Category: Steal this Enemy

To his patients, he is known as a generous soul. Offering medical care to the rookeries of the east end, and only charging what the patients can afford. This has earned him a stellar reputation, and even the criminals of that vice ridden den leave him alone, never knowing when they might need his help themselves. In the worst parts of London, stabbings are common, and blunt trauma even more so. All this good will comes at a price though, and when a patient dies on the slab, the body rarely goes to its final rest in piece., instead becoming a subject for Heathcote’s current project.

Heathcote has other plans for the flesh you see, and in his spare time he melds it with the latest in Neo-Victoriana technology. His goal: to create the perfect the worker. His years of working with the dregs of humanity has blighted his outlook on his fellow humans, and he now believes that the best course of action is to take those less fortunate and make them a part of the machinery of industry in a way that has never been attempted before. He replaces bone joints with hinges, internal organs with pneumatics, and anything else he can think of that will create a human being that will never need to shut down, as long as they keep taking on fuel. No more sleeping. Maybe even no more death at all.

It has been quite some time since he reached the limits of his experimentations with dead flesh. These days he is more than happy to pronounce dead the victim of a violent crime whose life is better ended before it perpetuates the cycle of violence that brought him before the Doctor’s knife.  In his own way, maybe Heathcote thinks he is doing good works. One look into his cellar would probably convince even the most generous of souls that that is far from the case though. The body will still be alive, and used in the most depraved ways that science can muster.

His failures are thrown into plague pits or the dark waters of the midnight Thames. Those he considers a success work with him still, perfecting his craft to create more workers. Although he considers them a success, he has yet to create a being that survives for longer than a month. And even the most long lived of his creations begin to rot before they finally succumb to entropy. Even though he disposes of those that fail him in the end, the smell of corpse flesh still fills the well lit cellar. His man-machines decompose while still breathing, a side effect of the strange chemicals that they must have running through their systems to allow muscle and brass to work together in a mockery of harmony.

How then does this generous man of the people afford to work so industriously at his passion? The medicines that Heathcote hands out are far from cheap, so he needs other ways to supplement his income. When not being a beacon of charity for the down at luck residents of a few city blocks, he works the whore houses. Great at dealing with cases of the clap, and many other things besides, this pays very well indeed. And for the madam who can’t pay, well the good Doctor is happy to take his pay in trade. His work in the less reputable of brothels has brought him into contact with some of London’s finest. Although to maintain that status, they would prefer if their presence at such establishments remained out of the public eye.

By cultivating relationships with such individuals, Heathcote has acquired a small but formidable number of patrons, including some of London’s Fathers of Industry. Most of these gentlemen eagerly await a final product that they will be able to put to work in their many factories, and are already pushing their members of Parliament – in both houses – towards changing labour laws to allow for such vile treatment of their workforce.

Bringing Dr. Heathcote into a game.

Depending on the social level of the game, there are a few options to bring in the despicable Doctor.

• He could be attempting to blackmail a friend of the players. A friend who seeks their help in blackening the name of Heathcote so that his word will be worthless should he choose to speak out.
• If the PCs are of the criminal classes they could come into contact with the Doctor as he sews closed a wound or two. this could either lead to being hunted by Heathcote after they discover too much about his other activities, or being hired by him to bring in more specimens or even steal large quantities of mechanical supplies.
• Local charities trying to achieve a betterment in the lifestyle of the working classes could across his patrons who are fighting to relax the already far from stringent labour laws, and thus discover his connection with industry, and quite what it means to the people whom he operates on.

After a long run of plot seeds, I’m going to be trying something a bit different for a while, and write up some character inspiration for you all. To start with I’m going to rock something from my current genre of choice, Cyberpunk. This one is written with CP2020 in mind, but there are plenty of other cracking settings out there that showcase the future shock just as well.

If you would see Blaze working away, you’d think he was just a bit of a douche. Sat in a high end coffee house, with a light blonde pony tail lank against his back, and thick rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. Under them a thin looking mustache and pitiful goatee. His fingers tapping away on a deck that looks deliberately vintage, for no good reason, while he sips his coffee. Looking closer though, and a few other things start to become obvious. He’s had surgery at some point, and both eyes have been replaced with cybernetic augmentations. Deep scars on his face have been corrected as well as possible, and the piece of crap deck is hooked into a fully functional cyberarm, with strands of living flesh stretched tight over chrome. His clothes seem heavier too, and that’s because they’re all as well armoured as money can buy.

There is definitely more to this Netrunner than meets the eye. Raised in a traveling family, he quickly made a name for himself as a “the computer dude”. And when he got the chance to ditch the wanderers and strike out on his own, he grabbed it. It didn’t take him long to realize that out in the world, there were two types of hackers. Successful and long lived ones, who usually never left their parent’s basement and weighed about the same as a mid size town car, and brave ones who joined a gang and terminally found out that skills with a deck were no match for someone with a gun. he wasn’t going to let that happen.

Instead of putting all of his money into the latest technology and firewalls, he bought biotech adrenal boosters and combat chips. Spent money made from hacking on armour and a hand cannon he couldn’t lift until he got his muscles laced with steel. It held him back in terms of becoming a kick ass Netrunner, but made him friends who were looking for more than a keyboard jockey. It also didn’t take him long to fall in with a bad crowd.

It all started with a job going south, ad the crew he ran with getting blackmailed to do some less than kosher jobs. Blaze saw that he could make a lot money from jobs if he shelved his morals, and just got the job done. This caused more than a hint of friction between himself and the crew, so he did something about it. With a well laid plan detailing how they would take out their blackmailers in place, the crew moved out. What they didn’t expect was that Blaze had tipped the authorities the wink, and with the villainous activities that the crew had performed sent the feds, everyone was taken down in one fell swoop. Blaze was a free agent, and looking forward to working for himself.

Since then he has masterminded more than a few jobs, but freelanced even more, working for the highest bidder and making contacts all over the place. His skill behind a deck or with a plasmatic revolver in hand make him valuable indeed, and he has been instrumental in human rights violations all over the globe, as well as ripping off corporations, governments and charities as well. True, he’s made some enemies, but a call to the right agency can often see them shipped to a penal colony somewhere warm and lacking in Wi-Fi access points.

Bringing Blaze into a game.

There are a few possibilities for this, the simplest being that any team that goes on a run will likely face another team sent against them. Blaze is a great jack of a few trades in this regard and he uses the fact that he doesn’t look like a combat character, or dress like a bad guy, play to his advantage. He will take his time and think about when best to attack, and has no qualms about bringing in others to do the dirty work for him.

There’s also the possibility that he is a mastermind of a job involving the players. Either hiring them on to do something that seems innocuous but casts long and dark shadows, or blackmailing them like he himself was to do something particularly unpleasant. Either way, he should be played like a reasonably charming easy going kind of chap, keeping the truth of his nature hidden for as long as possible. He knows that he can get better results if people think that they’re doing something for the right reasons even if their methods are deplorable.

I once did a rendition of the Savage Tide campaign that was put on in Dungeon magazine while it was still in print, for 3.5 edition. If you’re not familiar with it, think high-fantasy on the high seas, mixed with Demogorgon attempting to turn the entire planet into the crew of the flying Dutchman from pirates of the Caribbean 2. Demons, pirates, jungles, all that good stuff.

So anyway, the party was on its way to the pirate port of Scuttlecove, which is like Tijuana if it were run by the Manson family. On the way there, their ship is ambushed by a corsair, privateers claiming to be under the command of a man named Commodore Duchev. My players have a heated debate over whether that name is Russian or not as they make the pirates into chutney, then use their defeated enemy’s charts to find their way to Duchev’s hideout.

The ‘hideout’ in this case is a small tropical island surrounded by reefs, crowned by an old mansion that used to belong to an enterprising sugarcane baron. That’s unimportant, because its current tenants are Duchev, a mindflayer companion and his grimlocks, a tribe of Aztec-like lizardfolk, and some human pirates. Cue a few hours of excellent game-play, minus a penalty shot due Unnecessary Roughness for use of a Hydra. Two characters die, but the party comes back to full strength when they coincidentally find two prisoners. Eventually, though, the players come to a barricade of furniture leading up to the second floor, with a note on the top asking for a parley. If they are interested, says the note, they should return the next morning, to discuss terms of surrender. The PC’s agree this is a good idea, given the current fatality rate. They sleep in the jungle that night.

The next morning, they return to the stairs to find them completely clear, the doors at the top wide open. Time to see whose put them through all of this trouble, right? So they go up the stairs.

They come into a grand ballroom, with four figures looking at them. The first three are a mind flayer and two grimlocks. The fourth is Commodore Duchev. Thin, dressed in officer’s attire, hair parted down the middle and around his well-manicured horns. A half-fiend. A freakishly large hand wrapped around a flintlock halfway between a pistol and full-length musket, the other holding a morningstar lovingly crafted from pig iron. I tell the PC’s his eyes don’t look right, when he talks he talks at you, not with you, when he laughs he looks like he’s pleading for someone to laugh with him. A head full of bad wiring, no doubt, especially considering that he claims a creature as alien as a mind flayer as a companion.

So not thirty seconds of dialogue between the two parties and it becomes evident how off Duchev is. He asks them their terms. The PC’s answer. Then Duchev gives that laugh that I just described, and the gaming group just kind of looks at each other. Duchev responds that the terms were supposed to be their terms of surrender, why would Duchev surrender, this is his house and they’re his guests, it would be odd for the host to put himself at his guest’s power. The PC’s wonder what the hell he’s talking about, and then one of them asks why even holds this parley. Duchev responds that he was just being a polite host to his guests. He had wished the favor had been returned, unfortunately. This was why he hadn’t pursued them into the jungle, this is why he didn’t go on his own raids – those places were outside of his estate grounds, and those places weren’t his. That would be impolite, somehow.

At this point, the PC’s realize that they’re clearly talking to a guy that isn’t all there, and that clearly doesn’t know how crazy he is. And around that time Commodore Duchev not only decides they’re a threat, but that they’re an impolite threat, and should as such be removed.

Shit hits the fan.
Duchev unloads his flintlock, drops it, and chugs a potion of haste before wading in with that morning star. The grimlocks rage. The mind flayer mind blasts, which concusses part of the party but doesn’t penetrate the miasma of shit that passes for Duchev’s conscious mind. In a few rounds the grimlocks are down and the mind flayer is chewing on sweet, sweet gray matter. Meanwhile, Duchev is going toe to toe with both the barbarian and the druid, all the while chugging a Potion of Righteous Might in his other hand. He doesn’t give a shit, the sabre and axe blows are bouncing off him and the PC’s can’t understand why. To this day they don’t know that the only secret was DR 10/good.

Two rounds later, the mind flayer has peace’d out after killing the samurai/weapon master, but Duchev is still there, beating the party like they’re runaway foster children. He forces them back to the head of the stairs. The druid decides that enough is enough and transforms into a bear. The rogue in the back hits Duchev with a good crossbow shot. That pisses Duchev off, because it shears a part off of his uniform, and he liked that uniform. He dodges the hammer blow from the barbarian, smacks that offending party with a mace to the forehead. He points with his morningstar, the head caked in hair and brain, past the body of the collapsed barbarian and at the rogue, and mouths “YOU”.

This is where the bearshaped druid grapples the commodore, gets him in a literal bear hug. Duchev starts laughing again, that same PTSD laugh, and pushes him off. Pushes a brown bear off of him, and smacks him in the snout with his morningstar. By now the floor is slick, everyone’s bleeding, the rogue is still firing shots at point blank range. The bear and the half-fiend go to the floor, almost roll down the stairs. The next round, the bear goes to quarter health from an Inflict spell.

Did I mention Duchev was a cleric?
The rogue, seeing his last chance, runs to the grapplers, both now just resorting to claws and biting. Duchev gets in one last claw before the Druid pins the chortling dude, and the rogue shoves his rapier through the back of his neck and out the front. Coup de grace.

But still, Duchev doesn’t stop laughing, even as the blood chokes up and out of his mouth. He goes limp but his neck goes rigid. It’s almost a nervous reflex, the same way a snake locks its jaw in death. I tell the PC’s the laugh just subsides to a clicking, and then just spasms of the throat while the heart catches up with the death of the head.

He was the best kind of villain, the inexplicable thing that one can only watch and wonder about. I assume the rogue slept every night from then on with the lights on.

Okay…so my “villain” is actually the group of shadowy figures who terrorized my D20 Modern campaign.

Let me explain a bit of background: I ran a standard D&D 3.5 campaign for almost 2 years.  Six players created characters that they used to cajole, torment, intimidate, and fireball the world as they saw fit.  They were heroes who sacrificed themselves to save a world who barely knew them, and my players still talk about the characters to this day, though the campaign itself died before finishing due to several factors, most notably an inability to get everyone together.  When we elected to end the campaign due to scheduling issues, I asked my players if they wanted their character sheets, or if I could be given permission to utilize the characters in the future.  All the players gave their wholehearted agreement to allowing me to keep their characters and to utilize them if I saw fit (I’m pretty sure, since I’m a writer, they assumed I’d be using them as characters in prose).

Fast forward two years.  I’ve returned to take my place behind a GM screen, and I start a D20 Modern campaign.  My characters learn early on that there’s a world parallel to our own where all our “myths” and “legends” actually dwell.  The players are quickly drawn into a conflict that spans both worlds, investigating a string of murders that are targeting residents of the “mythic” world who’ve sought refuge in our own, and they’re seeking out the lost heirs of several races in the mythic world who’d been spirited to our own to protect them from the Shadow Lords, a conglomerate of evil who’ve become obsessed with overtaking not just the mythic world, but our own as well.  The players even get excited when they find themselves in a city called Moonhaven, in which their original RPG characters had raised a ruckus in the old campaign (the sheer volume of nostalgia that re-entering Moonhaven generated derailed my gaming session for nearly an hour).  Following the trail of the Shadow Lords, the group gather the lost heirs of the kingdoms, manage to gain support on both sides of the veil between worlds, and even befriend a white dragon, who sacrifices himself to ensure that the party is able to continue its mission.

The final showdown begins, and the players once again find themselves in Moonhaven, staring at a statue that immortalizes their former RPG characters.  They’re attempting to ascertain the actual location of the Shadow Lords when the bronze statue cracks, the city shakes, and then the town square opens into a large, cavernous pit.  Six shadowy figures slowly materialize; one by one, I describe them to the players.  And one by one, my players begin to panic.

The Shadow Lords reveal themselves to be the players’ former characters, driven to vengeance upon a world they died to save, but has largely now forgotten them.  Each of the villains were actually about 2-3 levels above where the new characters were, level-wise,  and the players remembered enough to know it.  I’ve never seen so much panic around a gaming table, ever.  I found my players torn—torn between knowing that to emerge victorious, they were going to have to slay characters they’d previously loved to play, and the desire to find a way NOT to have to do it.  I even had a couple of players begin an attempt at strategic diplomacy—they attempted to join the Shadow Lords to avoid having to kill their former characters.  I let them attempt it—after all, if they can succeed, so be it—but that first “natural 1” ended that parley rather quickly.

The characters actually did succeed in vanquishing the Shadow Lords and repairing the rift between the two worlds…and to this day, nearly 3 years later, whenever my gaming group gets together, that battle and those antagonists are STILL a common topic of discussion.

So while my entry isn’t a single, statted-out villain, per sé, the Shadow Lords were one of the most well-received and terrifying (to my players) set of antagonists to ever grace my gaming table.  I hope you’ll consider my entry!

In his forties, Maddox has striking brown eyes and short, brown hair with grey just starting to touch his temples. He is very fit, and can run many of his marines into the ground. He lives in his camouflage fatigues, with only the change of patterns (desert to forest to city and back to desert) varying from day to day. He carries a sidearm at his waist, with a combat knife opposite. He also has a holdout pistol in his boot.

Maddox is direct and to the point. He eschews small-talk and protocol and gets“right down to it”. He uses sharp hand motions to emphasize his points.

Maddox is very much an ends justify the means kind of man, dedicated to serving “his people”. Of course, he has so divorced that from any individual or group that this is almost meaningless. He is a dedicated servant of the state. Maddox holds most civilians in disdain, thinking them fat, lazy, undisciplined slobs.

Maddox is the only child of a prominent marine family from the capital, and his posting to the academy was assured. His parents died while he was in the academy and he has never married, nor pursued any relationships outside the corps. He is totally focused on his career, and his goal to make the state as stable as possible. If he has to break a few eggs (or step over a few bodies) along the way, he’s fine with that.

After the academy, Maddox quickly distinguished himself, exhibiting a combination of stealth, marksmanship and dedication. On an early mission to rescue several businessmen from a group of terrorists, he fired his rifle through one of the businessmen to kill the terrorist leader. His cold, calculated manner caught the attention of the director of covert operations, and it was then that his career really took off.

Maddox lives to serve the state, to eliminate all its foes “foreign and domestic”… especially domestic. He despises terrorists and dissidents of all stripes, including those who disagree with policy, or call for change, or limitations to the government’s powers to pursue or destroy its foes. Maddox won’t be bothered with things like due process or the rights of the accused. He has been called to eliminate certain lower ranking politicians, and has had no problem with that, seeing them as a cancer on the society he serves. This didn’t bother him. By the time an order comes to him, he is confident that it is justified.

Maddox commands the 22nd Special Drop Troop, a special operations regiment consisting of a battalion of spec ops troopers, a battalion of air transport assets and their own Corvette, the Shadow Falcon. These are the men and women that the government calls upon for all its dirty tricks and black ops against other citizens. Whether it is a terrorist cell to be taken out, hostages to be rescued, or anything else, the 22nd will take care of it, usually in a lethal manner. The legality of it doesn’t enter into the equation for Maddox, and he doesn’t lose any sleep over the things that his command is called to do. It is all in the service of the state, and that’s all that matters to him.

Maddox seldom takes to the field himself, limiting himself to the operations command center of the Shadow Falcon or his combination office and cabin just off that command center when his troops are at work. But when not “on-duty” he can be found in the firing range or the gym of the Shadow Falcon honing his skills, and he is still a very lethal man. Woe to the opponent that he feels justifies his personal attention.

Author’s note: I created Col. Maddox for my Battlestar Galactica campaign, but he ought to fit easily into any space opera campaign, or with a minimum of tweaking, into another genre.

Background:

Most rats are the lowest of the low. They spend their lives in a world of human waste and getting crapped on in the most humiliating and literal sense of the phrase, but most rats are not Ratgar.

Ratgar began life as a tiny, mundane black rat. He was born with an angry disposition and an intense hatred for the pale-fleshy two-legged creatures that constantly sent their feces into the dark, disgusting tunnels he called home. Despite his strong hope for vengeance against the hairless, flesh-creatures he was no more remarkable than your average sewer dwelling vermin. He could not speak, wield a sword, or cast spells, so, despite his pointy teeth and unrivaled cheese eating prowess, he would prove to be only a minor setback for even the weakest adventurers journeying through the sewers below the bustling medieval metropolis called the free city. Although, Ratgar hated such adventurers, his curse became a blessing when a druid came wandering through the waste tunnels. Needing an expendable scout for his travels through the sewers, the druid, ignorant of the vile series of events he would set in motion, cast Awaken Animal on the tiny Ratgar, giving the eternally hateful vermin the minimum intelligence he needed to begin his plan of widespread slaughter and eventual world conquest.

The rat first slew the unsuspecting druid by biting his jugular, and he celebrated his victory by consuming the druid’s whole bag of expensive goat cheese. After about a month long bout of crippling constipation Ratgar took up the druid’s dagger and began to practice diligently in the art of swordsmanship. His prowess with a blade coupled with his bouts of fearsome rage led him to become what most people would call a barbarian. The tiny rat forged a crude full blade fit for a halfling from the bones of the dead druid and began to slay any and every bipedal humanoid who set foot in his ever expanding underground kingdom, however these petty acts of violence did not satisfy Ratgar’s insatiable hunger for power, blood, and, of course, cheese. If he was to survive and conquer the unsuspecting city above him, he would need to harness the power that is magic.

He began to steal pages of books from gutters and bathroom readers from outhouses until he had taught himself to read. With a knowledge greater than that of any rat, he was able to become the first rat cleric, a cleric of tyranny. He then used the bones of his enemies to forge armor, becoming not only a powerful cleric, but a bone knight. Using his sword skill and new-found divine power he began to unite the vermin of the sewers, declaring himself King Rat and giving himself the title the Sewer-Dwelling Soul Slayer. Despite ruling with an iron paw the rats loved him, or perhaps they simply did not feel like a battle with a sword-wielding rat would be a fair fight. His claim for king of the sewers was further cemented when he stole scrolls of raise dead from a necromancer’s underground lair to raise despicable undead versions of many common vermin. Now an extremely powerful boneknight-cleric-barbarian rat, with a massive sword and a legion of small, yet powerful undead, he was ready for his campaign of world conquest.

Encounters:

Ratgar and his vermin legion’s lack of subtlety is made up for by their small size. He first sends out hundreds of ghoulish rats to infect those in the city above his sewer with ghoul fever, allowing him to use his powers of death to control the human population. The overwhelming chaos brought about by a plague of ghouls with no apparent cause prevents the city from mounting an effective defense against the huge army of rat skeletons and vermin morhgs that he leads up from below.

The players at this point must either fight his army in defense of the city or attempt to infiltrate the city after Ratgar’s legion has exterminated and/or enslaved the human populace. Either way, Ratgar’s army is not to be underestimated. Although his undead rats are quite weak, there are scores and scores of them ready to paralyze, infect, or wear away at the players before the vermin meet their quick deaths.

Ratgar also employs Boneyards, large piles of rat bones that attempt to add the player’s skeletons to their ranks. These creatures pose much more of an immediate threat than the tiny undead rats, but they also distract the players from the hordes of rats still attempting to bring them down. Once the player’s meet Ratgar, they will probably laugh at the angry one-foot tall lord of evil, causing the already temperamental rat to fly into a fit of unbridled rage. Because of his brutal sword and powerful spells, Ratgar will become much more than comic relief; he will become a serious threat to the party. Also, the pressure of not being the player to be killed by a little rat will add some stress into this otherwise ridiculous discovery that the greatest villain the players will face (before epic levels) is a rat, a twenty-fifth level darklord rat.

Lynn was vicious. I think that’s the best way to describe that girl. I dropped her into a mecha-powered dystopia game. The PCs belong to a place called “The Living City”, run by a group of individuals who style themselves as “gods”. Well, the campaign kicked off as a mysterious entity handed out mechs to the Godblind, select members of the population who are immune to the gods’ ability to track their subject. Lynn thrived on the ensuing upheaval.

Lynn showed up anonymously during an early fight where the PCs were getting the rough end of the stick. They were very close to getting thoroughly taken out, partially due to my lack of understanding about combat balance. So I sent some enemies away and brought Lynn in. She helped knock the enemy mechs out of commission, advised the others to leave, and then–dragged the last surviving enemy pilot out of her mech to kill her, once the PCs had left her sight.

I later brought Lynn into a scene with Nathan, the NPC lover of one of the PCs. I established a bit of her ruthless personality, and then revealed that she was Nathan’s sister. Then, the two of them started patrolling for the gods, and ran into the PCs again. Nathan’s girl was naturally shocked, and Lynn used that time to start twisting the knife.

See, both she and Nathan were the children of one of the gods, a fact that had previously been unknown to the PCs. When she revealed that, it put an enormous strain on Nathan’s relationship. Lynn did everything she could to make Nathan look bad, going so far as to scold him and physically beat him down in front of the PCs.

Lynn slipped out the back door as the uproar swelled against Nathan, and didn’t appear again for a short time. Her last act was to kill off a child NPC who’d attached himself to the group; after that, she was assimilated into a hybrid monster-creature-thing created by one of the gods.

Lynn’s ambition and cruelty were really her defining hallmarks. She saw an opportunity to unseat her parents in the chaos of the rebellion, but underestimated the power and overestimated the cooperation of the gods. Furthermore, as a character who took pleasure in hurting others, she motivated the PCs strongly to defeat her, even though she had been victimized herself by the gods.

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”
William Congreve

Introducing a Nemesis
Romance comes and goes when you’re living the life of adventure. But what if a past sweetheart, her life ruined by the man she felt she would give her all for, returned, looking for revenge? Erna Bodil is just such a character. The discarded lover of one of the player characters (PCs), she appears in the story bearing no grudges. Instead, her competitive spirit and superior abilities mark her as a challenging ally to have around. All the while, however, the thorn embedded so long ago, works its way deeper into her flesh and revenge is soon to come.

Creating a Better Half
In creating Erna you’ll need to pick a male character from the party, probably the most philandering one is best. It’s also worth chatting to the player you pick to see if the return of an ex-lover, who you’ll create, is going to be fine with them.

Now build Erna along similar lines as her ex. You’ll want her to be two or three levels higher than him, with skills that overshadow his own abilities or exploit his weaknesses. You want Erna to outshine him in any encounters they have, or if they tackle the same dungeon or quest, you’ll want her to have the upper hand.

Next, you should write up her companions. These companions should cover the basic needs of an adventuring party, while not specifically being the anti-party that is an exact mirror image of what the PCs bring to the game. They should be able to give the players a run for their money without intimidating them when they first meet. Note that while Erna’s companions might work with Erna for the most part, they won’t necessarily follow her into her madness and could become valuable allies to the party later on.

With regards to alignment, choose something that will allow Erna some freedom to switch between being seemingly helpful and downright murderous.

Profile of a Killer
Erna Bodil is the daughter of Jethro Bodil, a rich merchant who doted on his daughter and paid for her tuition at the best academy of her chosen profession. No doubt he was her greatest comforter after her lover disappeared. When she first met the PC, she was young and naive, and fell head over heels in love with him. Then he left her, heart dashed upon the rocks. For a time, all she could do was dwell on the black thoughts stewing in her mind. Her father, seeing her distress, asked her to choose a trade, thinking it might take her mind off her loss. It was an easy choice – the same trade as her ex-lover. He had recently begun learning the trade and had spoken of little else. Their conversations had sewn a seed. Little did she know that pursuing this path would drive the thorn in deeper.

Years went by and she worked harder at mastering the skills of her profession, focusing all of her attention on her task. She cared nothing for men and so had little to distract her and every reason to outdo her male peers. Soon she was at the top of her class.

Bad Memories
Now, as she finds herself staring across a crowded tavern at the man she once loved, a flood of mixed emotion bubbles up inside her. She decides to bravely hide her feelings by issuing him a challenge: a drinking contest, cards or maybe darts. But she is careful to only show how happy she is and how little she needs him.

One challenge leads to another and soon her and her companions are competing with the party time and again. Sometimes they beat them to the gold, other times they appear just in time to save the party from certain doom. It’s clear at this point, that Erna and company are a force to be reckoned with.

A Woman Scorned
When the time is right, either after the party pulls off a big win or Erna is ready to play her hand, competitive, friendly Erna snaps. Emotions once buried come flooding back. Clearly driven mad with thoughts of revenge for her lost love she becomes murderous and foul tempered. She’s not playing games anymore; it’s time for him to feel the pain she felt in her own heart all those years before. She’ll fight and ruin him or those he’s close too, particularly any other female characters he seems friendly with. And she’ll do it with the help of her allies or other nefarious entities, including building alliances with the party’s worst enemies. She’s not beneath selling the party out if she can make things right again, exacting revenge for her deep wounds.

Conclusion
Erna is the kind of villain that you can build up slowly and then turn on the players with all the benefits of someone who knows the party intimately. She’s also adaptable, and you can tweak her to fit your story perfectly. Timing will be the key concept here, but taking your time might work to your advantage too, so play it cool until Erna is ready to explode magnificently.

Image by obsidianentity