Greetings!

In my Thandor Campaign, I tend to use Crazed Alchemists, Mad Scientists, and Diabolical Doctors as a variation from the more commonly encountered depraved and ruthless Wizard, Sorcerer, Necromancer, or Witch.

I usually stock them with weird laboratories, lots of crazy experiments, and horrifying philosophies.

They provide a somewhat different adversary, often protected by layers of wealth, social prestige, and political power and influence.

Do you use such characters in your campaigns, my friends?

What kind of details or powers do you like to provide them?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I mean it strongly depends on the system of choice. If I'm running Shadowrun, those guys are part and parcel of the whole thing. They rarely will have powers themselves since they're just corporate entities, unless one happens to be a magician, in which case, they'll have a good loadout of Manipulation type spells. Really, they're there for fluff purposes only.

When I run Star Wars in FFG, scientists are actually really good at crafting custom equipment and crafting is brokedick as all shit, so when I challenged the players with him, I had all of his equipment be custom ace stuff, and the party was able to lift it off his corpse, with the party crafter just jumping up for joy when she got access to his crafting set-up.

I'm about to start running an ACKS campaign and I'm thinking that yeah, I'm gonna include an alchemist or maybe a whole society of alchemists. Dunno what they'd do yet, I'm still in the "collect as many ideas as I can and see if I can stick 'em in there."

Depends on the game. Although I've had everything from cackling lunatic evil scientists to absent-minded but well-meaning professors (sometimes, lab experiments get away from you).

Given that I self identify as a mad scientist wannabe, I usually don't cast them as villains.   

Since these tend to be learned men of science, they can be very hard to touch or even implicate in their machinations.  I would very much make it more of a mystery with lots of red herrings and other complications as these gentlemen play 4th dimensional chess with the PCs.  Load up on the tropes like secret escape hatches, diplomatic immunity, competent henchmen, my mentor is the bad guy, etc.

Shark's banned?

Quote from: Spinachcat on July 25, 2022, 08:37:15 PM
Shark's banned?

Apparently he posted off-topic at the TTRPG Guide to Woke Companies thread, where he had been thread-banned like two months ago. I had to go back like a dozen pages to find the post where he had been thread-banned. Guy probably didn't even recall, since as far as I know we don't even get a notification for thread-bans here (at least I haven't when I've been thread-banned).

This is the actual ban post...
https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/list-ttrpg-guide-to-woke-companies/msg1223966/#msg1223966

EDIT: Thread ban post...
https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/list-ttrpg-guide-to-woke-companies/msg1215928/#msg1215928