Dominion Designs: Crafting Cruelty
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To be heroes protagonists need adversaries, really they do. No matter how much pocket change you drop in the Salvation Army bucket it doesn’t make you a hero, just an individual prone to guilt and a decent. Don’t go running off to stop gun-wielding muggers with your memorized Jet Li choreography - or at least leave your wallet with the charity Santa first.
There is the arduous quest across country to acquire some saving boon, but after a while inclement weather becomes boring in a story. If there was a blizzard - more blizzards is tiring. Sleet storm yesterday, you can’t believably have a heat wave the next day, nor a monsoon after that - unless the adventure takes place in Michigan. Vaudeville era weather jokes aside, protagonists need antagonist hate to become great. This is why gaming companies provide you with bestiaries and monstrosity laden manu … guidebooks for low cost, in the pursuit of fueling our hobby.
The real monsters wear suits.
Communist sentiment aside, some of the best villains do wear suits or other forms of opulence. This is just one of the several categories of death dealer. Let’s focus on the most common:
Dire Threat (pg. 243) There’s the creature entries from the danger book you’ve bought from the same company that published your game - like a dealer that sells pipes too. Where is the adventure set? Find creatures that live in that environment. Choose a few that are around the power level of your heroes. Put several of the weaker ones in the beginning, a few less of others about even with the party in the middle then the worst mafucka at the end with a few more of the weakest working with them. Warning: the Sorrowsworn Deathlord is not the best choice for all parties, merely a random coincidence of page 243 citation.
The story that links all of these encounters is beyond the scope of this article, but you can hit up the search function to find another article that does. The previous is the most basic method of creating enemies in a simple session. For more interesting encounters, we have to customize.
The Personal Nemesis. Choose one of your heroes to get reamed and create a character specifically for their weaknesses and durable against their strengths. It’s best to give the villain some motivation that isn’t personal - he got a scroll from the Evil Guild and took the assignment to kill the party. It just so happens that he trained his whole life to defeat the class of the target. Alternatively, and less cheesy, the hero character has been especially annoying in foiling neighborhood evil schemes and some mastermind is more than willing to pay extra for a specialist. A few extra coins for support minions to busy their friends is no big issue; the Evil Guild offers discounts on packs of six and twelve - a dozen for the price of eight once a month with coupon. Being specifically targeted by an adversary can give the hero a feeling of proud accomplishment - even when he’s bleeding.
The Mastermind. A villain for the long haul. This one gets made to be the most powerful enemy the party will ever fight. After they fight him, roll credits - campaign over. He’s got the connections to pull of everything and pay for those that will be dealing with the heroes one on one. For that extra touch make sure to kill any helpful NPC that the heroes may revisit; others will get the message. His whole organization is a ladder for the protagonist to ascend, without slipping on the blood to be shed. I believe it best to give this caliber of asshole some kind of twist. “I AM your father,” is a oldie but goodie but cliché - ey. One of the most inspired would be if your benefactor from the beginning turned out to be the mastermind, whom used the party to cull the weak from his herd - that’s pretty fucked.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Pope was behind it all? If under that dress, he was muscled up with glowing infernal tats and piercings? Predictable, but interesting.
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