I know, I know. There’s nothing worse than hearing about someone else’s game. I hope you will forgive me for using up valuable words with a cut from my own out-of-game bit of storyline. However, the above snippet shows a new concept that I’m going to start trying out – quests for villains.
We all know and love quests for characters in 4th Edition. They solidify what our PCs do, what options they have available, and give some bonus experience or treasure for meeting a set goal. Good quests can tie together a larger storyline and give each PC something specific to shoot for. They’re a great tool for DMs to help build structure around their storyline and help clarify what might otherwise get muddied in a complex arc.
But what about our villains? Why can’t it do the same thing for them? What possible quests could they be working on while your party of PCs carves their way through some dungeon? What motivates them and what do they hope to gain?
Quests for villains, or any set of NPCs for that matter, can serve the same advantages that quests for PCs serve. They can help solidify your storyline by tying together motivations and goals. They keep villains focused on a set outcome rather than simply waiting in a big room for your PCs to come kill them. They help fill out the personality and character arc of the villain you have in mind.
Consider this. Your party has the quest to hunt down a necromancer in the icy north. They have to find his evil tower, defeat its guardians and traps, and face the necromancer himself. That’s a good solid party quest. What about the necromancer? Perhaps his quest is to release a terrible primordial evil buried under the ice for half a million years. To accomplish his quest, he has undead slaves digging deep into the ice while he researches a spell to awaken the beast below. As your party hunts down the tower, the necromancer is likewise moving forward in his own quest, sending his guardians to locate old tomes of forbidden knowledge. He is enslaving a local barbarian tribe, slaughtering them and reanimating them for his slave pit. If the party cannot move forward fast enough, he might even succeed and awaken the Darkness Below.
The nice thing about this idea is the feeling that the necromancer is just as alive as the PCs. He’s moving forward, following his own path while the PCs follow theirs. Instead of villains filling up monster closets, just waiting for a PC to open the door, the villain has his or her own path.
A good villain quest might also include a timeline. How many days will it take the necromancer to dig down in the ice to the beast below? What would slow him down or speed him up? How long will it take him to unravel the dark magics required to awaken the beast? As your party thwarts his plans, it might push his timeline out. If they fail in one path, it might speed him up.
Quests for villains are an easy way to make your villains come to life. They give your villain purpose and motivation. They give your villain a goal and steps into which the lives of your PCs can mingle. They help make your villains come to life.
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In absolute agreement! Having villains and monsters on their own “quests” really can bring a campaign to life, rather than it just be a series of random encounters. Just as quests bind a PC to the story, villains need that same “glue” to hold them to the campaign plotline as well.
Excellent Post!
I like your Necromancer example above — same as you, I’m often starting with a climactic scene in mind as the end goal for the Big Bad. But then I work my way backwards, reverse engineering the villian’s quest line, bringing it back until the point at which the heroes are currently investigating. In fact, it works even better if you take it back >even further< to stuff that the villian has already accomplished — and those are the clues that the heroes discover that lead them down the trail of trying to stop the big-bad-thing from happening.
Couldn’t agree more! And like InspectorHound, I try to do the reverse engineering of the plot method. I write out a virtual timeline. plotted with key events and possible tangents that depend on what the PCs do. Of course, you have to be VERY flexible with this and be ready for many re-writes. And it doesn’t really take as much time to do as it might sound.
I think what makes a good villain is the fact that they actually have quests, whether or not they are explicitly called that by the DM.
Think about it: Most heroes start out reactive — they respond to an attack on their hometown or are will purge places of undead because their chosen order wills it so.
Good villains on the other are active. Rather than being foozles that sit and wait for the players to kill them, they undertake quests: acquire mystic artifacts, kill chosen infants and kidnap your mother.
I gave my soul to the devil earlier in in the week, so it doesn
In 4ed it’s quite tricky to make a villain PC character, more so it’s not easy to DM an all-evil PC party and quest for them. But what’s the fun without challenge? ^_^