It’s been one week under a year since my last post in this series, and a big freelance project means I’ve been awfully quietly lately. It’s almost done, though, and I promise a return to form in February and March. This time, I’m talking about how a Mayhem villain scheme maps across the four tiers of play in D&D.
Immortality | Influence | Magic | Mayhem
Mayhem: Let Chaos Reign
If it’s important for the villain’s goals to be understandable, for them to be plausible heroes in their own story, the six schemes of this objective are a real mixed bag. Some of them are almost certainly bad for everyone, or at least everyone with a metabolism. The implication might be that the villain might be non-metabolic, Undead or Construct or maybe a Plant. We’ll see what comes to mind as I go.
Fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy. This is a classic for justifying any amount of carnage that the villain wants to enact: “I didn’t write the prophecy, I have no control in what it requires!” This scheme can easily be the backbone of a whole campaign: the PCs and the villain discover the prophecy at about the same time in Tier 1, clash repeatedly in Tiers 2 and 3 as the villain has to accomplish each step of the prophecy, and have an explosive showdown on your setting’s version of the Megiddo Valley or Mount Doom. It’s not a coincidence that this is a common structure for map-fantasy epics – the prophecy can easily be expanded to include as many steps as the number of books you can convince your publisher to release.
At the same time, you can run this story in a more bounded way. If the cultists make their early attempt to bring about the End Times at the old graveyard, maybe your PCs do roll up on them and put an end to the whole thing before it gets kicked off. It could be a lot of fun to have PCs collect a worrying variety of apocalyptic prophecies over the course of their adventures, eventually requiring them to thread the needle of their terms to avoid triggering each of them.
Consider at each step whether you’re ready to end the campaign in a full loss if the apocalyptic villain wins any given step. Can the PCs win some and lose some, or do they have to pull out a whole win every time? Let me suggest that you probably get more drama out of a progress track and the real possibility of loss without the campaign instantly ending.
The transformation and revelation of the apocalyptic prophecy is only implied to be destruction on a continental or larger scale. The word only means something is uncovered or revealed, so maybe the apocalyptic prophecy is really about exposing a long-kept secret, such as the true nature of a place, a creature, or a god. Because you want to give the PCs a villain group, the secret pretty much has to be something bad. Otherwise, your heroic characters would be working to complete the prophecy and reveal it themselves, right?
(Yes, there are secrets that are good things in the balance, but your PCs might still feel like they need to prevent their uncovering, perhaps because of the expected public reaction. That might be one way to set up an antagonist who is the hero of their own story.)
Enact the vengeful will of a god or patron. Your options here run beyond fiendish patrons and evil gods. Gods of justice are often in a position to administer punishment for societal sins – in fact, any god might inflict a curse for violations of their portfolios. Here again, my first thought is of grand-scale schemes, but a Tier 1 vengeful will could be leveled against an individual or a town. Greek gods curse individuals for hubris and violating hospitality all the time, don’t they?
This is also the perfect scheme to follow any notable victory by the heroes. Having defeated one foe, their divine or occult boss comes in to settle scores. That approach sort of “kicks in” at tier 2, following a good solid Tier 1 story arc. That might mean facing priests, zealots, or warlocks, or facing the fiend’s or god’s power still more directly. For Tier 3, let’s try a minor avatar or some war angels, and Tier 4, a major manifestation, such as an archdevil or demon prince Gating in and kicking over everything your PCs have ever loved.
Fey (especially the Unseelie), fiends, and genies traditionally have plenty of vengeful tendencies. The Great Old Ones… well, depending on your setting, they may not be even conceptually possible to offend. In part because I’m playing a Hexblade, it’d be interesting to see a Hexblade patron with sufficient volition to be vengeful. (“Farewell, friend! I was a thousand times more evil than thou.”)
Spread a vile contagion. Don’t run this one. I’m gonna say, really strong odds that your players are not going to have a good time with a disease plot. Not for many more years yet.
You’re still here? Fine. The tier boundaries on this are all about the number of people involved. Tier 1 is a town, tier 2 is a county or kingdom, tier 3 is a kingdom or continent, tier 4 is a world, or all members of one species in a world, or the like.
This is also every deliberately-triggered or spread zombie plague, for everything from ordinary low-CR zombies to 28 Days Later zoombies. Which leads me directly into unintentional villainy – a character unaware they are advancing a scheme of spreading a contagion.
And that goes right back to “too much like the present day, so leave it out.”
Overthrow a government. Vive la revolution! This is the protagonist goal in my Aurikesh campaign, as the prince who rules their domain is an incredibly awful villain. As a villain scheme, it helps an awful lot if the government in question is one the PCs want to save, whether out of personal loyalty or ideological sympathy. The placement of this scheme within Mayhem suggests that this overthrowing isn’t a step in a broader regional conquest, but you’re certainly free to play it as conquest-by-espionage.
In that light, then, Tier 1 might be about the suborning or elimination of a town mayor or council, or the antagonist gaining a foothold in the court of a duke or bishop. A lot of Tier 1 stories are about whether villains succeed in playing the long game to become a bigger problem, or PCs nip it in the bud.
In Tier 2, a county, duchy, or city-state might come to the verge of collapse, or the villains might act as agents provocateurs in a kingdom or empire, likely building into a more obvious threat for Tier 3. Tiers 3 and 4 aren’t especially distinguishable – kingdoms, empires, and grand extraplanar cities such as the Radiant Citadel or Sigil might be under threat. (Okay, it’s hard to imagine what could pose a threat to the Lady of Pain without her specific cooperation.)
There are other kinds of government-like organizations, too. Seas of Vodari has the Arcane Council that oversees arcane spellcasters, much like the Wizards of High Sorcery in Dragonlance. Destroying them outright probably requires incredible power, but getting one bad guy placed on a ruling or advisory council might be sufficient for widespread mayhem. Such villains are ideal if your gaming group enjoys interaction and investigation storylines most of all.
Trigger a natural disaster. Real Bond-villain kinds of vibes here. Or maybe they just discovered fracking and a quarterly earnings report. Same thing, basically.
In fantasy adventure games, mega-storms, volcanic eruptions, eternal winters, or unrestrained plant growth are classic natural disasters, often directly as the vengeful will of a god or patron. Without the god’s or patron’s involvement, at least in early tiers of play you’ll also need to establish why the villain has the capacity to trigger a natural disaster. That might be the result of a long, difficult ritual worked in a druid’s grove (maybe with the druid’s support, maybe after slaying the druid), or maybe there’s just a magic item that promises to give the volcano indigestion.
The obvious tier scaling for this is the number of people and settlements threatened, as we’ve seen in a lot of other schemes in this series. A Tier 4 natural disaster might be a Realms-Shaking Event, The Cataclysm, or The Unbearable Lightness of the Time a God Took Acid and Turned Off Gravity. (Later religious texts shortened that name considerably, to the confusion of still later scholars.)
Another kind of “natural” disaster – a disaster befalling nature, not an outcome that is in any sense natural – is any intrusion of the Shadowfell, the Inner Planes, the Astral (how would this work? I have no idea, I’m just tossing out weird ideas), or the Lower Planes. Lean on the tropes of disaster films and stories: desperation reveals character virtues and flaws, told as an ensemble with lots of smaller stories, and nature reaches a new equilibrium.
Rime of the Frostmaiden tells the story of a natural disaster already in progress at the start of that campaign. A lot of the criticism I heard of it, especially around Auril herself, amounts to players and DMs feeling weird about the adventure staying inside Tiers 1 and 2. Showdowns with gods, even in avatar forms that have been greatly depowered by sustaining the Rime for years, are things we’ve been taught to expect from Tier 3 at the earliest. (I’m not staking out a position on RotFM, just thinking about what I’ve heard.)
Utterly destroy a bloodline or clan. So the Harkonnen plot in Dune, huh? Or Fall of the House of Usher (2023 miniseries)? Breaking a line of legitimate inheritance by murdering everyone in a familial line is a classic power play, but it’s also just a matter of scale away from being ethnic cleansing. Suffice it to say, proceed with caution in this day and age.
The scale of
what’s under threat doesn’t really need to change – a bloodline consisting of
just a few individuals is just as interesting at Tier 1 as Tier 4. As I see it,
the change hinges more on the powers leveled against them – Tier 1 might be a gang
of mercenaries, a revenant, or some wraiths; Tier 2 might be a famous assassin or
a cabal of middling-power mages; Tier 3 might be an adult dragon in a
generational grudge match or an extended cult of warlocks; Tier 4 might be an
archfey, an empire and all its resources, or an Amberite a demigod.
The significance of the bloodline might change. I’d have a great time with a Tier 1-2 storyline to protect a local goblin clan from an expansionist threat (I ran something like this in Aurikesh with mostly Tier 2 PCs, and I’m doing something similar with orcs under threat from an adult white dragon in my post-Dragon Heist game). At higher tiers, the bloodline or clan might carry greater political or mystical significance – it might be interesting to have just one PC in the group know that they’re secretly protecting the intended great-grandparents of the Kwisatz Haderach, or something along those lines. In Tier 4 Forgotten Realms, I think it’s completely reasonable to introduce an enemy (Cyric and his Exarchs, maybe) that are dedicated to wiping out the surviving Seven Sisters. Untold magical and political mayhem (three current or former heads of state!) would result.
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