Social Monsters
People are flocking to my blog in deep distress. I track my site analytics and I know how and why each and every one of you found your way onto this page. And for some of you, it is because of fear. In 2023, roughly 300 visits were from someone very afraid, rightfully afraid. Afraid… of the doppelgänger. The search queries were:
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dopleganger
dopple ganger
If you live in fear, you’re welcome here. I am the internet’s foremost expert in all things doppelgängdom, based solely on my previous post on the subject, which provided advice to running this classic monster to be more like Among Us (hey kids, aren’t I relatable?). But I’d like to also discuss the ways in which a doppelgänger poses more than just a threat to your physical wellbeing. A doppelgänger can ruin your life while you are still living it.
DISCLAIMER: This post is entirely in reference to the doppelgänger and other monsters from Dungeons & Dragons and their derivatives. It does not purport to impart any advice with regards to “real life” monsters, as such categorically do not exist. The blog post is certainly not yet another trick by your own personal doppelgänger to lull you into a false sense of security so that it can kill you and assume your life while all your friends and family remain blithely unaware of your fate.
Towns are safe. Humans (or elves, dwarves, etc.) huddle together behind walls for their well-being in a world where monsters stalk every other biome. Some playstyles, therefore, encourage the referee to lead the player-characters away from towns as much as possible. For instance, in his instructive series that created the West Marches playstyle, my colleague Ben Robbins states that “the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town — As per the discussion of NPCs above, be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure instead of exploration. You can have as many NPCs as you want in town, but remember it’s not about them. Once players start talking to town NPCs, they will have a perverse desire to stay in town and look for adventure there. ‘Town game’ was a dirty word in West Marches. Town is not a source of info. You find things by exploring, not sitting in town — someone who explores should know more about what is out there than someone in town.”
However, player-characters will explore your towns, at least to resupply between excursions in the wilderness or delves in dungeons. And I agree that towns should be safer than adventure sites, but I can’t blame a referee for wanting to add a bit of danger. As Brad Kerr, notable blog-hater and renowned adventure writer, recently said on his podcast, Between Two Cairns, “Your town has to feel fun. The adventure needs to extend into the town. The game should also be in the town.” If you want adventure in your town, then you need adversity in your town. And adversaries are an easy way to add adversity.
The most obvious source of danger in town are the authorities. Player-characters have a nasty habit of finding themselves doing not-entirely-legal deeds or at least flirting with that line between law and chaos, which any civilized town won’t abide. Guards and even ordinary townsfolk keep a suspicious eye trained on these out-of-town ne'er do well adventurers.
Another source of danger is simply time, that ever-present bane of an adventuring party. Spending too much time in town may cause the player-characters to miss certain opportunities or for their rivals to claim them first. If the player-characters spend a week putzing around the town while their rival adventuring party is out searching for treasure, the player-characters run the risk of finding ransacked lower levels of dungeons, with notes left behind by their rivals taunting them for their city-loving ways.
Monsters are infrequently used as dangers in towns. Obviously, that isn’t the case in all scenarios. For instance, my own adventure, Barkeep on the Borderlands, has no shortage of monsters within an entirely city-bound adventure, which monsters may not always threaten just the physical well-being of the player-characters. But there are some monsters that feel tailor-made to make trouble for the players while their characters kick back among civilization. Chief among these social monsters is the doppelgänger.
From the Holmes Basic Set, doppelgängers “are intelligent and of evil nature. A doppelgänger is of mutable form, able to shape itself into the double of any humanoid creature (up to seven or so feet tall) it observes. Once in the likeness of the person it is imitating it will attack. The favorite trick of the doppelgänger is to do away with the person whom it is imitating in a manner which does not alert the person’s companions. Then, in the role of that individual, the doppelgänger will attack the others by surprise, and at great advantage, as the group is engaged in some activity which distracts from its watchfulness, i.e., such as fighting with some other monster.” This description obviously has combat in mind. After all, that’s what monsters are for, presumes monster manuals everywhere: fighting.
However, monsters can exist outside the dungeon and can be more than just threats to the player characters’ health and wellbeing. I want monsters that ruin the player characters’ reputation, that thwart the player characters’ political machinations, that break the player characters’ hearts. While almost any intelligent monster, with more or less effort, can accomplish all of this, the doppelgänger is almost custom-made to be an enemy outside of the dungeon. The first step to making the doppelgänger a campaign-level social antagonist is deciding what the doppelgänger wants (or what the entity they are working for wants, if applicable).
A doppelgänger who wants information. A doppelgänger spy is almost too obvious. Any villain worth their twirled mustache would tie their own mother to the train tracks for a doppelgänger spy in their employ. Such a doppelgänger tends to disguise themselves as either hangerons, the sort who don’t get noticed like the king’s royal toilet scrubber, or as hubs of gossip, like the matron of the most popular tavern in town. If a doppelgänger wishes to spy on the player characters directly, their best bet is by killing (or kidnapping, if it's a merciful doppelgänger) and replacing one of their henchmen, sidekicks, or flunkies. Now, the doppelgänger knows anything said in front of them, which given most adventuring parties like to sit around and debate their course of action, can be a lot. If the doppelgänger is in the employ of another enemy, the hard part is relaying that information to their boss without tipping their hand. The doppelgänger might have to engineer conflict within the social cohesion of the group (sidenote: always be suspicious of a gossipy hireling) so that it can use the temporary dissolution or just the general bad vibes at camp as an excuse to leave the group, either temporarily or not.
A doppelgänger who wants gold. Obviously they aren’t just gonna work a 9-to-5 like us schmucks. The simplest way for a doppelgänger to obtain tremendous wealth (or, more precisely, the decadent lifestyle that such wealth affords) is to kill and replace a noble or successful merchant or moneylender. The doppelgänger will tend to choose such an individual without many close relations who would recognize the victim’s changes in personality or fret over the doppelgänger spending away the relation’s inheritance. So for any noble that is lonely or crotchety enough to inspire few friends, there is about a 1-in-6 chance that they’ve already been replaced by a doppelgänger. Less ambitious doppelgängers who seek fortune tend to be the ones that most player characters meet in dungeons. After all, a fool and his money are soon parted and player characters tend toward the foolish. Dungeon doppelgängers seeking riches should hide out on the upper levels of a dungeon, near to the entrance but not so near that they don’t have time to usurp one of the party members and begin their string of murders. The 2nd level of the dungeon will typically suffice. They want to be near the entrance so they can see adventurers enter, but they do not attack them. Only when they see the nearly-successful party, heading for the exits with their bags full of treasure do they strike (in the manner described in your typical monster manual).
A doppelgänger who wants power. Because power and gold are so deeply linked, such a creature’s methods aren’t too dissimilar with what I described above. The easiest path is to kill and replace a person already ensconced in power. This is, of course, easier said than done, and may involve a trail of bodies as you kill first an ordinary servant, then a steward who has some privacy with their liege, before eventually taking over the whole operation. But this can draw negative attention–after all the doppelgänger can’t be the queen, their steward and one of their servants all at once. A typical way that doppelgängers, particularly one based in a dungeon, find their way onto the throne, is to infiltrate a heroic adventuring party, one destined for an audience with the monarch. Once they are face to face, however, they will need to force events to turn south, with the hope that they can capture, kill, and replace the king, but also ensure that any witnesses–be it the adventuring party or the guards, don’t survive. Maybe they keep one knocked out guard alive, so the doppelgänger-turned-monarch can award them a medal for their bravery in fending off the would-be assassins, the adventuring party. Once in power, a doppelgänger, like any ruler who desires to remain so, must remain vigilant against would-be usurpers. However, unlike those despots confined to a single form, the doppelgänger always has the option of co-opting the opposition. Long live the revolution, as long as the doppelgänger remains on top.
A potential encounter from Barkeep on the Borderlands, illustrated by Norn Noszka
A doppelgänger who wants love. I would advise against dating a doppelgänger, based solely on their penchant for murdering people and replacing them. And, according to Dragon Magazine #80 (December 1983), “[t]hey show little respect or concern for humanity and allied races, except when doing so benefits them.” Red flag! But if a doppelgänger does yearn for companionship, they tend to, of course, kill the target’s partner and replace them. So much more streamlined than dating! And doppelgängers do not tend to have the human desire to be loved for who they really are, so this simpler arrangement suits them well. And they don’t bother with divorce either. When the relationship gets rocky, the doppelgänger Don Juan just moves on.
A doppelgänger who wants revenge. This is the most fun motivation for a doppelgänger, in my opinion, because revenge is one of the best motivations for an antagonist. Only revenge can motivate someone to use stone and mortar to entomb their enemy in their family catacombs. You don’t do that shit for fame and fortune–there are easier ways, as outlined above. So when player characters make an enemy for life, they best hope it isn’t a doppelgänger. A doppelgänger deadset on revenge doesn’t settle for Cask of Amontillado shit though. They are out to ruin your life more thoroughly, and adventurers are particularly easy targets. Adventurers, by occupational necessity, are often out of town. But unless they are a miserable loner with nothing to live for except for their next carousing trip, they likely have people and things they care about back home in the town. This is where the doppelgänger strikes, and they strike while the adventurer is off galavanting throughout the wilds. They assume the player character’s form and just act like a total piece of shit. Slicked back hair, White bathing suit, glass house, white Ferrari, live for New Year's Eve, sloppy steaks at Truffoni's. Big, rare cut of meat with water dumped all over it, water splashing around the table. Basically they just act a nuisance and make enough enemies when the player character returns that everyone in town treats them as a pariah. The player character becomes a name on the lips of many, but no one has even one kind word to say. Whatever good reputation or budding friendships they’ve built up are smashed in an instant. Even when the player character protests that they couldn’t have possibly defecated in the tavern, who would believe them? There were witnesses! This type of situation will drive the player character to hunt down that damn doppelgänger. Everyone is worried about their doppelgänger killing them, but what about when they just make you persona non grata in the only refuge against the dangers of the dungeon?
A doppelgänger who just wants to kill. A doppelgänger is the ultimate serial killer. Being a serial killer was potentially pretty easy in medieval times, but in a more fantastic milieu, clerics and paladins have all sorts of cop-magic that can thwart would-be Jacks the Ripper. But when the killer can pose as a different culprit each time, the magic-cops will be hard pressed to even realize that the murders are connected. The doppelgänger tends to pick travelers as their forms for commission of unprovoked murders, and travelers so often tend to be adventurers, who just pass through a town from time to time between adventurers. So even if the doppelgänger does not have it out for a player character, they can still ruin their life. When the adventuring party returns to town and are immediately placed under arrest by the constable for a murder they don’t remember committing, 4 times out of 6, there is a murderous doppelgänger on the loose.
Some monsters can drain your character’s level, but a doppelgänger can ruin your reputation, wreck your renown, pummel your prestige. Beware the doppelgänger in town.
