Now I'm curious as to what our contestants were planning before Paizo pulled the switch on them. Did you have details of your own villains' lairs worked up, and are you willing to share? :)
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8
aka Tarren Dei
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Now that the voting is over, I'll answer.
I had something worked up. I was pretty far along with it. I think I like it too much to post online but I can describe it a bit.
I didn't want to put Bracht in a dark and creepy house. It frankly seemed to easy. (Sorry to the two Bracht lairs but it was the first thing I thought of and I wanted something more unusual.) I had him take over a slaver's camp just outside of Katapesh. He maintained the pretense of being a slave trader but was having fun playing with the merchandise.
Visually, the lair was stunning. I had a lot of fun with Adobe photoshop and various rendering programs to design it. When I read '100 dpi' my heart sank. I like me graphics.
My favourite character in it was a flesh-warped man-cricket bard in the basement that the other slaves called 'The True Prince of Taldor'. He scared the heck out of Bracht but Bracht kept him around because he was one of Bracht's more successful fleshgraft experiments.
When the suprise switcheroo came about I thought about using the slaver camp for Kar-En-Helit, Vessel of Moeris but I liked it too much to chop up like that.
Heck, I'll chime in.
The lair of Count Falconbridge was going to be the ironically named "Court of Free Will." It was going to be a legislative building that had an assembly where nobles, merchants, and guild masters would normally work out the laws of the land.
With the Count in charge though, it was going to be a place where he could issue his crazy edicts and, to keep the people in line, have trials in which suspected lawbreakers would have to prove their innocence (usually by blaming and accusing others). The idea was that since everything he did was "for the good of the people" he could get away with just about anything.
A lot of people were interested in what kind of laws I was talking about so I planned to showcase a few. Some where just crazy like "All western windows must be covered at all times" but others were actually designed with sinister purpose. My favourite of these was "All barbers must be state appointed" - why you may ask? The answer is hair.
His lair was going to have a Divination Headquarters for his secret police the clairvoyant assassins. These guys took locks of hair, clothes and other mementos of the populace so that they could constantly scry on everyone easily.
For those that are wondering, my original plan had these assassins be battle variant sorcerers with maybe a level in assassin. They had two main tricks up their sleeve:
1. The Count connects them all with a telepathic bond and then scries the target, giving direction and information to the assassin's as they chased. (Ex: he went left, up the stairs, under the bed.. etc)
2. Assassins using clairaudience/clairvoyance to study the victims of their death attack from behind closed doors.
Whew..that was a lot.. heh.. sorry. Anyway, when the rules came out I was shocked.. and then relieved since I realized that with 2,000 words there was no way I could build those assassins and still have room for.. well the lair itself.
And that's how it went.