DM Rowan
Adventurer
The DM Renaissance is in full swing!
Posts: 96
Favorite D&D Class: Bard/Paladin
Favorite D&D Race: Half Elf
Gender: NB Lesbian
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Post by DM Rowan on May 30, 2016 7:31:39 GMT
Some background: Creating a villain for a Steampunk campaign that takes place in a homebrew world that's entirely underground. The world is called Gallur, and in it, humans are far rarer than most campaigns. Simply by being human, you gain boosts in credibility. Like "Wow they're human! They can do anything!" So here's my villain. I'd love to have some feedback on him. I'll be uploading more as I create it. The Leader - Jasper Lepp
Background - Parents
Jasper’s mother, Joyce Yi, while human, can trace her lineage back to the first Water Genasi settlement. She grew up better off than most, meaning she and her family worked as physicians instead of being forced to work in factories. She had a decent education and a fairly happy childhood but as she grew older, she began to see the injustice in the world and began to write essays under the pseudonym Wyn Relsword. She became rather well known among the less fortunate as a champion of freedom.
Jasper’s father, Neil Lepp, was a big fellow with a soft heart who was raised in a factory family as the man of the house for his mother and his five younger siblings. In his spare time, he tinkered little toys out of stray parts he scavenged from the factory. Wyn Relsword’s works reached his ears and he was taken with the elegant poetry of it. Eventually, he opened his own tinkering shop. It was there that he met Joyce where she had taken over her family’s business when she saved his sister from a deadly sickness. The two became fast friends and he was the first person she told about her writings. Soon, they fell in love and were wed. They waited to have children, worried about the being unable to care for a child Joyce continued to write even through her pregnancy while Neil continued to tinker. Soon they had a strapping baby boy, Jasper Geming Lepp.
Background - Youth
He grew up strong and charismatic, a natural leader of the people. Shortly afterwards, his little sister, Daiyu Allison Lepp, was born. The two were close as close could be although Jasper often grew frustrated with the ammount of trouble she put herself in. The two were home schooled together. Daiyu always dreamed of being an adventurer and becoming an aristocrat. His parents taught him their respective trades and he took to both like a fish to water, tinkering in particular. He was so gifted that as an adolescent, he was offered a scholarship to the prestigious Akarwerry Institute of Artificery and Invention. His parents were prouder than proud and he moved out to study for several years. When he graduated, his parents were in their 40s or 50s. Daiyu had left long ago to seek her fortune. Jasper, on the other hand, came home in order to take care of them. He tried to grow their business but was unable to do so before they passed away. Angry with the system that kept them in poverty all their lives, Jasper decided to make a change. He sold his parents old home, packed up everything he could and moved back to Akarwerry where he opened a pub and sold his services as a tutor for students. Soon he became a public mentor figure and his bar a popular spot to study after class. |
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Post by Lexurium on Jun 22, 2016 15:19:21 GMT
Forgive me, I'm rather uncertain as to how this background produces a villain. Certainly a fighter for the freedoms of the masses is a hero? Sure, the party of adventurers could be tasked by the powers that be to maintain the status quo, but surely any good-aligned hero would not remain blind to the injusticeses of the system?
Is the idea to have Jasper be the main focus of the campaign only to snatch the ground from under your PC's and turn the tables on them?
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Post by blakeryan on Jun 25, 2016 5:27:05 GMT
'Angry with the system that kept them in poverty'
so does this mean he's working overtly/covertly against merchant houses/guilds or wealthy nobles?
so maybe he's trying to implement political change, maybe he has some mage guild or thieves guild allies?
did his sister return wealthy and full of tales of heroism, and it pushed Jasper over the edge with jealousy/frustration?
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Post by frohtastic on Jun 29, 2016 3:41:01 GMT
Hmm, I feel a bit more of a anti-hero vibe going.
I mean unless he wants to abolish this regime just to ascend his own status instead of abolishing the system of wealth?
Sounds a little like he's only viewed as villainous because he might herald a socialistic way of life.
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Post by dmxtrordinari on Jul 4, 2016 6:44:44 GMT
Something along the lines of what his motivations are within your campaign would be nice so we could actually see what he's doing now. As far as the backstory now I think it's fairly well developed with connections he has to living people as well as organizations. The villain part I'm assuming would come from whatever he's up to now which is what I'd like to see.
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DM Rowan
Adventurer
The DM Renaissance is in full swing!
Posts: 96
Favorite D&D Class: Bard/Paladin
Favorite D&D Race: Half Elf
Gender: NB Lesbian
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Post by DM Rowan on Jul 14, 2016 17:12:53 GMT
ok maybe villain wasn't the word i meant to use. IDK It was late when i posted it and i think i mostly wanted to share him cause i loved him so much. thanks tho guys
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Post by randosaurus on Jul 15, 2016 7:28:23 GMT
Try this out. Disclosure- it borrows from a popular British program. It's also a little long. - Jasper wanted to do his parents proud by becoming successful. He found quickly though that running a tavern is honest work, just not profitable work. The avenues of prestige and wealth closed to him, he employed his talents in more... dishonest work.
- His skill and inventions turned to 'soft' crime- gambling, making book, confidence, and some smuggling. He trained up a crew of 'educated gangsters' from his pupils. He would selecting those with the aptitude & skills for success but who also lacked the connections and prestige for easy success. Importantly, his plans and schemes would target outsiders or criminals only-- he wanted to enrich and grow his community. The bar would become a front for his 'back of house' operations, and a formal meeting room to run business meetings (crime).
- The PCs could interact with him when they need a contact in the under-under world (since you're underground). He may help them sell goods that don't have a ready (legal) market. Perhaps he hires the PCs for their skills in a heist(!). Perhaps he directed PCs to take down more dangerious criminals (opening up turf for him to then control). Importantly, he would be developed as a neutral-ish foil with a good hear, but who would work against the PCs when it's to his profit.
- Abruptly, the government moves in a new cadre of law enforcement from a different region. The group replaces the (somewhat corrupt/lazy) local gendarmes and begins restoring rule of law, stopping crime, and rounding up rabble rousing labor organizers. The perform raids, busts, shows of force to beat down the community but the actions are really to provide cover for another agenda. The commander is working at the order of someone very highly placed in the government, a minister of war, investigating the theft of government property. Certain goods were diverted & stolen, so he is tasked with finding the culprit. He is rounding up & interrogating the 'usual suspects' with all the delicacy of the sledgehammer. He might even question the PCs, but Jasper evades his traps.
- Jasper of course hijacked the shipment-- artifacts from a distant colony rife with Human ruins and relics. His skills and expertise made him uniquely suited to study and employ the artifacts, and he crafted them into gear and weaponry combining steam mechanics and unstable eldritch power. Equipped with unique tech, his crew started accruing power and renown, engaging in greater and more dangerous operations while retaking his community, uniting the workers, and fighting the power.
- The PCs would come into conflict as Jasper's tactics turn more dangerous & destructive. Perhaps he detonates a bank vault & the neighboring zoological society-- releasing dangerous magical beasts. Maybe they retrieve more artifacts for a 'buyer' revealed to be Jasper, amassing more relics. Are the waste products of his experiments affecting the creatures further underground, in the sewers or cisterns? In any case, his activities should be ratcheting up, getting darker, leading to more collateral damage and innocent bystanders.
- I think a nice 3rd act would be to reveal that Daiyu has been corrupted by one of the original artifacts, possessing & giving her strange and deadly powers. She could be manipulating Jasper, making him take greater & greater risks, creating more chaos and strife. I imagine an evil intelligent item that is triggered to and usable only by Humans. It could be related to the lore in your world, a clue to why there are so few Humans? Is it an ultimate weapon created by ancient Human arcane magic users in a war they waged on all other peoples? Maybe. Is she inspiring Jasper to build armaments en masse for a violent worker army uprising? Perhaps.
It's really challenging to write a villain that develops over time, because the PCs should stay on his periphery. PCs are the protagonists, not just minor characters in your Villain's Rise. Most of his actions and influence should be taken off-stage-- he should be a folk legend written of in broadsheets, uttered with respect in taverns as he grows in renown and then fear. The PCs can't be seen as a threat to him, nor Jasper an outright enemy of the PCs-- at least not until the final movements of the campaign. This version of Jasper is definitely a shadowy manipulator (his sister moreso), a friendly & influential by reputation, dark and cunning in secret. One theme that would be fun to develop is the conflict between civilization & nature, a pronounced element in some Steampunk. In my understanding, it takes place in a Victorian era. In real-time, this era was one of scientific discovery, development & progress but at the same time brutal colonialism, waste & destruction of the land and rivers, and amorality for the sake of modernity. Artifacts plundered from a distant colony are very real in Western history. In the above campaign the relics introduce elements of the wild & uncontrollable nature back into the developed world. Chaos and unrest are the reaction to stifling order under an onerous system of laws. We see a zoo full of trapped wild creatures, distant lands plundered & emptied, magic is dangerously incompatible with the civilized world. There's no end to the above, maybe there won't be one. There are some loose ends - can Daiyu be freed, will the commander track down & eliminate Jasper, just what was the war minister planning for the artifacts? It's difficult to tell if this idea fits into your world at all, but having a favorite 'villain' is something that's fun to write & fun to play as a DM. Make him as compelling to the players as possible, and let the adventure develop organically. Write a few character sheets for him, 4th, 8th, 12th level in case you need him to randomly appear. There's no harm if you write an NPC with a plan-- once it gets big enough, your PCs will have no choice but to take notice. |
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DM Rowan
Adventurer
The DM Renaissance is in full swing!
Posts: 96
Favorite D&D Class: Bard/Paladin
Favorite D&D Race: Half Elf
Gender: NB Lesbian
|
Post by DM Rowan on Jul 16, 2016 4:46:43 GMT
randosaurus Oh wow! Thanks a ton! I was beginning to think Jasper didn't fit in the campaign but now im really in love with this idea. We've only had one session but so far we've been playing heavily with the theme of good people who made a ton of bad choices and became someone they never wanted to be, most notably a veteran who has been kidnapping children to sell as slaves who was supposed to be a one off forgettable villain and not NEARLY as sympathetic as he turned out and is now part of the party/a prisoner.
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Post by randosaurus on Jul 20, 2016 4:09:21 GMT
Glad you found the premise will work in your world! If the entire world is underground, I think it would be really interesting to explore how that would affect a steampunk setting. I really like fully underground settings, so I wondered if you had considered any of the following. Take transportation, for example. An underground civilization probably wouldn't develop any of the more interesting steam-punk conveyance: - Zeppelin / Airship - there is no real reason to pilot an airship through a cave. No sensible one, anyway.
- Nautilus / Submarine - There may be underground seas, but being underwater is not worthwhile concealment in the dark.
- Titanic / Steamship - Who would build a ship so large it would scrape the roof of the cavern- just not practical
An underground steampunk definitely needs transportation, to move goods, people & armies about through the earth. I think an excellent thing to expand are some possible unique transitways in your steampunk world - canals, tubes, and hovercraft. Canals In the 17-1900s, canals and artifical water passages were built to move goods & fuel for a number of industrial purposes. Usually these were built to get under & through high terrain. They were filled with water and often used locks to step a boat down several levels from top to bottom. So no water slides. In a moderately advanced steampunk world, I think a lot of effort would be put into building these sorts of water roads. Anyone with sufficient resources could install their own water river, and move a lot of goods with ease. Otherwise you have to use natural waterways- underground rivers probably guided many historical settlements. I think this would do for most underground settings, but the zeal for progress in Steampunk would probably have people boring their own tunnels & private waterways (usable for a fee). Adventure hooks - A travelling culture emerges from boat people. These roamers are the effect of the uneven refinement of the underground. Development of an area requires much more resources to establish (blast and bore and build) than to maintain. An influx of workers follows the development, picking up and moving on at the end of a project. They could bring any number of unsavory traveling brigands, fugitives keeping a low profile, or haunted carnivals you could ever need. They could be made up of any group of underground races you need, or a totally mixed band of travelers.
- They didn't build tunnels any larger than they had to. Often the canals were only as large as the boats, you couldn't even stand or your head would hit stone. This makes for totally enclosed spaces, and on a boat train there is nowhere to escape to. Nobody likes being enclosed, it makes animals go to a panic, and darkness is already scary. It's at least a neat way to make a time-limited encounter- something goes down on the boat, and the PCs need to defend or survive for X many rounds, when the boat emerges from the tunnel. Tense!
- Something... bad happened up stream. Nobody has heard tell from the settlement at the other end of the canal. The locks aren't sending any boats through, and nobody has come down. It's only a few miles so PCs go to investigate. They find something has happened, the town overrun with zombies. They keep falling in the river as they wander aimlessly, and floating downstream. They are blocking the locks untilthe weight breaks, sending them down to the next lock, a heavier and heavier mass of zombies. The downstream town doesn't even know it's coming, so PCs must discover the source, or stop the undead flood...
Tubes This was a fun thing you can do with magic. Even though Mining through stone is hard enough there are harder, metal ores and formations that may require more energy. In RL, this was accomplished by explosives, and part of why they were developed. Transmute Rock to Mud would be a steampunk solution, but require a lot of arcane expertise (CL 9). Because every casting counts (20 ft3 per level) a caster would be as efficient as possible- perfect cylinders. This would make all of the tunnels as smooth and round as a hamster habitrail. If you had to call in a caster because it's iron ore, then the tunnel is also magnetic... well then you have mag-levs, monorails, and any other electric conveyance you'd want to run through a tube. Adventure Hooks - Tubes are built beneath a large metro area. Just pull off the band-aid & call them subways. Are they a secret method of transportation? Are they open to the public? Are there mutants living inside them, like in RL?
- Tunnel through the center of the earth. Or at least to the next level down. Who is to say there are not layer after layer of worlds beneath yours? This is the central premise to the hollow earth types of adventures, which are often set in a 1890-1920 era, perfect for steampunk. There even exists a whole game system around the notion, I really want to explore it but haven't yet. The tube would be a handy place to put an elevator. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth_Expedition
- The tubes are basically hamster habitrails... so why not use habitrails? You can build them into fun, 3 dimensional models of dungeons, mines, or whatever else you want to create. Just the sort of place a beholder would want to zip around inside.
Hovercraft Nothing really to say here, other than hovercraft get no love. When you are in steampunk, in a cave, and are making up archaic methods of conveyance, the hovercraft really stands out. The Nebuchadnezzar in the Matrix is the best example you can watch on film. It's a largish ship with repulsor pads at each corner so it uses a cushion of energy or magnetism to keep from bouncing off of walls or floors. It's just the sort of ship you'd want in mid to large underground passages that don't have underground rivers or seas. Basically any place you want to use a ship, make it a hovercraft in the underworld and you have a unique, flavorful setting for your characters to travel. It saves you having to draw the room plans more than once, just plan out the ship & you have a mobile setting for encounters. |
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