In the last post, which can be found here, we created a template for our party’s very first adventure! The template from the 5th edition Dungeon Master’s guide is a bare-bones tool to help create an unforgettable adventure. Today we are going to expand the template result for our villain.

The Villain – Concept

Our final template gave us something great to work with. Our adventure villain is a humanoid cultist, which is a pretty standard trope for a first adventure. Based on our template results, we know that the climax of the adventure results in our party’s new ally betray them. How they are betrayed will be detailed in a later post, but the important part is that they will be betrayed.

So why does this matter? We are talking about the villain not the ally right? Well, why can’t the villain double as both! It is a very fitting trope to introduce our party to the fact that not everything is not exactly as they appear on the surface. Let’s begin fleshing out our villain.

Who Is Our Villain? – Race

We know that our villain is an adventurer turned cultist, but what is their story? What caused them to turn? Who are they serving now? What is their goal? Well that is up to us to decide!

The first thing we need to determine is our villain’s race. While you can determine this to best suit your game, I am going to keep on the theme of random and roll to figure out our race. Since our villain is an adventurer turned cultist, I am going to use a playable race for them. I haven’t been able to find a simple way to randomly determine a playable race, so I created a weighted table based on all playable races and rolled on it (see table below).

d100 Result Race 01 Aarakocra 02 Aasimar 03 Svirfneblin 04-09 Dragonborn 10-21 Dwarf 22-33 Elf 34 Firbolg 35-37 Genasi 38-45 Gnome 46 Goblin 47-52 Goliath 53-64 Halfling 65-72 Half-Elf 73-77 Half-Orc 78 Hobgoblin 79-90 Human 91 Kenku 92 Lizardfolk 93 Orc 94 Tabaxi 95-98 Tiefling 99 Triton 100 Yuan-Ti Pureblood

After rolling on the table, we received the result of dwarf. Currently there are 5 sub-races of dwarf to choose from, so on a random roll the sub-race for our villain is going to be hill. Our villain is a hill dwarf turned cultist – quite an interesting concept and will make for a nice betrayal when the time comes!

Who Is Our Villain? – Schemes, Objectives, Methods

Now that we know our villain’s race, we can finally start fleshing out some of the more finite details. To start with, let’s go ahead and say that our villain is a devout servant of Torm, just like any regular dwarf should be! Next we need to determine the villain’s objective and scheme. To do this, we roll on the Villain’s Scheme table in the DMG – we ended up with the objective of winning favor with a powerful individual.

So how did our hill dwarf go from a devout servant of Torm to a cultist bent on havoc? Well that would be due to trickery of course! Our poor dwarf has fallen victim to a sham – in fact they believe everything they are currently doing is earning them the favor of Torm. How can that be you ask? Well unbeknownst to our hill dwarf, they ran afoul of a particularly tricky succubus who is currently trying to gather more victims for their succubi acquaintances.

While the DMG does include a Villain’s Methods table, we know our villain is a cultist who uses religion to attract others to achieve their goals. If you are stuck for ideas, I highly recommend consulting this table.

Who Is Our Villain? – Appearance & History

Now that we have a little background information on our villain, it’s time to describe them and build a little history. While reading over what we have so far, it feels to me that our dwarf should be a young male dwarf who feels out of place in their clan. Why do you I think this? Well you wouldn’t expect an older dwarf who was quite comfortable in their clan to be able to disappear without a second thought, nor would an older dwarf be as likely to be fooled as our villain.

Our young dwarf has faced many challenges on his chosen path of adventuring, most of which ended in failure. It wasn’t until Torm spoke to him in a dream that he became set on gathering more followers for Torm, through whatever means necessary.

After running through the process of rolling on tables from the Player’s Handbook to customize our height and weight, we now have a hill dwarf standing 4′ tall and weighing in at 163 lbs. He doesn’t have a long beard, as it recently caught fire and hasn’t fully grown in yet. He has brown hair, brown eyes, as well as a noticeable birthmark on the right side of his face.

Who Is Our Villain – What We Know So Far

Name: Dworic Battlehammer

Race: Hill Dwarf

Occupation: Adventurer

History: Devout servant of Torm. Naive, feels unwelcome in his clan, failed at adventuring.

Scheme: Gain favor with Torm (really a succubus)

Method: Gather followers for Torm through any means necessary.

Description: 4′ tall, 163 lbs, Brown hair and eyes, short burnt beard, and a noticeable birthmark on the right side of his face.

There is our villain so far, and if I do say so I think he is going to make a fine villain. In our next post we will go over building the stats and personality for our villain. Until next time, may your dice roll well.

Creating a Random Adventure – The Villain Pt. 2

Creating A Random Adventure – The Villain Pt. 3