Learning to Tell a Story: Part III

Bringing everything home can be tough. The climax is supposed to be the most memorable part of a game, right? I cant think of how many times my old players have recounted their battle with the "Warden of Dis", the battle on the roof of a sanitarium with an undead black dragon, or the time they faced off with a mind flayer shadow dancer.

All of these were excellent encounters  however some were hours of planning while others had happened by circumstance. It seemed entirely up to random chance and not up to the amount of work I had put into the encounter. I began to make a mental list of my most successful and least successful encounters and applied it to a new group of players that had never played Dungeons and Dragons before.

I cleaned up and altered the fluff of my top three boss fights and weaved them together into a new story. I planned the players would face a boss once every 2-3 sessions which lasted anywhere from 6 to 10 hours. For the first time I worked backwards and created a story and background for each villain. Next I worked out from them to their minions and the reasons they were minions. Finally, I designed how it would effect the world around them and what the PC's would encounter to lead them back to the villain.

As I kept notes, I realized what made these games great and ultimately the climaxes great was the party's anticipation leading up to the Big Evil Bad Guy. All three villains were different but they all had some form of identity to the party from the begging of the adventure.

Villain number one was a necromancer with a handful of instabilities, the party had to stay on their toes, but were able to use some of his strange ticks to their advantage and eventually foil his plot.

Villain number two was a common human who stayed as a shadow, a mad bomber that they discovered through "random chance" and assisted the city guard in disabling his magic explosives before the finale.

Villain number three was a bit of a red herring since they had faced off with her in the first adventure, but the final boss was a pure and simple monster fight that gave the party their victory while telling a dark and twisted story of dark elves grabbing for power in the underdark.

The thing that all three shared was they stayed consistent with the theme of the adventure and could be followed back to the hook. They were organic villains. So my only advice for the climax is to aim for the heart and stay logical. Even if you have to change something last minute, make sure that you end the adventure with the tone of your storytelling intact. The climax is where the bad guy only has to act natural and do the evil dance.