A little while back, I wrote about villainous schemes for immortality, working from the Villain’s Scheme table in Chapter 4 of the DMG. The point of this exercise is to think about the different tiers of play and how the higher tiers expand the scope and stakes. Especially if you don’t plan to continue into tiers 3 or 4, though, it seems to me that by tier 2 you can go as big as you want and it’s basically okay. For the purposes of this conversation, let’s ignore that last sentence for a bit. Okay? Okay.

Immortality | Influence

Influence

This is a villain scheme that has, in a sense, two major marketing problems, which I’ll be keeping in mind as I work through this.

1. It isn’t obviously or inherently evil or even antithetical to the PCs’ aims – that has to be established separately. Compare this to the Immortality or Mayhem schemes.
2. At least in my experience, a lot of players are unhappy engaging with in-game politics even enough to contest a villain with political aims. It might sound a lot like waiting for the stabbing and treasure-accumulating that they’re here to do.

So pay attention to establishing the stakes, and especially the reward loop of those stakes, right from the start. For some groups, you’re teaching a whole new language of interaction, and getting them to think in terms of The Three Musketeers rather than Conan the Cimmerian, who as far as I know never met an influential person he could abide. Too busy treading jeweled thrones under his sandaled feet, I suppose.

What you have going for you, conversely, is that everyone likes watching arrogant powerful people get taken down (citation: Leverage got five seasons, followed by a reboot). Wiping the smarmy smiles off their damn faces is better than cash money for a healthy percentage of players. As long as you’re not losing real-life friends over it, ham it up when you’re playing these NPCs. If the past few years have taught you nothing else, it’s that Captain Planet villains weren’t nearly as pointlessly evil as the real execs they were distantly referencing.

At its base, this is very tilted toward interacting with other humanoids in urban areas. I think it’s is too easy to overlook how that can shift in later tiers, as you might interact with the courts of the fey, the City of Brass, or the Court of Nessus (an awesome bad idea).

Seize a Position of Power or Title. The first thing that comes to mind here is an episode – it might be this one? – of Robin Pierson’s The History of Byzantium podcast, in which he described the structure of the imperial court – its system of paying for privilege, receiving stipends, and how that influences your position in the pecking order, as well as how it all breaks down once the Arabs aren’t attacking Anatolia every single year. What interested me is how the wealthy and powerful change their status games when living on their vast Anatolian or Thracian estates doesn’t seem like fun.

The broader point: if your villain is chasing a position of power or a title, you do need to explain what they’re getting out of it. Maybe they just want the pride of unlocking achievements, but then the players need more motivation to stop them. Villains wanting power for the sake of the power itself can work; it helps if you can add in “and they’d use it badly.”

In tier 1, we’re probably talking about the villain chasing an advisory, religious, or ceremonial role in a castle, barony, county, or major city. The list of people they need to schmooze, bribe, or blackmail to make this happen is probably very short, and most of those people are easy to access. On the plus side, that ease of access probably smooths the way for PCs to reach those same people and deceive, intimidate, or persuade them to go with someone else.

In tier 2, maybe the position in question is a regional wizard’s council, a ducal or royal court position (maybe trying to become the new ambassador between two realms), or something analogous to a Roman Catholic cardinal. This is also a great tier for facing down a big city’s crime boss, or taking out the up-and-coming boss who is trying to displace the one you kind of like. This doesn’t stop being okay at tier 3, of course! The weird or fantastical also start coming into focus, whether we’re talking about a beholder-run crime syndicate or the Summer and Gloaming Courts. Jockeying for power within the giants’ Ordning fits right in here.

In tier 3, if not before, the villain should have seizing the royal or imperial crown in their sights. Maybe that’s impersonating the true and long-lost heir, eliminating higher-ranked heirs, or luring the sitting monarch into a wedding-and-a-funeral double feature. Maybe you want to treat positions of interest in supernatural courts as “one tier delayed,” so this is where you go all-in on fey courts or the archdevils.

In tier 4, any office of mortal-held kingdoms or empires might be passé. Displacing the Queen of Air and Darkness or the Green Man is a reasonable scheme for a villain who is an appropriate challenge for a tier 4 party. There’s no higher to go in 5e, so if you’re interested in running a story about displacing a god, a demon lord, or Asmodeus himself, this is the tier for it. (You know, the “what do we do after Descent into Avernus” question.)

Win a Contest or Tournament. Well, for one thing, the tier-4 version of this is the plot of Unknown Armies, if I understand correctly? Also Mage: the Ascension? Anyway. Contests and tournaments are much more of a mainstay of tier-1 D&D, in my experience. It’s treated as conflict with training wheels on because the PCs won’t be killed for failure. It’s a fine way to teach the game in the early levels, but it doesn’t have to be something you drop from later tiers. You just need nonlethal stakes that the PCs are invested in – in the 13^th Age game I played yesterday, our high-level characters were invited to a contest in which the host will observe and select one competitor for marriage.

The classic here is a tier-1 village festival. The kind of villain that would exercise their villainy through winning the village festival… actually it’s George Gregory from the Curious George’s Halloween Boo-Fest special, and if you don’t also have little kids, that joke probably didn’t work for you at all. My point is that it’s going to come across as unbelievably petty if they’re willing to hurt people for this in some way. Or maybe you’re just doing cozy mysteries? That would be pretty great, I guess.

Other kinds of tier-1-appropriate contests or tournaments:

• A joust (maybe a qualifying joust for entry into grander tourneys?) or melee at the local castle
• Annual spring games held by the Summer Court, with everything from archery to, I dunno, high-rollers-table hopscotch?
• A somewhat less murderous version of the Wild Hunt
• A trial in front of a magistrate or local lord (this may be high-stakes or lethal in outcome – remember that it’s not a modern American legal procedural, the lord can just do what they want)
• One of the few Elminster stories I remember in any detail is a mage-fair with a lot of magical showboating. Probably a mix of Arcana and Performance checks?
• If your setting has “adventurer culture” and any meta-awareness of dungeons, a challenge or contest to reach some part of a local dungeon first would make sense, and would result in a meaningful status gain for the victor.
  • Which means it’s a dungeon crawl with a goal other than “murder everything you see,” and a way to get to the end and still take a narrative setback. Good work, you.

Anyway, what you should take from this is that we’re talking about a rival in as many cases as a villain. The table being called “Villain’s Schemes” implies actual evil on the part of the antagonist, but that’s never a given in D&D – villain and antagonist get used pretty interchangeably.

Things don’t change all that much in tier 2, except that the prizes and settings get more interesting. Have you ever watched a movie or TV series about a competition that gets a sequel or second season after the protagonist team won in the first season? They go bigger – from Regionals to Nationals, maybe. (Not these guys, obviously.) Don’t get me wrong, D&D wouldn’t be my go-to for a sports-movie format, but at the same time, that would be a fascinating subsystem to build.

Man, I am way off track here.

Anyway, by tier 3, the cosmos is probably responding to the stakes of these contests in some way. Maybe the gods are having a contest for one very stupid mortal to decide which of them is fairest. An art contest in tier 3 might intrinsically create magical art – Galatea or a painting you’ll store in your attic or whatever.

Finally, tier 4 contests and tournaments have world-wide or planar stakes. So Space Jam (1996) or Supergiant’s Pyre, maybe. I feel like Mythic Odysseys of Theros would be fine with the Iroan Games ending in the victor becoming a new god, if they did something impressive enough. Or you’re forced to defend the idea that humanity (or any other player origin) deserves to exist, in the face of divine judgment. Go big or go home.

Win Favor with a Powerful Individual. I’m kind of blending this in with some of the schemes listed for other objectives, but trying to draw a bright line between them is unhelpful anyway. Winning favor feels like it’s probably a stepping-stone goal rather than the end state – it’ll be harder to get the players invested in making sure X never even befriends Y without a clear sign as to how that friendship would be bad. Now, in hindsight, it’s easy to say that Tsarist Russia would have been better off if Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin had never befriended Nicholas II and his family. But you’d have to accept as a premise that Tsarist Russia was a good idea, and that’s way beyond me.

The means of gaining that favor is another whole scheme in itself. Is it just getting close and buttering them up with compliments? That can work once or twice, but it’s pretty shallow and a lot harder for players to counter in an interesting way. Instead, the villain does them a favor: inconveniencing an enemy (shared enemies create strong friendships), giving a lavish gift, or behaving in an impressive way (such as winning a contest or tournament). Think about the things that would make the target want to form a friendship or alliance.

Also, maybe read or watch Othello. This is Iago.

Anyway, this scheme has a similar pattern across the tiers as seizing a position of power or a title – tier 1 is a local official, whether that’s a baron, a crime boss, or a warlock who leads a secret society. Winning favor feels like it might be a step toward suborning that figure to some greater scheme – this is a great first step for any corruption story, if you want to give the PCs a chance to derail the plan this early.

Tier 2 is probably the point where your Rasputin insinuates himself at court. Pay close attention to what kinds of players and characters you have at this stage: are they going to try to end this story with an assassination (even at the risk of execution, exile, or revolution), or do they regard time at court in the August Presence of the Sublime Emperor as sacrosanct, and violence is unthinkable? You really need to have your villain on-stage at this point and making the PCs feel things, but you don’t want their first encounter with the villain to also be their last. Plan accordingly.

Tier 3, as usual, blows open the doors to grander magical forces: the fey, the City of Brass, maybe even the favor of the Lich Queen, Vlaakith CLVII of Tu’narath. No one’s favor could be any harder to earn than the Lady of Pain’s, so maybe she’s the one being in the cosmos who is still out of scope in tier 3. Much like the PCs, though, a tier-3 villain is personally powerful enough that almost no one interested in power and protecting their own position should brush them off. Even demon lords and Archfey should look at them and think, “Yes, you could be a useful friend to have.”

In tier 4, this scheme has probably had a bit of a sunset. The villain is finally working on the final goal for which this was a step. Wanting friendship for its own sake is just not… villainous enough, in a way I can see right now.

Place a Pawn in a Position of Power. This one inverts the thought process from the first three. It’s still an Influence scheme, but in a lot of cases it’s a higher-tier villain “stepping down” to a lower-tier space or using a lower-tier character as a catspaw for a larger goal. I mean, that’s what pawn means. As a result, this one feeds into higher-tier play, as you’re unraveling that higher-tier villain’s plan and earning their ire. If the PCs kill the pawn, the real villain is thwarted for just a moment, not resolved entirely.

In turn, that does two other things. This scheme is the Oldest Trick in the Book for tier transitions! You defeat one villain, only to discover that they were just a pawn of a larger threat! That’s a bit after-the-fact, admittedly, so maybe you change it up and reveal that the catspaw relationship before the showdown with the pawn. (Woo, big change, I know, but it avoids the trope.)

The other great thing is that it lets you involve fully monstrous beings in intrigue stories. Any kind of mastermind monster operates through proxies. Lamias, vampires, dragons, aboleths – they all have problems passing as mortal humanoids, but their schemes call for engaging in humanoid politics. Warlock patrons probably want to see their servants get into positions of power, even if they also have their own courts and hierarchies.

The Skrull/doppelganger/Mask of Many Faces possibilities here don’t bear explaining, I think.

You probably want to put some extra thought into the vulnerabilities in the greater villain’s plan here – what are the steps where the PCs can learn the truth and take action to prevent it? It’s all too easy for a DM to lose sight of that and have this specific kind of cloak-and-dagger action just happen by fiat, off-camera.

• Is there magical control or a magical disguise to detect?
  • Can or should the villain anticipate that, so that the plot isn’t too easily thwarted?
• Is there a payoff encounter or other money trail that the PCs could eavesdrop on, see happening, or intercept?
• Does the pawn have to eliminate the current holder of that position?
• Does the pawn take other steps that reveal their true allegiance early?

I’m usually not a fan of red herrings, but here I feel like it makes a lot of sense for the real villain to take some steps to throw you nosy kids and your dog off their trail.

Conclusion

I hope you’re enjoying this series. For me, while writing them, there’s a sense of giving some useful neural pathways a workout, so that I can think of these things when I’m put on the spot in the future. Thinking more deeply about story ideas, digging down to the part where I can envision how I’d run the scenes and link them up to form a storyline, that’s the critical step that my brain doesn’t like to do (because… work) until and unless I pay it off with the sweet, sweet neurochemicals of putting blog content in front of readers.

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