While I was writing my 300th milestone post, I got a very interesting email from a reader. Here’s what he wrote:
Good afternoon! I’ve been a long time reader of and commenter on your blog, and I was looking for some brainstorming help. Specifically,
what kind of holds could a magnificent bastard have over a party in
D&D of 10-14th level?The problem is offense is far easier in D&D than defense, and players
(as I’m sure you know) are often willing to risk a lot to satisfying
revenges or simply kill someone who annoys them. So, with that in
mind, what are some good holds a partially-revealed magnificent
bastard could use to keep the PCs busy and away from himself?There’s always the kidnapped friend or relative, but parties are
extremely good at breaking into tightly guarded locations, and
resurrection magic means they often do not fear the death of a valued
NPC. There’s information, but once that is imparted the Magnificent
Bastard loses his hold.What do you think? Any input would be appreciated. Thanks so much!
-PW
My post on the Magnificent Bastard is quite possibly my favorite Trope article so far. That makes me more than happy to try to tackle this.
In the 10-14th level bracket, D&D PCs are now big shots that can afford to bully/ignore pretty much anyone that isn’t an encounter planned by the DM. At that level, players expect to be the only local badasses that stand between
This makes playing a Magnificent Bastard as the campaign’s main villain hard, especially with remorselessness players who use the game’s mechanics to rationalize doing horrible stuff like letting loved ones be killed to raise them later.
If you must play the Bastard as a villain, I’d say that he/she needs to hold the PCs by the proverbial cojones. At level 10-14, that may be difficult but not impossible to pull off. The MB can hit old SchoolPCs/Teflon players in the following areas:
- Prevent the PCs from being raised if the NPC ever wishes so. (i.e.: You kill me, you hurt me, you stay dead!)… maybe the MB has sold the PCs souls to devils or has influence with the divine agents able to raise the PCs.
- Prevent the PCs from selling loot or acquiring new Magic Item (“Did I forget to mention that I am the son of the head of Wizards’ guild?”)
- The MB marries the sister of a PC… who truly loves him and dies of depression if the MB is killed. (She then refuses to get raised, always an option, unless her love returns whole! That’s evil!)
- Pull a Raven…
Pulling a Raven is a reference to Neal Stepheson’s Snow Crash, where one of the ‘bad guys’ called Raven goes around with a Nuke strapped to his motorcycle and has it plugged on his vital signs. You kill Raven, you create a glass Crater.
In that sense, you can make the Magnificent Bastard imbued with an enchantment (or artifact, or diabolic pact) that basically spells doom for a whole kingdom should he be slain. Now PCs need to find a roundabout way of dealing with the MB. Maybe by deactivating the doomsday device or trapping him on another plane…
…But being a Magnificent Bastard, you can be sure someone/something is going to fall under his charms and release him soon enough.
Lastly, if the PCs do end up killing the MB… why not bring him/her back to life all the time? The Bastard probably has allies in high places that can spring for a true resurrect much more easily than the PCs. That should annoy the PCs to no end.
I used exactly that trick with a Chaotic Evil Noblewoman in an old Ptolus adventure (The Banewarrens). Even though she was Evil, she had quite a few political alliance with teh Lawful Good church that guaranteed her a True Resurrection if she died…. and she needed them! 🙂
One key point of the Magnificent Bastard is that from the moment the players hate him/her unconditionally he stops being a MB and becomes an Overlord or other type of villain… The Magnificent Bastard depends on having a love/hate relationship with the other characters. If you can salvage a break in trust just once, the NPC has done it’s job… Don’t force it too much passed this point, you’ll be accused of having a Marty Stu.
Anybody else has ideas to share on how a villainous Magnificent Bastard could have a hold against old school/Teflon players?
Keep the letters coming! I might not get to them real fast but I’ll do one per week if I have enough material for it.
This one is easy. Simply make the magnificent bastard the lesser of two GIGANTIC evils. If I may mix genres, compare the Borg to Lex Luthor. Both are evil, but at least Lex wants to run the world through fear and intimidation. I find that preferable to being lobotomized by the evil alien machines.
Trask, the Last Tyromancer
Good suggestion… it’s like the Evil in a Can thing… The MB is the can… knows it and tells the PCs well in advance as insurance.
I would go with a tweak of Trask’s suggestion. Have two, equal MB (as if one was hard enough to pull off).. if one is killed the other will make him too big a force to reconned with.
Playing both MB’s has equals and probably partners should be fun too… However I think it would be important not to have them fight each other through the PCs too often or else it just becomes a war between two factions and the PCs will eventually pick one.
You crunch people can work this out but here’s another little fluffy idea with the concept of two MBs. The two MBs are warlords who have fought and won countless battles… Upon an especially triumphant victory, to cement their unwavering loyalty, they have used some ritual to anchor their own soul into the other’s body. To kill one, the other must be killed. Over the years they have become, not enemies, but fierce adversaries. Still bound by that ritual, they are caught in web of conspiracies to both gain advantage over one another and two protect the lives of each other. … hmmm, I think that’s also a great foundation for the Great Game both MBs are playing.
Hmm. Let me think here.
Goal: Make powerful NPC who into a character who the PCs will be uneasy dealing with but one whom they do deal with on multiple occasions instead of just kill on sight.
I think the idea of giving the NPC real power is one of the better ways to go. A given nobleman can be no more than a 3rd level aristocrat yet have family and connections that span an empire, effectively turning the PCs into wanted murderers if they get fingered for killing him/her.
Another approach… Has your group done any “rescue the princess” type quests lately? What if, unknown to them, the “princess” is really the daughter of your bastard?
If they let loved ones die because of a game mechanic I would imagine that would pretty much end any relationship. Getting trapped under ice in a river is about the closest thing to that which can happen in the real world. I’m not sure about you but if someone did that to me because it was an “easier solution” I would have a few things to say and I’d be tempted to let a Louisville slugger do most of the talking for me.
I’m assuming you can’t pull a Kitiara and have a past relationship with one or more of the PCs justify not killing your bastard. I’m also going to assume that no amount of “but he’s just too useful to kill” thrown at this NPC will keep the party from dogpiling on him at the very first opportunity.
Pull a Bubbahotep. Give your NPC some other means of being effective and then have something horrible happen to him that disables him. It’s kind of hard to look heroic while smiting some old fart in a wheelchair. Need a carrot for this kind of deal too though. Someone should notice and appreciate the restraint they show, if they show any. If they don’t, that should be noticed too.
Perhaps a Joker transformation? It’s kind of like the Obi-wan deal only it can be paraphrased more like this: “Strike me down and I will return more bat-guano crazy… I mean, more powerful than you can imagine.” This is a fun twist on the True Resurrection bit Chatty mentioned.
If all else fails you have two options. GM fiat or let the bastard die. Your game will probably be better served by the latter. Next time make the character useful to the party, have consequences and severe ones if he’s jumped and actually make the party deal with said consequences. Just give them fair warning first. If that won’t work then you may be stuck modeling your games after the old computer rpg’s if you continue to run for that group. Every NPC is either a quest giver, a blandly friendly and useful person like a shopkeeper or an innkeeper, or an enemy to be slaughtered as fast as possible.
Evil in a can has a huge number of potentials.
Every 50 years, a new person is chosen by the gods. So long as this person survives a great destructive force is held at bay (gate to hell, tarrasque, etc.) Welcome to year 7 of the MB’s status as the Chosen One. You could even make this a point of cooperation between most or all of the faiths in the land. Especailly nice would be having the party protect him from members of a doomsday cult.
As a young woman, the MB bound her soul to an ultra powerful evil artifact or immortal villain. If she dies of natural causes, the artifact or villian die with her. If she is killed, they are freed.
The MB is the only emissary that a powerful neighboring country will accept. If he dies, there is likely to be a war that the PCs’ homeland is unlikely to be able to win. (Endless barbarian horde, flight of Dragons, what have you.)
He’s an essential part of a ritual that the PCs are trying to perform. The ritual requires very specific conditions, conditions that won’t be met until 5 years from now. If they decide to scrap him and look for another person, the conditions needed will shift, possibly by hundreds of years.
From the Anime The Slayers or the Computer Game Diablo, he has a great and powerful evil sealed away inside of him. To kill the MB is to unleash the evil (think Demon Lord scale.)
Ooh, How about the Lords of Hell. He’s tied into the imprisonment of the one trapped in the ice. If he is killed, his killers gain the approval of one of the Lords of Hell, but the eternal and active hatred of several others including Asmodeus.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..
I hate DMing anything over 16th level, They require really awesome story-lines, and these are far and in between. Most of the stuff that challenges them is not 1 on 1 encounters, it is the realization of being important to so many different people, and if the players refuse to do this, then there really isn’t anything that you can do about it other then retire them until your evil mind can come up with something large enough to suit their skills, while avoiding the insane fights between two enemy’s that are so strong that neither one of them are going to die . . . ever.
Typically, it is at this point were they get their own fortress, or cash in on their power. Clerics have churches to run, Soldiers have armies dependent upon them, it isn’t about YOU anymore, it is about management skills.
I’ve got a 15th level Swashbuckler who hates his life, he is a Lord over a city. He’s a roguish scoundrel, and he isn’t as young as he used to be anymore. The responsibility kills him! But he’s stuck, if he doesn’t do it, he offends his King which he has sworn an oath too. He has become his own prisoner, but makes the best of it.
I think since gaining that high level, I role-played him once. My castle was under siege by an enemy who intended to take my nation. I’m right on the outskirts and to get through to the kingdom, you had to get through me . . . or rather, through my men. They refused to allow me to enter combat, they judged me to important to risk.
The siege was a nightmare, man! It took 16 games ranging about 6 hours of play each. My troops got tons of XP, which was the point behind the game. Strengthen the border. The DM was amazing! I don’t think that I would ever attempt to ever DM it, and it was all just a 1on 1 thing, me and the DM were the only ones at the table.
It gave me a whole new insight into the game itself. What do you do when you can literally kill everything inside of the MM? Well, the answer is simple. You serve.
The Lord is now an NPC, unless of course a brilliant DM comes up with a story that is fit for him, but I’m cool with his standing. It was a great ending to a great adventuring career! The ultimate praise that a player can get from any DM, is to be able to create a character of that magnitude and have it last. I don’t feel that it was just given to me, it was something that I had to earn.
I don’t think that I would make it that tough to do, simply because I’m an adult now (BAHHH!) and don’t have the time to ever take place in an adventure that is that long. If I ever run into a character that IS that good, being played by a player with that amount of dedication to play that kind of a game, I might make it last for 2 or 3 six hour sessions of nothing but crunchy hardcore combat. It does take a tremendous amount of talent from both men (or women) to pull it off, but the spoils are definitely worth it, I think.
Ripper Xs last blog post..Random Encounters Tweaked to Perfection
Woot nice comments so far, I’m sure our ‘mystery’ reader will appreciate.
@PM: Argh man, you are right that piloting 2 Magnificent Bastard NPCs would be hard. One of the key things about RPGs dear Trope brother is that Players don’t really care about NPCs all that much.
However, I love the ideas of joined villains. I’d use it independently from the Bastard concept. Or, have only one be a bastard and use the other one mercilessly. Finally… I’d make them freaking twins, without the players knowing about it initially (or better yet, triplets, quints or a whole army of them!).. To kill them, you need to kill them all!
@Lanir: In a campaign where players live and breathe storytelling and enjoy playing within the setting’s assumed social order, a MB is a lot easier to pull off… he’s the one who’s flaunting the rules and is going for the prize all the time. In the example our friend ‘PW’ gave me, I feel his players are more ruthless than that…
I really like your wheelchair example… if the players are a bit restrained it can totally work… I mean how much damage can a crippled man do? (Mwa HA HA!)
Finally you touch a point I thought about writing but you do it better than I could. Dying remains a painful, scary and potentially very humiliating process regardless of the chance one has to be raised. Chances are your loved one may hate you and even side with his tormentor (in a sick Stocholm syndrome way) against the former loved one.
@Michael Philips: Evil in a Can is one of my favorite plot tropes. It works perfectly well with Heroic Fantasy’s default power level increase of bad guys assumption.
Making the Bastard a key piece of a prophecy to save the world 5 years in the future is absolutely fantastic. Plus, by making the MB a spoiled teenager, there’s no limit to how much anguish and (good) frustration you can inflict on players.
I love that idea man!
@Rip: At high levels, combat threats should be accessory. They are needed to keep combat hungry players happy and to experiment with the fun of high level crunchiness… (I don’t know where 2e breaks in terms of power… 3.5 breaks close to 14-15 with save or dies becoming too numerous)
My advice that I keep reading and repeating on high level adventures is:
1) Let players use their toys, don’t create teleportation proof dungeons and Magic Immune bad guys.
2) Create problems that threaten the whole world, not just the players. Famine, Widespread diseases (maybe a paralyzing plague, that hits divine casters 1st). Mass scale demonic possession.
As a DM I would not go the ‘build a stronghold and manage way’… unless the players ask for it. The game turns around a group working together… if the campaign survives to high level and the players still want to adventure as a party you need to focus on epic problems that can solved by a small team with a lot of ressources.
A great example is the ‘Diplomacy’ adventure in one of the last Dungeon Magazine, where players are asked to negociate for a vein of the purest diamonds offered by Earth Elemental lords to whomever whats them in the multiverse… provided they win a debate as to why they should have it… and offer a good price…
We loved that adventure, players were 18th level and the only 2 fights we had lasted 2 rounds each and resulted in CR18-22 monsters being Slain by save or dies… (For once we were happy it turned out like that, we were very rusty with high level mechanics and we wanted to focus on the story).
Okay…. end of digression…
Here’s an idea along the lines of the Joker/Obiwan idea.
This requires some planning, but set up the situation where he is supposed to die. Ritual, timing, whatever. Maybe he gives rumors that he can only be killed at a certain place under a full moon, or some such. His death at the hands of the PC’s under these specific set of conditions actually allows him to be transformed into a demigod/archdevil/powerful undead, etc. A threat more powerful than he was before (and perhaps a threat appropriate for 20th level characters, carrying the PC’s on to the end of the campaign). And the PC’s were tricked into giving him that power.
And if he can retain his original form in appearance, (in the way of an alternate form or whatever), he maintains his “Magnificent Bastard” status that prevents the PC’s from getting to him normally. But now he begins an all-new set of plans, utilizing his new power.
Yeah, a bit cliche, but fun.
Good one Shadow. Clichés are not bad per see in RPGs and this allows a definitive leveling up for a Bad guy!
I really like the ideas of those who associated the Bastard with devils in the comments.
I totally see a Maniplative Bastard going for the Faustian deal and then pull off a fast one on the Archdevils with the help of the PCs (even if the PCs don,t know they are helping the MB)
Thanks for all the input!
Key to this character is the fact that he is not either the Main Evil of the game nor even one of the introduced Villains heading a hostile power. If I was more naive I’d assume that I could run him how I wanted and the players wouldn’t catch on, but players seem to be prescient when judging which NPC will stab them in the back.
Excellent point that dying is a painful, deeply disturbing process and anyone who willfully allows an NPC they care for die certainly risks losing that NPC’s respect and friendship.
I will mull over all the powerful connections which have been proposed, all satisfying the “ace” card an MB holds which gives them some protection should they become unmasked. Because he is not the Main Evil I have no qualms letting him die if that’s how the game works out, I just want to give him a good showing.
Ooh, another one? Make you MB unkillable. Something akin to Berem the Green Gemstone Man, but with goals other than being left alone. The party can knock him down, chop him up, vaporize him, what have you, but he eventually recovers and gets back up. If you don’t make him too evil and you don’t make him a combat monkey, this can create a well liked opposition character. I’d make him so strongly tied to reality that his presence disrupts magics that allow travel across planar boundaries as well. (Keeping the players from exiling him to the depths of hell or the Positive Energy Plane.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..
Micheal! Stop baiting me with that
I’ll open you a WordPress.com account myself!
🙂
It doesn’t like either of my urls. I’m not sure. Oh wait. I bet I haven’t been giving them titles. One more thing to remember to do. Yeah I don’t usually title my blog posts. At least it now admits that I have a blog. When you first installed it, it didn’t even admit that much.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..remembered one of the things I’d intended to say.
There you go! Weee!
It’s not directly on topic but just so you know… This isn’t an uncommon problem. I had a DM ask me to play a mole type character in a long ago game. I had some hidden power and hidden motives we were going to flesh out a bit later on. The basic intention was I would work with the group normally and then as a major plot or possibly campaign ender I would unveil some plan the other PCs would want to stop. Nothing big here, it just sounded like a fun romp and I knew I’d be slapped down at the end of it.
Side note: NEVER, EVER DO THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
Ahem. So, things started off okay. I was the only healer and I successfully stayed in the back without arousing suspicion. Then the GM goofed, managed to knock everyone else unconscious in an encounter and it was just me. The characters had no clue why they woke up safe afterwards but the players heard a couple rolls which implied I wasn’t a human as I appeared to be (had a 19 str in 2nd edition D&D).
From this point on the other players basically just metagamed. Every session there was player to player chat about how they were going to kill me and were just waiting for a hint of an excuse. The characters all started distancing themselves from mine, pouncing on things I said, acting paranoid, etc. I should’ve just stopped healing them.
End result: I was willing to sacrifice my character for a good plot. I wasn’t willing to do the same for metagaming silliness. So the whole plot got scrapped and the character got revamped. They all still hated their healer but I managed somehow until the game stopped due to too much silly OOC/metagaming BS.
I just figured I’d share the story since it sounds like the players in the original question have some metagaming issues as well.
Hostages. Killing the MB ensures that the hostages will die, but you can’t know how or where the bodies are, or if they can be raised– (“Mmm, your little brother was good with ketchup!” said Larry the Barghest.) This spawns adventures in itself.
There’s also soul-in-a-jar…the MB can’t be killed until his heart/soul/last hit point is found and destroyed. Then he can be killed like anyone else. I think a variant of this was suggested.
Make the MB the head of a subverted good organization that does a lot of good while unknowingly funding evil…killing him will put society on its ear and make the heroes horrible villains to the rest of the populace, turning a “good” organization against them.
Simulacrums, clones, and surgical doubles. Nothing allows your MB to continue operating like the rest of the world thinking he’s already dead. Did you get the real one? Are you sure? This one can’t be overused, but certainly if set up appropriately ahead of time, it’s as MB as MB can be. (“Oh, I know you killed me on the ramparts of Castle DarkbloodGlorymore. That’s exactly what I wanted you to do… It was the only way to return to my proper lair in time to crush the nobles of your homeland. Thank you!”)
Just some ideas.
-Ben.
Make your MB an obvious good guy who occasionally works at cross purposes with the party. The fact that you and I have the same end goals does not mean that we won’t occasionally be on opposite sides of a conflict. If you do it right, the PCs will have done a lot of work to reinforce the MB’s position. (And him theirs.)
One major issue is that it helps if your campaign has a history of rewarding not killing an opponent. If everything in your world is black and white, a MB won’t really work.
The MB’s goals don’t have to be evil or even overly harmful to the PCs. They just have to be opposed to something the party supports. Unless, of course, you want the MB to be a villain instead of an opponent.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..remembered one of the things I’d intended to say.
Thought on the MB who can’t die. The one who comes back even if vaporized, whatever.
Maybe he wants to die. Maybe he has realized that he doesn’t have the means to destroy himself, so he becomes a bastard to goad high powered adventurers into killing him. They may not do it right the first time, or the second or third, but pehaps he has faith that if he keeps goading them they will eventually discover something he couldn’t, and finally pull it off. His dying words…”Thank you…” One last bit of magnificence as the PC’s realize they have been played all along.
…Brainstorming an adventure hook of an insane Lich who wants to die but can’t remember where his Phylactery is hidden. So he hires/tricks the adventurers into looking for it. Not exactly like that, but something like that…
-shadow145-
That reminds me of a very old SF comic book I read at my grandmother’s house once and that I think can be milked for some game comics.
In the story, a research group had developed a treatment to reverse aging and they wanted to try it out. They went to some sort of old-folks home/institution/hospital and were brought to the oldest patient in the ward. He was 145+ years old and he feebly tried to get them to stop and leave him alone. He was strapped down and they used the serum on hm. As the aging process was reversed, he grew less and less human. In the end, he was an alien being. He informed them that they were fools and had doomed the whole planet. He was the advanced scout of an invading fleet. He was supposed to scout the planet and when he determined that it was a world they could easily conquer he was supposed to reverse his disguise. He had fallen in love with Earth and decided to live there and never trigger the invasion.
This allows for a wonderful evil in a can scenario. Instead of aliens, your infiltrator is a demon who has hidden in a human community. It isn’t a good demon, but it has self control enough to be a decent neighbor, and it is no longer trying to prepare the community for demonic invasion. It does some unpleasant things, possibly it has a penchant for eating cats, maybe there are some gory animal sacrifices that it needs to do regularly to keep up its disguise, maybe something else, but it tips off the party or their patrons that not all is what it seems. When the party finally discovers the demon, they are faced with a serious problem, since piercing its disguise will open the gates to an invasion.
(The Angel and Demon from Good Omens were beings of this sort. They were agents of their respective powers, but they were working together to avoid achieving their sponsors’ goals, since that would mean the end of the world that they both enjoyed.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..remembered one of the things I’d intended to say.
the Glass Crater idea is a very bad one. try it and the bound form of your MB will hurtle to the ground from a flying mount into enemy territory before you finish your stunned gaze of incomprehension while the party teleports away. even a plane-killing effect will get you thrown into the abyss.
Hey guy, welcome to the blog.
I’d never have thought that players would do such a thing… but I guess that in a situation where the adversity level between players and DM is high enough that could happen.
That being said, if it gets to that point with players in a storyline, I think the campaign is doomed anyway. If PCs hate a NPC enough to destroy part of the world (enemies included) well then, let’s roll credits and move on to something else.