Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 276836" data-attributes="member: 172">Galea and other villainsHi all!Heh... funny how rounser uses my thread as an example, but the villain in my thread really doesn't have any sympathetic traits. She does have memorable traits, though. She does have distinctive traits -- the players know her as a dark haired woman with a dark complexion, which IMC are a sign of the people that live in the isles in the southern seas. She also has a modus operandi -- she hangs out invisibly while summoning creatures to harrass the party. Incidentally, that is one thing I did learn from the 2e villains handbook... give villains a signature method or a trademark.Betrayal and tragic villains are tools that I have used elsewhere in the game. However, Galea was pretty much rotten from the get-go. As mentioned in that thread, she wasn't really designed as a long term villain, so I saw no need to weave her deeply into the politics of the game.Other than her memorable traits, I think one thing that made her a villain was that with Galea, the conflict was personal. There are other villains in the game that the party had to strive to stop, but the thing is, the villains often don't personally identify the party. They are just people that got in their way on the way to other goals.But when the party tripped up Galea the first time, she turned her obsession on the party and started planning ambushes for them personally, instead of just pushing forward the plans of the alliance of wizards she was working for.Recent events in the campaign have produced some interesting developments for Galea. A duellist claiming to be Galea's cousin showed up on the party's doorstep and demanded that they answer to a breach of honor for their "false accusations" of Galea, and insisted that Galea was a perfectly kind and gentle woman who would never do the things that the party accused her of. The party eventually found out that the woman the party faced was not the woman who was born as Galea. Galea and her companion out the time entered a mirror-universe (per MOTP) and were slain by their evil doubles. The doubles took over the lives of their "unmirrored" selves (which led to another adventure in which the party uncovered that a lord in the kingdom was secretly a mirror self. To date, the party has assumed that the "mirror lord" and Galea were an item since their "real" selves were, but in fact they have nothing to do with each other.)I've noticed that when it gets personal, the players get more obsessed with a villain. In a similar vein to the above, back in my old 1e and 2e games, the party was after a dark knight, an illrigger (would be a blackguard in 3e.) That was plain old ho-hum "tromp through the villain's keep and get the villain" action. But along the way, the party ran into a champion of neutrality named Fein (pretty much took the idea straight out of an old dragon article.) Fein was after the illrigger too, but he also raced ahead of the party, took the best peices of treasure for himself, and harrassed the more extreme members of the party.What's worse is one of the party members was a druid. Later on, the party had to choke down their bile during a meeting in the druid circle when fein showed up, as not only did the other druids respect Fein, they awarded him for his great deeds.I don't think I've ever had the party loathe a villain as much as they loathed Fein. And he wasn't even evil!</blockquote>

Verification