which point they were given a chance to surrender if they were mooks, or they were usually thrown off a tower after being beaten if they were high level members. He was so dedicated to killing the bad guys, he was perfectly willing to throw himself OFF a frigging castle in the last part of the campaign just to shoot the halfdragon in midair (tl;dr halfdragon fell off wyvern, death not confirmed, cleric has boots of flying).
So in the end, Lomeyo went from being someone who really had no proper backstory to someone who was a HYDRA leader, completely ruthless when dealing with bad guys, yet stalwart defender of innocents. If the campaign continues, who knows how much further he'll evolve.
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