Review: Portrait of a Villain: The Desire

The 57-page PDF is the premiere product from Nevermet Press. It details a single villain to be used as a recurring antagonist in your Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game, but the material can easily be adapted for use with the system of your choice.

The first chapter covers The Desire herself, a "low" woman from the streets who has managed to raise herself up to a position of wealth and power. She now operates a criminal network aimed at taking revenge upon the nobles who once abused her. Although her backstory is a sympathetic one, she is indisputably evil and her statistics present her as a demon.

The next section offers three encounters, designed for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. These can be used as stand-alone encounters, or as pieces of an ongoing campaign featuring The Desire. On their own, these three do not constitute a complete adventure, and this PDF is not presented as an adventure module, so some work by the gamemaster is required.

Organizations of Desire is a chapter devoted to four groups, and a Paragon Path for members of one of those groups. One is the villain's own web of agents, with statted antigonists and their modus operandi; the other three are groups sworn to destroy The Desire, with their reasons for doing so.

Eight new magic items are featured. I particularly like the magical masquerade masks. The concept would seem to limit their use to courtly intrigues at fancy dress balls, and I'd very much like to see someone expand magical masks into a sourcebook in its own right. The most fearsome item, however, is the Hood of Terror. This allows the wearer to dominate opponants, and appears to me made out of a Beholder (the wearer's face appears within the Beholder's mouth). It's sick and wrong on so many levels that it's genius.

In an odd twist, the book ends with a piece of color fiction. I like this, as rather than setting the tone of the book the fiction piece served to sum up a lot of what I'd just read.

For back matter, there's a list of the NPC's that appear throughout the book (with class and level) and a few maps to support the encounters.

 

Overall, this is a good product with material that could easily be ported to other systems. If you're looking for a ready-made villain to drop into your campaign, you could do far worse than The Desire.