Before the final blow was struck, I tore open an etc. etc.
As we all know thanks to our clearly-established canon, a Demon Lord cannot step between worlds except on Devil’s Night. But as only some of us know thanks to that one Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic where Succubus opened her own—ahem—Hell Portal for our heroes, some lesser demons have the power to go back and forth at will. And if you want to know why Demon Queen has a sudden interest in the Get Help maneuver, you only have to look at the hover text on this one. It’s almost as if some things are more important than ruling over the Demon Web Pits. No doubt the world’s buffest D&D player would agree.
Any dang way, it looks like Woolantula the Servile is about to embark on a a very important interplanar mission! I for one wish all luck and success to the cute l’il spider-sheep. The loyalty on display here for the rightful Queen is outstanding (even if it’s undeserved). But in the meantime, what do you say we talk about the other thing going on in today’s comic? Namely, the desperate ploy of a once-might villain reduced to back-of-the-head status.
You know this trope. It’s the idea that some fiercely loyal minion will still serve its underserving master, even in extremis. The castle has blown up, the heroes have destroyed the second-to-last phylactery, and only the monomaniacal care of an Igor can see you through.
The is 100% a villain trope, but the only time I can remember seeing it in-game came from the player’s side. It was a Ravenloft game, and Laurel (whose burned hand is doing much better, thanks) was playing a native Barovian. If you want to imagine her character, imagine the phrase, “What hump?”
Her laboratory assistant wizard was an apprentice to the most brilliant bio-galvanic researcher in all the realm! Of course, all that brilliance really belong to Igorina. So inevitably, when their windmill-lab exploded, the love-besotted young hunchback went to work saving her master. She spliced together a small, sickly, childlike body from the bits and pieces littered about the blast crater. And she used all manner of tubing and blood transfusion techniques and bioengineers to make the Master a part of her own body. Dude was basically a Voldemort fetus clinging to life in the hunchback’s artificial hump-womb. You might understand why we didn’t talk about it much at the table.
What about the rest of you guys, though? Have you ever had a firecely loyal minion? Why did they still follow your baddie, even after all the horrible things they did at the height of their now-diminished power? Tell us all about your own Igors and Woolantulas down in the comments!
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There he goes, the brave (?) little spider…
What? Evil can be brave (you need guts to run straight at a gang of murderhobos bedecked with magical gewgaws), and Woolantula’s evilness seems just slightly dubious.
I don’t envy Woolantula this job. DQ’s been an absolute rotter for who knows how long, and I doubt BBEG left her cultists unaware that he’d taken over the big chair. (Even without lumbar support.) Where is Woolantula going to find anyone who likes DQ enough to help? (Or who can be seduced or tricked into helping?)
Maybe the Servile One would be better off finding a new boss. Like someone who gave him gold stars…
Hold up.
If DQ was still middle management, who was her boss? 0_0
DQ has been demoted to middle management. Her current role is in more of an advisory / consulting / ashtray position.
What, no doorstop growth potential? 😉
She handles a lot of paperwork. Specifically, she prevents it from blowing away.
What? Evil can be brave (you need guts to run straight at a gang of murderhobos bedecked with magical gewgaws)
Not quite. I remember a Discworld quote; “And Sergeant Colon once again knew a secret about bravery. It was arguably a kind of enhanced cowardice – the knowledge that while death may await you if you advance, it will be a picnic compared to the certain living hell that awaits should you retreat.”
As for who Wooly is gonna get for help, my money is on Drow Priestess. Cause spiders.
On the subject of Laurel hopefully recovering smoothly…
https://www.deviantart.com/grendelkin/art/Be-healed-978221148
Thank you, that is super sweet!
I am very glad you lile it! 🙂
“I am a powerful demonic force! I am the harbinger of your doom! And the forces of darkness will applaud me as I STRIDE through the gates of Hell carrying your head on a pike!”
“Stride?”
“All right then, ROLL! ROLL through the gates of Hell…”
— — — — —
As a DM, I had one popular, persuasive, and particularly powerful lackey who (after his third defeat at the hands of the party and the 2nd defeat of his boss) –as suggested by a conversation with a player from a different campaign– persuaded his evil master that there was more money to be made in legitimate business (min/maxing the rules for magic item creation) than in elaborate and petty revenge schemes that always seemed to fail.
I’m not sure how an advanced winter wolf can drink a cocktail (Mage Hand plus a dog bowl with a little umbrella?), but I assume that after I retired the long-running duo they’re both now sipping Jippers on a beach somewhere.
Not an Igor story, but our Artificer managed to convince an amalgamation of 15+ childrens souls to let him loot them (after they had before that possessed him in an attempt to ‘play’, then switching to a giant dragon skeleton which we had to beat up, then being left with only a skull they were possessing) so that he can, like a proper mad scientist, build them a proper body.
Ahh, I should have known Woolantula the Servile embodies a loyal Igor.
https://wiki.lspace.org/Igor
Wonder if they’ll have a solo experience or group up! Either way, huzzah for the comedic potential. I bet earning his first non-NPC class level will be a novel experience of its own.
And thus, Oracle’s plot-convenient vision comes to pass.
With any luck, Woolantula will find a flock of sheep to blend in with.
In the first game of Toon I played, I arrived 30 minutes late along with another guy, so everyone else was already involved in shenanigans. He and I quickly looked at the rules and had to build something fast.
“I’ll build a mad scientist.” said my friend. “An evil scientist trying to capture the jewel the others are trying to get for evil science.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll be your Igor.”
And so it was. I took 1 power that game; the ability to appear behind someone whenever they said “Igor.” He had invention powers but decided to run with the idea that Igor appearing behind him was always surprising. What followed was everyone pursuing the gem with a sideplot that the evil scientist apparently hated Igor and all he stood for. He’d send poor Igor into danger, stand on ledges just to summon Igor to fall and screamed in rage when Igor miraculously appeared the next time.
When the gem did a body swap with all the brawlers and “Igor” died, the scientist did a little jig and said “He’s dead, he’s dead, hallelujah, Igor is dead!” At which point the Tuba that Igor was now in appeared behind him and said “You called, marthter?”
All the while, Igor remained completely oblivious to his bosses true desire to see him dead and jumped into the fray time and again. Legend says they are still together to this day.
Ok, we’d better be keeping a close eye on Alchemist now cause considering Claire’s character there is a good chance that Abercrombie was a previous BBEG whose gonna burst outta Alchemist chestburster style to become a new antagonist for the Handbook-world.
Now for an evil minion, the closes I can think of was this idea for a character; a black cat familiar to a witch becomes overcome with rage after their master’s death that they transform into a being capable of killing those who did the deed. Now this idea was originally for a vengeance paladin tababxi, being originally a pet cat to a kindly old lady who local villagers thought was an evil witch and thus killed her. The cat escaped, but felt such grief and rage for one of the only people who showed them love and care that they turned into basically a tabaxi (Stat wise) by their rage.
While meant for a PC, this could easily be used for an antagonist for a party, with the old lady actually being a witch (or if you really want to screw with the party, have it turn out she really wasn’t).
Now I feel unfulfilled as a DM. Thinking back, I don’t think I’ve ever had a BBEG that had minions. Paid hirelings, but never anyone that was loyal to them for more than the money.
With that in mind, I did have a story arc where the players decided to be sneaky instead of their usual frontal assault and hunted down one of the hirelings. The whole end of that arc became a total farce of double, triple and quadruple crossing, as money was flung hither and yon with total abandon. Even I was having trouble keeping track of who was working for who by the end.
UwUlantula.
Floofantula.
Nyanantula.
If this is Woolantula’s idea of ‘motivation’, I shudder to think what his life was like back when DQ was still on the throne in her own body.
Not sure if this counts… I’ve never had an Evil NPC who had a totally loyal minion, but I did play ‘second in command’ in a “we’re not really the good guys” Werewolf Pack in a Werewolf LARP once. I mean, we weren’t the Bad Guys, but if you know anything about 1st ed Werewolf the Apocalypse, there are very few objectively Good Guys… like maybe the Stargazers? We were definitely the “joksters” of the game as we pulled “pranks” on the other packs constantly, from harmless to lethal )depending on how well we liked the pack).
Anyway I was a Shadow Lord (known as power-hungry backstabbers) playing second fiddle to a Glasswalker (city loving fools who’ve turned away from the Wild), so I was going to make sure our pack was the pack in charge of the whole city. Every week for 6 months we’d hold a meeting and every week our leader would ask “So how goes the project of making us Sept Leaders?”
Now, I knew he was saying it jokingly, both IC and OOC, but I’d decided we were doing this. So every week I jokingly responded “All goes well my Lord” and gave him a little half bow. He’d laugh, I’d laugh, the rest of the pack would laugh… ’cause they were also in on the joke.
So after six months of him joking, the old Sept leader dies in ablaze of glory (no, my pack actually nothing to do with it), so when the moot was called and they asked for leaders to step forward, I shoved our leader forward, he laughingly stepped up, joking that he had no chance…
They unanimously voted him in as Sept Leader.
Best Prank Ever!
Many villains would kill for your level of supportive underling. Kill a lot.
Not exactly a “loyal minion,” but the mother of someone the PCs killed once caused them some trouble. This wasn’t a Grendel’s Mother situation where she was just as dangerous and twice as ugly – she was a little old tiefling lady with glasses. But she hired a competent private investigator/bounty hunter (actually a player’s character from another campaign) to track the PCs down, then subcontracted in a bone devil to capture some of them and drag them to Hell Court… where she sued them for wrongful death.
Total sidequest? Yes. One of the most memorable parts of the campaign? Also yes.
A fan answer to a minor mystery of Handbookworld:
https://www.deviantart.com/grendelkin/art/Wages-of-Heroism-978580861
My magus undead overlord in our recent game did have a “loyal” minion. He once took a solo trip to the Abyss and met there a quasit that would guide him to his quarry. The quasit name’s was Mike.
Of course, “loyal” is a vague notion for a quasit. I didn’t even know where he came from or chose to help me at the time. I was already on the path of becoming an overlord back then – if someone serves you well, you don’t ask questions, and if they don’t, you throw them in the hellsharks pit.
But Mike was quite loyal in his own way (and helpful to the GM). When I had to step out of the game for a few months for RL reason, he became my character’s eyes, spying on the party and keeping me updated on what artefacts and entities they encountered.
In the end, after a few events involving transferring him into a better demon’s body and stealing the power of a half-god of magic (and my return to the game as a player), he became my magus’ intelligent spellbook and helped him make his undead country prosper in the campaign’s epilogue.
What I like with that story is that the “helper” wasn’t under my control, it was a NPC actively controlled by the GM to shape / steer the story. And despite playing a large role, he wasn’t overbearing or railroading at all (the other players didn’t even know of him until we discussed our characters in the epilogue).