The Baddy that got away

[Arc_knight25]

I'm sure that there have been threads like this, but I'm just looking to hear some stories.

My players went all plot seeking missile on me, and found their way to the boss fight a second time before exploring the whole area.

Anyways, they come across a Quasit with class levels in Witch. They are level 2 and the encounter is about a CR5 (Pathfinder) No one has magical items, so the DR 5 cold iron/good is doing its thing, along wit the fast healing 2. After most of the evening of they have finally grappled it and pin it. They try to keep it down, it makes some good rolls and some bad ones. In the end it has 3 hit points takes a ton of AoO to fly its 100ft to get away. They all miss. It gets away and gets to alert the rest of her forces.

This was the 1st night so far, that everyone put down their phones and paid 100% attention to the fight. It aggravated them all and they enjoyed it. It was a good challenge and they all worked together to try and down her.

I would just like to know what other stories are out there. Good or bad.

[LoyalPaladin]

There was an awesome thread about Recurring Enemies (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?388945-Recurring-Enemies) a few months ago. For my story, the enemy in question both got away and became a recurring enemy.

Fu Master Toad was a plump and obnoxious Hobgoblin. He was in our very first encounter of the entire game and he managed to get away. At first it was just frustrating. Then he came back. I played Dragon Lance's War of the Lance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dragonlance_modules_and_sourcebooks#War_of _the_Lance_Chronicles) for three years. In that time, we encounter Fu Master Toad about 15 times and he was always doing better than before. Our DM did a great job of creating a character that really annoyed us.

The second to the last session, our party that is known for great roleplaying and cohesive decisions turned into full on murderhobos. We ignored Dragons, Dragon High-Lords, Trolls, and even an aspect of Tiamat to kill that stupid hobgoblin.

I'm feeling a little bitter even remembering that cretin. Anyways. The story ends with Fu Master Toad being pelted with arrows, our Kender falling through an invisible hole in the ground/ceiling, and Fizban turning out to be our deus ex machina. (The exact deus ex machina I had suspected for about two years.)

What you should take away from this, is that you should use that character to inspire/torture your PCs for years to come.

[ksbsnowowl]

I have a long-running campaign journal that has a few instances (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=14113.msg251489#msg251489) of a bad guy getting away and coming back to hurt the PC's later.

In one of the later adventures, the PC's completely bungled a mystery-style adventure, and half the party got killed when the BBEG revealed himself. I know exactly where he will show up again later.

There was also a time the PC's all got charmed, and freed a Succubus from an imprisoning binding. She'll show up again sometime, too, though I'm not quite sure where.

"The one that got away" is always a fun toy with which to torture your players. Maybe the BBEG of your current story arc scries the party... they will think it is their most-hated foe, even though there is no evidence of that. It can be great fun for the DM :smallwink:

[atemu1234]

My players actually did this by choice one time, letting an enemy go after destroying his ship (pirate campaign).

[Bad Wolf]

Not my campaign, but....Snickle.

[DrMotives]

I had a minor one-shot villain balloon up to become one of the central elements in my campaign, because of how the PCs reacted to him. Friar Richmond was a priest of what was supposed to be an obscure and insane death god, the Watchman. The Watchman wanted to keep the afterlife as empty of unworthy mortal souls as possible, and so had a goal of making all life undead so it could live in a pacifistic undead utopia, and the Watchman could bugger off and not have to worry about his job for rest of eternity.

Anyway, Friar Richmond's plot was killing villagers and re-animating them as ghouls, so they could propagate themselves. After the PCs stopped him, they made a point of dealing non-lethal damage to take him alive. They put a big deal about trotting him out in front of the surviving villagers and doing a public execution. After he was beheaded (the villagers were orcs, felt that was how they'd do it), they spent a lot of time gloating about it. So felt I had to escalate. I brought him back as a ghost.

The PCs were so scared, it never occurred to them they might have been able to beat him again. They kissed his feet and begged them not to kill them. Suddenly, my one-shot enemy went from recurring enemy to quest giver that the PCs were too frightened to say no to. They didn't have a paladin so there was no fear of falling from Goodness for doing an evil Friar's business, and I could send them on all sorts of missions they didn't like.

Eventually, my players wanted to make evil PCs and the Watchman became the most popular god among my players. The temples offered cheap healing because he didn't want anyone dying where they couldn't become an undead. The Watchman's minor relatively unknown status got him elevated to major god in the campaign. I eventually got sick of him myself, and got rid of him by introducing a neutral death god called Burial that hated undead as cheats against the proper end of things. The Avatar of Burial, an enormous worm made of dirt, swallowed most of the major Watchman temples and destroyed the priesthood, relegating Watchman to a minor obscure god once again. My players were disappointed at this point, but it was years after the initial attempted one-shot deal with Friar Richmond.

[Heliomance]

Lord Kerelak. Ooh, Lord Kerelak.

Lord Kerelak was a minor villain in my first ever campaign. He was a noble in our town, not a very nice man. Into demonic pacts and whatnot. Unfortunately, he was the major political opposition to the campaign BBEG, who was also a noble except he preferred to traffick with devils. If we'd killed Kerelak, then Lord Senbar, the BBEG, would have been unopposed in the city council, and that would have been Bad. So we didn't kill him. We actually saved his life on multiple occasions. Knowing he was evil, knowing we hated him, he was too damn vital to off.

We went through a two- or three-year campaign like that. Kerelak was always number two on our list of priorities to deal with. There was always something more important that we had to do, some reason why we couldn't kill him right now. We knew we would get round to killing him eventually, but it would always have been more trouble than benefit.

Until we got to the very end of the campaign. We'd dealt with Senbar, we'd dealt with the army of hell (long story), we'd dealt with all the more pressing threats. So we turned around to look for Kerelak to finally kill him.

Kerelak wasn't there. He'd run off, we think to the Abyss to work on becoming a demon lord himself, not sure. We never did manage to kill him.


The DM runs a persistant world - all his campaigns affect it. He's since run another campaign where Kerelak has done the exact same thing to another party, always being the second priority. Ooh, we hated him so much.

[WeaselGuy]

So, for about 6 months, we played a world-spanning game where we were trying to stop the dragon highlords from assembling a huge army to overthrow the nation's capitals. We actually had 2 main "villains", although we definitely didn't know it at the time.

Lady Valindra - This medium-high level arcanist was the source of our initial quests. She sent us to investigate weird happenings around the country, and as couriers to various nobles and associates.

Nep - A kobold that we agreed to let live after annihilating his entire tribe, on condition that he basically become an indentured servant to us. We set him up in our manor house as a butler, but at some point during our adventures the little bugger scampered off.

Cue the last few evenings of our campaign. We had failed to stop 2 of the 5 armies from assembling, and were now in the last bastion of hope with a collection of human refugees, a tribe of barbarian warriors, and a coalition of elves and half-elves to help beat back the horde of goblinoids and drakinoids assembled before us.
"Wait, I know, let's message Lady Valindra, and plead for help!" says our cleric.
Her response? "YOLO".
"Oh, let's try Nep, maybe we can get an army of kobolds to help us out!"
"Oh, hi guys! Uh, no, actually, these nice orcs and lizardfolk seem to think I'm their God or something, sorry!"

Turns out Nep was an aspect of Tiamat and Lady Valindra was the Red Dragon (and her butler the corresponding dragon highlord).

The look on our DMs face when he made that reveal...
In our current campaign, the follow up to that one (that we failed, by the way), I am playing a Drow Swift Wing Cleric of Tiamat, and one of Lady Valindra's chief lieutenants, acting as her liason with the party.

[Seto]

Two characters, passing through a tunnel deep inside a mountain, found an Abomination-looking (homebrew) creature trapped at the bottom of a crevice. After a chat with it, they refused to pull it out. That's when a Duergar Monk attacked them and try to push them into the pit.
Our Dwarven Monk pounded the Duergar, and left him alive on the condition that he would make sure no one fell into the pit ever. "If I come back here, and I will, and see humanoid bones next to the creature, you're gonna be its next meal". It was kind of awesome. I'm waiting to see if he goes through with his promise :)

[Telonius]

Grigylus the Falxugon. He had the players tramping halfway across the countryside after him. Each time they almost caught him, they implicated another member of the Royal Family in some sort of misdeed. They were down to two heirs to the throne by the time they caught on to the fact that the 10th-in-line, a cultist of Asmodeus, had been busy framing the rest of his family.

And even after that, he still got away. The last they saw him, he was tied to a rock, being made ready as a sacrifice by the 10th-in-line, to create a direct portal to Baator. They disrupted the ceremony, but they never did actually see the body. Which of course means that he'll be reappearing somewhere around level 18.