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<blockquote data-quote="Voranzovin" data-source="post: 7999696" data-attributes="member: 7020495"><p>I've started doing this almost exclusively, actually, to fit with the arch tone that I've been trying to give my campaigns. "Heroic fantasy" never entirely worked for me because PCs are almost universally goofballs. Leaning into it by going for dry, cheerfully dark comedy is working much better.</p><p></p><p>I recently ran a heavily-reconfigured Tomb of Annihilation. Accordingly, discussion that follows is behind a spoiler cut.</p><p></p><p>[SPOILER="ToA spoilers"]I treated both Ras Nsi and Acererak as comedy villains. Ras I played as vain, lazy, and incompetent (after all, he's been hanging out in Omu for an awfully long time without accomplishing much of anything). When he first encountered the PCs, he announced himself as the Serpent that Poisons your Dreams with Fear and suggested that they cower before his legendary presence. He was shocked when he discovered that the PCs, who had not been paying all that much attention to local legends in Port Nyanzaru, had <em>no idea who he was, </em>and never quite recovered his momentum.</p><p></p><p>Also, he sounded <em>exactly</em> like Cobra Commander, or at least my best attempt to sound like Cobra Commander.</p><p></p><p>I tried to play Acererak as a much more serious threat, but added a bunch of comic elements to him as well. He instigated the entire campaign, not by creating the Soulmonger, but by starting a rumor that there was a powerful and dangerous artifact hidden in Omu and then hiring multiple adventuring parties through intermediaries to go find the lost city and retrieve it. In fact, there was no such artifact in the Tomb of the Nine Gods. He just wanted to watch a bunch of adventuring parties fight each other across Chult for the privilege to go get his nonexistant mguffin for his own amusement, and so he could ask any of them who made it to the tomb (whether they were dead or alive at the time) for notes on their experiences of his death traps. Basically, the entire campaign existed so that Acererak could collect user data.</p><p></p><p>He was real smug about it too. I think that gave the PCs an extra charge when they finally took him down.[/SPOILER]</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Voranzovin, post: 7999696, member: 7020495"] I've started doing this almost exclusively, actually, to fit with the arch tone that I've been trying to give my campaigns. "Heroic fantasy" never entirely worked for me because PCs are almost universally goofballs. Leaning into it by going for dry, cheerfully dark comedy is working much better. I recently ran a heavily-reconfigured Tomb of Annihilation. Accordingly, discussion that follows is behind a spoiler cut. [SPOILER="ToA spoilers"]I treated both Ras Nsi and Acererak as comedy villains. Ras I played as vain, lazy, and incompetent (after all, he's been hanging out in Omu for an awfully long time without accomplishing much of anything). When he first encountered the PCs, he announced himself as the Serpent that Poisons your Dreams with Fear and suggested that they cower before his legendary presence. He was shocked when he discovered that the PCs, who had not been paying all that much attention to local legends in Port Nyanzaru, had [I]no idea who he was, [/I]and never quite recovered his momentum. Also, he sounded [I]exactly[/I] like Cobra Commander, or at least my best attempt to sound like Cobra Commander. I tried to play Acererak as a much more serious threat, but added a bunch of comic elements to him as well. He instigated the entire campaign, not by creating the Soulmonger, but by starting a rumor that there was a powerful and dangerous artifact hidden in Omu and then hiring multiple adventuring parties through intermediaries to go find the lost city and retrieve it. In fact, there was no such artifact in the Tomb of the Nine Gods. He just wanted to watch a bunch of adventuring parties fight each other across Chult for the privilege to go get his nonexistant mguffin for his own amusement, and so he could ask any of them who made it to the tomb (whether they were dead or alive at the time) for notes on their experiences of his death traps. Basically, the entire campaign existed so that Acererak could collect user data. He was real smug about it too. I think that gave the PCs an extra charge when they finally took him down.[/SPOILER] [/QUOTE]
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