Villain Ex Machina
So there you are. The day is saved. The heroes are victorious! Some deus ex machina has reduced all your bad guys to ash, and now it’s time to get on to the next thing.
But wait… Didn’t the next thing involve some of those bad guys? Isn’t that dastardly traitor supposed to show up and twist the knife? Aren’t the naïve dupes supposed to become pawns in a game bigger than they can possible imagine? Oh noes! For the sake of the narrative, you’ve got to save the villains your players have worked so hard to destroy. And doing so elegantly is a challenge. After all, last thing you want is a Somehow Palpatine Returned situation.
Last time we talked about the villain’s escape kit, we asked how your heroes can confront an antagonist without killing them. Today we’re looking at one possible, tricky-to-pull-off answer. When you want to “somehow they survived” an antagonist, you’ve got to make damn sure that it makes sense. That means you’ll need exactly three things to pull it off.
- A suitable mechanism
- A logical sequence of events
- A believable motivation
In the present example we happen to have all three. We’ve long established that Devil’s Night is a time for hell portals. That’s our mechanism. We know that the Fiend Team were sent to the Prime Material on some secretive errand. There’s our logical sequence of events. With Fiendster and Clerimp at the ready, it wasn’t too hard to abscond with the assets. Finally, we also know that BBEG used the l33t vampires of Aqua Vitae as a distraction for some bigger plan. What with all this maneuvering, it sure seems like there’s a motivation buried in there someplace. Why exactly our big bad skele-man wants the Vampire Twins for his nefarious machinations remains a mystery though. And the reason all this works as a story beat is because it’s a mystery. Now like any good GM, I have to pay it off.
Therefore, for our question of the day, let’s talk about miraculous villainous escapes. When you absolutely, positively, need your villain to survive apparent defeat, how do you justify it? What is your mechanism, how does the sequence of events make sense, and what motivation would someone have to keep that villain alive? Give us your best miraculous saves and returns down in the comments!
JOIN THE HANDBOOK OF HEROES DISCORD! Do you want a place to game with your fellow Heroes? How about a magical land where you can post your dankest nerd memes, behold the finest in gamer dog and geek cats, or speculate baselessly on Handbook of Heroes plot developments? Then have I got a Discord Invite for you!
See? The only thing that can perma-kill a vampire is feline consumption.
(Cookies for those who get the reference.)
I recently saw this referenced as Witches Abroad in the Discord!
Wat
One of the witches (Nanny Ogg) has a cat (who is a whole story himself) named Greebo. A vampire had changed into a bat to escape and Greebo ate him :). End of vampire. I love Sir Terry Pratchett.
The vampire had already been clocked in the face in bat-form twice by people throwing wide the window shutters. Then, while he was still mildly stunned, Greebo found him. Greebo noted the new toy he’d found was trying to change shape, but he wasn’t having any of that. Not when he’d finally found someone to “play” with.
Considering how happy the townsfolk were next day, and how they celebrated by setting the damn vampire’s castle on fire, I think we can assume Greebo was welcome to his meal. And as Sir Terry noted, vampires have risen from the grave, the tomb and the crypt, but they’ve never managed it from the cat. 😀
Sometimes, your day just gets worse and worse.
Look, all I’m gonna say is that this feels HBoEF-adjacent.
You know, Wonder Woman loses her powers if you tie her up with her own lasso. Same deal with techno vampires.
…I mean, given the original author of the character, the adjacent comment still kind of applies.
I mean what.
As for villainous escapes, the feat Craft contingent spell or a bog-standard Contingency is your f(r)iend. That, or having an ally scry you during the climactic fight, ready to ‘port you out if things go pear-shaped.
That, or pulling a John Constantine and selling your soul to multiple fiends so they preserve your life until they figure out who gets what.
Or your villain has a case of common sense and puts up a greater simulacrum to deal with the murderhobos while they prime the self-destruct device and leg it down the Acme escape tunnel and a restful holiday at Whitesands Beach.
Is there anyone in Hell who *doesn’t* own a piece of Constantine? Pretty sure he’s made more infernal bargains than Lucifer has…
Heck, I dunno.
Dude might as well craft himself a phylactery.
You gotta get the certificate of authenticity. Otherwise your Constantine soul fragment loses all its value.
Scusi, its whatnow?
“Authenticity” and “John Constantine” don’t belong in the same sentence.
Constantine’s soul is the infernal equivalent of NFTs.
Clones, illusions, look alikes, trap doors, reinforcements acting as cover/meatshield buying time for escape.
Most of the time my villains are one shot. Unless players took them as prisoners(giving me an option for prison break) or allowed them to retreat. But those kind of sportsmanship are rare among my groups
You can’t go past Doombots…
I haven’t quite had occasion to pull the trigger on this yet, but one day I’m going to have a villain come back through Raise Dead.
After all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and the PC’s would be quite likely to resurrect one of their fallen comrades.
All I’d need would be some loyal minions to come in and drag their fallen leader’s corpse off to the Temple once the dust has settled.
“When you absolutely, positively, need your villain to survive apparent defeat, how do you justify it?”
I don’t, if the villain dies, the villain dies. I live by the saying “Let The Dice Fall Where They May”.
Now, if plot needs a villain, someone else will pick up the villain ball, but my plots are designed such that “not surviving contact with the Players” is baked in. So there’s usually a few villain standing hanging around ready to be activated if needs be.
When all else fails, have the villain return as an undead (…if they weren’t one already, so the Vampire Twins are lucky to have had an alternative). In particular, Ghosts are very hard to put down for good. You do have to use this sparingly, though, or your PCs will burn the corpses, salt the ashes, and find a way to bind the souls of anything more significant than a Dire Rat they ever encounter.
Mechanism and sequence of events are built into this one. The motivation can be whatever their motive was beforehand, assuming it was strong enough to come back from the dead for, or revenge, or the blessing of some fell god… or if you want to have some fun with it, especially with Ghosts, you can have the villain suffer memory loss in the transition, maybe just making them confused and angry, maybe significantly shifting their personality (and even opening them up to redemption).
I’ve used this for a couple of my competition villains (The Warrior Philosopher, the Knight of Ghostly Thorns, and arguably Futility, though hers works best if she died in the backstory), but never in an actual game. But my guess would be that the key to using this one is showing that it wasn’t just a “get out of jail free” card for the villain, that they’re changed from the last time the PCs saw them, diminished by their defeat, and forced to shake up their strategy.
“You suffer from a misapprehension. You *succeeded* in killing me when last we crossed. I would have… words… with you about that.”
“Oaths sworn on the River Styx do not *expire* with their swearer.”
I’ve had a villain come back because her boss raised her from the dead. She actually managed to catch the heroes at a severe disadvantage later due to having healed a missing eye and tongue, thereby looking quite different and luring them into a trap. They burned and maimed the body after that fight. They’re still worried about running into her again.
When all else fails, introduce the killed villain’s sibling or such who just so happens to have exactly the same stats and resources and plans as the original villain (plus revenge on party).
Aww, pretty sure a lot of us were looking forward to the family reunion from Hell when Thiefling finally gets to meet up with Thief
Cousins? Half-sisters? Mother and Daughter? Coincidence and there’s thousands of them all looking like thief due to their shared bloodline?
Guess good things will come to those of us whom wait
In an earlier 3.5 campaign, years ago, I had the villain and his chief lieutenant cast Clone on themselves to create a hidden backup body for their souls to migrate to and then use Simulacrum to make that corpse into a construct. (Unlike Gentle Repose, it never has to be reapplied to preserve the corpse.) This MO gave the villains a recurring get-of-dead-free card that became a feature of the characters. (“How can we finally kill this guy and make it STICK?!”) His secret method was eventually revealed when the foe used it as a tool to make duplicates of the PCs in an effort to ruin their reputation. (…and create a classic Us vs. Evil Us scenario.)
Currently, in the samurai campaign I’m running, there is just one entity that is feared by our resident foolish samurai warrior with a magic sword. In their one and only fight (so far), good planning and lucky rolls meant that the villain dropped in two rounds of fighting with no one but the samurai being hurt (though he took 90% of his health in a single round). I expect that the primary antagonist in the current mission to Tibet won’t last long either, but since the wicked and paranoid shugenja has access to 15 years of Wish spells by the time the PCs encounter him, I’ve decided to dust off the old “backup body” routine for an off-camera return. Who better than a necromancer to naively revive the *really* scary villain for a to-the-pain rematch? (Cue the scary Inuyasha music.)
The samurai and his squad have reached end-of-campaign level content now, so I think it’s time to include something the player has wanted for a while but never expected to face: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashadokuro#/media/File:Mitsukuni_defying_the_skeleton_spectre_invoked_by_princess_Takiyasha.jpg
It occurs to me that I’ve run two games that have perfectly valid explanations for why a foe might come back later.
One is my old Glitter Hearts game that established very early on that any sort of death results in the person getting warped to a bar that has seen been renamed the Respawn Point. (It is now entirely non-alcoholic, because there are too many children ending up there otherwise. Dang child protagonists.)
The other is my Battle Network game with a far more prosaic explanation: backups exist and are generally considered to be a good thing. (That and the human level opponents live in a world that operates by Pokémon logic: merely throwing a punch is considered bending the rules of the setting.)
What sort of bouncer does the Respawn Point employ, if heroes and villains alike are going to respawn there?
I mean, the issue is less dangerous things getting in and more dangerous things getting OUT.
As such there’s a room in the basement for beings that cannot exist in civil society.
I’ve had groups head to the various Valhalla’s/Hades/Misty Isles to retrieve characters that have either absconded there or were snatched by nefarious means (really the most nefarious was the Deck of Many Things. So many trips to get characters back from hook demons from those over the years.) So a perfect excuse as to why the villain pops back up into their lives. Someone went and retrieved them.
Of course that usually means that the BBEG now has an even BBEG pulling his strings in the background and the group has new complications cluttering their lives. FUN! For me anyway!
I use Lego minifigs as minis for DnD. My Curse of Strahd players just fought off several attacks from an AliExpress zombie cheerleader minifig that looks a lot like the recurring villain, so I find this duo quite delightful
I am offended on FangtasyGirl’s behalf.
Just gonna say this, demon version of Wizard looks more hot than Wizard and i am sure it’s just the alignment shift towards evil that the charm 😀
I never even bother trying to set up recurring villains. Most of my group gets annoyed when they can’t finish off a villainous flunkie before he escapes.
When I DMed the group of villains were led by a Wizard with the **Clone** spell so death wouldn’t stick so long as they didn’t die again while another was gestating. (You can’t set up a queue, read again, it says “Original creature” and there’s no language defining what happens if there’s a queue)
Until the villains’ base was discovered for the final showdown they simply paced their encounters. The big bad did actually end up “surviving” the final because he had escaped a prior battle so when he was killed in the final battle he had a **Clone** up. However he was no longer a threat because the party had taken his base, his assets, and killed most of his lieutenants.
I actually balanced the bad guy group by having the party simply encounter a different amount of them at a time, only encountering all of them at once in the final battle. It was actually pretty tight, I killed a party member; he took over playing the bad guy Rogue who escaped.
Any non breathing Villian in pathfinder would be smart to mix a dose of ‘dust of sneezing and choking’ into his smoke bombs. potential 3d6 con damage on fail save aside the no save ‘nonetheless disabled by choking (treat as stunned) for 5d4 rounds’ is pure gold for a fleeing villain.
it’s also super cheap to make (since intentionally making a cursed item is the same process as making the normal item it is based on for cost and dc) it’s 250 base price (for 125 when crafting) for a cursed ‘Dust of Tracelessness’
I haven’t need to do this yet, but if and when I do I plan to exploit the presence of the Paladin of Sarenrae and have the BBEG surrender. Which she is by oath required to accept, which keeps the BBEG alive.
I had a 3e krynn-without-gods low magic campaign where a BBEG had learned higher level magic from demons as an Acolyte of the Skin. The BBEG had found a slight loophole in his deal where once his soul was already destined for the Pit, he could teach other Acolytes higher magic and let them bypass that step…in return for them vowing to Res/Wish/Gate/whatever him out of the Pit. He had made close to a dozen deals like that before he died at the PCs hands.
It took like 3 game years (and a couple of real ones) before one of his bargains paid off, and he came back as half-demon warlock. (A few years in the Pit changes a person….)
In a fun (for me) twist, the PCs helped the Acolyte responsible reach that point. The NPC lived in Taladas, in the Minotaur lands (Rome-esque) where a massive goblin army had formed around a plague cult. The Acolyte was LE and considered only slightly more harsh than Minotaur law by the PCs and also very congenial and welcoming to strangers (especially those with their own secret knowledge of higher magic). He was more than willing to fight a goblin army…for a price. Disarm the various traps on a chest containing an ancient relic, one that was critical to increasing the NPCs power and bringing back the BBEG.
My Ancient Aliens campaign has a surprising amount of recurring villains, though it’s mostly set up in advance.
There was a long-running rivalry with a vampire, on account of the fact that Pathfinder vampires are notoriously difficult to kill if you can’t find their coffin – they enter gaseous form when reduced to 0 HP and flee. The party fought this vampire like four times in various situations. To further complicate matters, the vampire was enslaved by a necromancer mummy who could leave her crumbling body and possess other undead. Sometimes the party fought the real, timid vampire, and other times the mummy using the vampire’s body. The mummy also possessed a ghoul and then a zombie she made out of an NPC, pretending that was her real body to through the party off. Only once the party made a deal with the vampire did they discover the location of the mummy and hunt her down.
Other villain escapes have included the villain actually being a hologram (ordered minions to attack but took no action, disappeared after taking any damage) and a wizard hiding in a Shadow Plane pocket who sent out a copy of himself made of shadowstuff to battle the PCs. I suppose some players might find all these tricks frustrating, but I find it is useful to establish a rivalry with a major villain, rather than have them just appear at the last room of the dungeon.
As for villains who have actually been killed… players are surprisingly quick to forget about resurrection magic.