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The Crystal Realm is home to a class of powerful, monstrous beings known as Fiends. They are the major movers in this world, doing things that players would likely view as evil or antagonistic. I have rough ideas for each one, and in trying to develop them I’ve come up with a guideline on how to write a Fiend.
The Fiend’s home base is in that location for a reason, otherwise it would be somewhere else.
The Fiend has a point of view on the world and how it should be organized. It is up to the player and character whether or not they agree with it.
The Fiend has already gone to work on their local region. They will have allies. Their control is complete in at least one place, and they are currently working on some new areas to conquer.
The Fiend provides some form of stability or benefit to some of the locals. On the other hand, some of the locals would very much like to see the Fiend go away.
A Fiend always has a cult with Acolytes and High Priests, though they may have different titles depending on the Fiend’s flavor and goals. Initiates into the Fiend’s cult don’t see the whole picture at first. The players can be initiated if they choose.
Monsters and followers emanate from the Fiend through the regional encounter table and hex fills. There may also be area effects (crop destruction, storms) or physical structures (idols, towers) associated with a Fiend.
These monsters don’t always want to kill, they have other motivations. They might have multiple standing orders and their own set of ideals and values.
They are good at some things they’ve been ordered to do, and very bad at other things. They might outsource some tasks, which gives them relationship with other factions and other Fiends and their followers.
The followers will get in the way of players trying to do something cool. If there is a place of power that the players need access to, it’s likely that the local Fiend’s followers are there, doing something distracting.
The Crystal Realm rules are based on Wolves Upon the Coast and some parts of Inhuman Violence 2. The reasoning behind this choice is that I like the way those rules make player knowledge isomorphic with character knowledge. Wolves is a game about discovering the game world. In the game of Wolves that I run, information about the world is power. As a result, the players are always hungry for more of it.
My home play group is not made of enfranchised JRPG enjoyers. But I also wish to present what I think is interesting about the source material in the game world, not rely on the genre literacy of my players. There are other games like Fabula Ultima which operate in the “play to find out what happens” story game space. That’s fine but it won’t work for my group!
To return to Fiends, what I find interesting about Final Fantasy “bosses” is how they are set apart from regular fights by making them into a puzzle. WUTC’s supernatural damage is the key here. Some monsters respond differently to damage, taking damage only when a 6 is rolled. I have reformulated this for Fiends. Each Fiend has a custom Harm procedure which describes how it responds to damage:
Monsters with HD marked † shrug off lesser wounds. Use the being’s Harm procedure to manage damage and death.
King Behemoth †
Lich †
Ahriman †
Ahriman, a Fiend, illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano