Face in the Furnace

DM notebook sketch 

This is an antagonist that I sort of made up, mostly stole. It's a stationary boss-preview monster. 

Wizard Phone

When a wizard is tired or her message is mundane, she'll send a courier or put it on the clacks, just like us regular folks, but when a message is really important and secrecy is imperative she'll probably send it via fire.

Really, it's not that hard if you have an appropriately prepared brazier on each end and know the right semantic coordinates. A few minutes of concentration and poof, your face appears bobbing and flickering in your correspondent's flame, and their's in yours. It's a skill nearly every professional wizard knows.

Cunning wizards of particularly deft power don't even need a special preparation on the other end. They can speak or spy from any mundane fire. This has created a bustling trade in herbs and hearth additives to prevent this sort of intrusion.

Praman Nand on Hell 71

This is a concept that's been omnipresent in folklore and fantasy fiction but the above panel from Kill 6 Billion Demons has really stuck in my head. 

Boss Phone

When an archmage, demonlord, or other major, campaign-arc defining bad guy needs to communicate with his lieutenants, cultists or assorted party-level appropriate mooks, he can give them a call via a furnace level inferno. It'll project him super huge and scary and with a thunderous booming voice. 

It makes him feel important. Better yet, it gives scrappy adventures a chance to interrupt a bad-guy teleconference and meet the Big Bad while they're still low level without getting squashed.

 

I got the idea from a Matt Colville video. 

Putting it into Play

"Enough!" I hear you cry, "We're convinced, it's awesome! Just give us some stats already."

Here's how to run this in whichever D&D you prefer: 

Step 1: Have a humanoid big bad guy (or gal) terrorizing the landscape or lurking in the wings. Someone that you want your party to be in awe of and scared by. 

Step 2: Have minions that a lowish level party of adventurers could probably handle. Maybe add some priests or cultists etc. for flavor.

Step 3: When the party infiltrates or smashes their way into the mooks' secret hideout or mountain base, they find them talking to an enormous, irate head of flame projecting and pontificating from an over-sized hearth. The Big Boss is furious. The barista gave him decalf, his dry-cleaning is late and now these incompetent #$%#*ers have botched their plot and let the hideout get invaded.

Step 4: The Big Boss strikes out with magic! The minions are all instantly killed. Do they stay dead? Of course not! They rise as skeletons, shadows or demon-possessed husks (whatever flavor you prefer). It's fight time! 

Step 5: While the adventures struggle to fight the risen mooks, the Furnace Face mocks them for their puniness and belittles their achievements. He bellows his name and brags about his power. He also casts spells every round. Command, Control Flames, Crown of Madness, and the like. He should toy with the party, not nuke them. 

The flaming head is immune to most kinds of damage. To eliminate it, the fire must be extinguished. Enough cold damage would do it, but ordinary water is the obvious solution.The party will figure it out eventually.

I didn't set out to make a Star Wars post but here we are

Step 6: When the party finally makes it to Castle Ravenwulf or ascends the Crooked Tower and meets the Big Boss for real, they'll know to be scared.