Dastards!
As a fan of heroic games, I'm always paying some amount of attention to Draw Steel and what they’re doing. When they announced Dastards as “Named Enemies” for their factions, I went “Oh, neat”. Now that I've read through the Dastards, I'm much more impressed with the concept and shocked I haven’t seen something like it before.
Dastards fill the invisible yet immense space between standard enemies and their Boss/Leader. Named enemies with just enough spice to leave an impression, but not enough power to dominate a combat.
The Goblin Thief and the Orcish Shaman are excellent candidates for elevating to Dastard status. So is that one bandit with the scar over his eye, or the elderly barbarian. Discarded character concepts make fantastic fodder for Dastards. Dastards are also an easy way to make a party of rival adventurers without them using player stats or completely overpowering the party.
Here's some rough guidelines I'll be using to make Dastards in my games.
A fun name.
Two descriptors, one personality based and one visual, focused on contrast from their fellows.
Give them the same amount of health as a normal member of their faction unless they are specifically meant to be the tank / muscle.
One or two signature actions that work on a different axis than the faction they represent. Buffs for a trickster group or debuffs for an honorbound culture might be fun, so long as they still feel thematically within the faction’s domain.
No defensive abilities unless that's the majority of their kit.
Next time, I'll be sharing some Dastards for the Riverchildren in Tales of Mythic Prehistory.