Reroute the river and other nearby water sources.
The settlement, if not rich enough to afford magical solutions, would need to up and move their settlement closer to the water source or die. This could probably be done with control water, expeditious excavation, shape stone, transmute rock and mud, and similar spells.
You could also use the Influence Nature feat to relocate game trails and the like, making it much harder for hunters to find their prey or for gatherers to find other resources (if you have pests eat all the editable plants near the town, they won't be able to forage).
Earthquake, meteor swarm, cataclysm, and summon Kaiju could all wipe out a settlement reasonably quickly. Upheaval would also be pretty spot on. Horrid Wilting won't damage buildings but it can murder a large chunk of the town to eliminate the settlement's defenders.
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Honestly, I would have a group of druids (a grove?) perform a ritual. Rituals are a great way to need only one high level person, and not require high spell casting to be effective.
The druids have a ritual (you're making a custom ritual) that will do things like the following:
1) Dry up wells/springs
2) Dry up streams
3) Reroute rivers or other bodies of water (except maybe oceans)
4) Kill cultivated plants
5) Kill edible plants
6) Get animals to move out of the area
7) Extreme weather (no rain, extreme hot/cold, unending rains, etc)
And this could be a special kind of ritual that the main high level person needs to start, but afterwards can be maintained as long as there is a minimal number of people performing it, and perhaps the effects and what it does increases and grows the longer the ritual is performed. Designed to be performed by a large group that rotates in and out of the ritual participation, perhaps for months to slowly cause the city to lose all the natural resources they need to survive.
Rituals in PF2 are exactly for this purpose so that you can have a group of enemies that can do something narratively crazy like kill off an entire town without needing them to have access to high level magic powers so they can be an appropriate level for the PCs to fight.
Summon Elemental can summon some fire-starting creatures to go around burning down buildings. Can also be used as the basis for a custom Ritual to bypass the normal Minion trait limitations.
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PF2e isn't PF1e, in that the bad guys don't have to abide by the same rules as the player. Just create some custom ritual/spells that feel druidic enought and you're set. You don't even need to homebrew all of it's rules (which level it is, what check it ask, how long it last, the effect for failing it, etc), because you can simply assume the druid succeeded the check, that it will last as long as the player don't do something to stop it, and that it's unique so that no player will ever learn it.
If it's the kind of druid that doesn't mind playing with fire, burning down the buildings so that "nature may sprout from the ashes" is pretty easy to do. Make him do some kind of ritual that rain down smoldering ashes in a big area, that somehow lit on fires only "worked" woods, but not living trees and plants. The people are combating this the best they can, by trying to cover up everything that could burn and splash with water anything they can't cover up, but now the animals are starting to become aggressive and are attacking people going to the river to fill buckets of water. The druid is trying to burn down the town, but isn't (so far) willing to simply kill them all, he'd be happy if they simply leave or decide to abandon the "burden" of civilization (now that he made it burdensome to live in houses that constantly catch on fire).
If you want a druid that rely more on the forces of life, you could make it so that the ritual/spell is making the vegetation in the town area overgrown, and making it slowly creep on existing structure and bring them down. Just like the other ritual, the town can somewhat resist it by cutting the plants as they grow, which would prompt the druid to get a little more aggressive and sic some animals on them to finally force them to leave. Like the first ritual, the goal is at term to make keeping the town around "not worth it" for the people, and force them to abandon it.
The important stuff is that the ritual is clearly unnatural but still feel "primal/druidic", and seems to target the building of the town. The attack by animals are also kinda important, but mostly because they are a direct link to the druid that the player can follow, while it would be difficult to track the bad guy if there was only the magical huge area of effect. Also of course because they provide mooks and minion for the players to fight before getting to the boss.
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I am planing a villain for my PCs to go against they are a Druid who hates civilization believes it to be a perversion of the natural order that makes people weak. There goal is to destroy buildings and other infrastructure they don't mind killing people in the process but killing people is not their goal. I want the druid to be of a level where they are an appropriate level to be a challenge for the party to take on without being unbeatable.
What spells or the like available to druids could I have them use to accomplish their goal?
I would aprecaite both high and low level spells or the like.
This is an interesting question. Claxon pointed you at rituals, but I would like to take that idea a bit further.
What is an NPC statblock for? Does it describe everything they could do, or does it describe what they could do right now on the spot?
I think the latter. The statblock is for what the NPC can do when the players encounter them. The statblock should be reasonable for the encounter level etc.
But the statblock doesn't really describe what the NPC can do off-screen. If they have lots of time and resources they can do a lot more complicated magic, strange rituals, summon elementals and manipulate the weather.
You don't need stats for how exactly they do that. You just use the results: the PCs encounter a group of elementals that the druid summoned yesterday and sent to attack the players. It doesn't really matter what kind of exact ritual the druid used to do that, you just write an encounter of the difficulty you want. When the players wonder why they just ran into a group of angry elementals you can just say "a druid did it".
This is actually how many many many published adventures seem to have been made.
Now, the next trick is to use the stuff the druid does off-screen, and that the players run into, to foreshadow the eventual fight against the druid. If the druid like using big fire magic, maybe previously he summoned some fire elementals to ambush the party. The party could take that as a hint to prepare some resist energy spells.
Of course that would make the final fight easier, if the players can prepare for it. But that's okay! Because it allows you to actually make the boss a bit more powerful, but because the players know how to prepare, it balances out. But as a player, it feels pretty good to prepare for an encounter and then notice that all your preparations really were useful and helped you win.
You know good ol' fireball will likely suffice for small settlements with wood buildings, especially if you let the buildings actually catch fire. (Whether wood ignites is pretty much GM fiat.) 6d6 damage will overcome the hardness of a building, and with the long range they can make a clean getaway. You wouldn't wipe it off the map with a couple castings, but if my neighborhood has 2-3 explosions hit it everyday I'd either move or hire some adventurers.
Everyone says reroute the water supply. Why not poison it?
Everyone says reroute the water supply. Why not poison it?
Because poisonning water don't help much when you just want people to abandon the buildings and live in the wilderness.
We're not talking about a druid who just want to kill a town in any way possible here, but about one whose expressed purpose is to destroy the buildings that makes up the town and make it's inhabitant abandon the burden of civilization. Poisonning the water supply would just make the whole area unlivable, both town and wilderness, it's a bit counter productive.
Everyone says reroute the water supply. Why not poison it?Because poisonning water don't help much when you just want people to abandon the buildings and live in the wilderness.
We're not talking about a druid who just want to kill a town in any way possible here, but about one whose expressed purpose is to destroy the buildings that makes up the town and make it's inhabitant abandon the burden of civilization. Poisonning the water supply would just make the whole area unlivable, both town and wilderness, it's a bit counter productive.
The druid was described by the OP as not particularily wanting to kill people. Just making the water unusable would do the trick. Throw some poison into the water. If it is not obvious throw in something that smells bad or is a strong dye as well. Keep it up for a few months. The people will leave.
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Also, depending on the poison it wouldn't remain effective for vary long. The town would have a short term water supply problem and then depending on how it was handled be fine.
Or they all die. As do all the animals that depend on the water sources.
Contrast that to manipulating wildlife and/or rerouting resources, where no one has any idea who is behind it all short of high level divination. The druid is almost totally protected from suspicion or retaliation.
It could be climate change. Or a natural blight. Or a big monster driving game away. Or a curse. Or any number of other plausible explanations.
Since it's actually a druid behind it, literally all of those things could be true too.
Even if the townsfolk suspect a malefactor and send Scooby-Doo Doo and the gang to investigate, the meddling heroes would have to find the druid, make the connections, obtain proof of mustachioed maleficense, and attempt to stop them on their own home turf.
Best of luck to those sorry bastards. You'd have to BDHs to pull that off.
If the druid plays it smart, they have every advantage. Even if they are somehow foiled and captured, if they didn't directly attack and kill any of the townsfolk, poison the local well, or take other overt hostile action, their punishment may well be relatively light (such as being imprisoned or driven from the area, rather than being killed).
Heck, if the druids are discovered they could pretend to be good druids trying to utilize a ritual to resolve the problems the area is experiencing. Heck, you wouldn't even need a group of evil druids to undertake this kind of action. Just a group of non-good druids. Heck it might even be possible to be a good druid, but value nature more than the concern of the encroaching people while trying to drive them out without killing them.
To me, that's actually far more interesting a story. Good druids enact a ritual to drive away (but not kill) encroaching villagers.
Now when the heroes show up the druids will detect as good. The heroes might see the ritual and be led to believe the ritual is attempting to resolve the problems. All out in plain sight.
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Heck, if the druids are discovered they could pretend to be good druids trying to utilize a ritual to resolve the problems the area is experiencing. Heck, you wouldn't even need a group of evil druids to undertake this kind of action. Just a group of non-good druids. Heck it might even be possible to be a good druid, but value nature more than the concern of the encroaching people while trying to drive them out without killing them.
To me, that's actually far more interesting a story. Good druids enact a ritual to drive away (but not kill) encroaching villagers.
Now when the heroes show up the druids will detect as good. The heroes might see the ritual and be led to believe the ritual is attempting to resolve the problems. All out in plain sight.
Bonus points if the druid(s) and their fey allies actually secretly saved the townsfolk from their own pollution/negligence already (such as by reversing the effects of a local well the townsfolk inadvertently poisoned), and are now doing what they're doing for the ultimate good of everybody as well as the environment.
Perhaps a druid or one of their allies was seen "tampering" with said well soon after the townsfolk started falling ill, and everything escalated from there to the point of involving the heroes over a massive misunderstanding.
Astute heroes investigating the matter might well come to realize that it's their own townsfolk patrons whose activities need to be stopped.
That could all make for an exciting story with lots of hooks and plot twists, and no actual villains.
Thanks RD, I love it. Honestly as a GM it's the most evil (best) thing I can imagine doing to players, by giving them an antagonist against whom violence isn't the correct answer.
PF2e isn't PF1e, in that the bad guys don't have to abide by the same rules as the player. Just create some custom ritual/spells that feel druidic enought and you're set. You don't even need to homebrew all of it's rules (which level it is, what check it ask, how long it last, the effect for failing it, etc), because you can simply assume the druid succeeded the check, that it will last as long as the player don't do something to stop it, and that it's unique so that no player will ever learn it.y if they simply leave or decide to abandon the "burden" of civilization (now that he made it burdensome to live in houses that constantly catch on fire).
I think PF1e might have been better for making an existential druid crisis at a reasonable level.
Mostly because wild shaping for hours with PF1e's long duration made it far more practical to use strange tactics to bring an ecoterrorist flair to assassins.
Besides the basic stealth options (ie- that bluenjay suddenly turned into a guy with a dagger), they can also use and exploit features that most classes can only use in a short duration spell. Like earthglide on elementals.
I remember writing up a league of earth elemental druid assassins that relied on hit and run tactics (earth glide and retreat to heal) to do a pressure campaign. While I mostly wanted to use this to tell the party "no, you can't spend 10 minutes every time a problem comes up so the wizard can prepare the exact spell", I would imagine that a siege like that could do quite a number on a small farming village.
You can basically reenact the movie "Tremors". Only the graboids can also use flame spheres.
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Heck, if the druids are discovered they could pretend to be good druids trying to utilize a ritual to resolve the problems the area is experiencing. Heck, you wouldn't even need a group of evil druids to undertake this kind of action. Just a group of non-good druids. Heck it might even be possible to be a good druid, but value nature more than the concern of the encroaching people while trying to drive them out without killing them.
To me, that's actually far more interesting a story. Good druids enact a ritual to drive away (but not kill) encroaching villagers.
Now when the heroes show up the druids will detect as good. The heroes might see the ritual and be led to believe the ritual is attempting to resolve the problems. All out in plain sight.
Bonus points if the druid(s) and their fey allies actually secretly saved the townsfolk from their own pollution/negligence already (such as by reversing the effects of a local well the townsfolk inadvertently poisoned), and are now doing what they're doing for the ultimate good of everybody as well as the environment.
Perhaps a druid or one of their allies was seen "tampering" with said well soon after the townsfolk started falling ill, and everything escalated from there to the point of involving the heroes over a massive misunderstanding.
Astute heroes investigating the matter might well come to realize that it's their own townsfolk patrons whose activities need to be stopped.
That could all make for an exciting story with lots of hooks and plot twists, and no actual villains.
Kind of reminds me of a Druidic threat plot I had in mind many years ago.
The Good Druids try to chase the villagers away, even letting the Neutral Druids do Evil acts if really needed.
Because once the time negotiated between the various Druidic sects comes, it will be the Evil Druids that will ensure the blight disappears forever.
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I think PF1e might have been better for making an existential druid crisis at a reasonable level.
Mostly because wild shaping for hours with PF1e's long duration made it far more practical to use strange tactics to bring an ecoterrorist flair to assassins.
Besides the basic stealth options (ie- that bluenjay suddenly turned into a guy with a dagger), they can also use and exploit features that most classes can only use in a short duration spell. Like earthglide on elementals.
This is sort of what I was trying to get at by talking about the difference between "what does the statblock say this dude can do" and "what can he do offscreen".
Statblocks are for balanced on-screen encounters between the PCs and the enemy. So they describe what the druid can do at combat-encounter like speed.
But it's totally okay to say that he can shapeshift for hours off-screen but that it's kinda heavy on the concentration, so he couldn't maintain that in combat.
Produce Flame and Burning Hands are decent arson spells. The first is a cantrip too. The limited range can be an issue, but if your villain is good at either hiding or otherwise mucking up avenues of pursuit via, say, Tanglefoot or Grease or Sleep or Burning Hands, then bad things happen.
Then there's minions. There's no game rule that says a level one druid can't have allies. Maybe they've spent some time domesticating local large animals and teaching them the Bulldozer trick. Or maybe there's a land developer who's secretly funneling resources to the villain to depopulate the land for their own sinister reasons (and is preparing to throw them under the cart once the place is empty).
Oh, and look, Putrefy Food and Water is a level one primal spell too ... hmm.
If nothing else, there's the classic standby, Summon Animal I. Although this may require a rules judgment call. When you use this to summon a skunk, is a building subject to the save against being sprayed to the point where the owners are willing to torch it?