When good villains go bad

[Carcer]

I recently GM'd a short campaign in which a small city was being terrorized by an abberation that induced guilt in its victims. The PC's found themselves dealing with children commiting suicide out of guilt, a journeyman carpenter driven insane by the false belief that he is the cause of these suicides, and citizens on the verge of storming the sanitarium with the intent of executing the doctor for murder.

I was hoping that the PCs would be motivated to hunt down this aberration and deal out D&D style justice to it. I thought I had done everything necessary for a successful Ravenloft game. The crimes were sufficiently evil. There was a mystery to be investigated and horrorific events to be explored. It seemed like I was on to a winner.

Unexpectedly the PC's decided that they wanted to speak to the highest ranking officer guarding the sanitarium. I hadn't been expecting this to happen but I was willing to improvise for a while and try to lead them back to the quest I had prepared for them. For reasons I don't recall I decided to make the highest ranking officer present at the sanitarium the Captain of the Watch who had been sent to there to keep the peace. And for other reasons I don't recall I decided to make him a dutiful, sarcastic, hypercritical, and authoritarian bully. For the players it was hate at first encounter. They despised the captain but without him doing anything "evil" they couldn't justify taking action against him.

My reaction to all of this decide that if they hate the Captain I should make him do something evil. Inspired by the way protests had been dealt with historically, I had him order a cavalry charge against the citizens protesting outside the sanitarium. I thought it would be interesting to make the very person responsible for protecting the life of an innocent a completely loathsome character. Unfortunately it worked too well and the players switched their focus on going after the captain.

An NPC for whom I had written no stats, no abilities, no equipment... no details had become the main villain of the quest. I had never seen players so obsessed with bringing someone down. With the abberation it wasa typical roleplaying experience for us. There was a villain who needed to be hunted down because of the awful things he/she/it had done. But the captain hit the PC's where it hurt. He made it personal. They weren't going after him because thats what your characters are supposed to do in a roleplaying game. They went after him because the players and their characters despised him.

They never did get to the bottom of the childrens suicides. The abberation was never even encountered. But they did have nine hells of a time confronting the captain - a man who was not a monster in the physical or biological sense but very much one in the ethical sense.

My carefully planned antagonist had been usurped by a improvised NPC. But I learned more from that mistake than I have ever learned from any previous times playing Ravenloft.

Have you ever had any similar experiences?

[Igor the Henchman]

Have you ever had any similar experiences?

At least twice. When a minor character you had no big plans for suddenly turns into a solid gold villain, you know something special happened at the table.

I find that surprises like that is one of the rewards of GMing. Congrats!

[Joël of the FoS]

Yes, that's quite cool indeed. I love when it happens, i.e. a NPC taking more and more space because the players love / hate him.

In your game, eventually, if you want to link everything, you could have the officer a controled pawn of the aberration, who is using this officer to get the heroes's focus elsewhere.

Joël

[WolfKook]

Yeap... It happened... But I wasn't the DM, I was the victim. And it was specially fun because of the particular circumstance...

When the campaign started, our characters woke up in the middle of a swamp, completely oblivious of who we were or where we were. While trying to put things together, a horse came up, and a deformed guy (Perhaps an early caliban... My DM was beyond his own time ) picked us up. He took us to the place of someone who he thought might help us.

The man, who we knew only as "Rudolph", explained us a lot of things, and was like our mentor to the land of the mists. He helped us a lot, but my character (And I) always suspected him: He knew too much, when most people were oblivious to the nature of the demiplane. He also seemed to know something about the past we didn't recall, and he seemed to have deals with strange people... Behind his father-like attitude, he was hiding something, and my character never really bought it, and he was always trying to discover the truth behind this mysterious character.

In the end, my character (And I) spent all the campaign suspecting, and trying to "unmask", Rudolph Van Richten.

[NeoTiamat]

Yeap... It happened... But I wasn't the DM, I was the victim. And it was specially fun because of the particular circumstance...

When the campaign started, our characters woke up in the middle of a swamp, completely oblivious of who we were or where we were. While trying to put things together, a horse came up, and a deformed guy (Perhaps an early caliban... My DM was beyond his own time ) picked us up. He took us to the place of someone who he thought might help us.

The man, who we knew only as "Rudolph", explained us a lot of things, and was like our mentor to the land of the mists. He helped us a lot, but my character (And I) always suspected him: He knew too much, when most people were oblivious to the nature of the demiplane. He also seemed to know something about the past we didn't recall, and he seemed to have deals with strange people... Behind his father-like attitude, he was hiding something, and my character never really bought it, and he was always trying to discover the truth behind this mysterious character.

In the end, my character (And I) spent all the campaign suspecting, and trying to "unmask", Rudolph Van Richten.

Magnificent....

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I had something similar happen. I had no plans to reuse Lemot Sediam Juste after his initial appearance in my campaign. But the players hated him so much that they are constantly looking for him for revenge for what he did to them. With motivation like that, I feel remiss if I don't give them another shot at them.

On the flip side, I had a Kargat vampire that I planned to make a recurring villain out of. But he got staked in his first time at bat. (no pun intended). Oh well, always more Kargat where he came from...