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Accersitus
2012-04-22, 01:55 PM
Share your stories about awesome recurring villains.
I'll start:

In our current campaign, we have an awesome recurring villain that we have encountered several times now, alternating who escapes each time. He is a powerful wizard, but we have managed to escape through various means before actually fighting the times we were clearly outmatched, and the rest of the times we have managed to narrowly defeat him the times we couldn't escape, forcing him to escape.

The last time, we managed to narrowly defeat him, only to have him teleport back with some reinforcements while we were still healing up, forcing us to flee back to what we thought was a safe place. This is when our problems started again, as our stronghold had been overrun (we suspected it might not be ours anymore, but it was our only form of escape at the time), and we had to fight a powerful Paladin(we are evil in this campaign) to escape the stronghold. After expending almost all our spells, most of our potions, and we were low on hit points we were getting really paranoid, just looking for a safe place to rest. Luckily the wizard was also out of spells and we managed to get some rest and start making a new plan to deal with the wizard.

The best part is that the conflict with the wizard started at level 9 when he and some of his soldiers had occupied the farm owned by one of our characters, and has kept going until level 16, and it is still not resolved. It has become a matter of pride for both sides.

Space Lawyer
2012-04-22, 02:13 PM
The best one I've experienced was in a Shadowrun game. He was the classic evil CEO. He showed up at almost every point, one step ahead. At one point, we had undeniable evidence that he had personally committed some truly twisted crimes (highly creative tortures, gang war instigation, etc.). It ended being crushed in the rubble of a building that was "accidentally" demolished. The next run, we were double-crossed by our contact, and ended up in the middle of a warehouse district with no support. We entered an AR zone with only one message: this guy taunting us and saying goodbye. After that, TPK.

Alabenson
2012-04-22, 02:39 PM
One of my personal favorite recurring villian stories wasn't much by the way of recurring, but the player's reactions were priceless.

Essentially, early in their career's the group nearly wiped out a gobliniod tribe, which included a trio of bugbears, and then sold the corpses to a shady merchant. Unbeknownst to the players, said merchant was a front for one of the BBEGs, an extremely creative necromancer. Flashfowards 6 or 7 levels later, and the players find themselves under attack by a group of wight-goblins being supported by a four-armed, large-sized, triple-bugbear undead monstrosity.

Moral of the story: If the DM allows you to sell your enemies corpses to a shady merchant, don't be surprised when it comes back to haunt you (perhaps literally).

Kaveman26
2012-04-22, 02:42 PM
For months in game we were pursued by Hippic Haverpuddle, a maniac halfling barbarian. We had come across half a dozen campsites with massacred campers. Other groups would make camp and then something would tear them apart. We found a Hewer's Handy Haversack and it brought death with it. DM had made a Haversack with a secret bottom that functioned as a hide hole for the halfling. He would wait til nightfall, slip out and attack. He went predator on us and stalked us for nights on end. We teleported away and got a repreive for a while, but the halfling tracked us down and started to harry us again. He was a nuisance that would spring up for the better part of ten levels. When we finally killed him we were level 17 as a party. He first attacked us at level 4.

Arranis Thelmos
2012-04-23, 07:22 AM
Early in the campaign my PC's orgamized a mass exodus from a villiage with an undead problem; apparently forgetting that the problem was in the countryside, not the villiage. They found themselves surrounded very quickly and were greeted by a skeleton dressed like an American WWII bomber pilot (I was creative, so what?) and puffing away on a cigar. He introduced himself as General Zellig Zog. He tried to talk them to death until the party's reenforcements arrived, and slipped away in the battle. The players soon located the source of the undead problem, a pair of bickering necromancers in a long abandoned tower. When they defeated the necromancers General Zellig Zog called out to them, still smoking a thick cigar. He had been sitting in the window and watching them fight. Before the players could attack him, he jumped out the window and rode away on an undead cow. He then struck up an alliance with a goblin witch doctor named Gullah Jack and his tribe of goblins, and he has been a thorn in the party's side ever since. :smallbiggrin:

Giegue
2012-04-23, 08:53 AM
Lord Akai. Just, Lord Akai. This guy was pretty much the epotomy of downright annoying persistence, combined with some serious evil. He was an evil wizard who pretty much always had his hand in SOMETHING. However, he was not always the main villain, and his credentials came from his own growth. He started out as the first major villain the party faced, an evil wizard who ruled a network of kingdoms from the shadows via dominated nobles and kings. However, after his initial defeat other villains took his place and managed to be more powerful then him, but he always was up to something on the side. After his shadow empire fell he began experimenting and creating monsters. He even went as far as to kidnap and experiment on small children, and was persistent as all ****.

He would get defeated, but always be back with another scheme to an annoying degree. Eventually, he made it all the way to epic levels and used a powerful epic spell to become the supreme ruler of the prime material plane via mass brainwashing and then had everybody on the prime material plane worship him to gain divine ranks. Simply put, he had become the official "Kefka" of our campaign, temporarily achieving godhood(though he was still ultimately defeated by team good, though it took a healthy amount of divine intervention/Deus Ex Machina.)

D1gital-ZER0
2012-04-23, 02:45 PM
I'm not sure you'd call him recurring, but in one of my campaigns, our resident damage monkey picked up a magic greatsword (so far, pretty uninspired). But little did he know that the sword held the soul of a long dead lich named Melagost! In true lich manner, he slowly started going insane (the intelligent sword, not he monkey) until the party sent it to the ocean floor with a very inspired Unseen Servant spell. Though, truth be told, the sword could easily be found...:smallwink:

Though I'm tempted to use Alabenson's and Kaveman26's villains, those are pretty damn sweet!

Crow
2012-04-23, 03:02 PM
We had a pretty good one in a 3.5 game we played ages ago.

One of the players had moved into an abandoned keep in the wilds, fixed it up, and brought in settlers. He styled himself as a king, which the local hobgoblin chieftan, Wolf-Father, took offense to. He leads numerous raids against the hinterlands in this player's domain, and the players clash with his forces a number of times.

So they set out to find this guy, gather information on his whereabouts, and track down him and his shaman-advisor. They kill the Shaman, and kill Wolf-Father, only to find that it's a Simulacrum.

As they return to the keep, they see a hobgoblin army on the march. The information they recieved was a plant to draw them away from the keep!

So they ride hard and circumvent the army, joining their forces in the keep.

As the hobgoblin army lays siege to the place, Wolf-Father walks out to the no-man's land in front of the keep's gate, and challenges the player to single combat. The player tells his cohort that he is in command of the keep until he returns, and heads out the gate to meet Wolf-Father.

In the ensuing duel, Wolf-Father sunders the player's ancestral sword, and follows up by killing the player king in an epic brawl. The cohort, overwhelmed with sorrow, calls out to Wolf-Father and exits the keep to exact revenge.

In the drawn-out duel that follows, Wolf-Father gets the cohort down to 0-hp. In a last-ditch effort, the cohort lashes out and scores a critical hit on Wolf-Father, killing him, and dropping the cohort to -1 hp in the process. As they both fall over dead, the enraged hobgoblin army, not fully prepared, assaults the keep, where the remaining PC's, and the keep's forces beat them back, then sally forth and rout the hobgoblin army.

It was an epic ending indeed! I couldn't have planned it better, and it's one of the reasons I always let the dice fall as they will when playing RPG's. If I had done anything different, it wouldn't have been nearly as cool as it was.

SleepyShadow
2012-04-24, 01:42 PM
The unanimous consensus of my group is that the best reoccurring villain was Valenessa the succubus. She was manipulative, seductive, and dangerously genre savvy. She even made friends with the party druid, and through the druid she was able to convince the party to not act against her on multiple occasions.

Valenessa had not initially been planned out to be the BBEG. In fact, she started out as a party member when the group decided to hire her for the unique mixture of talents an Unarmed Swordsage succubus brought to the table. She eventually did something to tick the group off, so handed her over to the local church and promptly forgot about her. Later on the party came back to the town and found it had blossomed into a peaceful crime-free city. The only problem was that warrants were out for the PCs' arrest.

Turned out that Valenessa had dominated the priests and subsequently gained control of the town while the PCs were out adventuring. The PCs escaped the city and went back to the usual adventurer routine, but every now and then they kept running into Valenessa's name in unusual places: a kobold clan idolized her, two warring cults both viewed her as an avatar for their gods, and a wandering necromancer named Johannes had been researching her.

It was from Johannes that they learned that Valenessa had been captured during the Blood War, and as an experiment she had been "reprogrammed" to think as devils do: methodical, cunning, and cruel. He had also discovered that she was acting as an agent for Mephistopheles for two very important reasons. First and foremost, Mephistopheles wants to increase his hold on the Prime Material Plane. Second, Asmodeus hates demons, and what better way to bring him down a peg than by the hands of a demon?

It took quite a while for the party to stop all of Valenessa's multi-layered and interwoven plans, and eventually the party got the chance to have a final showdown with the succubus. Of course, a good villain has to have a pre-battle speech of some kind ....

"I fight for a better world, a world where monsters like me don't exist. Why do you fight, heroes, if not for your own personal glory?"

After a running battle in which Valenessa killed one of the PCs, they finally got her locked down on the roof of the newly built temple to Mephistopheles and killed her while the townsfolk watched on in horror. Naturally, she had a post mortem line as well, because what good villain doesn't?

"You've killed me in front of a thousand people who love me," she said. "You made me a martyr and yourselves the villains. I still won."

Brauron
2012-04-24, 05:13 PM
Carl Stanford, in the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign for Call of Cthulhu. Slightly pudgy, bespectacled little guy, absolutely unassuming in every respect. When they first encountered him the party tried to save him from what they assumed was the real villain. He taunted them every step of the campaign, always two steps ahead of them, at one point even showing up to literally pick a McGuffin out of their hands and casually leaving in a zeppelin (which the players shot down and then assumed they'd killed him, despite him having demonstrated access to teleportation spells earlier in the campaign).

He was the sort of villain who, meeting the PCs again after orchestrating an assassination attempt against them that had failed, inquired about their health and well-being.

Solaris
2012-04-24, 08:13 PM
The unanimous consensus of my group is that the best reoccurring villain was Valenessa the succubus.

Thus far in this thread, I'm afraid I'd have to agree.

RandomNPC
2012-04-24, 08:28 PM
My group was all newbies, never heard of a lich before.

So they fight through five keeps all illegally collecting tax money, and find a map to the leaders stronghold. They fight through, looting as they go, and get to a hundred foot, well lit, non-trapped corridor. Who traps the pathway that minions come down to report to them anyway?

The party buffs at the door, kicks it open, and spot the skeleton, petting an orange cat. He looks at them, and says "Very good, you've defeated all of my lieutenants, how would you like their jobs?"

thirty minuets of OoC talk later, they decide no, they want to stop him. The Bard/Arcane Archer is the only one to push through his repulsion spell, he hits, barely passes DR, and the cat leaps at him, turning into a large red dragon as it does. The rest of the party made saves against repulsion on the next two turns. In the end the dragon fled, the lich let himself get killed, they didn't know about the soul hidey place.

They claim the chain of keeps for themselves, hunt down the dragon, and come back to find the keeps destroyed and all loot left behind was stolen.

Next encounter, they hear of a strong caster demanding tribute, so the assassin tries to hide at the drop off point and use a death attack. He got paralyzed and baleful polymorphed into a sheep. The druids dire wolf carried him out of that one. He took the tribute and dimension doored out of there.

They chased him north, next fighting him on a cliff face. Recovering his soul hidey place from hiding, he hit the druid with polar ray (I think) and made an overland flight style dash for it. The druid was at -2 in bird form, a friend climbing the cliff grabbed him from taking fall damage. They got him down to two hp before his next turn, he dimension doored out, and kept running.

Finally they followed him over the desert at the north pole, (my world is cold around the middle) met Santa (Leshay from epic level book) and chased him down the other side of the world. The druid cracked his soul hidey place with a comet fall style spell, and they went to the lynch pin of reality to fight him one last time. (The tower from Stephen Kings Dark Tower.) After the fight, the Bard sat in the throne of reality without realizing what it was, becoming the unwitting king of everything ever.

Righteous Doggy
2012-04-24, 08:47 PM
So, I actually played one once. The party was split a dozen times and I joined halfway through. The plot weaved me in and out of their group and my own. The fools actually thought I was a paladin there to help them, A paladin I was... of Slaughter, Mwahaha~. Mere stepping stones to get me closer to my own goal! Immortality. I would be closer to my goddess than any other!
Anyways, I became a big bad for them behind their backs and randomly worked with them or slayed named npcs. A few kingdoms toppled later I was finally slain by a rival lich, after being set up to slay an enemy commander working with their bard. I don't know if I did good or bad in their eyes, I worked apart from their group more often than not.

Silva Stormrage
2012-04-25, 01:14 AM
During a very long campaign I have had a player's character become evil and become a recurring villain that was more feared than the actual BBEG. This thrall herd eventually became so feared that I made it the finally boss of the campaign. And the players actually lost against it in the final fight as well. So far the standing has been the recurring villain 5, pc's 0 with one draw (He ran out of pp.'s and hadn't been hurt yet so he just fled)

Easily my favorite villain to role-play ever (he eventually became an npc when the PC had to leave the group). Sarcastic, spammable minions. He became the dragon to the BBEG and eventually became a dragon in chief. He had a custom artifact that let him get to epic leadership levels of followers and ended up with around 2000+ believers that he could swarm the pcs with.

When the player first betrayed the party he was actually just expecting to fly off on a soarwhale carrying all of his minions. The players then used dimensional door next to him and he shrugged and dominated them all in one round. He then made the characters bury themselves up to their heads in the snow (they were in the frozen northlands) and wait for 4 hours.

The next encounter was flying above a city the BBEG had tasked him to defend while the pcs were attacking it with an allied army. The pc's then failed to hurt the character as he had become a lich (they didn't know and he had an illusion up) and he simply laughed at their pathetic attempts. End result, tpk of the party and they needed to be raised by allies in the army. At this point he has still not been hurt by anything the pc's have done the entire campaign.

Next encounter, the BBEG has the thrallherd attack a city with a horde of undead and believers to get at the PC's. The pcs flee the city but are intercepted by him and his two thralls. He sends in the thralls laughing at the pcs and lounges about as they kill his minions. He then proceeds to utterly destroy them as they still have no idea how to counter his 3-5 abilities (Wilder without educated variant as a base class and a lot of his powers were situational non combat ). The end result? Still haven't taken a point of damage.

Now at this point I am wondering what to do. Due to the campaign world if the thrallherd was able to simply teleport away with the bodies the campaign would be over and the BBEG would win. So I had the next group of pcs come in right as soon as the thrallherd had killed their last group. It was during this fight where he was first damaged by the pc's... with a mass heal. The fight goes on for a bit and ends up in a draw. The lich is buried under about 3 tons of rubble with about 20 pp.'s left and simply teleports out.

His personal soarwhale inspired so much fear in the players that whenever I mentioned anything involving the sky they were fearing a soar whale coming out of a cloud and bombarding them with hordes of low level minions.

Greyfell
2012-04-25, 11:15 AM
Here's an old old school one for you....

We were playing the old Star Wars (the West End Games d6 based version). As usual, our GM did his standard opening to a rebellion era campaign:

drop the players onto the playing surface from a height, scream "Run! RUN! the Empire is after you!!" and watch us scuttle like cockroaches for the shadows.

We go about doing our thing, messing with the empire and all. We soon draw some attention though, and the empire sends one of their best to come mess with us in return: Imperial Security agent Mar Bareez.

For the next several months of games, we were treated to a constant dark presence following our every move, anticipating every plan. We always knew when things were about to get bad: the bugger would contact us on raido/whatever and his opening line would always be a calm, cold, "Greetings, Rebels."

After months of dodging, evading and just flat out fearing this amazingly competent agent, we finally lure him into a building in the middle of a firefight... and bring the entire place down around his ears with a thermal detonator. We cheered, we danced... we'd finaly nailed the bastard!

Months of sessions go by... we are all feeling very confident. We're elite rebel operatives, we're called on for the tough jobs. We hyper into a system ready to make our own special kind of havoc available... and a Imperial customs frigate starts hailing us.

Amused, we put it on screen...

"Greetings, Rebels."

The entire table of players (players mind you, not the characters!) stops dead. Everything goes quiet as we all turn and stare at the GM. One person even whispers, "Oh god... no...."

Then everyone started shouting orders in character, many of them contradictory.

I've never forgotten that moment.

DigoDragon
2012-04-26, 07:20 AM
In my current campaign, I'm fond of my reoccuring villain Astraxia - a red dragoness who started out as the mysterious leader of a far-reaching cult that was gathering ancient lore about a long-dead civilization (illegally of course), then the general of a coup to overthrow her adoptive mother and take over the kingdom that she was heir to (couldn't wait for the old lady to croak), and now is working alongside the PCs to slay a much more powerful vampire (hasn't given her reason why).

I think what makes her a great reoccuring villain is that many of her actions could be justifiable in the right context. Sorta that "Black and Gray" morality. :smallbiggrin:

Riverdance
2012-04-26, 07:03 PM
I had an assassin who tried to kill them twice before drinking from a cursed fountain, going totally psycho, trying to kill his partner, and running of into the mountains (not before going on a mad killing spree of course). Eventually he faked his own death and went to rebuild an old fortress in the mountains, which he thoroughly stocked with monsters and traps. He was still totally psycho the whole time.

Tamer Leon
2012-05-01, 03:01 PM
Wasn't a villain, but I once had a random npc turn into a character the party loved and recognized instantly. Not a member of the party, just some guy in the background.

I rolled a random encounter for a road, and ended up rolling a peasant merchant selling useless and broken (but interesting, apparently) junk. Played him with a very thick cockney accent, which apparently endeared him to the party rogue so much that they got to talking. The subject came up of the merchant having dreams of opening a shop in Sharn, but he didn't have money to start up. They ended up giving him a few hundred gold to help out.

Well... They started running into him occasionally, and every time it seemed he was doing better. By campaign's end, he owned a chain of shops in various major cities, and ended up giving the party a very nice magic item in return for what they'd done for him. I thought it was really cool.

Callos_DeTerran
2012-05-01, 09:29 PM
The most memorable recurring villain for my IRL group seems to be, right now, a former PC turned NPC when the player left our group. Played a monk that was, essentially, Chaotic Evil (never changed the alignment past LE though, as the DM, because the player only liked playing monks) and specialized in boarding enemy mechs, killing the crews, and often destroying the mech from the inside out. Through out the entire game, his usefulness to the group had been weighed against how much trouble he caused them until thep layed left and I took over NPC actions of the PC. The still-there PCs were there when the monk was bound and sent into the Stygian Depths for killing three members of the Guildwrights during a mis-informed 'rescue' of a lady engineer he had bonded with...and his last words to the remaining PCs were. "I'm coming for you."

...Should I mention that the PCs don't know if the monk will survive the Stygian Depths? Or that all of the PCs but one are built around mech-use/building (except for one, who essentially replaced the monk as the boarder) meaning they are exactly the kinds of characters he was designed to murder like sheep? Or that, against all odds, the monk had survived everything else the post-apoclayptic world of Highpoint had thrown at him with almost nary a wound?

There's lunar dragons (which are stronger then the MM dragons in every capacity and probably only surpassed by the Epic dragons for normal challenge) and re-fluffed ethergaunts hunting the players down, and they're more worried that they'll hear the sound of a crazy monk punching a hole through the hull of their steel/adamintine mech in the middle of the night to kill them in their sleep. :smalltongue: Gotta love Dragonmech sometimes.