The Villain of a Horror Encounter

• A successful Search or Spot check reveals that all the furniture in a particular room was recently moved around, then meticulously put back in place. • All the clothes in the closet are stained with blood, but there’s no blood anywhere else. • The only door to the cellar is reinforced with iron bars and locked from the inside. • As a PC stares at a portrait on the wall, its features change until they depict her own, but she is clearly older in the portrait. If a second PC does the same, the portrait again changes to mimic his features, but this time the face shown is clearly that of a long-dead corpse in an advanced state of decay. The portrait then slowly reverts to its original state. • While a PC is looking at herself in a small round mirror, her image is suddenly attacked from behind. She sees her reflection die in agony only inches away on the other side of the mirror, leaving behind only a blood-splattered surface, without ever seeing what attacked her image. Thereafter she casts no reflection for three days, after which her image appears as normal. • A PC’s touch suddenly withers and blackens living plants, then the effect ceases as suddenly as it began. • A cleric awakens to find he’s gripped his holy symbol so tightly that his hands are cut. • A rogue awakens to fi nd that her fi ngers have been stained an inky black while she slept and her forehand branded with an odd mark that quickly fades. • A fighter awakens to find himself panting and sweating, his blade covered in gore, although he’s fought no enemies. • A wizard opens her spellbook to fi nd pages covered in ramblings in a foreign language, all written in blood in her own handwriting after a minute the strange writing fades and the pages resume their normal appearance. • The PCs find that all their rope has sprouted leaves and thorns. • A PC wakes gasping for breath and fi nds he is throttling himself with his left hand while his right hand lies numb and inert it takes a round or two for his numb right hand to pry the left hand off, whereupon both return to normal. • At the stroke of midnight, all animals in a small town begin to shake uncontrollably, howl, and attempt to hide. • The PCs enter a valley where it never gets brighter than dusk, even at midday. • One (or more) of the PCs hears the soft but insistent buzzing of flies over carrion. • After a night of troubled sleep, one of the PCs wakes to fi nd himself in a strange place—an alleyway, swimming in the middle of a lake, embracing a long-dead corpse on a slab in a masoleum. • One part of a house or town has an unpleasant, not-quiteidentifiable smell. • The PCs hear whispered conversation coming from around a corner but turn it to fi nd nobody there. • The local church appears gray and decayed, although the townspeople seem cheery. • Smoke trickles from a chimney, but when the PCs enter the fi replace is cold and dead. • The PCs glimpse a cheerful roadside hamlet not far down the road, but when they arrive they find it a long-abandoned decaying ruin. • After a few hours in a new town, it slowly dawns on the PCs that there are no children. • One word: Fog.

The heart of any good horror encounter is the villain. Regardless of your campaign world, the bad guy of your horror encounter will probably be an entity with its own ideas, ambitions, and characteristics. Thanks to the myriad of options D&D offers, a DM can craft a worthy adversary from all sorts of raw materials. The villain need not even be a person: a cursed site or sentient object can serve just as well, or something totally impersonal such as a plague of contagious madness or cannibalism. It’s an easy task to model a D&D villain on a character from popular fantasy. Tolkien’s Saruman is the very archetype of an evil wizard. Many evil warriors who serve a greater evil power owe their genesis to the Horned King of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. Beowulf’s Grendel is the model of many modern monsters, and even Goliath has appeared, at least conceptually, in tales that involve a hulking, nigh-unbeatable warrior. To take from more modern examples, it’s a matter of only a little effort to create a D&D equivalent of Zedar from The Belgariad (David Eddings) or Voldemort from the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. It’s nearly as easy to take villainous inspiration from nonfantasy material, as long as it’s the general concepts, not the specifi c details, that you carry over. One can easily imagine, for instance, that Lord Soth of Dragonlance fame was inspired (if only unconsciously) by Darth Vader. Both of these villains were good knights who fell to evil through pride and arrogance. Both are armor-clad, hulking warriors with mystical and martial prowess. Both serve a greater entity but have their own agendas, and both have a soft spot for a loved one. Yet each is clearly his own character as well and fi ts perfectly into his own niche. Other science fi ction worlds can be mined for material. The Terminator could be transmuted into a powerful golem, or perhaps an inevitable. Predators could become a powerful goblinoid race or perhaps an offshoot of githyanki. The Vorlons and Shadows of Babylon 5 could be recast as outsiders. The kythons of Book of Vile Darkness are a perfect example of the concept of Geigeresque aliens in D&D, but almost any animalistic demon or draconic entity could serve the same purpose. Horror tales are, of course, an ideal source of inspiration, given the theme of Heroes of Horror. Mr. Barlow of ’Salem’s Lot and his efforts to convert the entire population of a village into vampires can serve as a ready-made D&D plot. The various spells and powers available in the game combine to allow even the strangest, creepiest effects. For instance, the horrifi ed corpses left in Samara’s wake in The Ring could be the result of a phantasmal killer spell, with the movie’s cursed video reworked as a cursed book or painting. While they wouldn’t necessarily be ghosts, the notion of undead who do not realize they are undead, à la The Sixth Sense, makes for interesting villains—or even victims. Also consider the various entities that possess the ability to haunt dreams. Combined with the rules for dream-adventures presented in Chapter 3, a DM can easily create a Freddy Krueger-style character to bedevil players.

Period pieces and adventures also offer a wealth of inspiration. The corrupt sheriff of Unforgiven could become a self-serving captain of the watch. Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Belloq is a rival adventurer and treasure hunter, serving only his own ambition and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Jeff Long’s novel The Descent offers a convincing model for the Underdark and the horrors that go with it. And just about every James Bond fi lm presents an over-the-top villain just waiting to be transplanted to a dark castle and given magic items. Ultimately, villains can come from literally anywhere, with just a small amount of alteration. Keep your eyes open, and the villain of your next campaign might just introduce himself to you from the strangest of places.

INSIDE THE NUMBERS

A villain can be made much more frightening by means of game statistics. One of the most terrifying encounters PCs can face is one they believe to be well beyond their capacity to defeat. Although it’s generally a bad idea to put parties up against villains whose Challenge Ratings are far above anything they would normally be able to defeat, it’s a perfectly valid way of filling players’ hearts with terror, especially if the PCs have the option of fleeing in terror—this time. If you have players who insist on thinking in terms of game statistics every time they face a monster, watch those players’ faces as the metagame realization of what their character are facing slowly dawns. Now, that’s horror! Along these lines, consider using the Advancement entry in a monster’s statistics block as a means of upping the horror ante. Many monsters in the Monster Manual become larger as they advance in Hit Dice, and this can be the perfect way to reveal to the characters the nature of the predicament they face. Describing a creature as being Gargantuan, when the garden-variety example of the creature is only Large, is likely to at fi rst disquiet and then strike fear into the heart of players who have only encountered the normal version of the creature before. Alternatively, the issue of apparent diffi culty can itself be a terror tactic on the part of a devious DM. Since striking terror into the players is the surest way of ensuring that the characters feel fear or anxiety, the villain’s appearance can matter more than its actual abilities. Consider a villain who kills his victims by poking two holes in their throat and draining their life’s blood into a cask. What roleplayer isn’t going to assume, at least at fi rst, that the villain is a vampire? Low-level adventurers who realize the difficulty a true vampire would pose will be frightened of confronting him, afraid of even touching him, and terrifi ed when he simply shrugs off their attempts to turn or control him. Deceptions such as this can provide the hook that allows an encounter to develop. Don’t be afraid of mixing truths with lies, as that will only increase the horror. The fl ip side of this coin is the notion that the numbers exist to serve the bad guys, too. Players hate to admit it, but some of the most frightening encounters are ones in which the characters are forced to accept a limitation on their otherwise reliable abilities. Dungeon-crawling through bad conditions (or, worse yet, fighting in them) can be a waking nightmare for PCs who have grown accustomed to their party’s well-oiled machine team play. Some effective limitations include hampered visibility (up to and including impenetrable magical darkness), cramped conditions that impose combat penalties, reduced mobility that makes it harder for the PCs to get to the monsters than vice versa (or to get away), and zones of antimagic or antipsionics, all of which should scare most players on principle alone. In a horror encounter, even more than in a standard one, a villain who expects company will often use her knowledge of an area to her utmost advantage, thereby forcing limits even on parties that come prepared.

Some of the most frightful encounters involve limitations on the characters’ capabilities

UNUSUAL VILLAINS

A nefarious bad guy isn’t the only way of driving home the horror. Some of the most terrifying villains are those with no bodies or those who can’t be defeated by force of arms alone. At times, a terrifying situation can evoke more fear than a terrifying creature. Consider the following unusual villains:

Countdown to Doom: In this scenario, the primary source of dread comes from the knowledge that time is running out. Perhaps the PCs are traveling through a harsh environment, such as deep underwater, and the spells they’re relying upon to survive are running out. Perhaps the stars are almost right for a dimensional gate to open, releasing a horde of creatures from the Far Realms. . . .

Freaky Friday: One terrifying scenario that’s become a roleplaying standard is the notion of a drastic biological or supernatural transformation. In these encounters, one or more of the PCs fi nd themselves fundamentally altered, usually with no apparent cause. Maybe one character wakes up to fi nd that his arms have changed into tentacles, or he has switched bodies with another character, or his gender has changed and he’s now female. At fi rst this last scenario might seem more humorous than horrifying, but eventually the PCs should begin worrying why the villain is changing

Illus. by R. Gallegos