How do you make your villians scary?

[Radiating Gnome]

My favorite thing is the recurring villan. Of course, you work in a bit of mystery and creativity, but the most important thing is that the party always knows that the villan is going to be back again.

In the main campaign I run they started with a goblin recurring villan named Spieny Grout. Grout was a goblin rogue who was the leader of a goblin warband that the players dealth with early in their adventures. Grout managed to escape, and manage to kill a few of the party's allies (npcs) before they caught up with him. They did manage to kill him, finally, and it was very cathartic.

Now they have three villans that are floating around making them angry. There's an evil cleric they've actually killed once and who has killed one of the PC's characters. And then there's the very old dragon the cleric serves, who is too big still for them to deal with, but luckily she can't have more than an indirect impact on the world of the players so far. THe thrid is Gaereth Axom, from speaker in dreams, who managed to escape into an alternate plane just before the PCs managed to kill him. He'll be back and they know it only too well.

The best thing about all of these villans is that they're smart, and they have a relationship with the PCs. They know who the pcs are and can reasonably be working very hard to counter the things that the PCs can do. One of the players is a dwarven death machine -- tons of hit points, high strength and a big axe. But he tends to be a big sucker for mentals spells, and the cleric is always ready with a hold person with the dwarf's name on it. The halfling rogue is wearing a psychic power crystal taken off a dead foe ages ago that she had made into a necklace without really knowing what it does, but Axom knows, and can use it to help sense her when she's near.

Anyway, my suggestion is to keep your villans around, and let them learn.

-jpj

 

[Renshai]

Oh.. also. When they party was fighting the mad clerics of Tharizdun in the Moathouse, I decided to show them how insane the clerics really were. They were in a heated battle with two of the clerics, one was human the other was a Troglodyte. In the NPCs descriptions it played up on the hatred between the two.

So, when the Troglodyte used it's sickening stench power against the party and the cleric was in the area of effect, he became enraged. He charged the trog cleric and began bashing away with his mace...

The party learned that they were not dealing with sane folk that day:

Ren

 

[Psion]

In a recent game, for example, my players fought the nightmarish remnants of a man who was driven insane by Lovecraftian cultists. His nightmares appeared as a cloud like a galaxy that distorted space and time around the players until they couldn't tell what was directly in front of them and what was as distant as the stars that appeared in the cloud. Mammoth faces appeared and disappeared in the cloud, at one moment distant as the stars and the next moment next to the character, screaming and biting mercilessly at the PCs' exposed flesh. Every now and then a comet or shooting star would flash in front of the party, blinding them with brilliant light.

Hmm... a creature with
-A constant confusion effect
-Multiple bite attacks
-A blinding attack every other round

Yep: it was a gibbering mouther. Only described in different terms that (I believe) appropriately freaked out my players.
(...)
Truth is, it wasn't any nastier than normal. It just looked it, and because the PCs weren't able to put a label on it, the battle was scarier.

Dressing up monsters in different clothes is a lot of fun, and can go a good way toward giving your adventures the appropriate ambience. I much recommend it.

Very cool technique. Monte recommended somthing like this a while back, and this is a very good example (except Monte actually changed stats... you didn't even do that...)

See:
http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly1.html

 

[Cloudgatherer]

I use more fear than mystery. I find mystery only tends to confuse and frustrate the players. My current main-villain was intercepted by the party as he proceeded to the main gates of the city: to open them for the invading army. As the party fought his escorts, he was followed by the party wizard (invisible, polymorphed) who saw him slay the watchmen with ease and open the gates himself.

It has made the party very wary of confronting this wizard themselves. Only one person in the party has wanted to "take him" so far, the rest of the party is afraid...

 

[Pielorinho]

Very cool technique. Monte recommended somthing like this a while back, and this is a very good example (except Monte actually changed stats... you didn't even do that...)

See:
http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly1.html

Thanks, Psion! Actually, although I've done this technique for a long time, Monte definitely gave me confidence in doing it. I still don't feel like I have a good enough handle on the rules to make changes to stats very often, though, so I tend to make my changes be cosmetic.

Fortunately, my players aren't superfamiliar witht he monster manual; even when they can guess what monster they're fighting, they don't always remember all its abilities. When a vargouille (IMC the severed head of a cultist's victim imbued with an evil demon) landed on a paralyzed PC's shoulders and tried to kiss her, green fog billowing from its mouth, the players knew what they were fighting. But they didn't remember what the kiss did, and so they were still scared.

Daniel

 

[quexly]

I have to agree with alot of the folks posting to this one: I love the creeping doom approach. Especially in the evocative career of DM'ing, it can be tough to "do a little with alot" .... but as a PC, that beast from the unknown bit sends shivers down my spine.

Anybody remember that old (what was it? 1960's?) sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet? The one with Leslie Nielsen in a NON-COMIC role... Pretty creepy... mind you, I was five the first time i watched it. But despite being low-budget space-pulp, to this day it strikes a chord with me and most people who see it. Give it a watch.

 

[Psion]

Forbidden Planet: Definitely! I listed it as one of my top 5 movies when someone post a survey a while back. Very cool, and it gave me lots of neat ideas... and I have seen smidgens of it in later SF as well.

 

[Zack2216]

If you're looking for fear, I think the cleche "rolling mist, see a shadowy form in front of you" thing might help. If he had powers that corrupted him, give him some demonic characteristics. Red glowing eyes that pierce the myst and what not. I think that being able to cast green fire balls and flame spells of the like could make him seem unnatural.

 

[Fiery Todd]

Tolkien Influence

I usually try to keep the main villian behind the scenes as long as possible. The longer the players go in actually meeting him/her/it face to face, the longer the players have to let their imaginations get the best of them. The best way to build this tension, I find, is to make his/her/it's minions/avatars/lieutenents etc. really nasty. Much the same way the dark riders work in LotR. Once the players have been put through the ringer by one of these nasty bad-guys their fear of the true villian is increased because they come to realize that that this nasty bad-guy actually calls somebody else "Sir".

Anotherwords, mystery rocks. Maybe Hitchcock is a better influence. He was a champ at it.

I have to go check the children now. Cheers.

 

[rounser]

Here's the gems amongst ore in this thread:

Only twice do I think I got a genuine emotional response from any of my players over a villain - the first was way back in second edition, the first time I ever pulled the henchman-turn-traitor on the party (This was actually the only time I was ever able to get a certain player to roleplay his character - Man, how he hated Erlith... ) The second time was just recently in my PbeM game where the paladin discovered his younger sister was turned into a vampire and he had to kill her (The player told me he loved the story and said it really helped him to get into his character.)

Two excellent examples of ways to get an emotional response from players, and both involve personal relationships with NPCs that they care about, or rely upon. I've noticed that players seem to respond particularly well to revenge, hatred and vengeance themes, too. Fear is trickier, and perhaps even less effective in an RPG (PCs may attempt to avoid rather than hunt the villain - and if they hunt the villain you won't even need an adventure hook).

Another excellent example of betrayal creating a strongly emotional reaction to a villain is on the WotC site:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/cc/cc20010518a

If you put this even in the background of a PC, the player would probably hate the betrayer.

So I'd say, for an emotion-evoking villain, lay the mystery and horror trappings and archetypes aside for awhile (they're just icing on the cake, not the main event), and focus on making their business with the villain personal, not just business this time.