Posts Tagged by villains
| May 31, 2011 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
The smart villain is a common GMing problem. How do you portray a person who’s smarter than you? And because we’re talking about games of imagination we’re not even talking about people like Steven Hawking or Marilyn Vos Savant: we’re talking about entities beyond the limit of human intelligences; dragons, alien intellects, super villains, mad AIs, godlings, and the like, and regardless if what Benson’s says about your brainpower is true or not, you’re just not THAT smart. So the best thing you can do…
| December 18, 2009 | Posted by John Arcadian |
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 on TV? Or do you use a truly threatening foe? What if, to your best efforts, the PCs kill their nemesis before…
| January 15, 2009 | Posted by Troy E. Taylor |
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, includes a list of the 20 greatest villains from D&D lore. Categorizing the best of…
| October 27, 2008 | Posted by Troy E. Taylor |
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 Seed of Evil” Mood: The pervasive — even oppressive — feeling of corruption fills you with dread.…
| July 15, 2008 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
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 PCs’ stuff (which is easy to overdo), killing their allies (great, but not to be…
