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Hello everybody!
I am playing a campaign based on kingmaker right now, but I'm not going to use books 4 to 6 (as I don't like the plots). The PC are level 9 and have to deal with strange murders in their capital as well as political entanglements these days as the House Orlowski seems to have suspicious plans.
The players then played the first book, killing the staglord and eventually establishing their first city right on the ruins of his fortress - Narlgaard. Few days before the coronation he dies to a Wright - Turalyn Baldor the Stillborn.
They then start building up their nation, make friends with werewolf mercenaries and find themselves in a planar adventure that after betrayal leads them to the fellnight realm (based on the respective module), rescuing Roswen the awakened goldfish witch and shutting off the arcane engines that connects the demiplane to the narlmarshes (I used the "Fangwood Keep" instead of the one found there in the second book of the AP.
Right after that Noleski Surtowa, king of brevoy, marries Elana Lebeda and announces that Restov shall again be ruled by the aldori swordlords - which costs Jomani Surtowa, sponsor of the PC, his job.
Meanwhile Raifs, the father of the staglord and Hragulka started to gather allies in order to defeat those humans penetrating their world. More threads arise within their boarders, riots of mine workers caused by some mysterious stranger, a bonedevil assaulting their high priest and killing dozens of guards and conflicts within the high council. Another PC dies in the very same tomb Turalyn did a year earlier. Far deeper in old catacombs of ancient cyclops. This is also where the PC defeat a normous costruct guardian who protected a long forgotten grave. An undead cyclops then rises from this very tomb and flees as fast as he can. He will later awake Vordakai, the lich king of cyclops.
This is the point where my questions below will connect.
A lot of stuff happens. An army of trolls appears right in the center of Narlgaard, their capital, and destroy a huge part of the town as well as hundrets of citizens. They can fight back the attack but the damage is great and the trolls appear to have some kind of great magic in their support. Suspicious. The players then notice that the trolls gave up their bond to Raifs, killed him and most of their allies. When the PCs enter a new but empty stronghold of Hragulkas troops they find a cave leading to a valley where they find an entrance to old caves - "The Rift" (You can goolge for the "rift" and the "warrens" maps, which I combined - they belong to the most amaging dungeon maps I ever used!) where they not only find Hragulka and his fellow trolls but also the entrance to a newborn underground keep of duergars. The battles are long and tough but finally the PCs manage to kill the high circle of the enclave - three powerful duergar spellcasters and recover an artifact foliant of droskar.
Back in their capital the recession kicks in. The damage is terrible but slowly the young nation starts to recover.
This is where my game is right now the next event will be a marriage between a PC (elven wizard) and Mina Lodowka, princess of House Lodowka.
What I want to do is make Vordakai a far more fleshed out villain than he is in the actual book. His tactics are so poor as written that I wouldn't want to waste and sacrifice a freaking lich for a little dungeoncrawl.
Thats why I thought about what he would do from the moment he is woken up by his champion that the PC released in the ancient cyclops tomb.
Minor Artifact
Category:
eyewear
Description:
An oculus of Abaddon appears as a sphere of clear crystal that contains a black void at its center. When held, the oculus feels warm to the touch and fills the holder with a sudden desire to pluck out an eye and place the oculus within the socket—this causes 1d8 points of damage, 1 point of bleed damage, and 2 points of Constitution damage. Once placed in an eye socket, the oculus can only be removed by ripping it free (causing the same amount of damage as the initial plucking). An oculus placed in an empty eye socket immediately heals all damage caused by plucking the previous eye out. Once placed, an oculus allows its new owner to utilize its powers, as listed below.
Darkvision to a range of 120 feet (constant)
True seeing once per day as a free action
Greater Scrying three times per day
Planar Binding once per week (only to summmon natives of Abaddon)
Familiar farsight at will
The oculus of Abaddon’s greatest power, though, is its haunting beckon. This ability is usable once per year, and allows the user to manipulate the minds of a huge number of targets, provided that the end goal of the manipulation is a tragic or otherwise horrific fate for those being manipulated. This functions as mass charm monster, but with a range of 1 mile, and establishes a telepathic link between the caster and all minds in that area. The effects are still language- dependant despite this telepathy—creatures without the ability to understand language (typically, creatures with an Intelligence score of 2 or lower) are unaffected. All other creatures are automatically affected unless they have 6 or more HD, in which case they gain a DC 22 Will save to resist the effects. Spell resistance applies regardless of HD.
The oculus of Abaddon is powerfully neutral evil and possesses a limited and hateful intellect of its own. while not capable of communicating directly with its owner, it refuses to activate its powers for any user who is not neutral evil.
But first he needs information - the most important good for him in the early and even more so in the later stages of his rise. Luckily his Aculus allows him to scy a lot and use his familiar for scouting the neighbourhood. He spots Varnhold, he spots the realms of my PC and he spots Brevoy as well as Mivon. A lot has changed within the past thousands of years. Together with his champion he wakes up all other cyclops buried in this very tomb (for which I use a slightly recolored map of Snurres Hall of the Fire Giant King) - enough to do some mining at least. He uses spells and undead workers to produce salt and jewelery - he needs money to accomplish further goals he set up. So while his minions are mining he scries and scries and scries. His raven travelling through the surrounding countries, listenig to important nobles, lords and ladies. He gets to know secrets, for example that the Orlowskis plan to attack the Lands of House Lodowka (an elven wizard PC is just about to marry the princess of House Lodowka) so thats a good point to start. He visits Lord Orlowski in human form (he uses Greater Magic Aura and a greater Hat of Disguise to appear as humen without magic properties) and convinces him that he wants to buy weapons for wars in the south so he makes him a great offer. He will fund the war against the Lodowkas if the Orlowskis provide more weapons he can transport to the south.
The Orlowskis will then ask Jomani Surtowa who was a broken man ever since he lost his reign over Restov to make a deal with the dwarves in the Highdelve. They should fabricate weapons for their war against the Lodowkas as well as weapons for Vordakai (who needs them as he will have to equip an undead army later on) - all in the name of House Surtowa.
For Vordakai this is perfect as he wants to use the war in the north as distraction and also profits from weapons for his own units.
Right after the deal is made he uses his artifact for the first time. He charms the population of Varnburg in order to take their (rather empty) treasueries and to have more workers for his plans. There is a lot of stuff he needs to prepare.
He gets mercenaries in Mivon who will deal with the transportation of the weapons from Brevoy.
He now has one year of time to get ready for the next step in his plan.
At this point I might need your help. He now has a couple of undeads, a lot of information and ~200 citizens from varnhold he turns into undead (maybe one or two intelligent ones as he needs help organizing his upcoming rulership). He also started to contact other evil enteties around to find some allies or vassels.
A year later when the war between Orlowskis and Lodowkas has probably started - according to his plans - he wants to use the Oculus of Abaddon for a second time. But now he's aiming for Restov.
I did some calculations on the distribution of CR among the citizens and the formula I thought looks plausible was an exponential function, proportional to EXP(-[HD of citizen]/1,25) which resulted in ~19.900 of the 20.000 inhabitants being charmed without getting a save. That sounds like a lot but I wanted to have a rather steep distribution. Most of the remaining citizens won't make their save so that I guess 20-30 of them being able to resist the artifact.
Now what? He has almost 20.000 humanoids under his control for 20 days. What does he do? Does he move them to his "base"? Will he kill them to raise them as undead? That seems hard to handle. He wont be able to feed so many people at all so he probably needs to kill them. That's a truely scary scenario. What does he do with those that resisted the charm? What will those who resisted the charm do anyway? Some might be able to use spells to stop several of the charmed... but I'm not sure how to think that through. What's going to happen afterwards? Would it be smart to even use the artifact? He could take every single coin from that city - not too bad. Could he use the structures? Should he leave the city abandoned? Can he still conceal whats going on? How does he move those people? Just have them walk two hundred miles?
And what would he need to tho in the previous year in order to prepare for that event?
This is how far I am right now. I also want him to get some help from Abaddon as his artifact is closely tied to this plane. He will get some Divs and Daemons to lead his armies because why not. He will also get an army of Urdefhans as I feel like this would suit him really good and is plausible.
I'm open to any kind of idea or critique - the more detailed the better. I want his plans to suit a highly intelligent ancient wizard with great knowledge and power so it should make sense all through and result in a subtly rising threat establishing in the very east of my PCs nation.
Thank you so much in advance,
Wasum
I like where you are going with this. Anything that brings more flavor into the campaign is gold in my book. I think what you need to figure out first is: What is Vordakai's ultimate goal? Does he just want to kill everyone? Ok, I suppose, but why? Even the extremely evil usually have some sort of reasoning behind what they do (not necessarily good reasoning mind you, but reasoning all the same). Does he want to rule a kingdom and build an army? This perhaps makes more sense, but then he needs to figure out who he wants his subjects to be.
So, assuming that he wants a kingdom of his own, I would say that he needs a) subjects to rule and b) a means by which to get them under his thumb. Varnhold was a good start, and sure, there are some centaurs in the area, but lets face it, the centaurs won't willingly be ruled by him. The rest of the Stolen Lands are certainly ripe for the taking, but he still needs that army. So that leaves two options:
1). He uses the army from Abaddon. That's certainly a nice, powerful army. The problem though would be that while powerful, ultimately the army's loyalty may not lie with Vordakai. Perhaps Vordakai is arrogant enough to think that he can turn them to his cause, but in the end, they're not "his people".
2). Use Restov. He can have them turned into undead -- might need to check the rules to see if he needs some other undead of his own to help, or otherwise just GM Fiat it. Its for a plot device after all. This would give him a sizeable undead army at his disposal -- and he likely would need to turn them because again, they won't likely follow him blindly into war. They might accept his "rulership" on the grounds that they can't do much about it, but marching to certain death in war is just as bad.
Now, as an alternative, if V does use the army from Abaddon to try to secure the Stolen Lands, he can then use Restov to attack Brevoy. Ultimately the attack in Brevoy isn't really about conquering Brevoy (though that would be nice from V's perspective) but rather, its about keeping Brevoy distracted so that they can not come to the aid of the Stolen Lands. The people of Restov are the very definition of disposable assets in this scenario and Vordakai will absolutely have them fight to the death -- probably with generals from Abaddon at their backs ensuring that they fight to the death. This army would be able to do a fair amount of damage before its ultimately defeated.
The only thing you might want to consider is allowing a few more people to make it out of Restov, but that's entirely up to you of course. Just remember that everyone who does qualify for a save would always have at minimum a 5% chance of making it (Nat 20). You've accounted for that in your analysis above, its just that you have very few actually getting a save. (Which may well be appropriate).
In my game, I had Vordakai turn the population of Varnhold into a zombie army and reanimated the linnorm skeleton just north of his tomb. Once the players became a problem, he also sent extraplanar assassins after them every week (he can use the Occulus to summon 1/week) and tried some more direct attempts, as well.
I also created some lieutenants for him so the players would have some variety of things to beat on before reaching the big V himself.