#RPGaDay2024 for 22 August: Notable non-player character

Today's prompt: Notable non-player character

One of the few features of 3e D&D I really like is giving monsters character levels, a quick and simple way of making any monster unique, or at least different from its peers. I mentioned this on a forum twenty-odd years ago - probably EN World or the pre-Gleemax Whizbros forum - adding that this was somethig I'd liked about 1e AD&D as well. Demihumans, liches, lycanthropes, and vampires as described in the 1e Monster Manual may include character levels along with their given abilities. As a referee, I took full advantage of this to create interesting encounters with which to challenge and bedevil my players.

Enter Vlad Tolenkov. Appearing in Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits as one of Lolth's allies, Vlad occupies a castle in The Nightworld, a sunless realm located in an alternative part of the Prime Material Plane imediately beyond a portal from the Demonweb. In addition to his powers, Vlad is also a 15th level magic-user, with all that entails.

I first started refereeing toward the very tail end of 1977, using our kit-bashed 'edition' of D&D - the Holmes blue box, the 1e Monster Manual, Blackmoor, and The Arduin Grimoire - so right from the giddyup I'd used AD&D monsters with character levels, but seeeing a vampire magic-user in an official module almost three years later was still pretty cool to teenage me.

This whole concept of monsters who were once human, or human-adjacent, touches on the notion that the most dangerous and terrifying creatures lurking in the dark places of our imaginations are funhouse mirror images of ourselves - the horror of Jordan Peele's Us, for example, leans in hard on this. I suppose Nietzsche's, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you," applies here as well. Monsters who were once human, or are similar to humans in outlook, increase the range of motivations available in presenting the challenge - they can even imply a familiarity.