Having trouble with a villain.

[Hand of Evil]

Your rift could also run througth the planes and could allow the dead back into the world of the living, pop a template (Fiendish/Elemental) onto your undead of choice. This could even be an old bad guy that the players did away with.

Do think there needs to be a device/object aka rod of seven parts that either enhances or breaks your seal Pleian Ban.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Perhaps the big bad mage(ess), working through either flunkies, magic or orbital mind-control lasers is slowly corrupting and manipulating the academy; her ulitmate goal? World destruction by somehow tearing open the rift to the elemental plane of fire, bathing the world in glorious flame and purifying it....

 

[derelictjay]

Here's my idea, how bout a plane of madness. Not a planet like your other planes but a roving cloud or comet, it starts out in the beginnig small, barely a blip on the campaign radar, but gets bigger spreading madness and illogic as it goes, like a glacier forming on the plane of fire, etc. The PCs would not understand it at first, but as the campaign progresses they've got to fix the problem, and eventually take on whatevers behind the new plane.

The BBEG would be a powerful slaadi or a templated up mind flayer. If you have Malhavoc Press's Chaositech, this would be a good way to use it.

(Shoot I'm likeing this idea might steal it for myself.)

 

[RangerWickett]

I'm liking the suggestions here. I figure I can probably tease at several different directions, and see what the players are most interested in. Well, with all the help I'm getting, I might as well mention a few other campaign elements to see if any of the ideas click:

• Shaaladel and Shalosha. In the last game, Shaaladel, an Elvish general, ended up being the main villain. A cunning, charming bastard, he stayed out of the thick of conflict until others (such as the PCs) had taken out most of his competition, and then he made his move. The PCs put him down, due in no small part to the assistance of his daughter, Shalosha. Shalosha was in love with Rantle, a PC, and when we ended the game, it was assumed that Rantle and Shalosha would marry and try to bring peace.
  
  Thing is, Shalosha was directly responsible for her father's death. At the climax of the game, and right now as well, the elemental plane of fire was interfering with teleportation, meaning you needed fire resistance or else you'd burn as you teleport. In the final fight, though Shalosha agreed that her father needed to be stopped, her will broke when she saw him being overwhelmed. So she rushed into the fray and tried to teleport them both to safety, not knowing that her father had been hit with a dispel magic, negating his fire resistance. There was a flash of light, and Shalosha was in the nearby forest, holding the burning, dead body of her father.
  
  Traumatizing a bit.
  .
• The Mother of Dreams. The party doesn't know exactly what she is, but they've met her dreams, psychic incarnations of her nightmares, with an agenda of their own. Each dream is the essence of some ideal, like Agony, Indomitability, Deception, or Beauty, and they have powers related to that ideal. The Mother of Dreams is somewhere in the 'underdark,' and her dreams were coming to the surface. In the last campaign, the PCs managed to seal the passage they were using, so there won't be many of these dream creatures, but the ones who are left on the surface would likely be up to something.
  
  The headmistress of the wizard academy Lyceum is a human woman who bonded with the incarnation of Foresight, who was one of the more friendly incarnations.
  .
• Guthwulf, the Minster of Pain. One of four brothers pledged to causing misery to pay back the world's callousness, Guthwulf is a former PC cleric who joked with the other PCs that he wanted to create an undead army. He was the friendly, joking sort of evil, the type you end up trusting because they seem relatively harmless.
  
  I don't want Guthwulf to be heavily involved, but maybe one of his brothers. They each have different methods of being evil, and they approach it as a hobby. They know they're evil, but they figure the world deserves to suffer.
  .
• Nations. There are four big nations that are still relatively stable. Innenotdar is Rantle and Shalosha's nation that has humans, Orcs, and Elves. Dassen is a mostly Orcish nation that resembles 18th century Germany. Tundanesti is an Elvish nation, formerly Shaaladel's, that refused to unify with Innenotdar. And Sempas is a human nation with a long coastline, which built a long wall to keep out the armies of its neighbors. Plus Seaquen is a small city state where the Lyceum Academy is. There are numerous other lands, but their infrastructures were destroyed over the course of the war in the last campaign.
  .
• Leska's Curse. Leska created a huge subterranean sigil that gathered magical energy and channeled it into her. She is immortal, but when she was defeated last game she was impaled through the heart with a lance that pinned her to a wall of a cave that then collapsed. Her heart cannot heal, so she cannot come back from the dead. However, because all the magic of the world is passing through her, intense magic use attracts her spirit, a wraithlike entity that kills with a touch. The curse has only recently begun to manifest, but it will quicken. The wraith is drawn to magic-users, but if a spell is cast, the wraith will follow its energy briefly, which means low-level magic-users die first, while high-level ones can keep away from the wraith.
  
  Oh, and the place Leska was killed is called the Heart of History. It is the resting place of the dream of Time, and with Leska lies buried the Aquiline Heart, source of immortality.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Shalosha being controlled by her father Shaaladel to destroy the PCs. she is just not right anymore. Plot twist have her take on the persona of Shaaladel.

Guthwulf, the Minster of Pain - in the background, to provide information if needed, still likeable but wanting to use all that magic energy to raise his army of dead. He see a possible way but Shaaladel could be in the way and PC could help out.

The Mother of Dreams and Leska's Curse could be the same thing, just the curse is nightmare affecting the phyical plane. Possible relationship.

 

[Ranes]

All of the magic of the world is passing through Leska, leaking into the multiverse beyond. Perhaps the Plane of Life was never supposed to have been magical. It was the collision of the Plane of Life and the Plane of Magic that resulted in the Plane of Ruins and the now impure Plane of Life. The denizens of the underworld are the trapped soular (stet) remains of the original Plane of Life.

Somewhere in the infinite, a serious planeswalker from the greater multiverse detects the power leaking from the PCs' universe. Instantly, he realises that, if he could harness that much power, he'd become a god in his own universe. Crossing into the PCs' universe directly through the magical wormwhole created by Leska would be a journey beyond his abilities. He tries to find another way. He comes across the Pleian device that contains the PCs universe. While studying that mystery, he detects the planar rift.

From his perspective, the Pleian ban is enforced by a set of McGuffins - sorry, artifacts - that bind each of the planes in the PCs' universe. The artifacts cannot be removed (and they are well hidden from the occupants of the planes on which they're situated). He squeezes a multiversal message in a bottle through the planar rift, into the Plane of Life. The academy pick it up, while studying the rift. Two-way communication is established. Using formula derived from fractal magics in his universe, he proves to the academy that the boundaries of their universe can be neutralised. He also proves that there will be an end to magic in the Plane of Life if they don't release the Pleian plane locks, which they will be able to with the aid of his unique perspective and guidance. What he doesn't tell them is, that when all the Pleian devices are undone, he intends to be at the focal point of Leska's magical haemorrhage in his universe, whereupon he will completely absorb the power of their universe, utterly destroying it in the process, while at the same time making all the gods in his universe sit up and say, "Oh dear."

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Some further ideas

Ok, so you also need some sort of leader type, which will let your players put a face to the evil bastard they are hunting down. No problem, but...

One of the annoying things about D&D villians is that your players are generally smarter then the heroes in movies and books. When they see the bad guy, they hit him and kill him, rather then listen to him rant about his evil plans. Kind of hard to keep things cinematic when that happens.

I would also suggest avoiding the typical sorts of campiagn villian beasts. Dragons, super demons from beyond the planes, and mad wizards are all a bit cliche.

So I suppose we want a planar based atypical opponent who can interact with the players once in a while without the fear of being smaked down on site.

I will suggest then that you want a non corporeal extra planar beast that can posses creatures, granting them some sort of chaotic template. This makes yoru bad guy very scalable, since your always starting from a 'host' beast. The possession would act like a magic jar spell.

This creature could be some sort of chaotic entity that exists outside of time, and whos prison was breached by Leska's death. This gives you the option of having the players choose to restore Leska in order to re-trap the demon. Or you could red herring that, and have that be a trick to get the players to release an evil they worked to lock up.

Anyway, as for what this creatures motive is, that is harder to say. Perhaps its from the 'far realms' and needs to alter the elemental substance of the universe so that it can actually exist. I like the idea of a villian fighting to bring about its own existence.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Getting more specific

Now that I am home instead of at work, and have my Manual of the Planes handy, and my Book of Vile Darkness, I can better articulate my suggestions.

I reccomend using Corrupt Anarchic Elementals with tweaked weaknesses. This will translate into Elementals with some Fast Healing, improved damage reduction, a handfull of extra immunities, improved AC, and improved damage (Corrupt creatures have their damage dice upped by one category). In addition to using Elementals, you could also apply the Corrupt Anarchic, and Element templates to non-elemental monsters just for variety.

For your sanity's sake, I suggest creating one 'meta' template from the Corrupt and Anarchic templates and another for the previous two + the 'Element' template so that applying the templates becomes easier.

Creatures that would be intresting to apply this template to would be Giants (just for the beefy reach and str), Giant Insects of all sorts, Sharks (just think of your players faces whe you tell them a large flying, great white shark made of green burning fire is coming after them), Owl Bears, Gryphons, Wyverns, and Trolls.

I see this as a great opportunity to get creative with the descriptions. Flames that burn wrong, skin made of corroded metals, and creatures existing outside their traditional elements.

As for the villian creature, I would probably suggest a Kraken with class levels and some of the above templates. Tentacles on a great evil beast can never be a bad thing. Especially for a villain / monster type that is meant to be fundamentally wrong.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

RE the father's firey demise: that burning sprectre monster from MMII (effigy?) looks good. Probably not as BBEG, though; same guy again doesn't feel right to me.