Greetings to all you fellow GM's out there! I just finished around a two-and-a-half year campaign with a group and have started up a new campaign with the same group. I don't normally do this but I thought I would see what kind of ideas I could gather from the community here. Feel free with the imput and ideas if you please. Slight spoilers ahead for "The Gathering Storm" so fairly warned be ye.

At the moment I have a group that consists of a High Elf Swordmaster, a Human Priest of Morr, a rarely attending Dwarf Iron Breaker, and a Human Celestial Wizard. They just finished "The Gathering Storm" and are rank 2. They faired well enough in it and saved the town from drowning but were run out of Stromdorf. Afterwards as they were licking thier wounds a beggar they had met inside the town approached them, and handed them a sealed sheaf of papers with the seal of the witch hunters on it. He told them it was important that they have these papers as "She is after me and wants to kill me! The most important thing you must remember is to…" and his heart exploded out of his chest. Naturally they are outraged at this and want to hunt down the killer.

As for what is in the papers: They contain ten names and locations in the empire each of a cult/conspiracy/enemy of the empire. As it is the "She" reffered to is a powerful follower of Tzeentch and has decided to "weed out" the competition so to speak. So she heard of these up and coming "heroes" and decided to make them her cat's paw by making a puppet out of a beggar they had grown to like to deliver the "message".

Thats the basic synopsis with out getting too detail heavy, feel free to steal for personal use. The plan is the kind of have a "villain of the week" approach where they go to these places try to find the person, figure out the problem, and figure out how to deal with them. And once they finish off the competition, well what do you do with tools that no longer have a purpose?

Anyways I was hoping to get some ideas/input from fellow GM's on ways to spice up the various villians, the plots they may have going on, ect. Also if you want more details on the background of the Npc's that I already have just ask away! Let us plot together to create a masterful evil brew!

Hi,

I too have recently finished a campaign of similar length, based around tzeentchian puppet master conspiracies. If there is one thing I'd suggest for this kind of story, it's to use a selection of recurring npcs that are connected to some of the events you plan to run. This had the effect of allowing the players to deal with the localised adventure (or Villain of the Week), while giving them an awareness of a bigger plot behind the scenes, and a growing list of npcs to suspect. As they found various clues, certain npcs were eliminated as prime suspects, until they had enough information to narrow it down to the master villain! Recurring npcs also gave the players a chance to explore the characters longer term relationships, and we had some great roleplaying opportunies there as a result.

The kind of long term npcs I used were noblemen, merchants (lots of merchants!), guild clerks and performance artists, as well as an assassin, an engineer, and a rogue wizard. I wanted to offer the players a chance to make social investigations within a variety of class settings.

Is there an ulterior motive behind your master villain?

Thanks for the response! Her ulterior motives are multi-faceted;

Thanks to the witch hunters killing her parents but missing her (a burn them all let Sigmar sort them out type) she has an axe to grind against the witch hunters. She hopes that by using a group such as this she can make the witch hunters look like incompetent fools, and hopes to implicate a witch hunter or two in the list she gave them. In addition she wishes to prove to Tzeentch that she is worthy of Deamonhood and by having the heroes kill these other cults/witchhunters by her manipulation she hopes to earn it.