Looking for an article idea to finish this week off with, I went trolling through the suggestion pot. The most recent question caught my eye. Crushnaut asks: "I would like to work a rival, or reoccurring adversary into the next campaign I run. How do you guys work these into your stories? Do you use the powerful, yet utterly hopeless defiler as seen ...

A new year calls for a new campaign. And a new campaign means devising a new villain. It’s the perfect time for a GM to shine. Is there a better test than coming up with an NPC who stands in complete opposition to what your players stand for? For inspiration I checked out my collection of Dragon back issues. The last issue published under Paizo, No. 359 from September 2007, ...

In the D&D Supplement Heroes of Horror (2005, Wizards of the Coast), authors James Wyatt, Ari Marmell and C.A. Suleiman recommend constructing a horror-themed adventure with four components. They are: mood, setting, plot and villain. So, it seemed natural to try and pair that approach with some of the other D&D supplements I had at hand and see what horror-inspired adventure hooks we could devise. Oriental Adventures “A ...

There are lots of ways to use NPCs to motivate your players to take a particular course of action (by motivating their PCs, of course), but I've recently discovered one that surprised me: lying. Specifically, having an NPC that they would like to trust -- or perhaps have trusted in the past -- turn out to be a filthy, lowdown liar. This is along the same lines as stealing the ...