Last month, I covered thematic bosses and how they can support the style, theme, and tone of your adventure. This month, I’m moving on to those people/creatures that work for the boss. In this case, I’m shifting a bit away from directly supporting your adventure’s concepts to supporting your boss. There a multitude of ways to approach this, but it comes down to two large categories: direct allies and unwilling support.
Mooks Are Important
Having a group of people in your boss’s organization are vital. The boss can’t do everything all on their own. Even in adventures where there is a “monolithic boss,” the boss has supporting characters, creatures, and people that make life a little more miserable for the PCs. I’m primarily thinking of the original Ravenloft adventure for AD&D. Strahd is the main boss of the whole adventure. That’s very clear in the presentation, writing, cover art, and all supporting material. The goal is to take down the vampire.
However, between the PCs stumbling through the fog-shrouded area and being trapped there and facing down Strahd (presumably in the castle), there are many creatures in the way. Roaming wolves, charmed people, banshees, ghosts, zombies, traps, twists, and turns are all between the PCs and their goal of freeing the region from Strahd.
Each of these mooks vary in power, intelligence, and support for Strahd, but they’re all there within his domain. They are there to demonstrate (sometimes actively, sometimes passively) the power the vampire has over the region.
Different Kinds of Mooks
While I listed some of the different creature types the PCs encounter in Ravenloft, this is not what I mean by “different.” My focus here is to show you that there are different power levels, ranks, and importance of mooks to your boss and the adventure’s story setup.
If your boss is the “captain” of the story, then directly under them will be a few “lieutenants.” In turn, each lieutenant will have what I label “sergeant” rank mooks that carry out the orders from the lieutenants. Below the sergeants are the “privates” who are the front-line opponents to the PCs goals. Obviously, you don’t have to have a military organization in front of the PCs, but these labels help categorize and organize the mooks into different groups and different power levels.
The lieutenants, being closer to the boss will be likely be tightly aligned with the boss and the boss’s desires and goals. They will actively, willingly, and enthusiastically carry forth the boss’s orders.
The sergeants, being a step removed, will do what the lieutenants order, but with the classic “telephone game,” there is a chance that the orders filtering through the lieutenants to the sergeants will become muddled, indistinct, or inaccurate for what the boss wants. This will show the cracks in the boss’s infrastructure, and these cracks are where the PCs can infiltrate and break open the boss’s defenses and organization.
Lastly, the privates are there to do what they’re told. They might not even know who the boss is or be aware that they’re working for the boss. This is where non-combat approaches for removing privates can come into play. Things like bribery, threats, reasoning, blackmail, or negotiation can come into play to get a private to simply walk (or run) away from their assigned duties. If a group of PCs is especially inventive, they might even be able to convert some privates away from the boss’s organization and into neutrality or joining the PCs forces.
If you think converting the enemy to be an ally is a stretch, go back and watch Star Wars IV: A New Hope. At the start of the movie, Luke Skywalker’s main desire was to join the imperial academy to become a fighter pilot. Yeah. Luke wanted to join the empire and fly Tie Fighters. Instead, the Stormtroopers slaughtered his aunt and uncle, which teamed him up with Obi-Wan Kenobi. This put them on a path for Luke to destroy the empire’s greatest weapon by the end of the movie.
Support Your Boss’s Theme
The higher ranked your mooks are, the more they should support your boss’s theme and style. In an adventure I’m running right now, the PCs are working their way through an abandoned keep in a bog. The keep has been taken over by a troll known as the Bog Queen. She has magic at her disposal that she uses to warp and control faeries from the nearby forest (more on that in a bit). However, her main allies and supporters are other trolls from the area that have moved into the keep to live with her. These trolls are absolutely loyal to the Bog Queen. There will be no turning the trolls from their queen.
Oppose Your Boss’s Theme
Now to talk about the warped faeries the Bog Queen has captured and altered with her magic. These faeries are unwilling supporters of the Bog Queen, but they’ve been controlled with her mind magic and warped physically by her body magic. The PCs have yet to find a way to break the faeries free of her control, so they have to battle their way through ranks of “privates” and “sergeants” as they explore the keep in the bog. Of course, there are a smattering of trolls (the lieutenants) here and there ensuring the warped faeries are doing their jobs properly.
In the case of this adventure, the warped faeries are nothing like the Bog Queen and her trolls. Their presence and theme and style and tone oppose the boss’s theme instead of supporting it. However, this “opposition of theme” clearly displays the danger, power, and cruelty of the Bog Queen that the PCs must eventually face down and destroy.
Conclusion
Of course, I’ve painted the extremes of mooks in supporting and opposition to the boss. I did the same with the ranks and powers of the mooks. In reality these are not binary or selective settings. All of the above are more like sliders that can go from zero to ten and all points in between. If you want a troll that is disgruntled with the Bog Queen, he could thematically support the Bog Queen, but be a “private” rank and be easily swayed to abandon the queen. That’s well within all of the ideas floated above. Likewise, you might have a powerful faerie who enjoys the additional physical prowess of being warped (even if his mind is muddled by magic), and that faerie will not turn against the Bog Queen even if her magical control is somehow broken.