Pyramid Review
Villains (for d20)
Published by Bastion Press
Edited by Aaron Rosenberg and Wil Upchurch
Illustrated by Giner Kubic and Todd Morasch
96 full-color pages; $24.95
Sometimes one of the hardest duties a Game Master has it coming up with viable opposition for a player. Of course, there are numerous books chocked full of new monsters to aid GMs in coming up with new and horrible ways to kill players, but most often, it's not some random orc or even some unheard of monster that truly matches the players not only in terms of power but wits. Instead, it's a good old non-player character that's taken a wrong turn somewhere.
d20 fans already have Dramatis Personae: Campaign Ready NPCs that includes good and evil characters, and Wizards of the Coast has released Enemies and Allies, another book chock full of helpful patrons and deadly adversaries. What, then, can Bastion Press add to the pot? Is this a book like the Complete Book of Villains that gave the GM tools to help design long term enemies, or just a monster book with a NPC twist?
It's more of the latter than the former. The book boasts over twenty NPCs with a wide range of challenge ratings. There is no specific information on designing your own villains, but there are crunchy bits that Villains provides the patient reader.
One of the nice things is that the introduction provides the GM with the methodology used to create the characters. In this case, it's a point build with 28 points. A brief section on how to read . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: April 5, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.