T w e n t y S i d e d
I don’t get why a DM wouldn’t want to play some veriety. There’s a certain point where the DM has to get just as bored as the players, right? Maybe he’s just so excited about his self published fantasy novel D&d campaign he’s immune to the monotony.
From The Archives:
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
I think at least part of the problem is that if a campaign centers around a singular Big Bad Evil Guy, your main foes are going to be whatever kind of minions they favor. If the BBEG happens to be a necromancer, for example, then get ready to kill so many zombies, skeletons, and wraiths that your game looks like any given open world zombie game over the past couple of decades. Sauron (and by extension Saruman) obviously had a thing for orcs (hell, didn’t he create them? I never read the books), so that was quite reasonably his go-to for whatever he couldn’t or wouldn’t send his ringwraiths to deal with for whatever reason. Which… why the hell wouldn’t you solve all your problems with invincible, immortal, 100% loyal undead servants? But that’s a topic for another day.
Neverwinter Nights 2 had this problem, especially in the late game. That game’s BBEG wasn’t a necromancer, per se, but he was in a condition that made making undead and shadows really easy and convenient for him. At least in the early game there were a couple of other villains vying for their piece of the pie, and you got to fight (a whole mountain of) orcs, and a handful of githyanki. But once the orcs are dealt with and the githyanki are shoved off the board, it’s pretty much all undead, all the time. Zombies, skeletons, shades, wraiths, banshees, vampires, the final dungeon has a few mummy lords and lichs hanging around. Hell, one dungeon you go to even has freaking baelnorns (basically elven liches, from what I understand), and who the hell ever uses those?
Probably why there’s no in-game recipe for making negative energy enchanted weapons; it would suck to make some awesome 3D6 negative energy sword, only for literally every enemy in the final dungeon to be healed by it.
“why the hell wouldn’t you solve all your problems with invincible, immortal, 100% loyal undead servants?”
Probably because there’s only nine of them. You can’t hold territory without garrisons, and nine bodies, no matter how powerful, can’t garrison more than a village.
Oh – and they sure aren’t invincible. Yes, they’re difficult to disembody, and they do come back, but it takes a while.
Not even that hard to disembody. In the books, Legolas kills a Ring Wraith offscreen without even knowing what it was, basically exactly how this comic dealt with Gollum. “There’s something back there, imma shoot it, hey I got it and it’s gone, wonder what that was.”
Legolas shot the flying mount from under the ringwraith. How it affected the wraith itself is left out of the story.
I believe that’s exactly the OP’s point.
The origin of orks is one thing Tolkien never made up his mind about. There is one version, that was incorporated bu Tolkiens son into Silmarillion, that orcs were created by Morgoth by corrupting the elves. Sauron started career as a lieutenant to Morgoth.
If memory serves, Tolkien’s later notes indicated that he wanted to revise that and have them be (the descendants of) corrupted Humans instead. But by the time that particular item came to light, the Silmarillion was already settled enough on the version that had them as (descendants of) corrupted Elves. Either way, it would have been Morgoth’s doing – an Archangel-level being to Sauron’s Angel-level, and the original leader of Evil.
One interesting reason (that I’d actually forgotten about until doing some rereading) is that, being mostly in the spiritual realm, the wraiths actually have a really hard time sensing things in the physical realm. Gandalf mentions that one of the reasons for their mounts was to provide an additional source of senses, and they can’t really see Frodo all that well unless he’s wearing the Ring (or been stabbed by a Morgul blade). So while they’re terrific at projecting an AoE supernatural fear aura on the battlefield where they can kind of just hang out and cut people down indiscriminately, they’re actually really terrible as special agents going after a single hobbit (as shown by how all nine get driven [on their horses] into the flood at the fords of Bruinen by three hobbits, one Ranger, and a high Elf-lord, and are not seen in action again for several weeks at least). That Sauron does send them is down to that “100% loyal” bit, and trying not to tip anyone else off as to the Ring’s location by sending a larger force.
I’m fascinated by the excuses some fantasy games give to show you a variety of enemies in a plot with a very particularly-themed antagonist, and I’ve found that most of them like to choose one of two paths:
1) The Big Bad Villain is the most impressively cosmopolitan dictator in the setting’s history and has their fingers in every evil race’s pies, often purely as side-hustles to their personal plans.
2) The Big Bad Villain has an army themed to themselves, but by coincidence you will need to carve your way through half the world’s evil races to get at them.
Baldur’s Gate 2’s antagonist oddly split the difference, being an immortal(…ish) elf wizard with more species of monster under his control than he has spell slots, but also someone who managed to piss off a ton of people while fleeing your party, and so the plot of every chapter in the game is a toss-up between an obstacle he’s deliberately set in your path or a hornet’s nest he’s kicked as he ran by.
Don’t forget that in terms of video games more enemies means more assets, which is going to be even more of an issue if we’re talking like AAA levels of development: you need the character model, it probably needs unique sounds, may require unique animations ranging from just hanging around through attacking to reacting to or dying from particular type of damage…
Another thing is that mechanically complex systems, like DnD, can have entire builds focused on certain enemy types or classes, between things like ranger’s favoured enemies, resistance to damage types or spells that specifically affect undead or outsiders/extraplanar creatures adding variety can really mess a party up if they’ve specced, or even prepared, for a particular kind of encounter. Which of course can have mechanical advantages and the other side of the coin would be someone diegetically exploiting this system, say a necromancer keeping a couple elementals on hand. Heck, go all the way and have the villain sprinkle in some illusion pretending their elementals are demons, their mercenaries are undead and their construct murderbodyguard is an ordinary butler.
I always wanted to ask Shamus if he meant that comment about skeletons as foreshadowing. Maybe somebody did; I don’t think I was active in the comments at this time.
Erm… is that it, then?
They have two more on the patreon, but it looks like they forgot to upload?
Nope, sorry I’m just behind on posting. I usually keep a queue but it ran out just in time for work to start throwing me between day shifts and night shifts. So I didn’t realize how much time had passed. This Sunday they should start coming out back on schedule!