D&D: Inside ‘The Book Of Many Things’ Lurk Four Powerful Antagonists
The Book of Many Things is full of, well, many things. Including four new NPCs that can serve as major villains at any tier.
One of the many cards in D&D’s Deck of Many Things is the Rogue card. When drawn, it reads as follows:
A nonplayer character of the DM’s choice becomes hostile toward you. The identity of your new enemy isn’t known until the NPC or someone else reveals it. Nothing less than a wish spell or divine intervention can end the NPC’s hostility toward you.
In essence, an NPC decides that it’s time for you to die. And they’re the ones who are going to make it happen. You get your own personal archnemesis. Now, typically the DM might pick from existing NPCs, but the Book of Many Things provides some spicy new options in their own Rogues’ Gallery.
Book of Many Things – New Antagonists Bring The Pain
The Rogue chapter is all about villains. And it has some interesting options for you to play around with, even though it’s all focused on the idea of an NPC from the Rogue card specifically, the advice is pretty universal. Find a motivation for the NPC, decide what their goal is. WotC has some creative suggestions here: kill the PC and take their place, use the PC as a ritual sacrifice, publicly humiliate the PC to prove their superiority. The list goes on.
And it’s all solid motivations for making an enemy that feels personal and specific to one or more PCs in the party. It’s good stuff. But what’s really fun are some of the four new stat block options; there’s one for each tier of play. So you don’t even have to wait.
There’s the Ambitious Assassin, for Tier 1 (levels 1-4) parties. This is a CR 5 enemy that hits okay. But that comes with built in stealth/escape options. Including a Legendary Action (which may NOT be phased out after all) that allows the Assassin to set off a smoke bomb that deals psychic damage and obscures vision within a 10 foot cube, as well as turning them invisible. So they can then hide and sneak away to fight another day.
At Tier 2 (levels 5-10), we get the Enchanting Infiltrator, a CR 11 enemy supposed to be all about enchanting. But, in reality is just a weird fighter with a poisoned weapon and 156 hit points. They can make two attacks and use an ability called Beguiling Whisper, which stuns a target until the end of their next turn. But after that, the enchantment fades. So. No followup there. It’s just a damage race, and this one is really disappointing for “an archnemesis.”
The Otherworldly Corruptor at Tier 3 (levels 11-16) on the other hand is much more fun. They are a weird far realm/alien influenced enemy that can change shapes, make you unable to speak when it hits you, and so on. And like the Infiltrator and Assassin before it, it has an Escape the fight legendary action. But it’s much more combat focused.
Finally at the mythical Tier 4 (levels 17-20) we get the Veiled Presence. A Celestial enemy who represents Cosmic Wrath. And again, quite fun. This CR 21 enemy slows creatures when it hits them, can reveal its otherworldly nature to enemies to paralyze them, and has a lot of mobility and damage in its Legendary Actions.
All in all, the NPCs aren’t bad starting points for your next villain. Though you’ll probably want to tweak them to make them a little more personal to your party.
The Book of Many Things comes out November 14th, in a digital-only release until the Deck of Many Things manufacturing defects are fixed.
