Thanks again!

He wasn’t even truly a villain, but an overzealous student of chivalry. His dastardly deeds no more than distracting the PCs away from more pressing matters, sometimes even catastrophically so. But all he sought was to reclaim his honor from the hands of the “ruffians” who had so embarrassed him in front of his family and betrothed. True, the one of the PCs hadn’t intended to be thrown into his reception hall by the dying throes of a roc, but that hardly lessened the blow of having his wedding day ruined and being charged to repair the rented space for the ceremonies. The penniless adventurers had truly done nothing more than to cause a minor disturbance in both the course of the day and his expansive wealth, but it was that very image he struggled to protect.

And so, it became a fun challenge to invent new ways to have Acotas Verdes inadvertantly stall or harass my players while keeping it engaging and well… fun. He was a challenge, himself, especially when operating with flunkies, and having a paladin in the adventuring party usually ensured his continued good health, considering he never truly wished significant or lasting harm.

However, it was an entirely new venture when said paladin decided to lose his divine backing for the sake of putting a sizable crater in Verdes’ skull. It was fun in and of itself making a side story of atonement and redemption (which was ultimately neglected in favor of a more lenient moral code) and dreaming up revenge plots on the part of the late Acotas’ family.

Briefly, the campaign had a number of arcs that dealt with the invasion of the PCs’ world by different forces. First it was illithids and their mind-controlled slaves, then the fiends that humans had summond to beat the illithids, then githyanki who were coming in after the devastation to conquer what was left. Throughout it all, there was Yusibosk.

One PC, Ashir, had lost five years of his pre-PC life to mind flayer enslavement. He had very little memory of those years, with a solitary tentacle scar in his head being his only token of servitude. Well, after a few adventures, the PCs met Yusibosk, the mind flayer scientist who had formerly enthralled Ashir.

Yusibosk was terrifyingly powerful. As a mind flayer, close combat with him always meant risking your actual brain. As a potent psion, he could blast PCs with energy, control their mind, and worst of all, teleport away whenever things weren’t going his way – which he did, *many* times. He always had a way out.

Yusibosk wasn’t just threatening on his own. He also worked with other monsters to always challenge the PCs in a new way. In the battle that led to his first death, the PCs fought him in the air, in a cave inhabited by a lernean pyrohydra and the astral constructs he had summoned. He nearly destroyed the party, until being nearly bisected in the air by the tiefling warrior. *I* thought he was dead for sure!

But then the players themselves gave me a way to bring him back. Such was their hatred for Yusibosk that the PCs weren’t content with simply destroying his body. Oh no. They had to humiliate his memory utterly, and so Ashir requested that the party necromancer Teresia animate Yusibosk’s body into a zombie. The tables had turned, and the Yusibosk corpse was forced into menial labor. Revenge was done!

Until the PCs returned to base one day to find a commoner in their home with his skull smashed open with brute force and Yusibosk nowhere in sight. See, I’d planned to make a villain of the next arc a vampire necromancer (Teresia’s former teacher and lover) with a unique artifact which allowed him to grant intelligence to the undead. Hm! What better candidate for him to test his relic than the newly animated zombie illithid?

With his intelligence restored, Yusibosk was even more terrifying as, ahem, a psionic zombie mind flayer. His strength was greatly improved and being dead made him immune to many effects. He worked with the vampire to destroy the PCs and managed to escape many more times. In one event, he even managed to mind switch the party’s dwarven ally Barker and infiltrated the group for days.

It wasn’t always a loss for the party, though. They’d killed him once (only to make the mistake of animating him), and has small victories along the way after that. Ashir had since gained the ability to change shape into aberrations, and actually took the form of a mind flayer himself and DEVOURED YUSIBOSK’s UNDEAD ILLITHID BRAIN. It didn’t destroy him, but left his necrotic skull an empty husk, and for an illithid, even a dead one, it was the ultimate insult.

In the end, Yusibosk was ultimately destroyed. He’d been a thorn in the party’s side from, oh, level 5 to level 19. Of course, once he was ultimately destroyed, it was then that they learned that his legacy would pollute their world far longer. He had planted hundreds of illithid tadpoles in humanoids across the world to repopulate his race, and worse, numerous *mind seed* duplicates (in the form of humanoids) were wandering about the land.

This also keeps player frustrations to a minimum. There’s nothing more annoying as a player than being faced with the villain… and oh look… another escape. When that’s happened in previous campaigns, I, personally, have just shut off. “I don’t care about the villain anymore, sorry. He’s unreachable. We can’t do anything to affect him, so who cares?”

So if you do use the “here he is! … and now he’s gone” trick, make sure that whatever situation that happens in is still a victory for the group. It can’t be a stalemate. The players still have to feel as though they’ve accomplished something, even if the villain escaped.

In my games I usually have one major story arc going on at a time with a “Big Bad” at the center. Between him/her/it there are always lieutenants that attempt to foil the PCs and, since they are not the major player, the PCs can safely kill the lieutenants progressing the story as well as giving the PCs some satisfaction. In games I have seen (my own and ones run by other GMs) where the antagonist escaping constantly really frustrates the players.

Aside from getting away from the PCs — which, believe me, gets them plenty steamed at the villain — I also have the villains do nasty things to the PCs. Blow up their head quarters, steal something precious from them, frame them for crimes, kill NPCs they are fond of, etc. In my D&D game I have done a lot to make my PCs hate their villains. I’ve had them kill a dear squire and kidnap their favorite NPC. What have others done?

Also, something in regard to villains that I would like some advice on from everyone is how do you deal with a confrontation between the players and a high level lieutenant or even the Big Bad when your players are trigger/bow string happy? In some of these confrontations I try to have the villain do a short monologue in which I can drop some hints for them or even just have the villain expound upon how much he hates the PCs, what he/she/it plans to do to them, etc.

How do you keep the players from jumping straight into combat? One of my players is so bad about it that I had a villain who would place her consciousness into mannequins whenever I wanted her to have words with the PCs. My sword happy Paladin could smote her down and wind up with a ruined mannequin and I got to keep using the villain.

The other way I try to deal with the players going right into combat is to have some handouts made up ahead of time to use as props for the documents the players find when ransacking the villain’s abode. This way I can at least get important information into the PCs’ hands…and also some false information.

Oh, and I love the idea of rivals as well. I haven’t really used that before, but now I think I will have to keep it mind for the future.

One thing I have done in the past is to set up another group of adventurers as rivals in the traditional sense. While picking up rumors around town ro looking for their next job, the characters keep hearing about the exploits of another adventruing party.
“Are you the ones who killed the red dragon over on Hardpress Hill? No, oh, that’s too bad. I was hoping to hear an awesome story.”
“Did you hear the latest thing the Cold Spear adventuring group did last week?”
“It must have been real dangerous killing the giant tribe, but I heard the Cold Spears killed the Arch-Lich. Now that’s impressive!”

I’ve found the players and characters start to resent the other group, without ever even meeting them. There is alot of tension already built when they do finally meet. Perhaps the rivals are evil, perhaps not. Either way it is easy to build the resentments into a confrontation of epic purportions.

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