Reoccurring villain (but they won't know)

[MellowMelon]

My evil DM brain flicked on as I scanned through splat books recently. I thought of a villain that might just be incredibly entertaining. I want to create a changeling beguiler/chamelion as a BBEG.

I began to think how difficult this guy would be to locate and identify. My players would be sooo paranoid. Does this sound as fun to you guys as it does to me or would this be an annoying buzz-kill as a player?

Any other interesting (perhaps even frustrating) villain ideas?

[MellowMelon]

No takers?

[melchizedek]

In this case, the motivation of the BBEG is going to be very important. Why is he a reoccurring villain?

If the players have some reason to suspect that it's a reoccurring villain, I think it could be sort of cool. If they don't it seems sort of unimportant.

[broderickdruce]

I did something similar to this, the party kept running into the same guy all over the place, a random merchant, an assistant in a mages guild, a "Captive" of the "BBEG", he always had a story as to why he was there. The truth was he was trying to decide if the party was an actual threat to his plans. The Irony was that in the very beginning they saved his life. He was lying in a ditch with negative hitpoints but stable after being ambushed on a road.

[MellowMelon]

The BBEG would be manipulative and selfish. He realizes the benefit of taking from others with no simple method of being caught.

His thieving/murdering/child sacrificing (whatever profits him the most at the time) will begin to attract the attention of adventurers (either hired to eliminate him/her or just philanthropists).

He is smart enough, that after a few of his plans are foiled that he will seek to eliminate (indirectly if possible) the party that threatens him.

The players will know about several different outrageous crimes and will eventually discover a few of the BBEG personsas have been seen in the same areas after some investigation. (The appearence of an old dwarven crone in the dirty alley behinda drug den around the same time as the dissapearence of the corrupt noble elven lord (nobody will know how he is noble))

He/she may even maintain a specific set of appearences in order to keep up his reputaion to make an easier profit. e.g. the black eyed halfing that the local taverns pay their "dues" to out of fear.

I don't know... just thought it'd be intersting. It needs to be a little more thought out.

[Fizban]

*Twitch* Okay, we just went over this in english. The word is "recurring", not "reocurring".

As for the topic at hand, recurring villains are great, but as has been stated motivation is important. The way I would do it would be to not even give any clues unless they players get through with some divination spells. They just go along, fighting against all kinds of villains like some sort of fairy tale superheroes, and when they finally manage to capture and unmask one, they find out the 27 different people were all the same one.

So, stat up the idea and most obvious motivations of each different encounter's persona, making them all nicely radically different, and then figure out how the chameleon will emulate them all. You can probably get spells to emulate any ability you can't already get with chameleon, and if you can out-splatbook your players you can just go wild.

Hey, I just had a random thought: the "demon" terrorizing a village turns out to be an incredibly talented chameleon.

[PlatinumJester]

In our campaign we have an evil dwarven fighter called Griss the Boulder. He is ugly, fat and has an incredibly low charisma score. The worst thing is that he teleports whenever we try to kill him.

Another character we have is a retarded humanoid called Alfred. He was devised when we found an old 2.0 character sheet. He originally had 18 intelligence but someone had crossed out the 8 so it was 1. Now he appears in most of our campaigns as a retard with mystical armour which gives him an AC of 972 and a broken sword (which he is too stupid to use) that can only used by him. If you pick it up you can no longer drop it and you explode. We found this out the hard way when our wizard picked it up. Even worse was that I decided to pick it up using a piece of cloth which failed. The only way to survive it is to cut you own hand off like I did so now my character has a stump knife instead of a hand. The best thing about alfred is whenever he appears he makes a sound best descibed as Nurghhh.

[Ninja Chocobo]

and when they finally manage to capture and unmask one, they find out the 27 different people were all the same one.

It was Old Man Withers all along!

[Aramil Liadon]

Well, that is my favorite PC concept...
I think the idea works only if the PCs are willing to go after him once and manage to screw him up. Then he would have a reason to get back at them. If they fail, it all falls apart. Be wary.
Also, fake persona's tend to get incredibly annoying after a while. If they cast true seeing on every NPC they meet, you know you've gone too far. A little paranoia is fun, too much more and life just isn't any fun.