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MonkeySage
2015-11-02, 12:22 PM
I'm working on a new character, a villain named Aazimal. Ever since the time of the fall, she has been a "loyal" servant of the Lords of Hell. She's a fallen angel, an erinyes. She's also a sorceress and a brilliant engineer(by mortal standards, she's a supergenius).

For the past couple centuries, she's been working behind the scenes in the Material Plane, in some cases singlehandedly creating Kingdoms from the dust. And all to serve her own purposes. Her true goals involve usurping the lords she's served so loyally for so long, and for this she needs souls...

I haven't really got her personality worked out though, and by extension her spell choice.

If this really needs to be known, she's a pathfinder character...

Flickerdart
2015-11-02, 12:26 PM
So what, exactly, is your question?

MonkeySage
2015-11-02, 12:31 PM
Well, I'm kind of looking for suggestions, thoughts, etc. Especially regarding personality. I've got vague ideas but overall sort of drawing blanks.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-11-02, 02:20 PM
She's obviously very patient, plotting over such a long time, and has meticulous attention to detail if she hasn't gotten caught yet. If this takeover of hers is to have an effect on the world her policies would probably be different than her masters'. She doesn't just want to sit on the throne, she wants to get some **** done. She's probably either even more evil than they are, extremely ruthless and calculating, optimizing suffering for all, or she's actually the preferable choice, she disagrees with some of what's currently going on and genuinely would change some things, if she could get these thousands of souls (or millions, or billions) and take control first. Being such an intelligent, evil and scheming person she could of course easily pretend to be one of these options and be the other. She probably plans on getting the souls in a single big blow, as to not alert the current lords to her plans too soon, so the PC's are not getting a redo if they judge her wrong. Either way, she probably has some particular likes and dislikes she does not necessarily share with all other evil outsiders. Maybe she likes paladins, because they're so easy to manipulate. Maybe she particularly enjoys torture, dislikes it as inefficient or approaches it in a very calculated manner, as a means to an end.

All in all, I'm coming up on too many maybe's here. My advice would be: start making choices. Just start at the basics, and from there fill in one blank in her personality at a time. Fill in one or two personality aspects that define her, that she's really good at and proud of. Then get five more that she can use, or that others might like about her. Finally fill in one big thing she would see as a flaw, and maybe two minor ones other people could dislike or exploit. From there on, see if the particulars start writing themselves. Don't like it? Start over.

Seto
2015-11-02, 02:28 PM
If she's a fallen Angel, she is probably (or at least was originally) a "the ends justify the means, fight fire with fire" kind of Angel. This could be one of her motivations : become a powerful Devil overlord and use her power to fight demons and crush Chaos by whatever means necessary. This fits in nicely with Lvl2 Expert's point on making things change. It also helps define part of her personality.

Segev
2015-11-02, 02:41 PM
Make her the consummate majordomo. The skilled bureaucrat who actually greases wheels, rather than strangling things in red tape. She is the administrative assistant that EVERYBODY loves, because she makes things run seamlessly and knows all the right people in all the right places. If she ever DOES want something stopped, the red tape seems to collapse into a tightly woven web all on its own. But it's not her MO; it's something she reserves as an emergency measure.

She's been founding, raising, and maintaining kingdoms for centuries, so she's patient and she's meticulous. As a LE fiend, she likely makes them have a lovely veneer of a Golden Age, with even the meanest peasant having a life that is clearly improved over the lot of peasants outside it...though with fewer, perhaps, freedoms and with more oppressed terror at what happens if he steps out of line. Corruption is rife, though only in the "take advantage of the law" sense, not the "quietly break the law" sense. But decadence and wealth await the ruthless. And all the while, her most common persona is a long-suffering facilitatrix, butler, and maid who tolerates it all but finds it just a little bit distasteful. Especially when it makes a bigger mess.

She's actually motivated in no small part by a frustration with the decadence and wastefulness of her overlords in Hell. She is, perhaps, a little more Lawful than Evil on the surface, taking far less pleasure in the cruelties and vices of her work than her lords and masters. Nonetheless, they DO appreciate her, because she's efficient and makes their realms efficient when she's "home" to help with them. In truth, she's more dedicated to Evil as an ideal than as a means or indulgence; Law is her means to bring it about more efficiently.

To that end, she's been sending the souls of her most promising bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians to Hell for centuries; they were honed in the fires of controversy in her kingdoms, and now they're enriching her fiendish overmasters as fresh souls AND as skilled functionaries she's trained in her highly efficient ways and means.

What she's also done, however, is ensured that their contracts give them an "out" from the control of the fiendish overmasters...but that her training came with a price of loyalty to HER. And they're slowly filling every important middle-management and administrative role in the hierarchies of Hell to which she is beholden. Her coup is only likely to be overt if and when her master calls her on something...and she reveals that he's been a figurehead for quite some time.

When she takes over, the efficiency of her domain will skyrocket. The petty cruelties and decadant vices will become more subdued, and yet the overall suffering and torment will become greater in direct proportion to how impersonal it is. She is more terrible than the master(s) she supplant(s), but more approachable and less terrifying unless you recognize the danger hiding behind the bland cover of the manila folder.

Angel Bob
2015-11-02, 05:30 PM
Let's see, how does the summoning ritual go, again? Red Fel... Red Fel... Red Fel...