Villainous Competition XXXIII: The Do Over

[3SecondCultist]

Just a note: Cassandra’s round is actually “Higher they Rise, Harder They Fall”.

Also, I had a bunch of ideas for “Power At A Price”. I looked at Verdant Prince for a while (MMV), since it had a unique ability to offer deals for mechanical power but it was something of a fixed optimization point and I couldn’t find much to gel with it.

My favorite concept idea was an Elemental Weird with the Magister Template and tacking on some Artificer levels for item creation feats and Legendary Artisan, then picking up Demonic Essence. Basically the character would making magic items for everyone for a 12.5% XP net income, but with a secret downside of a 10% chance of a cursed item. The fluff I had was that the Earth Weird had visions of an impending disaster (as Weirds are wont to do), and sought to gain and give enough power to stop it, trafficking with demons to make ends meet. Eventually (accidentally) it becomes the Magister, which only accelerates its plans, but once it finds the office of supreme power, it realizes that it enjoys its privileges far too much to step down...

[MisterKaws]

Just a note: Cassandra’s round is actually “Higher they Rise, Harder They Fall”.

Also, I had a bunch of ideas for “Power At A Price”. I looked at Verdant Prince for a while (MMV), since it had a unique ability to offer deals for mechanical power but it was something of a fixed optimization point and I couldn’t find much to gel with it.

My favorite concept idea was an Elemental Weird with the Magister Template and tacking on some Artificer levels for item creation feats and Legendary Artisan, then picking up Demonic Essence. Basically the character would making magic items for everyone for a 12.5% XP net income, but with a secret downside of a 10% chance of a cursed item. The fluff I had was that the Earth Weird had visions of an impending disaster (as Weirds are wont to do), and sought to gain and give enough power to stop it, trafficking with demons to make ends meet. Eventually (accidentally) it becomes the Magister, which only accelerates its plans, but once it finds the office of supreme power, it realizes that it enjoys its privileges far too much to step down...

Hmm... looking at my original table... Yeah, round XI. The entries were revealed pretty late, so let's put some slack on Venger. He'll probably get to fixing it soon.

[Venger]

Well, I guess I'll just delete mine...

Oh, by the way, Tigermonkey is XVII and Sverntir is VIII. Their rounds are pretty hidden.

Hmm... looking at my original table... Yeah, round XI. The entries were revealed pretty late, so let's put some slack on Venger. He'll probably get to fixing it soon.

fixed the entry column in tigermonkey, sverntir, and cassandra.

[Piggy Knowles]

Some thoughts I had that I decided not to go with:

• The Harder They Fall, but remove the no paladins restriction, and run with a white dragonspawn ex-paladin 1/blackguard 10/nar demonbinder 2/abjurant champion 5, with the fluff that the spawn broke free of its master's control to live a noble life before the dragon regained control and forced it to perform a heinous act, precipitating the fall.
• Ultimate Predator, make some sort of fiendish monstrous crab warblade or swordsage and remove the "stealthy" requirement, because That Damn Crab is pretty scary I guess but what if it could use tornado throw or feral deathblow?
• See above, but remove the "no undead" requirement instead, and make some sort of ridiculous predator based off of MM3's drowned.
• Nature's Revenger, removing the heavy armor limitations. Didn't actually have a clear build in mind, but I had a vague idea of something involving a dwarven ancestor that had been tasked to guard a temple hidden in a forest, and when the temple decayed and crumbled, decided its mandate extended to the forest itself.
• The Gadgeteer, remove the "no wands" restriction, and make a gunslinger-style wand user.

[Lionheart]

Since everyone else is sharing their other ideas...
My only other one was for the recent Scaled round, building a Dragon Turtle with the Sea Witch PrC from Stormwrack (removing that restriction). I just thought a giant underwater beast that could create whirlpools that dragged any opponent's directly to the Elemental Plane of Water was a lot of fun. Couldn't make it work to meet the PrC requirements without Loredrake, and as an untrue dragon, that would be iffy at best...

[MisterKaws]

My previous build ideas are related to one of my entries, so I can't post them until judging ends.

Though I did get some nice ideas from one of the entries this round.

[Thurbane]

Wow, quite the array of entries. Congrats to all entrants!

Good luck on the surgery. Hope she ends well.

Thanks - surgery went OK, but she's now in a fair bit of pain recovering.

[MisterKaws]

Thanks - surgery went OK, but she's now in a fair bit of pain recovering.

Post-surgery is always the hardest. I myself had someone in my family who had to spend the entirety of January recovering this year. Let her rest and she'll be okay in a jiffy.

[ben-zayb]

Whoa, that's another impressive array of entries! Really shows what the playground can do when allowed to let loose a bit.

My suggestion for getting a judge to step up. Offer them X vote credits that they can use for voting (or just outright deciding) the theme on upcoming rounds.

I'm a bit miffed that I really had no time for this round, not even enough to brainstorm a concept.

[3SecondCultist]

Whoa, that's another impressive array of entries! Really shows what the playground can do when allowed to let loose a bit.

My suggestion for getting a judge to step up. Offer them X vote credits that they can use for voting (or just outright deciding) the theme on upcoming rounds.

Well speaking as one of the entrants: thanks!

I think that is a good idea. Incentivizing judging is always good, and that is a solid idea for an incentive for the judge. Giving them full control over the next round should be okay, given that their idea is not universally disliked by the future contest entrants.

[MisterKaws]

Well speaking as one of the entrants: thanks!

I think that is a good idea. Incentivizing judging is always good, and that is a solid idea for an incentive for the judge. Giving them full control over the next round should be okay, given that their idea is not universally disliked by the future contest entrants.

The chairman could let them vote among themselves between a number of the choice themes he currently prepared.

I doubt anyone would come forward to judge this mess without some incentive. We went a bit overboard this time.

[GrayDeath]

Some really weird, and all really nice, well done!


Sadly it was (and from tomorrow onward will be again) fracking hot over here, so I couldnt for the life of it do anything requiring mental faculties above simple typing the alst few days.

Seeing as the present VoP Exemple outdid my VoP Idea, and my other Idea was too complicated (aiming to combine Psionic Overlord anhd leader of Armies via some shenannigans) thats not too bad. Still, sigh.


As for judging....I might be wiloing to do that, but at the earliest when it gets less tropical over here (seems wednesday at the earliest) and given the massive amount of detail it will take a long while.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I'll need to put aside a good chunk of time to read all those neat-looking villains. I submitted an entry, which I'm pretty sure means I can't judge, but I'll still offer my thoughts on them. Eventually. Once I get back from camping, maybe.

It might not be so bad, since limit for posts is 2x pms.

Really? I thought they were both limited to 10k characters. So glad I was wrong...

I think it'd be about equal to judging 20-ish characters at most. It's not THAT hard. Just hard.

I'd expect it to be more grueling or tedious than hard in the typical sense.

Spoiler: Others' Non-Entries

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Weirdly, neither Do Over nor One Feat actually have an alignment restriction, so the goal here was to go the Exalted route...

I'm not sure feat stacking should work like that, but I like it.

My second entry was going to be based on Panacea from Worm, only instead of [spoilers redacted] she would go completely downhill, get infected with a shred of essentia, turn into a misery Lost, and go into Necrocarnate.

Until you started talking about essentia and Necrocarnates, that sounds a lot like Panacea.
...Okay, that just leaves "go completely downhill," but still.

I was really happy with the fluff (more in depth than what I've listed here, naturally), but it wasn't doing anything particularly interesting mechanically (probably Cleric 3/ Incarnate 2/ Sapphire Hierarch 6/ Lost template +1 CR/ Incarnate +2/ Necrocarnate 9) and wasn't very threatening to the players (even for the Minion competition), so at the end of it all I couldn't summon the effort to turn it into an entry.

Any chance you could share the fluff?

My favorite concept idea was an Elemental Weird with the Magister Template and tacking on some Artificer levels for item creation feats and Legendary Artisan, then picking up Demonic Essence. Basically the character would making magic items for everyone for a 12.5% XP net income, but with a secret downside of a 10% chance of a cursed item. The fluff I had was that the Earth Weird had visions of an impending disaster (as Weirds are wont to do), and sought to gain and give enough power to stop it, trafficking with demons to make ends meet. Eventually (accidentally) it becomes the Magister, which only accelerates its plans, but once it finds the office of supreme power, it realizes that it enjoys its privileges far too much to step down...

Note to self: Look into all of those things. Well, I already know about the Weird, but aside from that...

I had two ideas that I didn't go through with.

The first was for the Swallow Whole round. There's a wu jen spell (giant size, I think?) that makes you ludicrously big, so I decided I'd find a creature too puny to use Swallow Whole on anything bigger than a rat, give them a bunch of wu jen levels, and go to town. But...problems.
First, the only way I could find was a dragonwrought kobold getting dragon-specific feats; for most reason, most things that give Swallow Whole are size-restricted. Small problem, but it adds up. Second, the spell only lasts one minute, and I couldn't find any good metamagic tricks to persist it. The best I found was using incantrix and getting a ludicrous Spellcraft check. Third, I realized that wu jen make terrible gishes.
If I just had one or two of these problems, fine. I could cheese or ignore that. But all together...meh. Which is a shame, since I had a decent lore idea for it: The kobolds of the Famis Peaks were driven into fewer and fewer caverns as the best were claimed for gnomish towns and farms. As dozens of tribes packed themselves into such a small space, starvation wracked the kobolds. Finally, one champion, gifted with power by dragon blood and spirit pacts, rose to devour those who drove her to hunger...

The second was for the Make a Deal round. There's this devil in the BoVD with liquid pain at will, and its CR is just low enough that it can pick up a bunch of warlock levels and get that ability that lets them make magic items with a UMD check.
I focused on its plan. The devil was chucked out of Hell, and wanted to not only get back but rule Hell. So it started cutting deals with basically everyone. First a deal with some demon lord for infernal power (it didn't want to bother studying artificering when it could just make a pact), then deals with local addicts and drug lords (most importantly, "Let me extract some liquid pain and I'll let you keep half" and/or "I'll pay you to let me extract liquid pain"). This let him claw his way into kingpin territory, at which point he helped a pain-addicted hero start a great big Adventuring Guild or Hero Association or something. Add some more twists and turns, and the devil has fingers in every pie.
Endgame: Gather an absolutely ludicrous stockpile of liquid pain, which can be used to replace XP costs when creating magic items. Combining that with the wealth he gathered as a kingpin and plenty of spare time lets the devil craft a number of artifact-level magic items, from mind-influencing circlets (both to keep his army loyal and disrupt the enemy armies) to a gate-opening sword (for both logistics and the initial invasion). Once he has all he needs, he'd gather a great army for a crusade into the Hells, composed of everything from mighty paladins and wizards to common cutthroats and addicts. Possibly also demons or knights/soldiers from kings who owe him favors.
Anyways, this army (kept loyal and coherent with the magic items) would march through the gates and promptly start attacking Asmodeus's palace. This would be Bad, because...well, I was a bit fuzzy on this. Asmodeus's vengeance? Some cosmic balance that only Good ever cares about? Just the tragedy of countless innocents facing death at the swords of Hell? Another problem was that I couldn't think of any interesting mechanical hook; it would just be a mid-level warlock with some fiendish abilities. Finally, I only thought of it a few days before the cutoff, meaning I couldn't properly develop the fluff or the crunch to a level I was happy with.

[MisterKaws]

Wu-Jen/Jade Phoenix mage is pretty good for deleting any number of foes via Body Outside Body, but it's too much investment to get any more classes and too overused to get an Originality above 3. So that's that.

[Venger]

Really? I thought they were both limited to 10k characters. So glad I was wrong...

PM limit is 25k, post limit is 50k

[3SecondCultist]

I had two ideas that I didn't go through with.

The first was for the Swallow Whole round. There's a wu jen spell (giant size, I think?) that makes you ludicrously big, so I decided I'd find a creature too puny to use Swallow Whole on anything bigger than a rat, give them a bunch of wu jen levels, and go to town. But...problems.
First, the only way I could find was a dragonwrought kobold getting dragon-specific feats; for most reason, most things that give Swallow Whole are size-restricted. Small problem, but it adds up. Second, the spell only lasts one minute, and I couldn't find any good metamagic tricks to persist it. The best I found was using incantrix and getting a ludicrous Spellcraft check. Third, I realized that wu jen make terrible gishes.
If I just had one or two of these problems, fine. I could cheese or ignore that. But all together...meh. Which is a shame, since I had a decent lore idea for it: The kobolds of the Famis Peaks were driven into fewer and fewer caverns as the best were claimed for gnomish towns and farms. As dozens of tribes packed themselves into such a small space, starvation wracked the kobolds. Finally, one champion, gifted with power by dragon blood and spirit pacts, rose to devour those who drove her to hunger...

The second was for the Make a Deal round. There's this devil in the BoVD with liquid pain at will, and its CR is just low enough that it can pick up a bunch of warlock levels and get that ability that lets them make magic items with a UMD check.
I focused on its plan. The devil was chucked out of Hell, and wanted to not only get back but rule Hell. So it started cutting deals with basically everyone. First a deal with some demon lord for infernal power (it didn't want to bother studying artificering when it could just make a pact), then deals with local addicts and drug lords (most importantly, "Let me extract some liquid pain and I'll let you keep half" and/or "I'll pay you to let me extract liquid pain"). This let him claw his way into kingpin territory, at which point he helped a pain-addicted hero start a great big Adventuring Guild or Hero Association or something. Add some more twists and turns, and the devil has fingers in every pie.
Endgame: Gather an absolutely ludicrous stockpile of liquid pain, which can be used to replace XP costs when creating magic items. Combining that with the wealth he gathered as a kingpin and plenty of spare time lets the devil craft a number of artifact-level magic items, from mind-influencing circlets (both to keep his army loyal and disrupt the enemy armies) to a gate-opening sword (for both logistics and the initial invasion). Once he has all he needs, he'd gather a great army for a crusade into the Hells, composed of everything from mighty paladins and wizards to common cutthroats and addicts. Possibly also demons or knights/soldiers from kings who owe him favors.
Anyways, this army (kept loyal and coherent with the magic items) would march through the gates and promptly start attacking Asmodeus's palace. This would be Bad, because...well, I was a bit fuzzy on this. Asmodeus's vengeance? Some cosmic balance that only Good ever cares about? Just the tragedy of countless innocents facing death at the swords of Hell? Another problem was that I couldn't think of any interesting mechanical hook; it would just be a mid-level warlock with some fiendish abilities. Finally, I only thought of it a few days before the cutoff, meaning I couldn't properly develop the fluff or the crunch to a level I was happy with.

That sounds a lot like the build I ended up doing for that round! The fluff and base monster were wildly different, but check out my entry for Antharyx, Emperor of Esmel in the round. I opted out of using Wu Jen in favor of dipping Wyrm Wizard, because it fit my build a lot better in terms of both crunch and fluff. I used Spelldancer to persist both giant size and bite of the werebear for free, which is admittedly equally as cheesy as Incantatrix. There were two major problems with my build's legality though: first and foremost is that Wizards possibly nerfed Banelars in the 3.5 errata to Monsters of Faerun (it's not 100% clear in the text, but I think it's possible that the wizard casting progression was removed outright, which would make the monster completely illegal) so I used the 3.0 version. The second problem I ran into (an actual oversight on my part) was that Antharyx never qualified for the Gape of the Serpent feat.

As far as the second build goes, I actually had something very similar in the works, but revealing it now would pretty much give away my entry. Suffice it to say that I consulted with the chair and was discouraged from trying the build because it could very well fall under 'alternate item crafting' rules and might be judged as not qualifying for the contest at all.

[jdizzlean]

Spoiler: Placement Table

Show

Entry Number	Build Name	Stub	What round is it?	Judge 1 scores	Judge 2 scores	Total Score	Ranking	Chef
1	Ialeah, Breath of Tiamat	Half-Black Dragon Multipleheaded (Pyro) Cryohydra of Legend	multiple personality disorder/ many-headed/ burn baby burn/ master of the tundra/ swallow whole
2	Atriox	CE Large Giant (shapeshifter) Legendary Lycanthrope Half Ogre Warlock 1/ Legendary Wolf 30HD/ Warshaper 3/ Warlock +5/ Hellfire Warlock 3/ Warlock +2	oh hell no!
3	Victoria Tavius, the Iron Immortal	Half-Iron-Golem Grey Elf Artificer 17	it's alive!
4	The Tigermonkey	Beast of Xvim Gambol Scout 2, Swordsage 7, Bloodclaw Master 5	it's alive!
5	Liliet, the First Feline	Neutral Evil Spellwarped Tibbit Psion (Telepath) 9 / Thrallherd 9	psionic overlord
6	Cassandra	NG -> NE Vecna-Blooded Half-Elf, Bardic Sage 4/Seer 3/Cerebremancer 3/Sublime Chord 2/Cerebremancer +7	higher they rise, harder they fall
7	Rhiannon, Queen of Magpies	half-fey sylph malconvoker 9/master of masks 2	power comes at a price
8	Snow White and the Ten Fleshrakers	CE human Bard 1/Human Paragon 2/Bard +17	one feat to rule them all
9	Pudding and Cuddles	Hivenest(Leech Swarm) Advanced Octopus Tree + Wood Element Spellwarped Half-Dragon(Black) Anarchic Arcane Ooze(Symbiotic)	it's alive!
10	Omega	beholder beholder mage 7	one feat to rule them all
11	Pestilence the Leanan	Pestilence the Leanan Sidhe/Binder 2/Fighter 2/Cancer Mage 10/Windrider 7 |War the Advanced Corrupted Walking Wall Mineral Warrior/Fighter 1/Ashworm Dragoon 10 |ghoulish ravenous abeil queen contemplative 1/oozemaster 5 | bodak creature rakshasa	the horsemen are drawing nearer
12	Sverntir and the Heralds of Winter	Lightkeeper White Wyrm Sorcerer 1	master of the tundra

2 INTERNETS COOKIES AWARDED TO VENGER!!!

Special Entry	Round	Judge 1	Final Score
Fred	XXVIII

My suggestion for getting a judge to step up. Offer them X vote credits that they can use for voting (or just outright deciding) the theme on upcoming rounds.

It's been a standing thing in my run as VC chair that judges get to submit a round idea to me for future use.

Gray, and any other potential judge this round can either select from the 2 themes i have ready to go and ADD a limitation of their own to it, or give me another idea that isn't on my list of upcoming themes to build for not the next round, but the one after.

[GrayDeath]

Sound sinteresting.

Again,a s soon as its below 30 degrees most of the time over here, I will get to it. Not before.

I hate the heat (and so does my PC ^^).

[MisterKaws]

It's been a standing thing in my run as VC chair that judges get to submit a round idea to me for future use.

Gray, and any other potential judge this round can either select from the 2 themes i have ready to go and ADD a limitation of their own to it, or give me another idea that isn't on my list of upcoming themes to build for not the next round, but the one after.

Oh! Didn't see Gray volunteered to judge. Good luck on this one, hope it's not too painful.

Edit:

Sound sinteresting.

Again,a s soon as its below 30 degrees most of the time over here, I will get to it. Not before.

I hate the heat (and so does my PC ^^).

Ninja'd by the man himself.

[jdizzlean]

my other idea was to use the Pyro feat a whole lot of times to make it impossible to put the flames out.

the bad things being that fire resistance/immunity is a pretty common thing, and that energy substitution would be great, but not work in the one feat to rule them all round. that, and i just recently did a pyromancer build, so it'd have to have been a sorc probably, but that's as far as that line of thought took me.

[MisterKaws]

my other idea was to use the Pyro feat a whole lot of times to make it impossible to put the flames out.

the bad things being that fire resistance/immunity is a pretty common thing, and that energy substitution would be great, but not work in the one feat to rule them all round. that, and i just recently did a pyromancer build, so it'd have to have been a sorc probably, but that's as far as that line of thought took me.

You could cut the "one feat only" rule, y'know?

[GreatWyrmGold]

That sounds a lot like the build I ended up doing for that round! The fluff and base monster were wildly different, but check out my entry for Antharyx, Emperor of Esmel in the round. I opted out of using Wu Jen in favor of dipping Wyrm Wizard, because it fit my build a lot better in terms of both crunch and fluff. I used Spelldancer to persist both giant size and bite of the werebear for free, which is admittedly equally as cheesy as Incantatrix. There were two major problems with my build's legality though: first and foremost is that Wizards possibly nerfed Banelars in the 3.5 errata to Monsters of Faerun (it's not 100% clear in the text, but I think it's possible that the wizard casting progression was removed outright, which would make the monster completely illegal) so I used the 3.0 version. The second problem I ran into (an actual oversight on my part) was that Antharyx never qualified for the Gape of the Serpent feat.

Pretty neat, though giant size seems almost unneeded on something the size of an elephant. I'm not sure using the Spelldancer class to enhance buff spells is all that cheesy, since that seems to be all it's good for (unless there's some trick I'm unaware of that makes spending several rounds on a single metamagic spell anything but a waste of actions). The banelar is broken for the opposite reason; it's pretty much the best gish, because it doesn't need to choose between attacking and spelling.

You could cut the "one feat only" rule, y'know?

Someone already did that.

[MisterKaws]

Someone already did that.

One of them removed the power score and the other removed the pre-requisites. None removed the main limitation.

[AvatarVecna]

Oh speaking of "builds for previous contests that got scrapped", during the feat round I found a really cool feat that would've been fun to stack up a bunch of times that would've been pointless in that competition. The feat is "Ceremonial Empowerment" from Faiths Of Eberron, and gives a +1 to CL "on any day devoted to your god". The idea of stacking it up a whole bunch of times seemed really cool as a villain idea - bake the "religious extremist" flavor right into the mechanics, while also giving a reason why the villain can't just pull off their evil plan whenever they want, and gives the players the opportunity to (once they figure out her gimmick) try to ambush her plan before the last minute so she doesn't have super-powerful spells. This would've been fantastic for the spirit of the competition, showing off a feat that can be self-stacked for wonderful effect to create a memorable and powerful villain...

...and it was ruined because you could replace any feat you weren't allowed to take with a CL bonus by default. Turning feat slots into a CL bonus that only triggers every couple weeks or so that pidgeonholed the build into being a cleric was just that much more limiting than "you can turn feat slots into a flat CL bonus for whatever, permanently".

[remetagross]

Oh speaking of "builds for previous contests that got scrapped", during the feat round I found a really cool feat that would've been fun to stack up a bunch of times that would've been pointless in that competition. The feat is "Ceremonial Empowerment" from Faiths Of Eberron, and gives a +1 to CL "on any day devoted to your god". The idea of stacking it up a whole bunch of times seemed really cool as a villain idea - bake the "religious extremist" flavor right into the mechanics, while also giving a reason why the villain can't just pull off their evil plan whenever they want, and gives the players the opportunity to (once they figure out her gimmick) try to ambush her plan before the last minute so she doesn't have super-powerful spells. This would've been fantastic for the spirit of the competition, showing off a feat that can be self-stacked for wonderful effect to create a memorable and powerful villain...

...and it was ruined because you could replace any feat you weren't allowed to take with a CL bonus by default. Turning feat slots into a CL bonus that only triggers every couple weeks or so that pidgeonholed the build into being a cleric was just that much more limiting than "you can turn feat slots into a flat CL bonus for whatever, permanently".

Too bad! That'd have been a really cool idea

[GreatWyrmGold]

One of them removed the power score and the other removed the pre-requisites. None removed the main limitation.

I could have sworn one did that...in my defense, I skimmed them days ago.

[3SecondCultist]

Pretty neat, though giant size seems almost unneeded on something the size of an elephant. I'm not sure using the Spelldancer class to enhance buff spells is all that cheesy, since that seems to be all it's good for (unless there's some trick I'm unaware of that makes spending several rounds on a single metamagic spell anything but a waste of actions). The banelar is broken for the opposite reason; it's pretty much the best gish, because it doesn't need to choose between attacking and spelling.

True enough, but I wanted a build that could swallow anything in the game (including Colossal creatures) without just making a dragon. It is a shame that the build didn’t work though. In my mind, anything that can effectively give out free Persistent Spell buffs is cheesy by default. Antharyx is maybe two medium steps away from Team Solar levels of cheese. And yes, banelars are ridiculous; anything that gets 1/round free action casting is absolutely ridiculous, but it fit so well with what I wanted and I figured it was a unique looking monster, so I went for it.

[MisterKaws]

True enough, but I wanted a build that could swallow anything in the game (including Colossal creatures) without just making a dragon. It is a shame that the build didn’t work though. In my mind, anything that can effectively give out free Persistent Spell buffs is cheesy by default. Antharyx is maybe two medium steps away from Team Solar levels of cheese. And yes, banelars are ridiculous; anything that gets 1/round free action casting is absolutely ridiculous, but it fit so well with what I wanted and I figured it was a unique looking monster, so I went for it.

Oh, beautiful Serpent Kingdoms. Is there a single thing that isn't broken in that book?

[3SecondCultist]

Oh, beautiful Serpent Kingdoms. Is there a single thing that isn't broken in that book?

For what it’s worth, I used the Monsters of Faerun version rather than the Serpent Kingdoms one (which is 3 full CR higher). I did not realize that the latter existed at all at the time.

[jdizzlean]

Victoria Tavius's author wanted this posted as for a "i didn't build this" part of the discussion

Spoiler

Show

Victoria was originally going to be a wizard (specifically, a transmuter with necromancy and probably evocation as banned schools, to heighten the contrast with Zama), until I remembered that artificers were a thing which fit better thematically and decided to go whole hog on that. As a wizard, she also had a silver dragon wyrmling as a familiar who stuck by her side even after Zama took control...and then left after she took control of Zama, replaced by a red dragon familiar. It was supposed to be symbolic of her face-heel turn, but it cluttered up the build too much once I switched to the more obvious class choice.