Well, here's the outline with some reveals for the shapeshifting villains, plus one of their key pawns (High Cardinal Krozen) and one of his pawns
Bel Shalor - The Shadow in the Flame (Campaign End Villain)
- Draws strength from acts of betrayal and discord
- No power to act directly, only through insidious inspiration and dark whispers
- Talented at getting good people to do evil deeds
- Makes people selfish and cruel
Strategy:
- fans the flames of the believers who think that the church must wage war to bring the faith to all non-believers and convert them at the tip of the spear
Actions:
- Bel Shalor has deceived High Cardinal Krozen by offering him the power to defend Thrane.
- Poses as the Silver Flame.
- Convinced Krozen to form the Argentum, hunt relics and summon demons to gain power.
- Had Krozen send Gaowyn plus a party of adventurers to defeat the dragon guarding the gate to Shavarath- allowing the invasion from Shavarath to begin
Revealing Mistakes:
- The Silver Flame would not call for summoning demons and doing evil in order to win for good; however, Bel Shalor picks followers who are too flawed or blinded by lust for power to realize this.
Durastoran - the Wyrmbreaker - Exarch of Bel Shalor (Epic Villain)
- Despises Dragons and Argonnessen and the Chamber
- Uses prophesy to shape the world and bring about a dark age
Strategy:
- inserts false Draconic prophesy to manipulate the world and bring victory to the Lords of Dust
- Attempts to open gates from Shavarth to allow devils and demons into eberron
Actions:
- created an ambiguous prophesy that suggests the heroes can defeat the Shakul, but first they have to unleash the anti-keeper and gather the keys that unlock the Khyber seals, which would free Bel Shalor. The heroes belive that unlocking the seal is required to defeat Bel Shalor.
- replaced Kaelys Tela, a Dragon of the Chamber posing as a half-elf, to prevent her from helping the party
- sent the party to gather the petrified remains of Shakul, in order to restore him
Revealing Mistakes:
- Did not recognize Erdrick, an old friend of Kaelys Tela, when they met in Sharn
- Recognizes Lady Guay (a formerly powerful succubus, now fallen in power, a PC in the party) and lets slips her exploits
Shakul - Fang of Khyber (Paragon Villain)
- Shakul has been out of action for 10,000 years
- Shakul leads armies and manupulated national level leaders and organizations
- archrival is Maruk, the defeated orc Hero
Strategy:
- manipulates nations and organizations to create war and chaos
- wants to occupy the ground that the Silver Flame is on, inorder to release Bel Shalor
- fight against the party to make them belive that they must gather the relics in order to defeat him and Bel Shalor, but actually wants the party to do the footwork of gathering the items and bringing them to Flamekeep, where he is certain he can beat them.
-Release the Anti-keeper
Actions:
- Shakul posed as Gaowyn Spiritwalker in Paluur Draal to get the black key and to kill the only people who might know he had been freed.
- Directs the Sharakul clan against the party
- Gathers the Carrion Tribes and prepares the Sharakul to march through the Eldeen Reaches to take Flamekeep
- Sent the Sharakul to kill Professor Kiernan, the last scholar who know about Shakul vs. Maruk
- Sent Sharakul to kill the Lhesh Haruuck, plunging Darguun into civil war
Revealing Mistakes:
- knowledge of the world is out of date
- when posing as an NPC, has unexplained familiarity with party
- Gaowyn Spiritwalker has never been to Paluur Draal and has never met the party
- makes off-hand analysis of humans as a species, even while disguised as a human, in Infernal.
High Cardinal Krozen (Heroic Villain)
- Puritan with fight-fire-with-fire attitude
- unwitting puppet of the Shadow in the Flame, he thinks the Flame actually speaks to him
- Is willing to do whatever it takes to protect Thrane and the Church
- Controls a secret society, the Argentum, and uses it to hunt relics of power and do his bidding
- ruthlessly craves power
- The Mourning has made him paranoid: he seeks control whatever caused The Mourning
Strategy:
- Utilizes an extensive network of spies, agents and assassins to maintain power in Thrane by blackmail, murder and discredit
- Summons demons and uses dark rituals to remain powerful and informed
- Uses the Argentum, a secret society of treasure hunters, to retrieve powerful relics
- Strengthen Thrane's military and the influence of the church in daily lives
- Silences anyone who tries to reveal his sinister methods
Actions:
- Hired House Tarkanan to infiltrate Dreadhold inorder to release the Anti-Keeper (thinking the anti-keeper can be destroyed)
- Accused Adriel of heresy, which he did to prevent Lady Guay and Adriel discovering he leads the cabal
- Hired Git to kill Jonathan d'Tharask (party member) and Professor Kiernan
Revealing Mistakes:
- Pre-emptively sent Adriel to Demon Wastes, based on advice from a Devil
- Botched a summoning, stripping Lady Guay of her power and creating here vendetta against him
- Is missing his personal holy symbol (which Lady Guay has, although she has not figure out who the owner is)
- issues orders that don't always match the orders given by Shakul or Durostan when they replace him
Gaowyn Spiritwalker (Minor Heroic Villain)
- Obedient servant of the Silver Flame
- Turns a blind eye to the evil he deals with in the service of the Greater Good
- Willing to get his hands dirty becuase most other priests aren't willing to make the sacrifices needed to defeat evil
Strategy:
- Do the work of the Church as directed by Cardinal Krozen to ensure victory for the Flame
- Keeps the actions of the Argentum secret
- Deals with criminals, like the Bloodghost Syndicate, to procure illicit goods, and maintiain plausible deniability
Actions:
- Taking an eyewitness to Krozen's dark ritual to Dreadhold to be silenced
- Pursues the party to capture them
- Procures materials for dark rituals without questioning
- Hypocritically prosletyses to criminals he hires or buys from
- Leads the Argentum
Revealing Mistakes:
- Does not recognize the party, despite having tried to kill them early in the campaign (was actually Shakul in disguise)
