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View Full Version : need ideas for a criminally insane boss.



nakedonmyfoldin
2012-07-09, 12:40 PM
The PCs are going into a disused asylum to recover an artifact hidden there. I have ideas for the minor encounters, but I need some ideas for the baddest craziest guy in the joint. Pcs are only level three, but input from any edition or game is cool.

Madfellow
2012-07-09, 01:05 PM
Well, any class could work as far as I can figure, but I think barbarian or sorcerer might work best, barbarian because of rage and sorcerer because of illusion, enchantment, and necromancy spells.:smallamused:

Steward
2012-07-09, 01:46 PM
A psion or a spellcaster focusing on "battlefield control" might be ideal. Maybe she was a mind flayer captured by the authorities after passing through a portal from the Far Realm. Or maybe he's a mid-level lich, defeated and taken into custody a thousand years before. The latter has the advantage of an easy reason why he hasn't been destroyed yet; he can regenerate if his phylactery remains intact, and no one has found the phylactery yet. The authorities in charge of the asylum kept him in check using abjurations of some kind, which were started to fail after the jail was abandoned. Now the lich appears to have gone insane and is using his powerful magic to lash out at the PCs, other inmates, etc. You could leave it like that, or take it a step further; the lich isn't actually insane at all, but is instead trying to get itself killed by the PCs in the hopes of regenerating outside of the asylum walls.

Another way you could go is to have the creature in the asylum not be evil at all (at least, as first) but driven insane by the wicked experiments of the asylum's former owner, who abducted it and hid it beneath the asylum. The experiments eroded its psyche but gave it strange powers, which could be mechanically represented as either ordinary spellcasting/psionics/incarnum/whatever or a few templates stack on top of each other.

Yitzi
2012-07-09, 03:14 PM
Here's an idea for a template that might be interesting:

Favored of Madness.

This individual is favored by the powers of madness.

Requirements: Chaotic alignment, must be utterly insane

Relevant mechanical changes:
The creature takes a penalty to its WIS score equal to its hit dice; even if this lowers its WIS score below 0, it is not hindered in any way other than the resulting extremely low modifier. A creature with access to the Madness domain instead uses its hit dice (instead of its cleric level) as its insanity score (it is still not hindered by a score below 0).
The creature is able to cast all madness-domain spells available to a cleric of its level as at will spell-like abilities (CHA key modifier, but the creature adds its hit dice to its CHA for this purpose) with CL=total hit dice, and may quicken such spells at no cost.
The creature is treated as affected by an Insanity spell, with the manifester being a random creature (other than itself) that it can see. Even when prevented from other actions by the Insanity spell, it can still use its Madness domain abilities normally.

CR: You'll have to work this out for yourself. Keep in mind that it gains powerful SLAs as at-will quickened effects, but also won't use any tactics.
LA: -

Slap the template onto whatever class you want, and it'll be a boss fight to remember. Just be very careful when balancing it.