This post is part of a series of answers to the Reverb Gamers 2012 blogging prompts (full list in PDF format here).

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #16: Who was the most memorable foe you’ve ever come up against in a game? How did you beat him/her/it? Or did you?

To be honest, I don’t remember most of the major foes I’ve come up against in the games of old. I remember Thanatos who owned the good pub in the bad part of town and seemed to be our ally or patron, then tricked us into leaving town just as he was about enact the dark ritual. I remember the slug-hinded alchemist living out in the forest sending leeches all over the country. I remember a giant worm we fought and a wizard who we pretended we’d help, then all killed him in a single round while facing the worm. He was there for the nut inside it, after all, and we needed that!

I have created some memorable foes in my time, my players tell me. Greyman was the first and one of the greatest. He was a grey-skinned man who the PCs knew was bad but had no idea how to tackle him; not after seeing him explode a lizardfolk village with a flick of his wrist (it was actually an explosive nut he had prepared, not a spell, but he scared them well and good).

I remember the scene where he was digging up a grave. The PCs came out and confronted him but he kept digging, looking for one of the many items they were all searching for. They didn’t dare fight him at that point. Greyman was great because he wasn’t lurking in the shadows or sitting in his castle. He was out there and talking to the PCs but they weren’t fighting him directly. It was a lot of fun. In the end the Elemental Legends (the PCs) all were sheathed in giant elementals and fought Greyman’s giant shadows over their hometown. They won in the end of that epic battle.

Oh, then there was the self-proclaimed Salt Lord who caught the PCs in a dead calm and if they showed any disrespect he glared at them and they took damage as he turned their internal waters into salt. He was one hell of a bastard. They got away after a ship came – by this point even the non-religious PCs had resorted to prayer – but I can’t remember how or if they defeated him.

I think, though, that Orson Crake is my favourite foe. I ran two time travel based games for my wife. Orson was a business man and, like Greyman, he was one you couldn’t just kill. He was confident, calm and scary. His had one power but it was a good one; he could move anything through the timestream by touching it. He could touch a door and move it to a point in time where it was unlocked, for example. Mostly, he touched stuff and aged it till it was dust. It worked on people too, and he could heal his own wounds this way and keep himself young. 

Orson convinced my wife’s character to travel to a certain point in time, where she got stuck in a loop as he knew she would. She managed to change the loop a bit and spent the rest of her life there, met a man, built a family and these things continued but the year never changed. She eventually sacrificed herself to save her daughter and in doing so shot through the timestream, bursting through to another dimension.

In that dimension – my main homebrew world – we ran another game with her daughter (who had two sets of memories about growing up). She encountered a younger Orson under a different name and after things went to hell and she managed to finally pull things back and sort things out, he admitted that she was like her mother and mentioned some quality that he implied he admired. For my wife, this was a massive victory. She remembers it still. Breaking a tiny crack in his hard emotionless outer shell. For her, that was how she overcame him and it was sweeter than any death of his would have been.

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