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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Draksila" data-source="post: 4850164" data-attributes="member: 31376">Personally, I see such things as a sign of bad DMing.  You can easily use signature characters from a setting without taking the spotlight off of the players. In my years of DMing I've had Elminster show up once for comedic effect, twice to offer obscure advice, and once to offend one of my players' clerics in my FR games.  All of those appearances were scripted into modules that I used in high school, and none of them solved the players' problems or even detracted from their top billing. My players have been face to face with Fzoul Chembryl twice.  Once was in one of the afore-mentioned modules (Curse of the Azure Bonds, one of my and my players' favorites), and once was in a homebrew.  The first time they fought him for control of a relic to slay Moander.  The second time a different group of heroes were attacking a Cyricist band of Zhents while Fzoul was working for Iyachtu (sp?).  The last battle involved some kind of arcane artifact that the Cyricists had stolen from the Xvimites, and there were lots of bad rolls on the side of the PCs.  At the end the villains lay vanquished and the fighter was at 0 hp with everyone else stabilized in the negatives, meaning the fighter was the only one barely coherent.  I described a dreamlike sequence where through his haze of pain he saw Fzoul enter the chamber with a squad of Zhent soldiers before taking in the scene, thanking the fighter, taking the artifact and tossing a bag of gold at the bleeding warrior's feet.  Far from seeing it as any sort of 'here there be gods' cameo, the players (knowing me) understood that rather than be ambushed by Fzoul's forces on the way out of the complex, I had given them a near-miss in what I considered to be the most cinematic way.  I never got any complaints about it. A player of mine hunted down and killed Raistlin Majere in my one and only Dragonlance campaign, just because he could.  I didn't pull any punches in the fight, but the player got in some lucky shots. Oh, and I have used Darth Vader in a Star Wars campaign before.  My players considered it their bounty hunter's fault, though.  They were trying to flush out an old surviving Jedi in the Rebellion era, and the bounty hunter had the bright idea of doing so by manipulating some images of Vader stolen off of the Galactic News Net and putting out a transmission that claimed he was coming to the planet they had tracked the Jedi down to due to reports of fugitives in that sector.  The bounty hunter was expecting to wait at one of the major ports and see if the old guy tried to get offworld.  The problem is that in that era, the Empire controls the Galactic News Net.  When Vader's spies got ahold of that footage and relayed it to him, he was very curious as to why anyone should think he would be interested in that world and who would have the audacity to use his image for their own ends.  The next day there actually were Star Destroyers in orbit watching any inbound or outbound ships, and the PCs were so pissed at their bounty hunter that they ditched him during a shootout with some of the local thugs they'd made enemies of....</blockquote>

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