Every adventure has a purpose and more often than not that purpose is stopping the villain from completing their malevolent agenda. The central villain of an adventure is perhaps one of the most important design decisions a DM makes. If the appropriate time and effort is put into designing the villain, the rest of the adventure will form around him, creating memories you and your players will remember for years. However, if you don’t take the appropriate time to craft your villain you may find your adventure sessions shallow and lacking a clear sense of purpose.
What was the Fellowship without the evil of Sauron and the One Ring? Sherlock Holmes has Professor Moriarty as a nemesis and Batman has the Joker. All of these villains provided the requisite motivation to keep the hero working towards the success of his quest or mission.
This is part one of a series based on the Adventure Builder Workshop held at GenCon this year. Part one will focus on the villain, what you will receive in this series is a breakdown of the seminar that was led by Rodney Thompson from Wizards of the Coast. Earlier in August I posted a high level review of the Adventure Builder Workshop, what this series will do is go into much greater detail about the individual sections.