And that Rogue sounded nasty. I hated him just by reading about him!

I’ll ponder on this and will probably do a few mini-posts on your bullet points this week.

1) Evil
2) Menacing
3) We HATE this guy

They can appear alone or in any combination.

Menacing is the easy one. Just pile on the raw power. In D&D, it’s simple math: if CR > average party level +2, it’s a serious threat.

But that’s not the same as being scary, right? A bunch of 1st level characters may recognize a CR 3 ogre as a potential-TPKing BBG, but they’re not likely to respond to it as Evil.

We Hate This Guy needs a bit more work. This is the NPC who’s messed up the PCs or those they care about. Can also be evil or menacing. But not necessarily; the gnome rogue/illusionist who keeps ripping them off is HTG, but not all that Evil.

Evil is hard. Evil is horror. Evil is mostly chrome, and it’s all about creeping out your players. Since all players differ, you have to sit and think about this.

Here’s one example that worked IMC (YMMV). A recurring NPC was a rogue who was a henchman of the BBE wizard. The rogue wasn’t a serious threat — he was about the same level as the party. But he was both Evil and WHTG; he was the BBEG’s torturer, and a clinical sadist.

I played this straight — no camp, no giggling. Let the PCs see one of the rogue’s victims. Let them meet the guy, and described how his cold, fishlike eyes seemed to linger on them. How, at the prospect of interrogating a captive, “he doesn’t say anything, but — roll a Spot check? — well, he starts breathing a little heavily, and you see sudden beads of sweat appear on his forehead.”

At one point the party was briefly forced to ally with some of BBEG’s minions. While travelling, I had the PCs come across sad little masses of fur and feathers — small woodland animals the rogue had caught and tortured.

I tried to walk a balance between showing and showing too much (which is just a gross-out). And I guess it worked, because the PCs came to really loathe and fear this character. At one point two of them were captured by the BBEG’s minions, and were sort of blase about it — metagame thinking, we’ll escape and get our stuff back. And then I said, “the door opens and [the rogue] walks in. When he sees you two he goes perfectly still.”

The shout of “Ohhhh SHIT!!” that went up was, I can’t deny, satisfying.

Doug M.

I find my players mostly remember the harder stuff. There was especially one *very* anonymous mage that kicked the PCs arse because he was well prepared and they were ecstatic when they found him and exacted revenge. He didn’t have much to do in the grand scheme of things, but he was memorable nonetheless.

Evil vs PCs has never been very successful in my groups. Capture, torture and especially gear theft is universally booed by my group.

I did however have a Method Actor player once who thrived on these things, so I had him captured, tortured and stolen from, while the rest of the party went out time and again to bail their drama-king buddy.