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Bannan_mantis
2018-07-11, 08:27 AM
I am creating a new villain for my D&D and I am trying to create someone that is more flawed and human than most villains. I am planning for it being where he was a powerful wizard and he worshiped the main gods in my world. Soon a war of universal proportions started in which he found at near the end his wife had betrayed him and was leading the opposing. He had to strike her down and he went to the gods begging that she be healed and saying that she isn't evil but they destroyed her soul before it reached the after life. He blindly accepted the gods decision thinking that they new what they were doing but then they did it again and this time it broke him. He and his spouse had a daughter and one night a group of worshippers found out about this and believed her to be a antichrist of sorts and did unspeakable things to her and made him watch. This was what broke him and when the gods destroyed her soul like they did her mother's he couldn't take it and mentally broke down. Soon a otherworldly being found him and this being was the same one to wage that war from the past, this being manipulated him in his broken state and told him that he could bring his daughter back and through desperation he trusted him and became his servant.

Good or bad and any suggestions?

MoiMagnus
2018-07-11, 09:40 AM
I am creating a new villain for my D&D and I am trying to create someone that is more flawed and human than most villains. I am planning for it being where he was a powerful wizard and he worshiped the main gods in my world. Soon a war of universal proportions started in which he found at near the end his wife had betrayed him and was leading the opposing. He had to strike her down and he went to the gods begging that she be healed and saying that she isn't evil but they destroyed her soul before it reached the after life. He blindly accepted the gods decision thinking that they new what they were doing but then they did it again and this time it broke him. He and his spouse had a daughter and one night a group of worshippers found out about this and believed her to be a antichrist of sorts and did unspeakable things to her and made him watch. This was what broke him and when the gods destroyed her soul like they did her mother's he couldn't take it and mentally broke down. Soon a otherworldly being found him and this being was the same one to wage that war from the past, this being manipulated him in his broken state and told him that he could bring his daughter back and through desperation he trusted him and became his servant.

Good or bad and any suggestions?

Seems good, but there is some questions to answer:

When both your wife and your daughter have your soul destroyed by a council of Gods, you are very suspicious. And I fail to see how the gods could have not consider your Villain becoming insane. You can't say they didn't care about it. I'm sure some of your gods wanted to eliminate him too "to be cautious", and that others gods cared enough about it to prevent it to happen. And those gods probably care enough about your character to remark that he was broken and becoming insane. In short, if at least one of the gods cared about him, him becoming evil was obvious. So you need that:
+ Either nobody cared about him
+ Either the only who cared wanted him to become mad
+ Either he was already "against the gods" when her daughter was executed. Ex: he tried to take vengeance on the worshipper, he was exiled by the gods for this. During this time her daughter was executed. The otherworldly come to see him in exile to warn him about it, offering him freedom and vengeance.

Absolute necessity: Your gods knowledge of the future is crap, and their capacity to read mind too. This background does not make sens if your gods have any kind of omniscience.

Bannan_mantis
2018-07-11, 10:48 AM
That part goes into a major part of this era. I am making so this all happened years ago (basically not too far from the creation of the universe) and the gods were still young and quite arrogant and naive then (none of the gods are omnipresent or omniscience or anything like that). That is the main reason why they didn't intervene and didn't think much of him.

BlizzardSucks80
2018-07-11, 01:28 PM
That is a very interesting backstory for your villain. So what is this otherworldly patron that he is serving and that is offering him freedom and vengeance? Some kind of demon lord? A fey spirit? More importantly, what is that otherworldly patron's reason for helping him? Does it want to use him as a tool? Did he make a pact with it and basically become a Warlock?

Kaptin Keen
2018-07-11, 02:22 PM
Essentially, you should always strive to make love the basic motivation of your villains. Love of what or whom is entirely irrelevant - but only love realistically makes us do the crazy **** villains do. Dracula loved Elizabetha, Frankenstein yearned for love, and was torn between love and hate for his creator and tormentor.

Never go with 'destroy the X because of Z'. It never convinces anyone, ever.

Instead, go with 'nothing, not time nor death nor the gods themselves will keep us apart, my love.' Or, if it's not a person, 'our proud and noble nation has stood for millenia - and I will let nothing threaten it now, I will stop at nothing to keep it safe.'

Love really is the only thing that truly drives us nuts.

Bannan_mantis
2018-07-11, 03:19 PM
That is exactly what I am going for. He has three main reasons for going with the otherworldly patron but easily the more important reason is the idea that he can bring his daughter back and his love to see his daughter come back and live a normal life is what drives him and as for his patron, the patron is a god from the outlands that is more powerful than lord ao himself (that said the lord ao in my story isn't as powerful as the grey hawk lord ao but he is still the creator of the universe and such) and he is using my main villain as a pawn in his game as he has essentially given him a ritual he can perform to bring his daughter back but he doesn't have to power to do it so he needs to go through a giant amount of things to do it from killing entire populations of people to killing demigods and minor gods and intern the villain will create a opening for him as essentially I have made it where there is two parts of the outlands, the close outlands and the far outlands (ik creative names but it gets the point across) a being from the far outlands can almost never get into the normal universe so he needs him to create a opening for the god from the outlands to be able to invade into the world (this is a long campaign)