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Message: <blockquote data-quote="F5" data-source="post: 2115402" data-attributes="member: 4607">Let's see...a couple of good ones.  It's hard to come up with a favorite.The first one that springs to mind is Barghaelyss the Ogre Mage.  Ooh, the players hated him.  HATED him.  One of his many schemes was to hire a group of young, inexperienced adventurer heroes to take out his rivals.  Of course, he appeared in a much less threatening form (a nondescript older man), and the unwitting adventurers he hired were the PCs.  I played him with a haughty, sort of generically british accent, and while he was arrogant and harsh, he was a good patron to the players.  When his true nature was finally revealed, the PCs were all ready to go to town on him, but he countered by asking them what, other than disguise his identity, he had done wrong?  He had never betrayed them, never asked hem to commit a crime, but had only ever had them fight monstrous opponents that, in other circumstances, they would have wanted to fight anyway.  Just because he himself was a monster, does that lessen the good that the group had done in the world?All but a few of the PCs bought it, and those that didn't were pretty morally ambiguous anyway.  The game didn't continue on for much longer, but I would have loved playing out a group of more-or-less good PCs working for an Evil employer, up to the point where the PCs were powerful enough to oppose Barghaelyss directly.  What would they have chosen to do?  Another fun NPC was Archbishop Lahren, from another more recent game.  A complete looney, that believed elves were impure and evil, but you would never know it from talking to him.  He seemed like a reasonable person, kind and good-humoured, until one of the PCs got him talking about elves.  He went into a wild-eyed, spittle-flecked rant, the intensity of which really caught the players off guard.  I think they might have thought of him as a potential ally against the big, evil stuff gong on until that point, where their opinions of him turned a complete 180.  That was fun.</blockquote>

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