Necromancer or cleric of Vecna NPC ideas?

[Havrik Stoneskimmer]

I'm working up an NPC that will be the main villain in my campaign for most of the heroic tier. The NPC is an agent of the cult of Vecna, and I originally envisioned her as a cleric of Vecna but now I'm leaning towards building her as a necromancer using some of the powers from the new Heroes of Shadow book.

The idea is that she is supervising an expedition to locate some ancient powerful Vecna artifacts, etc. When the PCs first meet her, she is seen as a frightening and ominous hooded figure. If they fight her early on she will be way too powerful, and will just display one or two particularly flavorful spells/powers and then vacate the premises. Eventually they'll have a chance to fight for real, but early encounters are entirely for flavor and foreshadowing. So her powers should really define her as something very creepy and disturbing.

My current thought is to build a necromancer mage using the NPC rules in the DMG and maybe add the Ascetic of Vecna template from Open Grave for added flavor and to bump her up to an Elite.

But I thought I'd see if anyone knows of any other sourcebooks or DDI articles that have a stat block that would work well for a necromancer or undead-oriented cultist, etc.

 

[storm_wolf]

There are quite a few entries for Necromancers in the old Monster builder if you still have that running.

I would have one of her flavor powers be something like "Hands from the Grave" that causes immobilization until the end of her next turn for everything in a area burst 1 within 10 squares, targeting fortitude, giving her the ability to stop the party so she can run away or cause damage during the final encounter.

A second good flavor power would be "Lifeleeches" which are attacks from her minions that either give them temporary hit points when they hit the PC's or that will crawl to her after her minions hit that she will eat to gain either bonuses to hit or regenerate encounter powers during the fight.

 

[Kinneus]

Give her a bunch of minion mooks, orcs or goblins or whatever is appropriate for the level. When they (inevitably) die, she casts a foul spell... causing them to rise as zombie minion mooks.

Obviously, count both groups of minions in the XP budget. This is just a fun and flavorful way of including two groups of minions, and letting them come in 'waves' (lest they be WTFPWNED in the first round by a Controller's At-Will area burst).

 

[Aspeon]

Give her a bunch of minion mooks, orcs or goblins or whatever is appropriate for the level. When they (inevitably) die, she casts a foul spell... causing them to rise as zombie minion mooks.

Obviously, count both groups of minions in the XP budget. This is just a fun and flavorful way of including two groups of minions, and letting them come in 'waves' (lest they be WTFPWNED in the first round by a Controller's At-Will area burst).

Yeah. The Death Master template in DMG1 pretty much does that, though since elites have been errataed heavily there's not much left other than that and making it an elite. (It's basically a standard action encounter to summon some minions, 5/tier necrotic resist, and an aura 5 where friendly undead aren't vulnerable radiant.)

 

[Havrik Stoneskimmer]

Thanks for the great ideas. I ended up using the DMG NPC rules to build a necromancer using some of the necromancy school powers from Heroes of Shadow (which is not a book that I would want to use for PCs in my campaign, but it has some great stuff for villains!), and then adding the Death Master template from the DMG.

That Call of the Grave power should make for a cool scene. The first time they meet her, the encounter will start with a bunch of goblin minions and once the party kills them, she will arrive on the scene and raise them up as zombies.