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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 8486019" data-attributes="member: 63">For the War of the Burning Sky adventure path, the main antagonist is Leska, whom the party is introduced to originally as just the classic trope of 'vizier who took over after the ruler mysteriously died.' But you get snippets of her history throughout the campaign - sometimes not even realizing that stories you're hearing are about her - and as you get closer to actually confronting her, you meet someone pivotal to her life, someone who betrayed her, someone she has kept alive and in a prison to torture him for decades.Ultimately, you find out that Leska was in her youth a patriot and an idealist, and was looking forward to serving the emperor until a fight between her nation and their neighbors put her home town in peril. She intervened to try to stop the emperor from attacking, and he was impressed by her gumption, but was obliged by honor to order her death. So he gave her an impossible task - find the secret of immortality. He gave her a year to do it, promising he would spare her home that long.She undertook a quest, suffered horribly, made terrible choices she regretted, found love, was betrayed, nearly died, but nevertheless succeeded at the impossible. When she returned to the emperor, she was all but broken by the ordeal, but had a cold pride for the victory she'd achieved.The emperor commended her. Then he gave her the regrettable news that while she was away, the army of their hostile neighbor razed her home town and killed everyone there. From that point on, Leska was motivated by a desire to get power so she could hurt the rest of the world, but her plans were patient. She was, after all, immortal. She could take her time.---Now, I came up with her 15+ years ago. If I were writing the adventure path again today, I'd put in more ways to force the PCs into situations parallel to hers, where they lost things they cared for, where they were betrayed and had sacrifices. I'd try to turn the PCs into mirrors of the villain, so perhaps they could understand why she'd make the choice she did. But the challenge of the set-up of an adventure path is that it's really hard to let the PCs meet the big bad early on if you don't want the PCs to, y'know, kill them when you've still got story to tell. So the party never met Leska until the end. But I hope they understood her, at least a bit.</blockquote>

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