Unhappy Endings

the campaign—the defeat of the adversary who has dogged the PCs’ steps since day one—is one of the most satisfying experiences D&D has to offer. For every villain, the DM should have at least the basic outline of a backup plan. Your one-shot villain might manage to escape if the PCs have a run of bad luck or poor planning. It would be a waste not to use her again, especially since the players are likely to gain a lot of personal satisfaction from a second shot at the one who got away. A recurring villain or even a long-term villain might fall before you intended if the PCs are particularly creative. If the players come up with an unanticipated way of taking down an adversary you thought was too powerful for them, don’t deny them their victory. You can always have a subordinate or ally step in to take the villain’s place in the plot, or allow the villain himself to return from defeat and even death. If you have this backup plan sketched out ahead of time, you won’t need to stop the game or rethink your entire campaign if the unexpected occurs.

SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK

The PCs have won their hard-earned victory. The villain has fallen, her schemes shattered, her lair in fl ames. Perhaps they played their checkmate before you anticipated, throwing a huge monkey wrench into your plans for the rest of the campaign. What do you do for an encore? Why, you have the villain pop back up, or you have the PCs’ victory turn around and bite them. Unless you’ve altered the campaign setting to make resurrection magic exceedingly rare or even nonexistent, odds are good that your players have taken advantage of such things (or at least have taken comfort from the knowledge that they could). Yet few ever seem to consider that NPCs and villains have access to the same abilities. Their adversary might have arranged for an ally to resurrect her. Perhaps the evil wizard had completed all but the fi nal steps of the rite of lichdom, and his death at the PCs’ hands triggers the ritual. It might be that the villain’s rage at her defeat is so strong, it binds her to the Material Plane as a ghost. If you would prefer not to bring a dead villain back to life (or undeath), but still want your players to continue in the current plotline, make use of minions and allies. A trusted lieutenant steps in to continue, or even improve upon, his master’s work. A child or other relative vows revenge. A minion of the deceased villain takes her place, claiming to be the original back from the dead. Particularly if she has access to illusion magic, or if the villain always wore a great helm or mask, this isn’t too diffi cult an impersonation to pull off. Or, to really disturb your players, drop hints that the great villain was simply the servant of an even greater power. Don’t take away every victory the PCs earn; that’s more frustrating than never winning at all. Instead, use these techniques to save a campaign that might otherwise stall or end prematurely, or to begin a brand-new story. Use them sparingly even then. Having a single victory stripped away is motivation for greater efforts; having them all rendered meaningless is sure to inspire apathy.

The Soul-Locked Creature

If you really want to hammer home the notion that a particular creature is almost unkillable—or the fact that violence is not a winning solution—consider giving some of your monsters the soul-locked trait. This is something like a template, since it takes a preexisting monster and modifi es it. It makes only a single change to the creature, however: namely, it cannot be killed under normal circumstances! Soul-locking functions similarly to a ghost’s rejuvenation ability. Whenever the creature dies, it makes a DC 16 level check (d20 + HD). If it succeeds, the creature returns to life—or undeath, or animation—4d20 days after being slain (or twice that if the body is completely destroyed, such as by disintegrate or immersion in lava). Each soul-locked creature has one specifi c way in which it can be dispatched permanently. In some cases, this might be a particular type of weapon, or even a specifi c weapon. In most instances, the creature can be permanently defeated only through indirect means. If the monster is the manifestation of a familial curse, it can be banished forever only by making amends for the sin that called the curse down on the family in the fi rst place. If it’s a demonic entity, the heroes must fi nd the ancient symbols that drew it to the Material World and destroy them. If the beast is a creature of taint, the characters might have to cleanse an entire area of taint or lure the creature to a sacred purifying spring before it will stay dead. Even though being soul-locked makes a creature almost impossible to permanently destroy, it does not increase the monster’s Challenge Rating, since it is no harder to defeat the monster in any given encounter. You should give the PCs extra XP as a story award—perhaps an additional 25% over and above the XP for defeating it in that particular encounter—when they fi nally best it permanently. In most campaigns, only one or at most two creatures should be soul-locked. If you’re running a campaign in which violence is not a viable solution—such as a campaign in which violence deals taint—a great many creatures (or even all of them) can be soul-locked.

UNHAPPY ENDINGS

In most campaigns, players tend to assume—usually with good reason—that the end of the campaign is likely to be a happy one. Certainly bad luck and the occasional Total Party Kill (TPK) can interfere, but for the most part the end of the story is more or less a triumphant one. Throw this idea out the window for horror campaigns. The story might end happily, the heroes having fi nally defeated the great evil and freed their lands from whatever terrors stalked them. On the other hand, the evil of the campaign might be undefeatable. The campaign might end with the PCs driven mad or overcome by taint. Perhaps they cannot destroy the foul demonic entity but can only sacrifi ce their lives to end the ritual calling it to the Material Plane. An unhappy ending doesn’t mean the PCs must lose or die. They can still have their victories and accomplishments—and should have, in fact, if the players aren’t to feel frustrated or ill used—but those victories need not be complete. Consider a quest to retrieve a loved one from the clutches of a vampire lord. The heroes fi nd her already undead, drained of life and raised as a slave to their enemy. They can destroy her, freeing her soul to travel on to the afterlife, but they cannot save her completely. She is lost to them. Depending on your players, you might choose to warn them at the start of a horror campaign that the end might not