Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 irish_vampyre Jan 27, 2009 1:41:03	I am looking to create a new villain for a campaign that will be starting soon. Now a bit of background on the premise of the campaign before I state my idea. I am warping Ravenloft to suit my campaign, adapting the monsters and scenarios, adventures and general rules and features to suit a world that mostly runs on the basic rules. In this campaign there are areas that aren't so much warps into Ravenloft as chunks of Ravenloft that are landscaped into my world. I want them revisitable, possible to leave and to allow for interaction between the world as a whole and Ravenloft, to make for interesting plots and natural developments. In my world, a futuristic time has already passed, there are remnants of the technology and it's being figured out by technicians, who are a new class I am working on. The world has basically been overrun by evil forces and a futuristic city was resurrected by good and neutral peoples. The area is filled with radiation poisoning which the good population has found a cure for and creates a bit of a defense against the evil community overrunning them here. As well as a defensive system from the futuristic city to keep them safe. Some small firearms have been resurrected, but there are major limitations and it's all very untapped and I plan to keep it mostly medieval outside of those things. there are a few cities however that are adaptations of Ravenloft and they are a jumping point after we've gotten a few levels so the characters can survive undead and increasing combat sequences as well as the dangerous end of the undead sectors. The villain I need is for a hook to get the PC's to use some form of teleportation, I was thinking futuristic because it would limit the availability to return and allow the PCs to finish off the villain, to go into the Ravenloft adapted areas. Now there are small medieval cities in the swamps below the hovering technocity. These towns and lands are where this villain is going to take place. The villain's plot and story-line as well as adventure involvement is going to be a point to make the PCs investigate new areas, following leads and finding other happenings until they are well progressed enough to go through with the Hook Villain. For that reason I decided a strange occurrence needed to be involved, it had to be a beatable arc, but it had to have a creepy ending and a mastermind to make it a little more "horror" based. So with that in mind, here's the general plot outline... At age 4 a child had a demonic possession, though the demon was exorcised, he was tainted by the influence, given an intelligence boost and an evil disposition as well as experience hiding these facts. He of course will be the villain, who would suspect a now 7 year old child of anything evil? Moving on, the pawn would have to be an unsuspecting human or something, I am undecided on the pawn so far, but the boy will have seduced and forced control over the pawn to use as a shield in case he is found out. The taint from the demon was not so unpleasant to the child, and he's been looking to bring back the demon every since the exorcism. However, being quite intelligent, he realized that pure strength was not his strong point and so he has been constructing a body for the demon to take as its own once he has found and released the demon. To find the demon, he's been using his knowledge about the demon. He knows that the demon needs a host of a child for possession because of its weakness from not having a host for so long. He also knows that the more evil around the child, the more likely the demon can find it's way into the body without complication. So he's been using minions to kill families and take the children. In his growing frustration, he's been trying to make the hosts more susceptible. To entice the demon even more he's been experimenting on the children, using clerics that have been twisted to used their healing magics in new and dangerous ways. Tearing open 2 children for example and fusing them together with healing magic. The idea here is that the PCs will slowly gather more and more information on the disappearances of the children and the killing of the families until they discover the lair of the demon summoning site. They'll go through and destroy the cult and the master pawn. It'll create a sense of relaxation and finally, when the killings and kidnappings don't stop they'll track the continued string to a new facility just as bad if not worse than the first with one exception, the facility has been destroyed. The back story which the PCs will likely have no idea about, will be that he found the demon and it's in it's new body. While the PCs are gone it'll be wreaking havoc, and this will be a nice secondary plot for much later in the campaign. They will discover the boy and learn about his evil ambitions now that he's found his master and they will of course attempt to kill him. The boy WILL escape, and lead the PCs on a chase where they wind up teleporting into the Ravenloft providence by means of following him. The major hook here will be that the boy has knowledge of how to defeat the cities defenses and the actual medicine to cure the radiation poisoning so the evil community will be able to march in unchallenged by the landscape. I know in this form it's not well played out as to how the PCs will experience it. But I am looking for feedback here. Thank you for reading and in advance for any suggestions and/or advice.
#2 goblin_pride Jan 29, 2009 17:45:03	My first impression is that the monster is too monsterous. The key to good gothic horror is that the villain, creature et cetera is somewhat more human that their outward appearance would suggest. If you want to make it more horrific, the demon shouldn't be external at all, merely a part of the villain's nature. Think back to the greats of horror for inspiration. Dracula was driven to the depths of moral depravity because of the loss of his one true love. Rejecting that morality in response to it's abandonment of his love is what made him a monster. It was in the restoration of his love that he found the final peace of the grave. Frankenstein's monster wasn't the monster in that story at all. It was the doctor that was truly monsterous in that tale. The creature was as kind and gentle as child, until forced into isolation because of the doctor's vanity. I would put my villain in the floating city if I was using your setting. The child would be something altogether innocent, a red herring to divert the attention of the PCs from the villain pulling their strings. Perhaps the child is the one being foretold in the tales of the Vistani as the one that can defeat your villain and end his imprisonment of the good people in the city floating above a largely uninhabitted world.
#3 irish_vampyre Jan 29, 2009 20:08:58	The demon in and of itself is nothing more than a means to an end. To give the child some inherent evil nature, and a more sinister visage. I don't even know if the demon will make a reappearance or not. Once he is gone I might decide he's a plot failure and his created body will die off. The whole idea behind having that particular background story is so if the PCs discover things to lead them to the truth I can be prepared with a background. As any DM knows, all PCs have one thing in common, no matter how much you plan, no matter how hard you try and what you anticipate, they will do something WAAAYYY off script. My hope however, is that the villain of the child would be somewhat of a shock and enough to lead them into my division of Ravenloft. I am not for a huge horror up slope. I have seen a great deal of horror movies, read novels and while the monsters were somewhat monstrous and the true monsters outlandish, they never drove a spike into my heart filled with fear. I am hoping that the PCs will not discover the demon's involvement at all. I want them to see a child that is capable of more evil things than anyone they've ever met, slaughtering children from all over the land. I'd have put the child in the floating city, and that's where the end point will be for him come time for the final "Safe City", which I have named New Linvea (lin-vay-uh), act. While outside the city, I don't plan on letting the PCs revisit the city for a good long time. While technological weapons will be available, I want the PCs to stick to basic weapons for as long as I can make them do it. Part of that is keeping them out of the city as much as possible. I am not sure if I am even going to allow the PCs to kill the child, because I can see a huge sub-plot out of an evil child as well as giving the PCs an undertone adventure. Whenever they complete an adventure unexpectedly or run out of things to do, they can revert back to looking for leads on the child. It's an idea and it's in progress. While I like your input, I think it's a different direction of what I want to do with the overall campaign. Another thing to note is I have 2 girly-girls in my sessions, so any form of extended horror would drive them off. So at intermittent points I need to throw in a nice day or something to give them a rest from the constant run of undead and black area and evil in general.