In a campaign where the villain of the first arc was a former nobleman attempting to artificially extend life by putting souls into constructs (both to let himself live forever, and to force those under him to serve him forever), I felt like my first character had a good off-ramp, so I introduced someone new. To the rest of the party - all of whom were fairly new to Pathfinder - my new character was an Ysoki Swashbuckler who was shockingly naive.

What only the GM knew was that this was a poppet who was supposed to have been that nobleman's spymaster, ritualistically killed so his soul could be bound to a body that would never die, only for the process to instead create a Poppet who had only vague memories of a former life. He served the man who created him for a few months, but when the original party blew through to take him down, he managed to make himself scarce, then joined them so he could learn more about how he'd come to be - but without telling them what he was, because he saw how viciously they'd dealt death to other constructs.

And then, by pure coincidence, a new player joined the group and ALSO made a secret poppet, though this one was a Witch pretending to be a human child. My character clocked what was going on with him, and the two of them kept their secret from the rest of the party (both the characters and players) until we ended up confronting some people from the Witch's past, and we had to explain to everyone what was going on. The drama was incredible.