I've been there, done that. Except the consequences of my homebrew character are still being felt in the quest a year later in real life.
Party Composition:
Me - Tiefling Rogue Arcane Trickster (Chaotic Good before multiple alignment checks)
Khizer - Tiefling Warlock Pact with a Fiend (Chaotic Neutral)
Lee - Formerly Human Vampire Druid (Lawful Evil)
The Story So Far...
To preface, this game took place in a mega city with an underground fortress that housed a secret gnome guild who ran the city. An evil witch and her black cult were enslaving the gnomes and they needed our help.
We need to infiltrate the mansion of the witch, the best way to do so is by going to an arena (real Roman Colosseum type stuff, all the rich folk are going to be there). Everyone else fights in the arena, I sneak off into the VIP section with careful use of Disguise Self. I bribe the bouncer to get to a VIP, coerce information from him, give him roofies, and steal his 35,000gp constituting my first alignment check in the process.
Since we know have the address, we regroup at our makeshift HQ and wait until dusk. We infiltrate the witch's mansion, Khizer using Mask of Many Faces and Lee using Vampire wall walking. I walk right in through the front door and make a seduction check on the witch when she answers, my plan being to distract her then slip away while the rest of the group robs her blind.
Khizer kills the witch's man-slave and steals his face while Lee searches the basement and finds a secret door. He calls Khizer over who, in the guise of the man-slave, decides he should go first. As they open the trapdoor they hear shrieks and moans of ecstasy coming from my direction. Khizer walks out to see me getting eaten alive by the witch's vagina, Monster Girl Quest style. He quickly high tails it out of there. (We also played this part in publuc. People came over to investigate when the DM shouted "Hurry, roll to resist to her pussy tentacles!")
I did not die from this, my body was melted away and I was made into a soul gem. When the rest of the group rescued me, the witch was there waiting for us. We are able to kill her by ramming my soul gem up her ass and I Nat 20 a CHA check to hijack her body and steer her into everyone's attacks. A fight that should have been really difficult was made into a cake walk. I then convince everyone it was a good idea to put my soul gem inside an Iron Golem.
Now we begin.
As I am being made into the golem, the rest of the group thinks it would be funny to carve my golem to look like the demon the townsfolk were taught to fear. Me being the Agent of Chaos that I am, however, turned that against them.
I walk across the town to the True Neutral weapons dealer who doesn't care who you are as long as you pay him. I buy the biggest sword possible then walk across town in broad daylight back to the castle. The townsfolk, as you can imagine, did not take kindly to the demon they know and fear walking through the city visibly armed.
By the time I make it back to the castle, I have a decent sized lynch mob behind me. I lead them directly to the group where Khizer very quickly and expertly is able to dump the problem into the king's lap to deal with (constituting my second alignment check in the game).
Time for the golem to be in its first battle!
A gnome engineer opens a portal for us to go through and kill the deity the black cult worships. The fight is unimportant, all you need to know is that when we killed the deity its death throes sent a malevolent blast of energy after us. Also there was a dragon that we domesticated.
We all run through the portal where the Gnome Engineer shouts "PUSH THE RED BUTTON!!!"
Hearing the urgency in the gnome's voice, I immediately turn around and push the green button widening the portal more and letting as much of the destructive energy out as possible.
A brilliant beam of light passed through the portal and hit the gnome, completely erasing him from existence. Not killed, killed implies there was enough of him leftover to identify. He was erased from existence. Specifically, he was disassembled down to a molecular level and converted into a fine mist before quickly dissipating.
Accurate depiction of what it was like for us to watch this gnome being hit by the beam of light
Now, here comes the fun part. In that fortress lived 500 gnomes. 499 of which were nameless, expendable NPCs. Since I was absent from the previous game and nobody bothered to tell me the name or physical description of the gnome working the portal, I assumed he was another one of those nameless expendable NPCs. I didn't know he was the NPC central most to the plot.
The group was fucked over literally every single way possible by this. To begin, the gnome was going to pay us 100,000gp the moment we closed the portal. He held a position of extreme political prestige, so he could have gotten us a ton of resources and been our liaison into any culture. He was the reason another very powerful NPC was working with us. The energy that destroyed the gnome carried the deity's grudge and now its thralls are spreading like wildfire throughout the continent. In order to fix this, we need to kill every single other deity to reset the cosmic balance of things, essentially setting the game in to hard mode. The DM also gave us meta knowledge that in order to kill the final boss we absolutely positively need that particular gnome's help. This constituted my third alignment check of the quest.
Dialogue after I kill the gnome:
Khizer: "Why would you dick around at the finish line?!"
Me: "I plead the 5th."
Khizer: *Turns to DM* "Why even give him a green button to press in the first place?!"
Me: "Hey, I thought he was just an innocent bystander."
Khizer: "Okay, so why fuck over an innocent bystander then?"
Me: "...To be a dick."
DM: "Make your fourth alignment check."
Me: "Hey, golems are colorblind. You never should have trusted me to do this."
Khizer: "No, there is no combination of words you can put together in any language that will justify what you have just done."
The powers that be are now out of whack.
Khizer upon discovering the thralls spreading like wildfire decrees an official "get the fuck out of dodge" to the rest of the group. He and Lee pack up all the loot at the hideout, I fly out on the dragon to pick up the 3 NPCs we need. (My exact dialogue was "Pack your shit, we're leaving now. Trust me, I'm on a dragon.")
I then make fly-bys on the dragon burning the city to the ground to halt the thralls as much as possible (with acceptable collateral damage, of course). The townsfolk merely see the demon flying around laying waste to their city and collectively look up to their god and go "WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME??" This constitutes my fifth alignment check in the quest.
DM to me: "Man you must be setting some sort of record for alignment checks."
So where to from here?
We fly north, to the mountains where a city which is the epicenter of gnome culture exists. We touch down on the outskirts of town and have the dragon fly off to the neighboring village to have its fun (it was a Black Dragon, after all- it was Chaotic Evil). We have a way to summon it to us if need be, however, because plot.
We then go about usual business of a new town. Establish a network of connections, find an inn and tavern, collect resources, etc. As this is happening, we can't help but garner attention, directly due to the fact that the gnome town is smaller than a normal town and I'm a 12 ft iron monstrosity. (You ever play Psychonauts? The Lungfishopolis level, that was me in this town.)
The mayor and his trusted elite guard approach the group, not in a hostile manner but definitely wanting some answers. Our Warlock, under his Mask of Many Faces, swears up and down that the golem will do no harm at all and it is under the rest of the group's command. As he finishes, the mayor points out that the golem is nowhere to be seen.
I slipped away from the group and meandered across town where I dropped anchor in a bar. The gnomes were not used to serving a talking metal man, so I made an Intimidation check to get my way. It went like this: One of the gnomes, clearly not a wise gnome, tries to hit me with a broom to shoo me out the door. I break the broom effortlessly and tell him I can go megaton on the bar in the blink of an eye, so it would be best not to piss me off. I realize only the mayor spoke a language other than Gnomish. While my words didn't register, my threatening tone did and the gnome backed off and gave me an entire bottle of booze on the house. (Hey, golems can be charismatic, too.) My blatant exploitation of power is yet another alignment check.
The rest of the group had gone to a cemetery on the outskirts of town to investigate a murder that screamed supernatural cause. As they do, a Wyrm That Walks ambushes the group.
I charge across town, the DM lets me roll a d10 to see how many turns it takes me to get there. I roll a 2. While the rest of the group is contemplating how I have achieved hyper speed, I said clearly it's because I'm smashing through buildings on the way to get there. Since I announced it to the DM, it's happening now. And, you guessed it- alignment check number 7.
I make it there, DM has me make a DEX save to see if I can stop. I say fuck that, everyone else is making a DEX save to avoid me. I body slam the Wyrm That Walks, pulping it into a fine juice and impacting so hard it takes me 3 turns to dig myself out of the crater I made. We head back into town, where there is a lynch mob waiting for us.
The group sees a clear tunnel of destruction, the dimensions of which are only slightly larger than my golem. Remember, nobody speaks the language of the townsfolk, but they're all pointing at me and shouting.
Collective "Really nigga?" from the rest of the group.
I throw myself into the lynch mob and start wrecking shit. The rest of the group runs for their lives. The town militia mobilizes and the heavy Gnomish artillery gets busted out. 9th Alignment check, and this was only in the 7th game so far.
My golem sustains critical damage in the ensuing battle but I did take out a shit ton of the militia. Khizer rips my soul gem out the golem and abuses Mask of Many Faces to get out of town alive. I should mention that our 3 NPCs were being played by people new to D&D, so they also got the front row seat for this shit.
Everybody except for me and Khizer was hunted down and hung from the gallows. While everyone rolls up their new characters, Khizer introduces the idea that I should no longer get to have any body at all, as moving on my own is clearly too much of a liability. The group votes a unanimous yes to this.
Conclusion
So, the group has yet to kill all the deities to reset the cosmic balance. They have killed 4 of the 7, and are still trying (to be precise, it has been 15 months at the time this post has been made).
Homebrew is a finicky thing. Some of them are really good, but for the most part homebrew is broken. Most people don't understand fluff to crunch or they simply want something with no regard to how it balances out. It's like you just learned to snorkel and you immediately scuba dive down to the depths of the ocean. Most people who homebrew are unaware of this, I was completely aware my golem was bullshit. It was fun while it lasted.
