Nemesis for the Players

[Einkil]

Well, i'm making alist of¨Posible Nemesis or rivals for a adventurer group of 4-6 people, basically, there is a rogue and a druid and a fighter, and the others can be randmo by circunstance.

The party is mor eneutral than good or evil, so i have a good panoramic to choose, any idea?

Ihave:
-Paladin
-Barguest

Somthing else
(the party is level 3)

[FoE]

This should probably go in the Gaming threads. This is more the forum for relationship woes, invitations to group meets and my overwhelming personal problems.

On that note … I NEED A HUG!!!

(Face of Evil starts crying, rocks back and forth while sucking thumb)

[I'm da Rogue!]

*hugs Face of Evil and with a gentle voice says*
Shush, shush, don't cry, it'll pass.

[Raolin_Fenix]

Neutral parties are tricky to manage a Nemesis for. Your average Nemesis, after all, tends to Exemplify something -- a crusading paladin out to kill you for your crimes, or a meglomaniacal wizard out to Take Over the World, who Must Be Stopped for the Good Of Us All.

For a neutral party, though, you'll need something a little more subtle. Actually, usually Neutral works well against Neutral. If they're neutral, most likely they've got a sort of mercenary outlook on life. So give them a really nasty rival. Give them Indiana Jones's Rene Belloq, someone to steal the treasure out from under them after they do all the work for it. Or give them Professor Farnsworth's Wyrnstrom, someone who always manages to one-up them in discussions.

Have that rival beat them a few times in whatever competition they have, be it the treasure or the talk or the prestige or whatever. But have the rival gain power more slowly than the PCs, so that eventually, the PCs beat the rival two or three times in a row.

From there, you can choose the alignment of the direction of the entire campaign, based on the way most of the PCs have been leaning.

If the campaign is Evil, have the rival turn from his mercenary life and become a cop, whose entire career is bent on taking out those wretched adventurers who finally topped him. With the rest of the guard behind him, the PCs are outmatched, and forced to seek help throughout the criminal underworld, which soon has them going out on assassinations and thefts to "prove themselves" through initiation. Eventually, the PCs might win the support of the criminal underground or enlist some unscrupulous allies, and end up Taking Over the World themselves.

If the campaign is Neutral, do something similar: have the rival become a cop, but show that he makes sort of a bumbling cop. The law's still on his side, but the PCs can get by him on his own. Take it in a sort of Blue's Brothers direction.

And if the campaign is Good... well. The possibilities are limitless. Furious and humiliated by the PCs, the rival turns to darker powers to give him the strength he feels he needs to overcome them. Give him a wild thirst for power and a total overestimation of the PCs' abilities -- so once he gains a lot of power, he wants a lot more, especially when the PCs somehow still manage to thwart him through good luck and sneakiness. The rival seeks out more and more power, to the point where he wants to Take Over the World just to make sure the damned PCs don't manage to trump him again.

[Backpack]

I've always been a fan of a nemesis that uses the PCs, sets them up as the bad guys to the general populace and then walks away with the treasure. Bards typically work well for this sort of thing. It makes it a perfect way to hook in the PCs and no matter the alignment, no one wants to be hunted by every major law enforcement agency for things that they never did.

[slexlollar89]

a neutral beguiler and warlock pair: the beguiler is a pain to catch, and the warlock could really freak them out with the darkness and the blasty from 250ft away... mwa ha ha ha!

[Hallavast]

Can you give us a little more info on what kind of setting you're using, what the players' goals are, and other things of that nature?