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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9249302" data-attributes="member: 5948">So here's a question.  What published previous-edition campaigns do this best?  What are the classics that get it right?  Which ones set up the best villain, have the villain most central, and keep the PCs involved with (or aware of) the villain all the way through?It's not an easy thing to do, structurally speaking.  The nature of levelling in the game very much works against it in a long campaign.  If you have a campaign ultimate bad guy meet up with a low level party, he'll squash them like bugs if he notices them.  If a campaign ultimate bad guy meets up with a medium level party, he probably WILL notice them and have sufficient reason to squash them.  And PCs are resourceful critters, if they DO meet up with an ultimate bad guy early, they might just be able to kill him in some unexpected way and disable everything.  Normal way of doing this is having an ascending hierarchy of intermediate bad guys - in the classic DL series it's clear that Takhisis is the ultimate bad, but PCs have her cleric Verminaard to start with, then her armies at higher levels, then Ariakas and Takhisis herself at the top.  Similarly, Savage Tide (while it does have other problems) does this pretty well, having Vanthus be a bad seed from level one, having him advance with the party up to the mid/high levels by which time the PCs realise he's just a tool of Demogorgon, the ultimate villain.  But even then, in my playthrough the PCs got really intense about making sure Vanthus was dead dead dead and not coming back waaay before the modules had finished with him, and that was very awkward to manage.What is the gold standard here?</blockquote>

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