Helping The others Realize The Advantages Of Spellcrow
What is a role playing game without a villain? Whether it's a necromancer busy at work in the local cemetery, a corrupt Baron levying too many taxes from the peasants, or a monster emerged from the caverns beneath the earth, your players will come back each night to your gaming table in the hopes of being presented with villains they can love to hate, bad guys whose plans they can seek to foil, and in general all sorts of nasty opposition that they can triumph over. How do you take these villains and make your players truly hate them? How do you raise the emotional intensity?
One of the problems is that your players will see so much combat and so many enemies over the course of their PC's life that after awhile they'll begin to take a business like attitude to defeating them. Like pest exterminators, they'll wade into every crypt, dungeon and haunted house with a professional demeanor, wipe out the zombies, orcs or ghosts and then nip back to the inn for a pint of beer and a good laugh. There's nothing more frustrating than having your villains not taken seriously, or even worse, to not make much of an impression on your players. So here's how you go about getting under your player's skin, and making them hate them.
Get personal. If their personal beliefs, emotions or feelings are involved, the only way you will get your players to care is. Say they break into a necromancers tower, and as they confront him he unleashes a score of zombies against them. No big deal. Now, what if those zombies are the animated corpses of their families? Now you've got their attention! Say they apprehend a pickpocket and give the lad a hard clout on the head and send him running. No big deal. Now, imagine they find out later that very same pickpocket snuck into the inn stable and cut the front right tendon of the knight's charger. How that player will hate him!
You guys get the idea. The villain has to in some way personally affect the PC. I had a player suddenly develop an undying hatred for a villain in one game after not caring much about him despite sessions worth of slaughters, sacrilege and worse. What did this villain do to finally earn this hatred? He cut a scar into the PC's cheek and left him disfigured. Where slaughtering villagers failed, a personalized attack worked.
Players present endless opportunities to mess with. Anything they prize, care about, or are proud of can be a source of antagonism should a villain interfere. An inn that they've built with hard won cash. A wife, a prized sword, a sacred temple, their reputation at court, a trusted ally: all of these are potential sources of personalized hatred.
Just one word of caution: be sparing with this technique. If the villain turns the PC's lives into a bad country song, then the player will lose connection with his PC. You have to add insult to injury, not drag the PC's whole life through the mud. A couple of choice insults will always go much farther than a total undoing of everything the player cared about in the PC's life.
Picture your typical fantasy setting. It's positively medieval. You've got your villages, castles and towns, your deep forests and rocky mountain peaks, your flowing rivers and oceans. Everything is green, the sky is blue, and people ride around on horses wearing armor and swearing fealty to a King, who rules over a small aristocracy and a mass of peasants. This has to be so familiar that it's almost comforting, a Middle Ages that never was, with dragons and wizard towers and orcs skulking around in the forests. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a generic setting as much as any other, but this is a fantasy game: how about injecting a little more fantasy into your world?
So say you decide to be a little more creative and original about your setting. What could you do, where would you start? The easiest way to go is to pick a different culture or time period from our own history, and set your campaign there. All you need to do is a little online research, spend a little time with Wikipedia and Image Search, and you should quickly have enough original material to run a game with a completely different feel. Samurai in Japan, or Aztecs in the jungle, or Mongolians riding across the steppe; there's no need to limit yourself to Medieval Europe. If you want to get even more trippy, you could mix two of those together: what is ancient Japan was neighbors with the Aztecs? Throw in some magic, dungeons and monsters, and you're good to go.
The next step up is to not just look at our past for inspiration, but to start asking questions like: what would the world be like if I changed a fundamental law or two of reality? What if gravity was weaker in certain spots? What if fire acted like water, or clouds were solid enough to walk on? What if the sky was green, and rain was acidic? You take one of these questions, and run with it. So say you decide that yes, your sky is green, and rain is acidic and causes burn damage. How would that change the world? For one, oceans and rivers would be acidic too. People would need to purify water to drink it, or draw it from pure sources deep beneath the ground. Which would mean that something in the atmosphere, not water itself, was making the rain acidic. What could be causing this? How would people live, what would they wear? How important would weather mages be? What kind of landscape would result from being scoured by acid? A harsh wasteland? Would plants evolve to live in the acid, forming vast jungles of toxic vegetation? Would animals adapt?
Step by step you go following the logical chain of your idea, until you have a complete campaign setting. Remember, with magic you can make anything possible, so any possibility can be real. The trick into preventing it from becoming a surreal dream the players can't connect with to a palpable, real setting is to be logical about the consequences. Medieval villages wouldn't exist in the same way if acid rain fell from the skies. Walking into one would jar the players, as they would find it implausible.
How do you take these villains and make your players truly hate them? If the villain turns the PC's lives into a bad country song, then the player will lose connection with his PC. Whether it's a necromancer busy at work in the local cemetery, a corrupt Baron levying too many taxes from the peasants, or a monster emerged from the caverns beneath the earth, your players will come back each night to your gaming table in the hopes of being presented with villains they can love to hate, bad guys whose plans they can seek to foil, and in general all sorts of nasty opposition that they can triumph over. website How do you take these villains and make your players truly hate them? If the villain turns the PC's lives into a bad country song, then the player will lose connection with his PC.