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Ameraaaaaa
2021-11-17, 02:56 AM
Whether it's a lich or the head of a mega corp I'm curious.

You see i never actually managed to have a big bad evil guy. Most games i was in died before 1 could appear. With the exception of some 1 shots. So I'm always curious with other guy's experience with BBEG'S.

So the questions are 1 which are your favourites and 2 why they are your favourite. Feel free to name more then 1.

Xervous
2021-11-17, 11:42 AM
To this day every campaign I’ve played in has either ended before a BBEG could appear or has so far managed to avoid BBEGs. For a moment I was hoping the antiquity campaign would lead us to deal with the bandit lord Shanks, but we’re off on a save the world by restoring balance quest now.

Kurt Kurageous
2021-11-18, 12:30 PM
Strahd, hands down.

Beware. The more you play as Strahd, the more you think you are doing justice to the NPC. You start to think you are Strahd when playing him. Then you realize Strahd has been controlling you all along, commanding you all along. You are merely another thrall.

Quertus
2021-11-18, 10:11 PM
Me.

That is, I prefer when the party is proactive, and trying to change / take over the world. When the PCs are in the role of the BBEG.

Offhand, the most fun I've had dealing with a BBEG that I can remember were the ones that got about two seconds screen time before the party killed them. Because there really isn't much "game" to be had, dealing with your average BBEG. And I've rarely been in groups that could handle allying with / propositioning / recruiting the BBEG, so my experiences have been that a BBEG is generally just really boring.

Spore
2021-11-18, 11:39 PM
Strahd, hands down.

Beware. The more you play as Strahd, the more you think you are doing justice to the NPC. You start to think you are Strahd when playing him. Then you realize Strahd has been controlling you all along, commanding you all along. You are merely another thrall.

Strahd is honestly a bit difficult nowadays, if you look at it not as an hommage to classic monster movies and gothic horror, but as an actual representation of role models. Sure, he is the one pacting with the devil/dark power, women in the book are either victims, his brides, or evil witches. I am not one to reassign NPC genders for the sake of feminism, but the games could have enjoyed a bit of alteration in my honest opinion.

@ thread topic

I think it is a tossup between Jon Irenicus of BG 2's fame, and the Emet-Selch from Final Fantasy 14 (some kind of Loki-esque tragic villain). Honorable mention to Minagho of Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous (for the classic hero's journey arc; first she laughs at your impotence, then she is taken abakc by your phenomenal powers, and thirdly she is surprised to which lengths you'll go just to torment/hunt her).

As far as PvP goes, there was an insane halfling necromancer in my last true Pathfinder game. He had an artifact that could rewind time every time he died. But his soul dipped into the river of the dead each time, making him progressively more insane.

Because fighting epic monsters or god is cool and all, but my heart belongs to humanoid high level spell casters as the final villain. There is just something great and epic about charging a human with epic magical powers.

Kurald Galain
2021-11-19, 02:26 AM
The PFS arc about Koth'Vaul is very good. He's a glabrezu that was trapped for millennia and accidentally released by the (low-level) PCs, then stages an all-out assault on a major city. He corrupts one of the city leaders into doing seriously creepy body alterations; this leader becomes his second-in-command and we've spent several creepy scenarios chasing him. And it ends with a major confrontation in a demon lord's pocket dimension as he tried to take over the demon lord's powers.

Also, Grandmaster Torch :smallamused:

Phhase
2021-11-22, 10:21 AM
The true BBEG is still behind 7 proxies in my campaign, but the current bad guy (girl) they're up against is a lovely lass named Sarissa. She's a human wizard that majored in necromany and minored in enchantment (with a little abjuration), and is the owner of her self branded magical fashion boutique, which is just as kitschy, cringe, and garish and pink and inexplicably popular among the youth as she is. She's smug, almost unflappably calm, always dandied up, very, very prepared, and a complete $#@!. She's fun to play because I can just mouth off all of the smugisms that I want ("myes~ dearie...").

My players LOATHE her, it's great.

Oh, and she's also a cultist of Vecna, masterminding a local sect in an attempt to assassinate one of the most powerful governmental officials and a stabilizing influence on the whole region - an inevitable Kolyarut that somehow became a head magistrate in the setting backstory.

HumanFighter
2021-11-22, 12:28 PM
I remember, it was years ago, my friend's campaign actually had us, the players, being the henchmen of a BBEG. It was so fun and...different.
He was a vampire named Vincent and I remember our Sorcerer (or was it Summoner) actually defied him on one minor point. Anyways, Vincent proceeded to blood drain him some time later on, making him take Con Drain. Afterwards, the player of that character was like, "Can I play a new character?" Lol.
In that campaign I was merely a human ranger, just there as arrow support mostly, didn't do anything thoroughly evil, but I did manage to Critical Shot Kill a Black Dragon with my crossbow once, because Dragons were my Favored Enemy, for some reason. A Red Dragon once came and destroyed his whole village, and he was the sole survivor. So I guess that's why.
Vincent was trying to take over the entire land, and given his history, I believe he did actually have a semi-legitimate claim to the throne, since he was of noble blood or whatever.
Sadly the campaign never finished, as the gM was lazy or stupid or something idk.

And there was another campaign we had where we working for the BBEG. It was an Egyptian-style campaign. We awakened a mummy queen accidentally, who proceeded to Geas all of us so we had to do whatever she said. I left the group before it ended, but apparently it got finished and was overall pretty good (probably cuz it was ran by a diff GM)

Grod_The_Giant
2021-11-22, 12:41 PM
I think my favorite was from a low-level 5e game I ran-- a revenant by the name of Balthazar Philips.

Mechanically he was great because there's no way to really stop a revenant. I never had to worry about his being threatened or killed early. He could get up in the party's face and piss them off all he wanted; if they cut him to pieces he'd just pop back up the next night.

Personality-wise, he was great because he was insanely petty and seriously overdramatic. You didn't really need to do anything to get him upset, and once he notices you pretty much anything you do just keeps making him more infuriated. (He also was greedy and vengeance-obsessed more than actively evil, so he was unlikely to start slaughtering innocents no matter how angry he got).

All of this adds up to a guy who figures out where the party is going next, rushes ahead, and spends two hours building a wooden gallows in the middle of nowhere so that he can make his entrance as a hanged body suddenly raising its burning eyes. He then proceeds to scream at them for five minutes about how they're ruining all his plans and killed his favorite ghoul and left muddy footprints on the floor when they searched his house before someone finally gets fed up and takes a swing at him. The party jumps in too, and he's down to single-digit hitpoints and totally surrounded by the time his first turn comes up. At which point he snarls something along the lines of "**** all of you," casts Fireball centered on his current position, and vaporizes himself along with the entire party. Literally everyone was down at dying; if the Cleric hadn't rolled a natural 20 on their first death save it would have been an actual TPK.

HumanFighter
2021-11-22, 01:07 PM
I think my favorite was from a low-level 5e game I ran-- a revenant by the name of Balthazar Philips.

Mechanically he was great because there's no way to really stop a revenant. I never had to worry about his being threatened or killed early. He could get up in the party's face and piss them off all he wanted; if they cut him to pieces he'd just pop back up the next night.

Personality-wise, he was great because he was insanely petty and seriously overdramatic. You didn't really need to do anything to get him upset, and once he notices you pretty much anything you do just keeps making him more infuriated. (He also was greedy and vengeance-obsessed more than actively evil, so he was unlikely to start slaughtering innocents no matter how angry he got).

All of this adds up to a guy who figures out where the party is going next, rushes ahead, and spends two hours building a wooden gallows in the middle of nowhere so that he can make his entrance as a hanged body suddenly raising its burning eyes. He then proceeds to scream at them for five minutes about how they're ruining all his plans and killed his favorite ghoul and left muddy footprints on the floor when they searched his house before someone finally gets fed up and takes a swing at him. The party jumps in too, and he's down to single-digit hitpoints and totally surrounded by the time his first turn comes up. At which point he snarls something along the lines of "**** all of you," casts Fireball centered on his current position, and vaporizes himself along with the entire party. Literally everyone was down at dying; if the Cleric hadn't rolled a natural 20 on their first death save it would have been an actual TPK.

That is pretty impressive. I like that

dafrca
2021-11-22, 06:17 PM
For me, it will be a tie between Lofwyr and Strahd. Each held lots of power and yet felt like the conflicts were personal. As a player I had fun with the interactions with both over time and the realization of who we were "sparing" with. I admit Lofwyr felt more like we were small field mice and he was a large cat, but both made their respective campaign/games fun and memorable.

KorvinStarmast
2021-11-23, 01:00 PM
Eow, the BBEG in a friend's campaign of OD&D that I played in the early 80's.
The world had place names mostly in Welsh. During one underground expedition we ran into a large cave/room full of hogboglins who worked for an evil druid (Greyhawk monster druid, not a PC) who had basically light crossbow, crank operating gatling gun-style weapons mounted on pedestals.
That was a hard fight. (I remember it 40 years later, eh?)
That was but one group of evil minions who served the grand designs of Eow.

We had to fight the Rainbow Demon (cue the song by Uriah Heap) and stop him from destroying all that was good and light. A lot of elves died before we accomplished that.
Eow was at a power level similar to Saruman or Sauron, but he was also a little bit mustache twirling. He taunted us on more than one occasion.
I had a Fighting Man who (before it was all over) flew around on a giant fly (figurine of wondrous power) and an elf Magic User named Burnitrol who liked to use explosive runes on rolled up scrolls now and again.

The final showdown, which we were building to, never happened.
DM had to move, and then got married. When I ran into him a few years later in Virginia, D&D wasn't an option but it was great to see him again.

Jay R
2021-11-23, 06:25 PM
No question, whether you mean a character in a game I ran, or an NPC in a game I've played.

The answer in both cases is Cardinal Richelieu, in a game of Flashing Blades.

Both Robert and I play him as the quiet, menacing, nearly omniscient minister who is focused on the good of France, but doesn't care who is hurt in his plots, as played by Charlton Heston, Vincent Price, or Nigel Brulier (and described by Dumas), not the frothing madman of Tim Curry.

Spore
2021-11-24, 02:46 AM
The true BBEG is still behind 7 proxies in my campaign

The concept might make for a frustrating experience unless the group enjoys the "villain of the week" game, but boy do I love the "we killed the BBEG for the THIRD TIME THIS MONTH, I am getting beyond pissed if we still didnt kill the head of the organization" vibes here.

KorvinStarmast
2021-11-24, 09:13 AM
No question, whether you mean a character in a game I ran, or an NPC in a game I've played.

The answer in both cases is Cardinal Richelieu, in a game of Flashing Blades.

Both Robert and I play him as the quiet, menacing, nearly omniscient minister who is focused on the good of France, but doesn't care who is hurt in his plots, as played by Charlton Heston, Vincent Price, or Nigel Brulier (and described by Dumas), not the frothing madman of Tim Curry. He's the model for a BBEG I have at the moment. Yeah, Cardinal Richelieu. He was pretty nasty in the books by Dumas, which I just realize I first read nearly half of a century ago! :smalleek:

Milodiah
2021-11-28, 07:57 PM
For me, it will be a tie between Lofwyr and Strahd. Each held lots of power and yet felt like the conflicts were personal. As a player I had fun with the interactions with both over time and the realization of who we were "sparing" with. I admit Lofwyr felt more like we were small field mice and he was a large cat, but both made their respective campaign/games fun and memorable.

I honestly love Lofwyr. The idea that in Shadowrun, dragons can keep like a thousand trains of thought going at once if those trains are filled with cargo of grudges and revenge and acquisition and victory, is such a dangerous idea to shadowrunners. I always ask myself before I accept a run against Saeder-Krupp, "Is Lofwyr going to take this personally, or is he going to accept it as just business?"

I know that if the answer is 'personally', he will find out who I am, and he will make me pay in some way. I'm not afraid of Mitsuhama's 'zero-zones', I'm not afraid of Ares' big guns, I'm not afraid of Aztechnology's sacrificial magic and ridiculous punishments.

I'm afraid of the Dragon deciding that I've ruined his plans for the last time...except of course I, as a mere mortal, could never have ruined his plans because he has a contingency. But the fact that he has to use Plan B in the first place is a slap to the face.

He's a perfect summary of the world of Shadowrun in one entity. At the end of the day, if the megacorps decided, really decided they all hated shadowrunners and wanted them gone, 90% of them would be dead or incarcerated in a couple of weeks. But that'd cost so much, they'd lose so many assets, and they'd lose their plausible deniability; it's just not worth it. As long as you play by the rules, that is. Do your break and enter, grab the data, maybe a little paydata on the side, get out. Extract the headhunted recruit, kill the designated target, try not to get seen and if you do get seen try not to cause too much collateral damage. You're a shadowrunner. It's stupid to try to punish you for doing your job, and the effort would be much better spent at trying to figure out who ordered the job and why, because you were just the tool. Sure, the guards have orders to stop you, the doors are locked, and the nodes are full of black IC. If they weren't, anyone could do this. Once the pros are in and out, though, there's nothing to be gained from tracking them. And any business owner can tell you that if you spend so much money on loss prevention that you're now in the red, you've defeated the entire purpose of loss prevention.


But as soon as something truly goes sideways, you plug the wrong guy, you look in the wrong node, you make too much of a mess, it's now worth it to have you hunted down, and they will do so with extreme prejudice. It might be the target that does it, it might be your employer. Hell, in one game it was the rest of the crew because the mage we were with did some Really Bad Magic when our backs were turned and we knew if we didn't hand him over we'd fry right with him. Because at the end of the day, there's ten more teams queuing up to take the job, and they probably won't make the same mistakes after they hear what happened to you.

Lofwyr is that, personified.

dafrca
2021-11-28, 08:21 PM
I honestly love Lofwyr.

Very well written. I could not have said it better myself. :smallbiggrin:

NRSASD
2021-11-29, 07:10 AM
Strahd. BBEGs are supposed to be satisfying to take down, and none have been more satisfying than him. He’s present from the beginning, he’s overtly toying with you, everything wrong in the setting is in some way his fault, he can be charming or lethal at the flip of a coin, and finally he’s just atrocious.

I second that warning though: the more effort you put in to portraying Strahd, the more he plays you. Make sure your players are okay going to some very dark places if that’s how you roll.

Jon Irenicus is an excellent runner up because of his actor’s performance. I can still hear his voice in my head even though I haven’t played in a decade.

Reathin
2021-11-30, 11:18 AM
Technically didn't get to play this yet, but I'm waiting for a chance and it's easily my favorite so far.

So, there's a lich, and he's pretty much your haunted-bog-standard seeker of knowledge and immortality. Been undead for nearly a 1000 years, and is actually a comparatively tame element, since his research is so esoteric that nobody really knows what he's up to in his mountain lair, but he still has to swat the occasional adventuring party that comes knocking after figuring out that there's a local ancient monster. His most recent home invasion was going pretty much as normal (ie. overwhelmingly in his favor), until their bard ends up hitting him with a musical effect, due to having the Requiem feat that lets their powers impact undead. The lich is totally stunned, not because the music's power was anything, but because it had been so long since he really FELT anything that he was thrown for a loop. He offers to spare the party and forswear his dark research, if the Bard teaches him how that worked. Not exactly willing to trust, but clearly not going to find a better option, the party lets him, and the lich picks up the basics of Reqiuem Bardic Music.

The good news is that the lich intends to keep his promise to not continue his research. Problem is, he's now completely addicted to the power of music that he can now experience. And he wants to ensure he's NEVER without it. So he's re-adjusted his research into a new, epic spell designed to be essentially a memetic-virus. Anyone who hears the music understands it, how to add to it, how to perform it well, and is forced to implement the song (and accompanying dance) eternally. Once the person doing it dies, their skeleton rises up and continues the party until it's dust.

So, he needs to be stopped before he completes the admittedly pretty hefty research needed to complete this viral song-and-dance routine magic. I like that it's both silly and incredibly threatening.

Kurt Kurageous
2021-12-14, 03:16 PM
Strahd.

...the more effort you put in to portraying Strahd, the more he plays you. Make sure your players are okay going to some very dark places if that’s how you roll.

Absolutely. You get to know him, and know him so well you become him. But you never do. You are a thrall and nothing more.

LecternOfJasper
2021-12-14, 04:41 PM
Bahamut. That bloated dragon and his bloated church is going to get what's coming to him.

Honorable mentions go to Acererak, the living metal god we are going to ruin one of these days, the Fog Demon (who we will also, hopefully, ruin one of these days), the Knowing Dragon (but you kept saying there were no psions in this game!).

My games tend not to end with the BBEG getting stomped, as they usually end when I run out of steam or the party gets themselves killed in awful ways, but I have high hopes this time around.

farothel
2021-12-15, 04:07 PM
The BBEG in my Star Trek campaign wasn't actually evil at all. He wasn't even a he, but a macro-virus that originated in some subspace domain and colonies of it could just eat whole planets. It was actually quite easy to play, as there were no plans and colonies could show up just about everywhere by dropping in and out of subspace. Want to do a rescue mission: players have to help refugees who's planet was destroyed. Science mission: try and find a sample. Diplomacy mission: try to get other races to help out.

And tribbles of course. I actually have some plush tribbles (they make sounds and vibrate, luckily they don't breed :smalltongue: ) and that session I had them make rolls at times (glitches in the systems, seeing something out of the corner of an eye, stuff like that). As soon as the first PC hit a certain target number (going down as the tribble count went up), I said nothing, but just put one of those plush tribbles on the table.

SimonMoon6
2021-12-15, 10:14 PM
Here are two:

(1) Bill the Lich was a villain in my longest running D&D campaign. This was back in 1st edition days. He was actually the first enemy that the group encountered. And you'd probably think that there's no way that a group of 1st level characters could beat a lich. Normally, you'd be right. But Bill the Lich was a little bit... off.

First, his strategy was rather subpar. He had a special (homebrew) crystal ball that he could cast spells through. So as the heroes were advancing through his headquarters, he would cast spells to destroy them. The one flaw in his reasoning is that he expected to fight high level heroes, so there was no point trying to use damage dealing spells. It was far more important to use "save or die" spells because that's how you defeat high level heroes. The other flaw in his reasoning was throwing all these spells at the barbarian, who had incredible saves against such spells. So, the party was pretty much unscathed as they finally reached Bill in his lair.

Then, Bill fearing defeat, used his first turn to cast burning hands to destroy his own spellbooks, so that the heroes wouldn't get their hands on them! So, yeah, not the best tactics. Of course, the heroes couldn't hurt him (or even "hit" him, using 1st edition terminology) without magic weapons, but Bill had a bunch of magical knickknacks in his secret room. So, the heroes ended up grappling him with a magic tablecloth and trapping him. Eventually, he did teleport away, enabling him to become a recurring villain.

Some of the moments I remember include

(a) one time he showed up while the party was in the middle of an adventure. He then demanded they give a certain amount of gold (enough to buy a ring of fire resistance, since that was a lich's main weakness back then). They gave him the gold and he went away.

(b) he was found (via crystal ball I think) in a place that the PCs called "the dimension of plotting", where he and several of the other main villains were working on plans to defeat the PCs.
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(2) Then, there was me in one of those "self insert" games. This was a multi-dimensional multi-genre game, where the other realities (other than the main Earth that the PCs were from) were all taken from fiction, such as a Star Trek universe, a D&D universe, a Doctor Who universe, a DC comics universe, an Elric of Melnibone (Young Kingdoms) universe, etc. One universe was a Cthulhu mythos universe. And, we were using the sanity rules from Call of Cthulhu. And, as I knew a lot about the Cthulhu mythos, the NPC that was my representative in this universe had a lot of the "Cthulhu Mythos" skill which limits your maximum sanity. Long story short, "I" quickly went permanently insane and became a ridiculously powerful villain. The reason I could become so powerful was that all of these other universes were things that I knew about and therefore knew where all the items of power could be located.

For a while, many adventures were the heroes making a futile attempt to stop "me" from stealing some new item of power. Eventually, the heroes were given a chance to fight "me" in any universe of their choice. And of course, with that advantage, they should have had an easy victory. But they chose a superhero universe instead and made it a much closer fight than it had to be. ("I" had a ton of high tech items that wouldn't have worked in, say, the Dreamlands where high tech items are transformed into a low-tech equivalent. But... they didn't choose to fight there.)

Bohandas
2021-12-16, 03:03 AM
Whether it's a lich or the head of a mega corp I'm curious.

You see i never actually managed to have a big bad evil guy. Most games i was in died before 1 could appear. With the exception of some 1 shots.

None of my tabletop games ever got that far either.

In terms of CRPGs however, the deranged warlord in Fallout New Vegas who acts like Julius Caesar is rather compelling, in that he comes off as a convincing believable character, while at the same time being entirely repellent and unsympathetic, which makes it VERY satisfying to blow his head off with an anti-tank gun

EDIT:
With an honorable mention to the main villains from Fallout 3 who are also convincing yet repellent and unsympathetic, and the villain from the DLC Fallout 3: The Pitt, who is convincing and repellent albeit without necessarily being entirely unsympathetic

King of Nowhere
2021-12-18, 10:10 PM
I'm quite proud of my current villain, Alice the crazy nymph.

In my world, nymphs' power of animal emphaty manifests in having those animals behave like they are in a cartoon, being all friendly and with human emotions. Alice got mutated by wild magic and she got her ability greatly expanded, covering tens of kilometers in radius. but, because of the whole "humanized" business, and because nature actually sucks when you look up close, she started feeling pain. unbelievable pain. she felt the suffering of every single animal in a large area, increased by projecting human emotions on them. whenever a mosquito died, she felt like she had lost a beloved brother - and she also felt the pain of every other mosquito in the swarm for losing their relative, even though mosquitoes should not have feelings in the first place.
Overwhelmed by grief and trying to cope with it, she eventually decided that life is an evil contraption made to perpetuate suffering, sort of like the machines to extract liquid pain, on a larger scale. And she decided she had to try and stop it.
She plans to take over the world, gradually expanding her wild magic bubble, until it covers everything and she controls every creature within. then she'd order everything in it to die. then she'd kill herself too.
Unfortunately for everyone, her control over the wild magic and its creatures make her powerful enough that she could actually pull it of...

What makes her interesting and compelling to me is that she's genuinely a good person. She's truly altruistic, and she'll go out of her way to kill you with the least amount of suffering, if at all possible. She's also prone to consoling her victims, apologize, cry for them. But she got into her head that she has to kill everyone, for their own good, and she won't change her mind.

there is a tendency in media to portray the well intentioned extremist as an hypocrite. they claim to have great ideals that justify the suffering they spread, but when push comes to shove, they reveal their evil nature. just look at redcloak and miko. I always felt this is a reassuring lie we tell ourselves. see, those people claim to be good, but really, they knew they weren't. if you try to do good, you definitely don't have to worry that you'll accidentally make things worse; that only happens to bad peopleTM!
Ever since I noticed that trope, I've been wanting to subvert it. I wanted a well-intentioned extremist that was not secretly hypocrite, liar, power-hungry, edonist, egoistic, trying to assuage his guilty conscience. i wanted someone who was truly caring, while committing unspeakable atrocities.

Alice's establishing moments during her reveal:
- she unleashed hellwasp swarms upon a city garrison, infesting the soldiers
- she used the soldiers against the city, forced them to shoot their comrade in arms, their families
- she hurried up to join her soldiers and cast a custom-made spell that she researched herself to ease the discomfort of being infested by hellwasps
- she used the swarms to exterminate as many civilians as possible
- she apologized profusely to her victims, trying to cheer them up because "soon the pain will pass"
- she captured a succubus and she let herself be persuaded to spare her, because "if you kill me I'll spawn back in hell, which is a very crappy place; it won't ease my suffering at all"
- she used her infested soldiers as fodder where they were more effective than the wasps
- she told their surviving soldiers that she'd put an end to their misery as soon as she was sure she wouldn't need them anymore.
- she ordered them to have as much fun as they could while they waited
- she refreshed the painkiller spell while she waited
- she had all the soldiers commit suicide
- she ran around the piles of corpses laughing with joy, because she couldn't feel any suffering coming from any of them. Proof that she's right and she's actually helping people.

mechanically, her nymph boosts to AC and saving throws, plus a bunch of other eclectic abilities she got from the wild magic, make her virtually invulnerable. she's meant as a puzzle fight, with the players having to figure out ways to actually hurt her

Bohandas
2021-12-18, 10:34 PM
she eventually decided that life is an evil contraption made to perpetuate suffering, sort of like the machines to extract liquid pain

.boB I wanT alL mY garmonboziA

EDIT:
Strike that, the Twin Peaks analogy is weak.

Better analogy, she sounds like the villains from Pitch Black 2: The Chronicles of Riddick

EDIT:
No, better yet: https://www.angryflower.com/586.html

King of Nowhere
2021-12-19, 08:06 PM
.boB I wanT alL mY garmonboziA

EDIT:
Strike that, the Twin Peaks analogy is weak.

Better analogy, she sounds like the villains from Pitch Black 2: The Chronicles of Riddick

EDIT:
No, better yet: https://www.angryflower.com/586.html

well, I'm not as well versed in all those media. To me, it was a very original concept.
Of course, in a world with billions people it's impossible to come up with an original concept that nobody else thought of before.

Ameraaaaaa
2021-12-20, 12:16 AM
well, I'm not as well versed in all those media. To me, it was a very original concept.
Of course, in a world with billions people it's impossible to come up with an original concept that nobody else thought of before.

True. And the way you approached it from your description was amazing. Definitely a unique villain.

Vahnavoi
2021-12-20, 02:26 AM
My top three are:

3) the amulet from Lamentations of the Flame Princess module Death Love Doom. There's a thing that comes outside when the amulet is offered to another as a gesture of love. It exists for the sole purpose of deconstructing all that's near and dear to whoever makes that error. It's sort of like the One Ring, if instead of world domination, the Ring would want to make your personal life into Hell.

2) a sentient reality-warping aurora from Lamentations of the Flame Princess module Weird New World. It has the power to make what the player characters most fear into reality... permanently. Just having a thing like this in an ongoing campaign eventually leads to it having overarching influence, even if player characters never figure out what it is or does.

3) climate change, visualized as Satan in the form of a giant red dragon melting glaciers with his fiery breath to flood the world of Men. The best part of this is that it's all pure nonsense, a boogeyman the players created by accident out of their own web of lies and misconceptions. But because the campaign also includes the aurora, above, there's a non-zero chance that it will become a literal thing. Indeed, the player characters think the aurora either is the dragon or fire escaping from its mouth, meaning the story they themselves spun points them in that direction! :smallamused:

LoneStarNorth
2021-12-20, 03:44 AM
In the long running Warrior Rogue & Mage campaign that my group wrapped up a couple years back, the party ended up fighting against a group called The Seven, which was comprised of every lich that existed in the setting. They were working on a plan to render the world inhospitable to the gods (and every other living thing) so that their power would be unchallenged. Each of The Seven had different magical powers, such as one that was immune to fire (and liked to blow himself up), one that could increase his physical strength exponentially, and one that could control people with words alone. The one I consider my favourite big bad is Zankore, the First Lich.

Zankore is the First Lich because he was the first person to undergo the lichification process. This process grants the subject a nigh-indestructible regenerating body, as well as the ability to persist as a spirit if that body is ever destroyed. The spirit can then inhabit the first compatible corpse it comes across and revive itself. However, lichification is a tricky thing to accomplish, and the first attempt was really more of a proof of concept. While liches five, six, and seven were remained mentally sound, the first four were all damaged in different ways during their transformations. Zankore's transformation, however, failed almost completely. His body had no ability to regenerate itself, and wasn't even properly prevented from decaying over time. However, not only did his ability to inhabit new corpses function, he could do it even before his first body was destroyed. He would graft new bodies onto himself, be they human or animal, in order to persist indefinitely. The act of doing so repeatedly gradually changed him into a hulking mass of limbs and slowly eroded his mind almost completely. He couldn't cast spells any more, only violently detonate the magic within his body. Eventually he lost the ability to speak or reason. He would only follow the orders of the Seventh Lich, who could command anyone.

The party fought each of The Seven at least once, and each would utilize spells, magic items, minions, and traps to the best of their ability. Zankore, however, would only bellow and run at the nearest living body in order to turn it into a corpse that he could absorb. He first appeared when he smashed a hole in the wall of the party's fortress to aid the escape of one of his allies. The party encountered him again in the city The Seven had converted into their nightmarish stronghold as their plans neared completion; he emerged in giant form the city's sewers, grown massive and powerful from the thousands of dead bodies he'd been fed. Although the party had magic fiery swords which could be used to trap a lich's spirit within its burning body and prevent it from reviving elsewhere, Zankore would simply rip the swords out of his body, heedless of his own soul being ripped to pieces in the process. The party managed to kill him, but they couldn't trap him.

When they found him again in the deepest levels of the lich's lair, he was only a single human corpse once more, chasing and devouring rats. Once eaten they would claw their way out of his swollen gut and provide another set of limbs with which to hunt and grasp. He may have been weak enough to bind at this point, but the sight of him was so unnerving that they panicked and killed him outright once again. And so, after the rest of The Seven were bound and their hidden stashes of backup bodies destroyed, Zankore's spirit remained free. He would inevitably reappear, too damaged to understand that his plans had been ruined, too hungry to ever stop searching for fresh bodies.

Maybe one day I'll run a sequel campaign where Zankore can be dealt with permanently, but for now he's just out in the world... somewhere.

Ameraaaaaa
2021-12-20, 03:58 AM
Here are two:

(1) Bill the Lich was a villain in my longest running D&D campaign. This was back in 1st edition days. He was actually the first enemy that the group encountered. And you'd probably think that there's no way that a group of 1st level characters could beat a lich. Normally, you'd be right. But Bill the Lich was a little bit... off.

First, his strategy was rather subpar. He had a special (homebrew) crystal ball that he could cast spells through. So as the heroes were advancing through his headquarters, he would cast spells to destroy them. The one flaw in his reasoning is that he expected to fight high level heroes, so there was no point trying to use damage dealing spells. It was far more important to use "save or die" spells because that's how you defeat high level heroes. The other flaw in his reasoning was throwing all these spells at the barbarian, who had incredible saves against such spells. So, the party was pretty much unscathed as they finally reached Bill in his lair.

Then, Bill fearing defeat, used his first turn to cast burning hands to destroy his own spellbooks, so that the heroes wouldn't get their hands on them! So, yeah, not the best tactics. Of course, the heroes couldn't hurt him (or even "hit" him, using 1st edition terminology) without magic weapons, but Bill had a bunch of magical knickknacks in his secret room. So, the heroes ended up grappling him with a magic tablecloth and trapping him. Eventually, he did teleport away, enabling him to become a recurring villain.

Some of the moments I remember include

(a) one time he showed up while the party was in the middle of an adventure. He then demanded they give a certain amount of gold (enough to buy a ring of fire resistance, since that was a lich's main weakness back then). They gave him the gold and he went away.

(b) he was found (via crystal ball I think) in a place that the PCs called "the dimension of plotting", where he and several of the other main villains were working on plans to defeat the PCs.
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(2) Then, there was me in one of those "self insert" games. This was a multi-dimensional multi-genre game, where the other realities (other than the main Earth that the PCs were from) were all taken from fiction, such as a Star Trek universe, a D&D universe, a Doctor Who universe, a DC comics universe, an Elric of Melnibone (Young Kingdoms) universe, etc. One universe was a Cthulhu mythos universe. And, we were using the sanity rules from Call of Cthulhu. And, as I knew a lot about the Cthulhu mythos, the NPC that was my representative in this universe had a lot of the "Cthulhu Mythos" skill which limits your maximum sanity. Long story short, "I" quickly went permanently insane and became a ridiculously powerful villain. The reason I could become so powerful was that all of these other universes were things that I knew about and therefore knew where all the items of power could be located.

For a while, many adventures were the heroes making a futile attempt to stop "me" from stealing some new item of power. Eventually, the heroes were given a chance to fight "me" in any universe of their choice. And of course, with that advantage, they should have had an easy victory. But they chose a superhero universe instead and made it a much closer fight than it had to be. ("I" had a ton of high tech items that wouldn't have worked in, say, the Dreamlands where high tech items are transformed into a low-tech equivalent. But... they didn't choose to fight there.)

The 1st guy sounds like a great rpg version of a silly Saturday morning villain and i love him.

"You" as a villain is a pretty cool idea.


In the long running Warrior Rogue & Mage campaign that my group wrapped up a couple years back, the party ended up fighting against a group called The Seven, which was comprised of every lich that existed in the setting. They were working on a plan to render the world inhospitable to the gods (and every other living thing) so that their power would be unchallenged. Each of The Seven had different magical powers, such as one that was immune to fire (and liked to blow himself up), one that could increase his physical strength exponentially, and one that could control people with words alone. The one I consider my favourite big bad is Zankore, the First Lich.

Zankore is the First Lich because he was the first person to undergo the lichification process. This process grants the subject a nigh-indestructible regenerating body, as well as the ability to persist as a spirit if that body is ever destroyed. The spirit can then inhabit the first compatible corpse it comes across and revive itself. However, lichification is a tricky thing to accomplish, and the first attempt was really more of a proof of concept. While liches five, six, and seven were remained mentally sound, the first four were all damaged in different ways during their transformations. Zankore's transformation, however, failed almost completely. His body had no ability to regenerate itself, and wasn't even properly prevented from decaying over time. However, not only did his ability to inhabit new corpses function, he could do it even before his first body was destroyed. He would graft new bodies onto himself, be they human or animal, in order to persist indefinitely. The act of doing so repeatedly gradually changed him into a hulking mass of limbs and slowly eroded his mind almost completely. He couldn't cast spells any more, only violently detonate the magic within his body. Eventually he lost the ability to speak or reason. He would only follow the orders of the Seventh Lich, who could command anyone.

The party fought each of The Seven at least once, and each would utilize spells, magic items, minions, and traps to the best of their ability. Zankore, however, would only bellow and run at the nearest living body in order to turn it into a corpse that he could absorb. He first appeared when he smashed a hole in the wall of the party's fortress to aid the escape of one of his allies. The party encountered him again in the city The Seven had converted into their nightmarish stronghold as their plans neared completion; he emerged in giant form the city's sewers, grown massive and powerful from the thousands of dead bodies he'd been fed. Although the party had magic fiery swords which could be used to trap a lich's spirit within its burning body and prevent it from reviving elsewhere, Zankore would simply rip the swords out of his body, heedless of his own soul being ripped to pieces in the process. The party managed to kill him, but they couldn't trap him.

When they found him again in the deepest levels of the lich's lair, he was only a single human corpse once more, chasing and devouring rats. Once eaten they would claw their way out of his swollen gut and provide another set of limbs with which to hunt and grasp. He may have been weak enough to bind at this point, but the sight of him was so unnerving that they panicked and killed him outright once again. And so, after the rest of The Seven were bound and their hidden stashes of backup bodies destroyed, Zankore's spirit remained free. He would inevitably reappear, too damaged to understand that his plans had been ruined, too hungry to ever stop searching for fresh bodies.

Maybe one day I'll run a sequel campaign where Zankore can be dealt with permanently, but for now he's just out in the world... somewhere.

This is a bloody fantastic story. Thanks for sharing. For some reason the 7 lichs remind me of the 7 hemuculus from full metal alchemist with both being a group of unnatural monsters each with unique abilities.


I'm quite proud of my current villain, Alice the crazy nymph.

In my world, nymphs' power of animal emphaty manifests in having those animals behave like they are in a cartoon, being all friendly and with human emotions. Alice got mutated by wild magic and she got her ability greatly expanded, covering tens of kilometers in radius. but, because of the whole "humanized" business, and because nature actually sucks when you look up close, she started feeling pain. unbelievable pain. she felt the suffering of every single animal in a large area, increased by projecting human emotions on them. whenever a mosquito died, she felt like she had lost a beloved brother - and she also felt the pain of every other mosquito in the swarm for losing their relative, even though mosquitoes should not have feelings in the first place.
Overwhelmed by grief and trying to cope with it, she eventually decided that life is an evil contraption made to perpetuate suffering, sort of like the machines to extract liquid pain, on a larger scale. And she decided she had to try and stop it.
She plans to take over the world, gradually expanding her wild magic bubble, until it covers everything and she controls every creature within. then she'd order everything in it to die. then she'd kill herself too.
Unfortunately for everyone, her control over the wild magic and its creatures make her powerful enough that she could actually pull it of...

What makes her interesting and compelling to me is that she's genuinely a good person. She's truly altruistic, and she'll go out of her way to kill you with the least amount of suffering, if at all possible. She's also prone to consoling her victims, apologize, cry for them. But she got into her head that she has to kill everyone, for their own good, and she won't change her mind.

there is a tendency in media to portray the well intentioned extremist as an hypocrite. they claim to have great ideals that justify the suffering they spread, but when push comes to shove, they reveal their evil nature. just look at redcloak and miko. I always felt this is a reassuring lie we tell ourselves. see, those people claim to be good, but really, they knew they weren't. if you try to do good, you definitely don't have to worry that you'll accidentally make things worse; that only happens to bad peopleTM!
Ever since I noticed that trope, I've been wanting to subvert it. I wanted a well-intentioned extremist that was not secretly hypocrite, liar, power-hungry, edonist, egoistic, trying to assuage his guilty conscience. i wanted someone who was truly caring, while committing unspeakable atrocities.

Alice's establishing moments during her reveal:
- she unleashed hellwasp swarms upon a city garrison, infesting the soldiers
- she used the soldiers against the city, forced them to shoot their comrade in arms, their families
- she hurried up to join her soldiers and cast a custom-made spell that she researched herself to ease the discomfort of being infested by hellwasps
- she used the swarms to exterminate as many civilians as possible
- she apologized profusely to her victims, trying to cheer them up because "soon the pain will pass"
- she captured a succubus and she let herself be persuaded to spare her, because "if you kill me I'll spawn back in hell, which is a very crappy place; it won't ease my suffering at all"
- she used her infested soldiers as fodder where they were more effective than the wasps
- she told their surviving soldiers that she'd put an end to their misery as soon as she was sure she wouldn't need them anymore.
- she ordered them to have as much fun as they could while they waited
- she refreshed the painkiller spell while she waited
- she had all the soldiers commit suicide
- she ran around the piles of corpses laughing with joy, because she couldn't feel any suffering coming from any of them. Proof that she's right and she's actually helping people.

mechanically, her nymph boosts to AC and saving throws, plus a bunch of other eclectic abilities she got from the wild magic, make her virtually invulnerable. she's meant as a puzzle fight, with the players having to figure out ways to actually hurt her

i love that the nymph genuinely thinks they are a good person even tho they are about to commit omnicide. Probably one of my 2 favourite homebrew villains in the thread so far along which the 1st lich. I can't tell which i like more because they are both so great.

Kid Jake
2021-12-22, 09:42 AM
He wasn't exactly the most epic or menacing, but I think the most amusing BBEG was the 'villain' from the game I ran to introduce my nieces to tabletop.

They were runaway pixie princesses exploring the outside world for the first time and he was an unattended three year old wandering around a trailer park.

They tried to befriend him, because they were fascinated by humans, and he ended up stealing their source of pixie dust; trapping them in a trashcan with a feral cat; soaking them with a garden hose so that they had to spend half the campaign walking while their wings dried and even squashed one of them (with oblivious toddler joy) during the climactic final 'battle' for their dust.

In the epilogue the remaining princess returned home and destroyed her people's portal to our world, believing that humans are indestructible soulless monsters, never realizing that their tormentor was a child that didn't even realize what was going on.