Favors Owed

Mentions of the main character or their group of adventures possibly dying/being killed in some outcomes.

You're a young adventurer.

Your mentor has sent you out on your own to find your own path and gain experience.

You are to complete a kind of pilgrimage that is usual for your people and/or the profession you have chosen.

It's not too dangerous and you are expected to return home and show your mentor what you have learned afterwards.

On your travels, you come across someone in peril.

It's a mage/sorcerer/magic user that for one reason or another can't get out of this trouble themselves.

You have just the skillset to help them and decide to do so, for whatever reason.

They are grateful if a bit chagrined that they needed the help but promise to pay you back one day.

You part ways amicably or at least on civil terms and each of you continues on their way.

After a while, you put them out of your mind and more or less forget about the encounter.

After the pilgrimage is over, you return home to show what you have learned.

You show enough promise to get sent on further missions and grow more skilled and prominent in adventurer circles.

Eventually, you hear rumors of a dark mage who is gaining power and trying to take over the country/kingdom.

You investigate.

Every time you think you get close or have found the possible dark lord's lair, it turns out it's a false lead or it's already emptied and abandoned.

That continues until you are invited to join a group of rebels against the mage's reign or a band of adventurers who are intent on bringing the mage down.

You manage to infiltrate the lair and for once it's not empty.

But the dark mage who captures you is the same one you once helped out.

This can go several ways:

• the mage kills the whole group, including you, despite the debt they said they owe you

• you can convince them not to kill everyone and are let go, alone or with the rest of the group, in exchange for the debt being cleared

• you ask for the mage's side of things and they actually have a point/are in the right/have bad fantasy PR, and you decide to join their cause

• no one needs to get killed because the mage is not the one who killed people after them (that might have been a patron deity/fanatically devoted/follower/ex-lover, or political opponent, or magical rival out to ruin their reputation that way/or they have an evil twin/doppelgänger)

• they let you alone live and keep you in a cell/cage/gilded cage kind of nice room, and never let you out again until your sanity is worn down enough to accept your new normal

• it's a big misunderstanding and you have the wrong lair

• they are kind of shady but avoided you because they honor their debts and didn't want to have to fight or kill you but now you've pushed and they need to decide what to do 

Several possibilities.

Is the mage actually evil?

Is this the right mage who tries to take over the country?

Are your fellow adventurers trustworthy or not?

(Possible they are only here for the loot or they have the order to steal a magical artifact for someone, or they are the bad guys and a mage is actually a decent person, etc)

The mage is really a future dark lord type and ruthlessly practical and thus unconcerned with never paying you back.

The mage is shady/dark/evil but willing let you live in a twisted sign of gratitude after they have gotten rid of the others

There might be even more shades of grey between this.

It's an interesting topic to explore.

Some notes:

I tried to keep everything fairly gender neutral.

Its in second person because I'm so used to it from reading IF myself and hope it helps a bit with immersion.

I'd like to see what others make of this.

Some interesting char

acter explorations or maybe a fun dungeon crawl or a even a comedy of errors?