Villainous

Kiel over at the awesome Dungeons & Donuts blog came up with a pretty interesting villain questionnaire. He said it was more D&D focused but I found it fairly system agnostic which is good because that's not what I've been running recently.

My campaign has a couple of villains I'm fairly proud of. Many of them more of a threat and possible more interesting than the guy I talk about below, but he's coming up sooner so I've thought about it more recently.

1. What's her/his name?

Nicholas R. Nero

2. What's her/his race and class?

He's a human CEO of the Nero Corporation. A New York based company with ties in all sorts of black market magic. He's also a Wanderer, a wizard with time and space magic who collects realities to use as weapons.

3. What, if anything, inspired you to create said villain?

I knew I wanted a power hungry corporation for the players to deal with. I wanted the leader to represent everything about the corporation: ambitious, strange magic, eccentric, and a little sadistic.

4. What was her/his main goal? Did she/he accomplish it?

To awaken a group of extra-dimensional titans called the Slumberers. But that's really just a side effect of summoning  and attempting to enslave Eschaton

5. What in their history made them pursue "evil"?

Most people look at everything the worlds have to offer and are filled with awe, Nero looked at it all and got greedy.

6. What was their relationship like with the PCs?

They've yet to actually meet him but he's going to be their opposition. Probably for a while too since he's much more powerful than they are. It could be interesting though if they manage to kill him.

7. What, if any, was one of their fiendish plots that stands out in your mind? Also, how did the PCs overcome it?

Again this hasn't happened yet, but the players are planning to break into his corporations main headquarters while they are having a fancy masquerade party. He's going to turn the building itself into a Slumberer while they are in it.

8. How did your villain dress/talk/present themselves?

Nero is well dressed, but flashy and kind of tacky. He's so full of himself and fairly crazy that his fashion sense is a bit extreme. Think like a brightly colored suite and wearing a lot of rings. He speaks loudly and moves with purpose

9. What was your villain's greatest secret or weakness?

There are definitely ways to exploit his insanity and his magic is rather unstable. The players can find ways to make it all backfire if they seek them out.

10. If applicable, how did your villain die?

The players blow stuff up a lot so that seems likely.

Evil Christmas and Adventures within New York City

Last game the players ended up saving Christmas. The holiday is still a week away but it was our last game together so I made a holiday themed adventure on the epic side of things.

Santa was for some reason in the Appalachian mountains, corrupted by the Book of Terrible things (or the Naughty List as most might know it) which has been recording the sins of humanity for so long it seems to have gained sentience.

The players fought some giant toy tanks and life-sized tin soldiers with permanent stuck on smiles. They did pretty well, though known of them can pilot a tank for shit and this almost got them blown up several times.

Santa's elves were building these war machines because of all the evil corruption going and the players decided it might be a good idea to stop this. That, and they discovered that Santa planned on shifting the poles which would have nearly destroyed the magnetosphere, which would have been bad for pretty much the entire planet.

Other highlights of the adventure include the players narrowly escaping a weeping angel made of ice, befriending a top hat-wearing ice elemental named Frosty, and getting there names written in a book that messed them up pretty bad.

The final fight with Santa included mind control on both sides, homicidal knife-wielding elves, flying reindeer, and two characters nearly dieing. This battle was made even more complicated by the fact that the players were getting dose with magic that increased their powers. But also made their bodies pour out energy and their abilities go haywire. Think telekinetic storms, swarms of summoned spiders, and floods.

Most of the time the players looked like this. I've been watching a lot of Doctor Who recently.

They ended up surviving the process and freeing Santa from his possession. As a reward he offered to teleport them and the car they are so fond of to wherever they wanted to go. They recently found out about a shady business called the Nero Corporation in New York City so that's where they chose to go.

It was an incredible session. Several of the players told me how it was out best game yet and ended up being quite epic. We won't play again until after our winter break so that was basically a season finale for us.

And I could not have a better option for a season premier. Throughout this campaign I've had vague ideas about what can be found throughout this semi-magical Earth I've been building. I've tried to keep most of these ideas loose so I can easily respond to the players.

New York is a big place even without supernatural elements. It's safe to say a lot goes on there. You could spend an entire campaign in the city in a variety of genres. I'm not sure how long the players will want to stay in New York but getting into the Nero Corporation won't be easy so chances are they'll be spending at least a couple sessions there.

I'm trying not to let myself get overwhelmed with what all I could put together but there are a few things I want to focus on. I'll probably expand on these in a later post:

-An area of decadence: The upper crust of society hiding out in high-rise penthouse apartments. Making multi-million dollar business deals and spending the gains on often times corrupt hobbies. This could include personal armies of adventurers to gather artifacts for them, dealing with expensive, and often times enchanted, artwork, throwing elaborate parties, and secret murders or potential rivals.

-An area of delinquency: Like the show misfits minus the accents. Everything is punk rock, recreational drug use, one-night stands, and superpowers. Nearly everyone in this area has a criminal record of some kind though it's often. Everybody is scrounging around to make a decent living but a select few have a wish of theirs answered by a gaining a superpower one day. This of course creates quite a bit of chaos.

Not sure yet what all this is going to entail but I'll try and keep posting about it. Let me know what you think especially if you have any ideas of your own.