Good afternoon everyone!
Designing a villain that is a sort of Joker in design and hes after the PCs. Hes an alchemist with a real mean streak and a flare for the dramatic/ridiculous.
I figure he isn't going to confront the party directly himself, he's too smart for that and he knows he'd obviously lose.
First thing he'll do, hire some muscle to keep them occupied. Easy.
Second thing he's done, kidnapped a friend of theirs and placed a letter telling them he had to go into hiding and needs help. Meet me at the lighthouse.
When they get there, he's rigged the lighthouse to go up like a roman candle. Alchemical bombs all over the place, vats of alchemist fire to help it burn. They get to the top, find their friend with a slit throat and BOOM. They'll survive that, too much magic in this party to not make it. They get outside, see him smiling maniacally and giving them a dramatic clap before vanishing into a teleport.
So, what I need is a good secondary plot to get their attention and have a chance to threaten them. Something creative. I have a few ideas, but none that are particularly cool and you guys are nothing if not a gold mine for cool ideas.
Soooo... go! :) Thanks!
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Corpses with jolly clown faces start showing up. They all died of suffocation due to the multiple layers of thick acrylic face-paint and airtight rubber noses.
Someone appears to have somehow eaten their own brain right out from their own skull - they've still got the spoon in their hand, their cranium's wide open, and their brain is indeed found in their stomach contents.
A super-fast-growing creeper vine has completely overtaken a victim's circulatory system from the inside - and it all leads back to an entire, intact melon found in their stomach. Seems like it grew in there from the start.
An alchemical "longevity tonic" from an unknown distributor becomes popular in town - what consumers don't realize is that drinking it causes their digestive tracts to slowly turn to solid gold.
City watchmen, street thugs, aristocratic bodyguards, adventuring warriors, and other musclebound types start showing up dead. The weird part is that their corpses are all massively asymmetrical - one side of their body is revoltingly huge and musclebound, and the other side of their body looks like like it never received an hour's workout in its life.
A corpse gives no clear indication of how it died, but it has a giant third eye socket, complete with eye, in place of a mouth.
Corpses show up who, regardless of sex or race, all have the exact face of the local ruler. The actual local ruler is fine, however.
A corpse appears to have been waffle-ironed to death - and is covered in strawberries, cream, and syrup. The presentation is very well-done.
A corpse's head looks like it was stuck in a giant pencil-sharpener and sharpened to a fine (albeit incredibly gory) point, and their feet have been replaced with pink rubber replicas. Anyone attempting to use it as a writing implement discovers that it works very well.
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The villain (modified corpses) is found dead in different locations. The locations, when placed over a map of the city, reveals the location of his next killing spree...somehow.
The villain traps the spirit of the dead friend, and uses the subsequent undead to turn the sewer systems into a collapse waiting to happen.
Just as a character idea, he could carry around a "vitamin stick" (magical sap) to "energize and motivate" his underlings.
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Make it a mystery. Have unfortunate mishaps start to happen around a town to drop hints that its a mad alchemist behind them.
The fire breather performing at the tavern last night is found dead having swallowed alchemist fire.
The dry cleaners (or whatever place cleans clothes) is over run with oozes once they start washing laundry containing dehydrated ooze.
Maybe for a grand finale, the whole town comes down with a pox and or contact poison after a huge fireworks show was (unexpectedly) put on at the end of a festival.
A local did something like this using the harlequin concepts and associated silliness in a champions game a decade or two ago. She got into the whole theatrical of the genre and ran this while in Paris for studies. Apparently there is a sizable body of material in French. She made them an alliance of homicidal maniacs, each with their own theme. Scaramouch was her head villian, if memory serves.
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Just know- for philosophical themes, daemons are often a shoe in for the joker. They are all about a nihilistic belief that existence is ultimately meaningless ('a big joke' basically). Combine that with an irreverent attitude and total disregard for human life... it can work fairly well.
It also presents interesting problems for slightly higher level parties- raise dead doesn't do much if you can't get their soul out of the soul gem. Spells like create soul gem make the rezzer pass a DC of 11+the mad man's caster level. +2 to the DC if it is in an unholy location (which can be a nice little plot point-find where the soul gems are kept). It can also present a time factor- you do not know when the soul will be consumed during an offering to a daemon.
On other matters- I like the depiction of the Joker in "Beneath the Red Hood". It doesn't always have to be gas spewing flowers and leathal shock buzzers. Sometimes it is suddenly stabbing people with a broken glass after you had been quietly eating chips with a bored look on your face. The conclusion of that movie shows a quick ability to improvise and a manic devotion to dramatic flair.
Awesome stuff guys, thanks!
Went great! Just so you know, here is what happened:
They return home from a mission outside the city and find a festival in full swing highlighted by a huge circus.
They find the first body on a landing of the stairwell in their inn, one of the bargirl's is dead, her face twisted and warped until she looks like a man with a scar by his eye, but her body is still definitely female.Its also smiling maniacally. The cause of death? A string of silk handkerchiefs stuffed down her throat until she suffocated. The mother of the girl comes t the city's watch's main building to identify her as best she can, and is horrified to say that the man's face the girl now wheres was that of her dead husband, the girl's father and a former member of the city watch who died 3-4 years ago.
They found a tarot card hidden in her bra, the card of Judgement.
The captain of the watch, a paladin named Brenna Knightsworn, takes over the investigation and thanks them for their aid.
The PCs do some investigating and determine the face was changed using some form of advanced alchemy and after the point of death. The cleric finds the resting place of the dead watchman and casts speak with dead and found out that before his death, the guard arrested an alchemist named Esal Bailey who murdered his wife.
Then comes the 2nd murder, that of a renowned judge. He has his own face, but also that insane grin on his lips. His head was back and he swallowed a sword incorrectly, much the same way the circus' street performers are. He had a tarot card on him, that of the Sun.
They freak out and find a temple to the Sun god in the city. There they find the head priest who was also involved in the Esal Bailey case. He was a liaison to the Watch at the time and he cast a Zone of Truth. Bailey resisted the spell and told them he didn't kill his wife. They wait while the priest gets his temple in order and comes with them into protective custody at the Watch Headquarters where the Watch Captain, Knightsworn, put him in a cell to protect him.
They then examine the records and find another link, the Dutchess' SON was also involved, a playboy swordsman named Vinson. They track him down to a low rent inn and find him dead, his body frozen solid on a wet bed. Two sets of clothing are there (1 male, 1 female). They find the mixed in the man's clothes, the Hierophant!
They leave the Captain of the Watch to secure the scene and rush back to find the priest dead, poisoned hours ago. His tarot card is the Queen of Blades. Assuming this referred to the Captain, they seek her out and find that she has all but vanished. No where to be seen, no one knows where she went.
With no leads they seek out the imprisoned alchemist's old lab, thinking that he must be set up somewhere. The place is old and empty, the man was never wealthy. Tucked in the wardrobe they find a journal of the murdered mother. Turns out she hated her life and her husband's obsession with his craft. After the birth of their daughter, it got worse. When the girl was 15, the mother hated life so much she decided to kill herself and punish the people who made her life so miserable. This got him thrown in prison and left the girl to fend for herself.
They questioned the imprisoned alchemist and he told them he was innocent and how much she loved the circus, which just so happened to be in town when he was convicted.
The last piece of the puzzle, they found the decomposing form of the REAL Captain of the Watch, dead for several days.
They figured it out. The daughter ran away with the circus and recently returned to get revenge. She killed the Captain and assumed her form, using that shape to kill all of her targets. The only one she couldn't reach without help was the priest, who the PCs conveniently delivered to her.
They are on their way down to the circus now to confront her. How did she kill the dutchess' son? She makes simulacrums, made one of a gorgeous woman and stuffed a cold alchemist bomb inside her. The simulacrum's job was to seduce the young man, which was simple enough. When they had sex, the cold bomb went off, killing the young man. Heat from the hearth in the room melted what was left of the simulacrum.
Thanks for all the ideas guys! Feel free to use this storyline to your hearts content :)