Making an appearance...

[Matthew Stinson]

Anyone want to take bets on which lairs we'll be seeing on Tuesday?

[Mike Welham]

My guesses:

I'm pretty sure we'll see at least one lair for Gulga, Malgana, Hecateus and Bracht.

Maybe one for Rustin Harp and Aelfric.

Definitely not one for Sharina, although I would be very impressed if someone came up with a good rationale for her to have a lair.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there will be at least one villain chosen by more than one person.

[Lord Magus]

Gulga & Hecateus seem like good guesses. Gulga may be used more than once.

I don't see Sartel as having a real lair, with her parade of headless followers.

[William Senn]

I'm willing to bet we won't see a lair for Vashkar. He's much too high a CR to have a 2000 word lair. A single customized encounter at that level would be 750+ words.

[roguerouge]

I was hoping for a Derinogen lair: mad scientist and effete snobbery rolled into one. Plus, you could learn from the decor what his sense of inadequacy sprung from.

[Philip Snyder]

I'd hope for Ryth'a, just so I can see some new haunt mechanics.
[/biased opinion]

[Steven Helt]

I think the most commonly repeated lair will be Gulga's. Sewers are easy to envision, offer open spaces, and you can work with a lot of details: the specific city you're under, what kind of trash gets re-used, which types of monsters in his organization can be found there. Even some connection to the Darklands was hinted at.

I would add more conjecture about the upcoming lairs round, but I just had a sinister idea.

Back soon.

[Sue Flaherty]

Steven T. Helt wrote:

I think the most commonly repeated lair will be Gulga's. Sewers are easy to envision, offer open spaces, and you can work with a lot of details: the specific city you're under, what kind of trash gets re-used, which types of monsters in his organization can be found there. Even some connection to the Darklands was hinted at.

I would add more conjecture about the upcoming lairs round, but I just had a sinister idea.

Back soon.

Unless the contestants, thinking all the rest (except Neil) were going to do Gulga's for the reasons you mentioned, chose another villain in a try to be "unique" in who they do :)~

[Eric Morton]

Steven T. Helt wrote:

I think the most commonly repeated lair will be Gulga's.

I don't know. I'm thinking Bract may be the most-used villain, because it's always fun designing a lair packed with fleshwarped monstrosities and random supplies of body parts.

[Charles Evans 25]

Lair predictions:
Hecataeus.
Gulga Cench.
Bracht Darkhouse.
Count Falconbridge.

If I were in the contest, at this stage, I would be looking at all of these; they are all wizards, allowing me to plausibly mess around with magical traps and other arcane things (such as constructs in Hecataeus' case or weird out-of-this-world aberrations in Bracht's) all probably have minions to hand (and organisations in the case of Gulga Cench and Count Falconbridge) and something about the villain offers (to me) extra creepiness or other worldliness about the lair.

Lord Jeroim Borloz might also come into the reckoning (thieves' guild, with secret doors, etc, hinted at by later rewrite of entry).
Whilst the mention of the trophy heads on the walls of the vampire rakshasa's lair in Eric Bailey's Round 3 villain entry was interesting dressing, I have no idea how to handle the lair of what seems to me to be effectively a CR 23-24 villain in an appropriately challenging manner. High level parties raiding such lairs have too many options at their disposal, that I have little experience of catering towards in 3.5/Beta.

Edit:
Derinogen would be another outside possibility since he allows the chance to 'do something simple really well', and hope that that is enough to please the judges and catch the public eye.
Sharina could be a gamble based on her 'hawtness'.

[Clark Peterson]

I was very, very surprised to see what villains were chosen by the contestants. I think you will be surprised.

[Fern Herold]

I bet one Count Falconbridge, since it's a good excuse to design a noble court. I also suspect there will be attempts to "improve upon" villains that didn't make Top Eight by giving them cool lairs. A circus tent for Rustin Harp, a haunted guardhouse for Boemundo, etc.

[William Senn]

Gamer Girrl wrote:

Unless the contestants, thinking all the rest (except Neil) were going to do Gulga's for the reasons you mentioned, chose another villain in a try to be "unique" in who they do :)~

Yep. I actually don't expect to see any Gulga Cench lairs for precisely that reason - that and he's another very high CR villain, which makes compressing his lair into 2000 words difficult. I won't be surprised if one surfaces, but I would be very surprised to see that two or more people submitted a lair for him.

[William Senn]

Demiurge 1138 wrote:

a haunted guardhouse for Boemundo, etc.

Oh, man. You could actually design a whole CITY (or, at least, a section of a city) for Boemundo. You'd have to do a little shoe-horning to get everything into 2k words, but I gotta say the idea intrigues me.

[Charles Evans 25]

Clark Peterson wrote:

I was very, very surprised to see what villains were chosen by the contestants. I think you will be surprised.

Clark... Uhhh. now you're starting to worry me that everyone's gone gonzo or tried to metacontest and I'm not going to see any entries worth voting for in the next round. :-?

Please confirm that there was at least one entry you felt able to recommend?

[Clark Peterson]

Charles Evans 25 wrote:

Clark Peterson wrote:

I was very, very surprised to see what villains were chosen by the contestants. I think you will be surprised.

Clark... Uhhh. now you're starting to worry me that everyone's gone gonzo or tried to metacontest and I'm not going to see any entries worth voting for in the next round. :-?

Please confirm that there was at least one entry you felt able to recommend?

Oh yeah. There is some good stuff. My initial review has 3 solid top 4s and then 2 more I'm deciding between for the last spot. Good stuff! The surprise is not the quality - which is all good - the surprise is the villain choices.

[roguerouge]

The freak show/traveling caravan angle for Rustin Harp would be an attractive one, I bet.

[Joao Beraldo]

Does that mean everyone choose Boemundo's lair?
The brazilian curse lives on! :D

[Neil Spicer]

I have to admit I'm really interested to see if anyone chose Gulga...and if so, what they did with him. Out of courtesy for the competition, I won't offer up any commentary until well after the voting round if they did, though.

--Neil

[James F.D. Graham]

NSpicer wrote:

Out of courtesy for the competition, I won't offer up any commentary until well after the voting round if they did, though.

--Neil

That's about how I feel too.

Although, for some reason this round has set my nerves off more than any round so far... and I can't really figure out why.

Voting time just can't come fast enough...

[Neil Spicer]

Mistah J wrote:

...for some reason this round has set my nerves off more than any round so far... and I can't really figure out why.

I feel the same way. These last couple of rounds haven't been anything like last year's competition. Splitting the stat-block apart from the villain concept was different...as well as the opportunity to revise work from an earlier round. Then, the curve ball of using someone else's work for Round 4. Some of these things weren't unexpected. But they still mix in a lot more variables than how the rounds were conducted last year. Good? Bad? I don't know. But definitely more nerve-wracking, I think...

--Neil

[Clark Peterson]

NSpicer wrote:

These last couple of rounds haven't been anything like last year's competition. Splitting the stat-block apart from the villain concept was different...as well as the opportunity to revise work from an earlier round. Then, the curve ball of using someone else's work for Round 4. Some of these things weren't unexpected. But they still mix in a lot more variables than how the rounds were conducted last year. Good? Bad? I don't know. But definitely more nerve-wracking, I think...

--Neil

I cant speak for Paizo, but I think this year's contest is really doing a good job of showing us who is a better designer and freelancer as part of RPG Superstar. Not just who is the best pure idea creator. I think these tasks this year are better at requiring the actual skills that a really great feelancer has--revising a villain shows that (since all freelancers and designers are asked to revise stuff so it is great to see how people respond) and working with someone else's content shows that (since freelancers are often asked to step in with already established content and ideas and flesh the stuff out).