As some may know, I’ve been gaming for a long time. One of the problems a lot of older gamers like myself have with 3rd edition is that despite an overabundance of garbage for 2nd edition, there were some fine gems out there too. In my opinion, the old blue book, The Complete Book of Villains, was a strong offering of rules and ideas on how to incorporate villains into your campaign. Well, that was 1994 and 2nd edition and the 3rd edition has needed something similar for GMs for a long time. Enter Kenzer and Company with the Villain Design Handbook. Suffice it to say, this is a worthy successor in almost every way.
The book starts off by turning some of the old stereotypes of fantasy role playing on their ear. For example, instead of adventurers beginning in the tavern, the town dislikes adventurers and sets up taverns as a trap to get rid of these bothersome mercenaries. How about the damsel in distress? I actually disagree here though as its hard to see an actual damsel in distress who isn’t some shape changed demon. How about a good warlord, leading his people to freedom? The section hits more often then it misses and provides the GM several ideas on how to insure that player’s don’t moan when they hear about some necromancer that’s supposedly evil or some Halflings that aren’t thieves.
In actually crafting the villain though, the genesis of creation is chapter 2, Archetypes. There are six broad categories, deviant, devoted, fallen, inhuman, power mad, and visionary, with subcategories within them. For example, under Fallen, we have Forsaken, Nihilist, Polarist, and Thanophile. These sections provide the GM with good ideas in a board sense and a narrow sense. They use specific examples and explain why said example is a villain. They include sidebars that have variants so that GMs unsatisfied with the core idea can move onto another type. For example, the Necromancer has three variants. The Academic, the Megalomaniac, and the Undead Hunter.
Does it hit all the broad types? No. I didn’t see anything that would cover something like the Hulk, a misunderstood monster who causes destruction but doesn’t mean too. Such a archetype might be questionable as a villain though as it’s not really out to get you. I was also a little disappointed not to see something under the Fallen where they were cursed by a powerful magic item they owned and if they only got rid of it, they could redeem themselves.
The definitions here are easy to read and apply. GMs who don’t like one idea can flip to another rule. For me, perhaps one of the strangest types is the Polarist, a being who feels that there can be no great good without great evil and so makes himself that evil to draw forth the goodness in people. I suspect that I’m a little influenced by anti-heroes who want to do good and feel that if they cant’ be the hero, they might as well help others become it.
Chapter 3, Inside the Mind of a Killer, continues the building of the villain. It’s different than Chapter 2 because it provides more details, more ideas on how to mold the villain after its broad archetype has been selected. It help answers why the villain is the way he is and how he does his villainy. Need to know how much wealth a villain has access to and how much henchman services are? Need to know what levels of technology the villain has access to? A brief look at some tables here and you’re all set.
Just as important as the villain though is his lair. What good villain doesn’t have a memorable base of operations? It provides ideas on what type of home individuals have, wilderness and urban, as well as how much such places tend to cost. The table breaks down costs by climate and location, starting with a simple 100 gold pieces per 10 X 10 room, modified by climate and location.
Chapter 5, The Heart of the Serpent, starts to mix advice with rules as we get different types of villains and a typical feat progression for them. Each type of organization lists what it does and then a list of the common feats to members of that class. Need to see what feats thieves usually take? How about Hatchet Men? For those not in the know, it’s a person that makes problems go away. How about military forces? I found that this feat progression table, coming after solid advice about how to use each type of villain, very useful and appropriate. It helps to ground the evil NPCs and makes a GMs job easier.
The book closes up with advice on how the villain fits into the organization, as well as how to build levels of intrigue. It’s pretty boring if the players go after the main bad guy and get him on the first shot without having to go through his lackeys, henchmen and personal protectors first.
For those who live for crunch, Chapter 6, New Villainous Rules, introduces new feats and other goodies. Ironically, here’s where the villain part of the book fades a little into the background too. For example, Craft Trinket is an item creation feat that empowers a minor magic item. Not necessarily an evil thing eh? How about Parry? With this feat, you can make an attack roll to cancel out an opponent’s attack once per round. Something most characters would want to take I’m sure. A whole slew of Enhance Familiar Feats are included that power up a caster’s familiar including Darkvision, Poison, and Spit Poison. While some of them may be questionable for good players, there are many that are just at home in the hands of good characters as evil ones. Some though are indeed villain feats. Take Love of Slaughter, where you gain a will bonus for every person that you kill. How about Strike the Innocent, where you can do a Coup de Grace against characters with a base attack bonus of 0?
One of the biggest things I was looking forward to reading about was the variant rule, Anti-Feats. I was a little disappointed with it. Once every level you can roll for an Anti-Feat and for every two Anti-Feats you get, you can select a feat. The Anti-Feats work just the opposite of Feats so for Anti-Toughness, for example, you lose three hit points. Now the bad news is that these Anti-Feats are random, the roll of 1d1000. How can they have a roll like this? Well, there are Anti-Feats for just about every official feat there is from the official webside, to Dragon Magazine, to the various WoTC Splatbooks, to the Forgotten Realms book, to the Kalamar’s Player’s Guide. That’s a lot of goods and it’s very complete and provides a GM with a lot of d20 material, a good guide on how to craft your own Anti-Feats. I guess if I was designing the whole Anti-Feat thing, I’d put the Anti-Feats in progression so that they didn’t effect what you studied, but had an effect on you. For instance, a fighter wants to master ranged attacks? Fine, he get’s Anti-Melee list starting with Anti-Power Attack, Anti-Sunder, and a few others based on melee. It’s effecting his combat ability but not the field he’s specializing in.
More impressive to me are the variant combat maneuvers. By takeing a penalty to your attack roll, you can inflict some interesting wounds on our opponent. Some of these may be overpowered for some campaigns. Take the Decapitate maneuver. If a target is denied it’s dexterity bonus, you can attempt this attack. You have to declare it, get a critical strike, and the victim must make a Fortitude save of DC 15 + Strength, + magical bonus with failure resulting in death by beheading.
Chapter 7 continues the rules expansions with 7 new Presgie Classes. Once again though, not all of these are exactly villains. While the Blackfoot Society seeks to undo all forms of government, and the Blue Salamanders seek to master the entire world, the Brotherhood of the Broken Chain seeks freedom for slaves and the True Disciples of Avrynner seek to defeat those who hunt psionicists while Veteran Officers are, well, veteran officers. By making more appropriate villain PrCs like the Darklight Wizard, the book would have a more unified feel to it. It’s too bad that they couldn’t have swapped the Unchainer from this book with the Slaver from the KoK Player’s Guide.
Now Chapter 8, New Spells, includes lots of spells for the core classes, including the variants in the KoK Player’s Guide, so those Basiaran Dancers, Shaman, and Spellsingers now have more goods to add to their arsenal. Once again though, the rules aren’t aimed squarely at evil. After all, why do you need nine new paladin spells in a book about villains? And what’s so evil as excavating dirt and adding water to create a moat? The spells are all useful though and fill more needs than just blasting your opponents to dust. I’ve already had several players whose characters are paladins bother me about One on One, a spell that prevents interference in one on one combat, as well as Sacrifice, where you trade places with someone who is dying an unnatural death. For those looking for evil though, spells like Venomous Serpent Arm make your arm into a poisonous serpent, while Bat Accident sprays bat guano over an area. I think that this section would’ve benefited more, for villains at least, if it focused on assassin and black guards instead of paladins and bards.
Chapter 9, Wicked Things, is like a collection of magic items from various Kingdoms of Kalamar modules, and even some older Dragon magazines. Does anyone outside of me remember the cursed sword of Everstriking? It’s returned as a Vampiric Sword. For those not in the know, this sword never misses and drains the user’s hit points to account for the difference in what was rolled and what was needed to hit. How about the Orb of Midnight, making its return from the module, Midnight’s Terror. How about Siren’s Prize from, yes, the Siren’s Prize adventure? How about The Coin of Power from the trilogy of adventures or the Darklight Codex from that Deathright module? That’s not to say that everything here is reprinted, and for those who don’t own all the modules, the collection of items is great.
One of the most redeeming features of this section though, to me, isn’t even the items. It’s the rules of binding and summoning. The rules include circle information for either imprisoning a summoned creature or putting yourself in the circle to protect yourself. Modifiers on how to control them are based on your charisma, the offering, alignment, type of outsider, and other goodies like knowing the creatures true name, having the appropriate items, and the type of circle you’ve used. One of the more interesting aspects though is that almost any one can use these rules from fighters and rogues, to mages and shaman. Also important is that you’re not limited to summoning evil outsiders and can seek aid from celestials as well.
Now Chapter 10, Dangerous Denizens, provides the GM with only two monsters, the Darkling Snatcher, a goblin relative, and the Guardian Effigy, a small construct used to guard items, but it provides a ton of undead templates. Want to become a free willed zombie? How about a lich? How about a powerful wrath? These rules are included and allow those villains too stubborn to die another crack at the characters. It provides the rules for the rituals needed as well as the template statistics.
Now normally, a book should be done here, but there are several appendixes to help the GM further. For example, Appendix A provides stats for all those example characters used as examples early on in the book. Did you want to know more information about Baletak, a half-fiend, half-human blackguard? Do you want the stats for Miznamvho, a druid who attempts to make heroes greater by truly testing them? How about the adult gold dragon who guards the city that pays him homage?
Appendix B provides a Glossary of Terms that’s useful for those running a Kingdoms of Kalamar game, while Appendix C is a two page villain character sheet with space for anti-feats, henchmen, objective planner, and fatal flaws. Appendix D is a brief adventure, “A Change of Plans”, which is really an encounter with some slavers. The book closes out with a twelve page index, providing quick measure to finding anything in the book.
Art is great and the cover is a good indication of the type found inside. Text is fairly widely spaced providing the GM an easy read on the eyes. Text has a high margin at the top as an indicator provides information on what chapter the DM is reading, and a low margin, perhaps a little too low actually, at the bottom. Editing is good and game mechanics seem sound but I need to playtest more to verify that.
In short, the book provides the GM with all the tools he needs to have fully functional villains in his campaign through a series of articles that advice and more articles that provide game rules. The book falters a little in it’s presentation of non-villainous material and perhaps reprints too much material from other resources but it’s low price, $24.95 for over 170 pages, makes up for this. The Kalamar references are there but are not overwhelming and can often be ignored for those not playing in that setting. The book is aimed at GMs of all levels of skill and provides simple tools to help them run their campaign and any GM having issues with crafting good nemesis villains should peruse this book at their earliest opportunity.
REVIEWER'S NOTE: After more in depth use of the material, I find that there are some game play issues, especially with the anti-feats and combat moves, that lowers the overall utility so I've adjusted the score.
