I'm preparing a homebrew campaign and I have almost everything prepared except the class of the main villian, I know she going to be the cult leader of a great old one, and I am pretty locked on her being a Worm That Walks, and that requires a spellcaster I just don't know what class to give her. I'm almost certain she should be a divine caster but can a Druid make an interesting villian? Especially if I don't give her an animal companion?
I love it how contradictory it would be to have a Druid being a cultist of the Great Old Ones, and a Worm That Walks would fit the bill in that case all the better. Then again, having this villain as a Cleric of a Wizard/Cleric/Mystic Theurge would also be interesting. Also, consider making a Pathfinder conversion of the 3.5e class Alienist from the book Complete Arcane.
Well I initially threw druid at the wall to see if it would stick since the great old one I'm going to be using would be a modified Xhamen-dor (spelling?) from the article in Wake of the Watchers about cults of the dark tapestry, and since Xhamen is basically an alien fungoid infestation, druid seemed like a natural fit, thing is I haven't played a druid since second edition and was wondering how it could stack up as a villian.
Though I will look into the Alienist class, is it a prestige class or a base class?
Fungoid druid is a good exception to the normal plant/animal druids, but sadly they're too often associated with fungoid demon lords (I really wanna make a good-aligned fungoid deity now), but anyway. Chaotic Neutral or Neutral Evil are both alignments that the Druid can take, but make a Cleric if you'd rather have the villain be Chaotic Evil.
And Alienist is a prestige class, which may or may not have been Arcane-exclusive.
Ok so I found a run down of the alienist on teh interwebz and it seems all you need is a little bit of insanity, a few skill ranks, and the ability to cast summon spells of 3rd level. So it looks like a druid could work, but most likely what I'm going to do is completely gut the class and rebuild it almost totally when I convert it to Pathfinder, I'll probably need to update the psuedonatural creature template as well.
Why is it so much work to make a simple woman who just wants to worship an unspeakably alien intelligence and destroy a good chunk of the world?!
Yeah I have Carrion Crown and it has helped a lot, in fact I'm using one of the entities from that book as the god that Emmara worships.
As for the summoner, I've had a few bad experiences with that class, so it no longer exists in my homebrew setting, along with non human paladins as a race/class combo and elves as a playable race, so it would be a bit of a dick move for me to whip one out on my players.
What level is the villain?
I ran a few level 20 druids against a party. Wizard/Sorcerer and Cleric/Oracle spell selection outclasses druid spell selection at high level including summoning ability. Might be effective if lower level, but summoner monster beats summon nature's ally at high level. Lack of energy drain, defensive spells like invisibility and mirror image and travel spells really hurt the druids.
If you can pull it off, that's cool. But you may want to try a Mystic Theurge druid/wizard, sorcerer, or witch to make the villain more potent.
What level is the villain?
I ran a few level 20 druids against a party. Wizard/Sorcerer and Cleric/Oracle spell selection outclasses druid spell selection at high level including summoning ability. Might be effective if lower level, but summoner monster beats summon nature's ally at high level. Lack of energy drain, defensive spells like invisibility and mirror image and travel spells really hurt the druids.
If you can pull it off, that's cool. But you may want to try a Mystic Theurge druid/wizard, sorcerer, or witch to make the villain more potent.
She'll probably be around 17-18 when the final throwdown happens, I may have her go witch. I want to avoid Oracle as I already have a villain with that class and I don't want to have two villains with that class.
Now to iron out how Emmara will be connected to the attempted coup the heroes will have to stop. This is gonna be fun...
What level is the villain?
I ran a few level 20 druids against a party. Wizard/Sorcerer and Cleric/Oracle spell selection outclasses druid spell selection at high level including summoning ability. Might be effective if lower level, but summoner monster beats summon nature's ally at high level. Lack of energy drain, defensive spells like invisibility and mirror image and travel spells really hurt the druids.
If you can pull it off, that's cool. But you may want to try a Mystic Theurge druid/wizard, sorcerer, or witch to make the villain more potent.
She'll probably be around 17-18 when the final throwdown happens, I may have her go witch. I want to avoid Oracle as I already have a villain with that class and I don't want to have two villains with that class.
Now to iron out how Emmara will be connected to the attempted coup the heroes will have to stop. This is gonna be fun...
Druid animal companion or extra spells?
Now to iron out how Emmara will be connected to the attempted coup the heroes will have to stop. This is gonna be fun...
You mentioned that you already had most of the plotline mapped out, so I don't know how helpful we could be with this. But just having her as a hired gun for whomever is trying to overthrow the government should work out fairly well.
If you're still going with the fungus druid idea then perhaps she could magically taint all the yeast used in the country for wine/beer making so it produces methanol as well as ethanol, causing a mysterious wave of blindness that weakens the government.
I think a druid is a great choice. Don't forget that when building a druid, you've got some different directions you can build, and won't be able to do all of them at once.
If you go with an animal companion, you may want to give it the Worm that Walks template, or some other interesting template. Personally, I'd go with the Worm that Walks template because it can introduce those characteristics into the campaign little during multiple encounters, rather than only once when they hit the boss. It only takes 24 hours for a druid to get a new animal companion, so this boss can conceivably send a number of buddies after them over the course of the adventure. You could, in fact, have a mini-boss animal companion WTW show up every day or two as they approach the big boss, each one being a different animal companion base: snake, wolf, cat, working your way from weaker to stronger.
If you decide to go with a domain instead of an animal companion, you may want to consider one of these. They're not normally on the short list of allowable domains for druids, but I don't think subbing a special domain is too big of a stretch for an interesting boss.
Protean
Night
Madness
Insanity
Nightmare
Growth
Dark Tapestry
For the druid itself, you probably want to focus on either summoning (summoning feats, metamagic rod of extend spell, etc) or on melee combat (combat feats, shape changing, make good use of darkness).
In either case, having an interesting and well prepared lair can go a long way toward making the boss fight(s) more fun. For example, WTW gets darkvision and blindsight, so some permanently enchanted darkness would be fun to play with. Also, grates would be awesome as floors, ceilings, or walls - WTW can discorporate and move through them! Also, summon spells would have line of sight for harassing attacks.
The other thing is that druids are only so-so as behind-the-scenes mastermind manipulator types. They don't have a lot of great information-gathering spells (not none, but not a lot), nor do they have a lot of mind-bending or controlling spells. So a druid cult mastermind would probably rule by awe and intimidation rather than by enchantment and manipulation, and it should be possible for the PCs to spring *strategic* surprise on the druid (as opposed to tactical surprise, which should be very hard).
Doug M.
Seconded.
Druids are very much Old Testement-style manipulators. Ruling through plagues of locusts, lightening, and floods.