Heart in a Box (Previously posted to a forum)

This post is a follow-up to my previous post about the city beneath Albuquerque.
Other than one brief, half-hearted, return trip, the underground city was largely left untouched. However, for the rest of the campaign, the main villain was the various incarnations of the kingly ghost and the other blights and horrors they'd set loose upon the world.

I recruited Micah, a buddy from work, to play the big-bad. His character sheet was just a possessed human with no pulse, tons of Willpower, and immunity to Dominate. Purely defensive capabilities. Incredibly weak in combat. Any player character could have torn him limb from limb at very little risk to themselves.

He crashed Elysium and they all accepted him as a recently un-torpored Caitiff, thinking he was a PC not NPC. It was fairly big news because this game was set in the late 1800's, and he was the first vampire anyone had met that didn't have a discernable clan. But Caitiff is a normal part of the default World of Darkness, so everybody assumed that's what he was.

I told Micah:

"You don't get XP normally. Instead, every session that you do something patently evil in front of at least one PC and live to tell the tale, I'll give you another power appropriate to a Baali or Demon. We'll start with a single level-one discipline and move up if you last."

"If they're smart, they'll ferret you out and grease you in a session or two. If not, you'll eventually grow powerful enough to destroy them all and end my campaign."

After a few sessions, Micah brought a small wooden box to the LARP and started carrying it around, in-character, every session. He refused to say what was in it. Everyone who was on to him now assumed his character's soul must be in the box, but it was just to distract and divert them.

When finally they took action against him, he was so sickly overpowered. He flung green demon fire all over the place, and used uber corruption powers to make them fight themselves or hit a fear-frenzy. In the midst of this very lethal battle PCs blew actions trying to capture, destroy or steal the meaningless wooden box. That fact alone bought him at least 3 more rounds of combat. He was doing Agg damage left and right and holding his own against 12 or 15 PCs till finally he ran out of Willpower to fuel his big Disciplines. Without the big flashy powers, he went down very suddenly and (to the PCs) unexpectedly.

In the free dialog accompanying his last few actions he revealed that he was the spirit that they'd set free months ago. At the end of the night, we made it painfully clear they could have nipped this in the bud before he ever became a threat.