At Will

I recently talked about what makes a villain work in the context of an RPG campaign. Today I’m going to talk about three different types of villain. The next few Fridays I will give specific examples of the villains, ready to be dragged and dropped and possibly re-skinned (painful!) for your 4e games. In the spirit of “The New Breed” , we’ll lay out some basic background and psychology for :

• The Well Intentioned Villain
• The Nihilist Villain
• The Faustian Villain

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Reading is Fundamental

The session starts down one Bobrick . It’s the aftermath of the party’s defense of themselves versus a group of angry specters in the Ivory Library. They go through the books to find items of interest and find several.  I had props for each book printed out, but an accident involving my cat and water ruined them quick, and I’m saving printer ink for my maps.

The players learn more about the Grey Guard, the Baron’s forces, and about the Shadowfell version of Greyharbour (named coincidentally, Blackharbour), as well as a bit about the dragonborn city Iovanthar.

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You may be surprised by this, but I actually run my group through the skill challenges you find on this site. I don’t do them all at once, as it often doesn’t make sense. One I’d been waiting for the opportunity to play through is Walk Through Dreams. It’s easily my most ambitious skill challenge in terms of what it is representing, so I wanted to give it a thorough test and see what came out of it. Th short version of the results is the playthrough was excellent, and my players had a lot of fun with it. The long version –the manuscript– follows. This is the closest approximation I can make, but my memory of it is pretty vivid, because it was pretty damn cool.

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I’ve been a bad boy.  With everything going around me I’ve let session notes slip, and after a while we got so far behind that it became a mountain in mind.  All I’ve got is this little ice-pick to climb Mt. Everest with.

So, I’m wiping the slate clean, in a sense.  I want to update everyone on the story thus far, and then I can in good conscience move on and keep taking notes from the last session.  This will also give anyone who’s new a chance to catch up and follow along with my weekly game.

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Last Time: The characters ran through the city as wraiths attacked, defending townsfolk where they could and looking to grab the wraithstones that brought the wraiths there.

This Time: Lot of fast combats with boards full of minions.  No time for extended rests, so each combat wore the group down gradually.  The group acquired all the wraithstones, and then high-tailed it out of town, with hundreds of wraiths pursuing them, almost descending upon the group to bring the Pcs into their undead ranks…just as day broke, and the wraith horde dispersed.

The Twist: Some of the townspeople were being mind-controlled by the wraiths.  This was a fun and interesting combat as I also added two conditions: 1) the players could get XP by killing no one out of 20 possessed citizens and 2) because of their crazed nature, they couldn’t just choose to drop the citizens at 0 without talking an attack roll penalty.  The PCs managed to navigate this by isolating and killing the controlling wraiths.

Some Background: Finneas Jack, an old foe of the party, was yelling taunts out from the shadows.  The players know he’s involved with this somehow, but they don’t know what yet.

The Best Part: The final skill challenge of the evening with the PCs high-tailing it out of town with an “entourage” of soul-thirsty wraiths.  The players were in absolutely no shape to fight anything.  Low on HP, no healing surges, the PCs could not have survived anything close to a real fight, so the tension was pretty high on the results of the skill challenge.  When your players themselves audibly breathe a sigh of relief, you know you’ve done your job.