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booklord
We've all seen them. NPC villians designed to be arch-nemesises of the team. The kind of enemy it takes the entire team to fight. So I thought I'd share the nastiest bad boy I've ever put in front of a group of players.

Garoke was a high-level Initiate Rat Shaman who worked for Aztechnology. None of the other Aztechnology magicians wanted to work with him. ( Though he sometimes commanded groups of mundane Aztechnology grunts. He tended to use them like cannon fodder )

Metamagic techniques :
Invoking, Masking, Shielding, Blood magic, Anchoring, Quickening
Favorite Spells :
Displacement ( physical illusion making him appear to be standing a few meters from where he actually was )
Painful Death ( physical illusion that makes it appear that the target is dying a horrible, gory death )
Disguise others ( Illusion spell where he changed the appearance of another. Used it creatively )
Foci: Weapon Focus, power focus, multiple sustaining foci ( originally spell locks ) and Conjuring foci.

Ally Spirit : Force 5 ally spirit that appeared as either a elven woman or a skeleton wearing a hooded cloak.
Enslaved Free Spirit : Force 8 Blood Spirit of an initiate physical adept who specialized in whips. Appeared as a man covered by hundreds of small, bleeding cuts wearing ragged trousers and a cape of blood mist. The spirit used a whip in combat that substantially increased its reach.

Number of separate adventures he faced the characters in : 4
(Garoke actually won one adventure, stealing the prize underneath the players noses)
Number of characters killed by this NPC: 2 in separate encounters.
Number of characters seriously injured by Garoke: A lot, including one player who was nearly drained dry by his enslaved blood spirit.

Most evil moment :
Cutting the eyes out of a character and sending them to the team as proof he had the character prisoner. ( This character lived )
Second most evil Moment :
Cutting a paralyzed character with his weapon foci dagger to make the mind probe spell he was casting on that very same character more effective. ( This character lived )
Third most evil Moment :
Wiping out the staff and patients of a small hospital as a distraction. Then trapping the players inside so by the time they broke out Lone Star had arrived.

Thing that drove players into a killing frenzy 1 :
At one point he hunted down the players through their contacts. Leaving a bloody trail of dead contacts behind him.
Thing that drove players into a killing frenzy 2 :
Garoke hated direct confrontation. He prefered to summon a large number of great form spirits and use them to engage the characters while he cast spells safely from a hiding spot. If he ever felt the tide was turning against him he'd run and use his illusion spells to cover his escape.
Thing that drove players into a killing frenzy 3 :
Garoke loved to use spells to either trick or manipulate characters into fighting and even killing each other. It just made his day.

Final fate: Players hunted him down and killed him in a final battle and they weren't even paid to do it. Of course Garoke was loaded with valuable foci and Garoke's ally spirit became a Friend for Life contact for each party member. Their hate for Garoke paled in comparison to hers.



Anyone else have evil NPCs they'd like to share?
Crimsondude 2.0
Evil is such an overused term.

Sadistic? Sure.
Clever? Sure.

Evil? Eh...
DeadNeon
His name was Andre Tolliver. He was essentially a "vat grown person". Think something along the lines of a bioware equivalent of a cyberzombie. He was incredibly intelligent and manipulative.

First he hired them to steal a piece of prototype cyberware, and made sure to gain the footage from the security cameras, as well as various other things connecting the players team to the theft. Then he blew up the lab.

Fast forward a few game sessions, and he shows up again. Telling the players about the evidence he has collected, ensuring them that "Evidence will be found, even where there is none" and that he would go to the authorities if the player team did not work for him. They worked a few more jobs for him, then had an opportunity to break free from him, which they did. Needless to say, Tolliver didnt like that.

Little did the team know, Tolliver was a rival of one of the team's allies, a man named Underhill. Tolliver's men thought they killed Underhill with a car bomb, instead they paralyzed him. No one, outside of Underhill's bodyguard knew he was still alive. After that, several of Underhill's men jumped ship from Underhill's organization, to Tolliver's. Those who didnt were hunted down.

A little while later, the team was contacted by a mobster named Lupino, who told them somone (who later turned out to be Underhill) was paying him a great deal of money to make sure they stayed alive.

Over time, Tolliver toyed with the player team. Doing things like leaving a note in a player's apartment saying "If this were a bomb, you'd be dead". On more than one occasion, the players thought they had his location, but arrived only to find an empty warehouse.

Slowly, Tolliver began to suspect Underhill was still alive, so he then started to make hits on the team and various businesses Lupino ran, always leaving some kind of evidence which incrimnated Underhill. This was so that he could use the players to draw him out of hiding. Through some excellent roleplaying and working their contacts, they eventually contacted Underhill. However, through a series of near fatal confrontations with Tolliver's men, and some bad perception rolls, they never realized they were being tailed, which meant Tolliver know knew underhill was alive.

While the players were having things explained to them by Underhill, Tolliver made his play. He kidnapped one of the player character's brother, as well as several other friends of the player characters, then used agents he cosmetically modified to look like two of the players to assassinate high ranking underworld figures, simply to keep the players on their toes. Then he made contact with the players, stating that if they ever wanted to see their friends and family alive again, they had to kill Underhill and deliver his eyes as proof.

The crew wound up taking the eyes of one of Tolliver's men, and arranging a meet with him, where they wound up being set up. When they pulled their guns on him, he simply smiled his evil grin and told him that each of their friends were wearing a collar of plastic explosive coded into a detonator he implanted in his body. If his heart stopped beating, they would explode. Tolliver then sicced his bodyguard (a cyberzombie named Krieg) and several of his heavily cybered agents (NPC's loosely based on the sammie template in SR3)

At this point, through some well timed Deus Ex Machina, a team of Underhill's surviving men attacked Tolliver's compound, and came to assist the players. The ensuing gunfight was almost biblical in its brutality. IN the end, the agents of Tolliver and the bodguard were dead, three of the five PC's were at death's door, one was moderately wounded, and one was dead.

By now, it was only Tolliver and the remaining players. The thing about Tolliver, is that despite being a menace and general pain in the hoop, he wasnt a fighter at all. The players realized this, and took their time. They beat him savagely. He reminded them about the explosives on their friends and they continued. They gouged out his eyes with hand razors and cut his tongue out, and finally sent him into sweet oblivion by smashing his skull with a monitor from a vid terminal. The explosives went off, killing their friends and family.

Tolliver was now dead, but so were a lot of their friends.
kevyn668
Undertow.

He has no stats. Get some. vegm.gif
BitBasher
In one campaign I used a manipulative twisted hermetic, which a bound force 4 free spirit that had astral gateway, and he had posession, he could posess mundanes that way, and none of the party was a full mage. If someone spent an action to percieve they could see him coming, which isnt all the time. He was a manipulative vindictive bastard that was almost impossible to stop, because they didn't even ever know where he was, nor what race he was or what he even looked like. He was a frigging lunatic too.
kevyn668
QUOTE (BitBasher @ May 4 2004, 04:10 AM)
In one campaign I used a manipulative twisted hermetic, which a bound force 4 free spirit that had astral gateway, and he had posession, he could posess mundanes that way, and none of the party was a full mage. If someone spent an action to percieve they could see him coming, which isnt all the time. He was a manipulative vindictive bastard that was almost impossible to stop, because they didn't even ever know where he was, nor what race he was or what he even looked like. He was a frigging lunatic too.

"Ty-I-ee-ime, is on my side...yes, it is..." wink.gif
BitBasher
QUOTE
"Ty-iee-ime, is on my side...yes, it is..."


What's that from?

Edit: oooh Shocker?
Kanada Ten
Fallen, the movie; not Fallen, the webcomic.
kevyn668
Shame on you, Bit Basher. smile.gif

NERPS for Kanada Ten! biggrin.gif
BitBasher
Wow, never seen it! I'll have to fix that biggrin.gif
kevyn668
Its a good pick up.

The day after I first saw it, me and the boys went to Burger King. The MUZAK version of that song was playing. It took a moment to place it.

I almost had a panic attack...

I Eat Time
QUOTE (DeadNeon)
His name was Andre Tolliver. He was essentially a "vat grown person". Think something along the lines of a bioware equivalent of a cyberzombie. He was incredibly intelligent and manipulative.

Here's a pre-broken mechanic idea:

Vat grown people. Generally humans, always Unawakened (easier to deal with nonmagicked genes) with altered Racial Limits to attributes. Maybe hardwired to readily accept information (higher Intel limit.) Or built with more mass per volume of tissue (increased Lifestyle, higher Bod limit). Super muscle tissue (enhanced strength). And so forth. If nothing else, it makes for a much more interesting explanation for the Exceptional Attribute edge.
Moonstone Spider
Oddly enough the NPC character I used to hurt my players the most wasn't a bad guy at all, but a super-zealot good-guy Dove Shaman.

Through a series of tricks he got material samples from the runners, at a rate of about 1 per Shadowrun. Then he started casting ritual mental manips on them to get the players under his control and into his lair. Then a second set of spells gave every player he got ahold of a quickened magical version of the Total Pacifist flaw, and a mental command to try to keep the quickened spell safe (ie. Thou Shalt not run through the strongest Ward Thou can find).

Dang that was fun. The players managed some superb role-playing too, backstabbing each other, the quickened ones stealing the EX ammo and replacing it with Gel for the rest, heroic mental battles against the control, etc.
DeadNeon
QUOTE (I Eat Time)
QUOTE


Vat grown people. Generally humans, always Unawakened (easier to deal with nonmagicked genes) with altered Racial Limits to attributes. Maybe hardwired to readily accept information (higher Intel limit.) Or built with more mass per volume of tissue (increased Lifestyle, higher Bod limit). Super muscle tissue (enhanced strength). And so forth. If nothing else, it makes for a much more interesting explanation for the Exceptional Attribute edge.

The thing is, aside from his intelligence, his stats weren't really much more than average. He just had a lot of resources, contacts, and a sadistic streak a mile wide. He was meant to be more of a non-combative kind of menace. That's why he had a cyberzombie as a bodyguard.
northern lights
i was developing one but my group decided to play a boatload of munchies and so i have discarded the idea to start again.

with different players
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