I would be very careful with walking down this path of the Eternal Super Resurrection Man - it certainly runs into the strong risk of creating player fatigue. It can create all the bad things about a DMPC along with being an adversary.
I've seen it done poorly more than once.
ESRM, again?!? <sigh> OK, ALRIGHT, I'll "kill" him again.
Zzzzzzz...
<later, to other players, "Man, I wish (insert GM name) would get over his fetish for ESRM, he's not interesting except for the fact that he can keep coming back to irritate us.">
You need to make sure that the character is interesting, important, likeable on at least some level and has a connection to the PCs.
This is much more important than HOW he keeps coming back.
I did this in a campaign with a Halfling Necromancer villain.
When he was first encountered, he was living. The party captured him and remanded him for justice, where he was sentenced to die by hanging.
He came back as an Undead Zombie Master to harass the party later. They defeated him again, but an underling bamfed with the head.
He made his final appearance as a Brain in a Jar.
Ah, Phinn, how I miss you and your evil ways.
|
Isn't the Graveknight just a re-tread of the Death Knight from the Dragonlance series back from the 1980's?Edit: Actually, I did a bit of research, and the Death Knight apparently first appeared in a TSR publication in 1981.
It goes way back. But if you want a more melee oriented BBEG and not yet another vampire or liche it works well.
You can even start them off as mortal - an evil fighter can choose to undergo the ritual or he can be "cursed" (i.e. GM fiat).
Imagine the look on the PC's faces after they hunt down and kill the local mercenary leader who is tormenting the townsfolk, only to watch him rise as an undead monster to command his former men. One by one, as they fall in battle, he turns them to undead... pretty soon you have an undead general leading an undead army...
He works 'passably,' not well. The problem graveknights have is they dump their phylactery at your feet.
And at the level you encounter them, its a safe bet your religious guy (aka knowledge religion) can suss out what they are, and that you need to eradicate the armor to get rid of them. Ruining the armor is punishingly easy, especially when its just a suit laying at your feet.
An 11th level party has ample resources for effecting a final destruction of the armor. This is also why I kind of tilted my head at Undead Revisted when the cleric seemed unaware of the reason for the lich's serial resurrections being due to his phylactery. Its a knowledge religion check, that stuff is a damn sight more likely to be known then what their DR is, or what magical shennigans they get up to.
I had a graveknight who was 'self-cleaning' due to party action, he'd packed his entire suit of armor with explosives so he'd explode when he died (intended as a sort of 'screw you, heroes!'), spreading his armor fragments all over the place.
The party bullrushed him into a created pit, covered it, and he proceeded to be eradicated quite thoroughly by the backblast that comes from packing 200lbs of dynamite into your armor and detonating in an enclosed space. They then proceeded to have the armor filaments whammied by the undead fighting clerics of the world just in case.
A later graveknight was dispatched by a higher level party by expedient of plane shifting his armor (after killing the guy) to Mt. Celestia to boil away in its holy water oceans.
The party got around a serial clone user by knocking her unconscious (barbarian with a merciful greatsword) and petrifying her, but now they need to figure out what to do with the petrified body. Smashing it would possibly result in the creature within 'dying' sufficiently to release the spirit to a clone, and imprisonment just creates problems later.
Liches have the benefit of no matter how they die, they get to reappear with their phlyactery miles or planes away. No teleport tracking. No means of finding the guy.
What about a Troll with all four Damnation feats from Champions of Corruption? The Fiend Skin one grants immunity to an element at 3 feats and again at 4 feats, so you could have a Troll immune to both Acid and Fire...who happens to have a really ticked off Demon patron, since he's kinda immortal now, and thus his soul can't really be claimed. Bonus points for Mythic Troll, since their regeneration is nuts.
Mechanically not the best way to gain immortality, but thematically it would make for a great villain and an interesting story. Plus, will the PC's be willing to help a freaking Demon get it's prize?
Game mechanics wise there are lots of ways, as have been mentioned, but what might be cool for your party, is instead of him being reincarnated, or a clone, or lich. Is to have him change each fight based on the way he died, vaguely inspired by how Orcs work in Shadows of mordor. If you burn an orc with fire, he comes back with a massive scar.
choose how you want him to fight in the beginning, and then depending on how your party kills him, change his tactics, some of his abilities (and if you want to use the retraining rules form Ultimate Combat) even his class.
Example: Maybe the first fight he is an alchemist, throw bombs and such, then he dies to a fireball. The next time they see him, he is all chard, had some fire resistance, and is casting some fire spells. Then they kill him with an axe cutting his arm off. Next time they see him, he only has 1 arm, but it's really huge because he upped his strength. Next time they take his head to make sure he is dead, he becomes a Dulan(AKA the headless horseman) and so on.
If you want to explain this using game rules the easiest way is the aforementioned UC retraining rules, and some sort of Artifact.
I thought of another way that would be fun, have the villain really be a summoners Eidelon, that just looks like a person. When they kill him he just vanishes, and then comes back later with different evolution, until eventually they track down the man behind the curtain.
We had a lich in a 3.5 homebrew campaign. The backstory was that he was of unimaginable power, on par with the gods by siphoning magic from magic items.
We knew that we could physically beat him but he would be back. It took us a long time, following ancient lore on him to learn that his phylactery was made of multiple pieces that had to be taken, disenchanted and seperated to prevent him reforming.
Players have to know that every big bad has an Achilles heel - just some might take some real effort.
This lich we fought was the BBEG but we had to deal with all his mooks, allies and lieutenants before dealing with him. And even after we fought a few times, it took us awhile before we defeated him the first time and even then, we knew that he'd be back. It actually built the suspense for us for the final battle.