A Dark & Silent Knight: Warmest Christmas Wishes
A Dark & Silent Knight: Warmest Christmas Wishes – A Patreon-Created Setting for the Pathfinder RPG by Paizo; WEEK 4
A few weeks ago, I asked readers of this blog to send me their rolls from a very special series of charts.
Our newest entry is, in order: 6, 17, 7.
Here’s (one version) of our campaign:
Alright, so – to begin – our Voldemort is an indestructible Lawful Evil reality-warper clocking in at only CR 9: the famed Khakissandra Ayla, the Foul Wish Granted, Storm of Stolen Hopes.
She’s fast, she’s immortal, she can go invisible at-will, she can fly & turn into mist, she wields potent illusions, she can silently arrow-snipe people from all-but-orbit, she can punch right through brick walls, she can step between worlds – and into the alien realities beyond! – at a frigging whim, she’s just exceptionally good at lying, and she doesn’t actually die from … you know, from being killed in any normal-monster way.
Pretty good power-set for an E6 ultimate baddie.
She can be a veiled & nameless threat – a man-behind-the-man, power-behind-the-throne shadow-menace – as much she wants to be, with a secret base on the moon ON THE PLANE OF FIRE, six layers of minions and then another ten extra layers of double-minions (plus all their own cultists) standing in the darkness between her and the PCs.
It just that … you know, the exact moment that her whole gambit isn’t really working out for her anymore, she can also just stand there, grin, drop her defenses, pull a Bond-villain quip & then straight-up literally endure any amount of damage you care to unleash on her.
Nuke the city? Eh, she’ll be back next month.
Oh … and yeah. One more thing: she can also grant three wishes per day, to anyone except herself or to another genie.
That last one is going to be a major & central point of concern for all of her foes (the PCs included), which we’ll get into here in just a moment; above – and way, way! – beyond all of her other immediate schemes, however, the dread Khakissandra desperately needs a safe & preferably-inaccessible place in which to store her “husband”.
Hmm … well, Arkham Asylum would work, right?
Yeah, this is now a Gotham City/DC Comics E6 urban fantasy game, borrowing heavily from Christmas stories like Gremlins, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and – most especially – Slayride & Krampus.
The whole concept around Khakissandra is ‘granting dark desires,’ so she’ll always have a loyal army of goons, lackeys & lieutenants ready, willing & eager to become her new ‘favored one’ … and if you ever want to make any super-weird changes to your setting, there are assuredly far-worse sources of Applied Phlebotinum with which to up-heave your basic shared reality than “an infinite well of 9th-level magical effects with a remarkably short list of (arbitrary) limitations”.
In fact, you could have the entire city of Gotham:
plunged into a crippling, never-ending mid-winter blizzard,
locked-off from the rest of the DC universe, keeping-out pesky members of the Justice League (like Superman),
and thrown into a closed time-loop, where the sun never rises … because it’s always Christmas Eve,
… and you could have all three of those nasty effects come into play on day one, just before the campaign even starts.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Instead, let’s talk our Godzilla, because we have a biggie:
The Swift & Terrible Krampus is the abject, total-monster, in-your-face, zero-subtlety nightmare boogie-man of our twisted tale, and I feel like he’s the real reason that this campaign is going to stay low-level.
If the PCs can be kept nervous about the Shadow of St. Nick showing up and murdering all of them damn-near-effortlessly – from the very first encounter until the last showdown – so much the better!
So … what does the Krampus want?
Well, he’s Chaotic Evil, immortal, mythical and linked to the First World, so I’m thinking he’s crazy even by the standards of traditional Batman villains; figuring out how to track him, trick him and finally beat him is the sort of (dare-I-say-it?) MYTHIC thing that only a brilliant team of heroic & dedicated crime-fighters can hope to accomplish.
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