who were your most memorable villains

[FabulousFizban]

for whatever reason you explain.

[DigoDragon]

Astraxia the red Dragon bard. Memorable for nearly converting the entire party into her lackeys just by offering them loot for helping her murder a royal family and topple their country. For fun.

[Vrock_Summoner]

Astraxia the red Dragon bard. Memorable for nearly converting the entire party into her lackeys just by offering them loot for helping her murder a royal family and topple their country. For fun.

"Nearly"? Loot and anarchy are pretty convincing arguments, so what in the world swayed them against it?

@OP: Tertheria in an Ars Magica game. Unique in that it was my PC's own actions that brought her into the saga. She was the slumbering daimon of a forest destroyed hundreds of years ago. Everybody else (including the SG) expected us to try to awaken her as an ally by replanting her forest and causing it to grow quickly with Creo Herbam, but my magus tricked the other characters (in-character; I told everyone my plan OOC) into waiting a season. He spent that season teaching himself a variant summoning spell that brought an Aspect of the daimon into the world without its conscious effort, and as everyone spent the next season regrowing the forest and tending to everything that would be necessary to get her on our good side, my character was binding her power to himself via her Aspect. She woke up earlier than expected, and violently insane to boot, due to the pain of basically having some of her spirit torn off and bound. Thus did the forest turn into a hellish, constantly-expanding jungle, and thus did a noble rival of the covenant get aide from Aspects of Tertheria in undermining the covenant and its goals.

Fun times, fun times.

[saeval]

I had a Renegade Gnomish wizard/spell thief... who was more of a memorable annoyance than dastardly villain. It all takes place in the Dragonlance setting... He was introduced to the party as a problem by them watching a Red Robe Renegade Hunter attempt to force him to comply to taking the Test. The Red Robe died to a phantasmal killer spell. This takes place in broad daylight, in a large city. The party had actually interacted with him earlier, the other day without knowing he had any special talents whatsoever. They had decided he was a bit odd.

The party attempts to pursue, but the Gnome scoffs and tells them "You'll never get through my BEARrier!" as he casts a barrier which takes the form of several bears blocking the pathway. He was Entirely made of bad Puns for every spell he cast... and the party swiftly found out he had stolen their Gem of Truesight, as well as an important story related amulet that was kept in the same satchel. They were beyond irritated and at the same time... unBEARably entertained by him. I used every bear pun possible, as well as puns unrelated to bears, but just as painful to sit through. They actually let him live, (after several thwarted attempts to catch/kill him) and the wizard in the party teleported him to the tower of high sorcery, where he left him to take the test.

He ended up passing the test, and falling in with a group that opposed the party again. He didn't know that, and in the end, saved two of the party members who tumbled off a cliff wrestling a Sivak.

[Kid Jake]

Vincent Depaliamo, a ruthless Italian mobster from my M&M campaign who repeatedly threatened the PCs families and generally tried to wreck up their lives until they finally toppled him and locked him in a cage in their basement...

Then he begged and pleaded and reasoned with them until they gave him a little leeway and a chance to redeem himself, at which point he immediately went back to murdering family members and screaming 'Nanner nanner, I got away!' from the sidelines.

[DigoDragon]

"Nearly"? Loot and anarchy are pretty convincing arguments, so what in the world swayed them against it?
s.

The party fighter did. She tricked the party at one point that Astraxia had left without them on a boat to another town and hired a scribe to give Astraxia a letter that stated the party declined her offer. The fighter managed to play both sides and it worked for quite some time. :3

[Bard1cKnowledge]

Ahhhh, my villain, I called him Lord Tezzen (in his human form) in his true form he called himself Poe, a LE BBEG who hired the party to bring him items in a run down mansion, including the phalactary of a Lich (unknowingly of course)

[NRSASD]

Not my villain, but my DM's: the deity Cyric. In our completely homebrew AD&D setting, Cyric is the lord of the undead. Our party of trounced some Cyric cultists/slavers in our home city and found a figurine that we unwisely decided to sleep in the same room as. Since we were too close to Cyric's connection to our world (we found this out later), my wizard had terrifying dreams about Cyric. Cyric asked for my wizard's name and location, and rolling a natural 1 on a will save, I gave it to him. Cyric decided to kick off the undead apocalypse that night by raising every dead thing within 30 miles and just about destroyed the city. Our past four campaigns over the last 8 years (irl) have been trying to reclaim the city from the undead, resulting in multiple city states within the shell of our former homes.

[Marlowe]

Currently, we have Sisyphus aka "Syphilis". Preening, blond-haired sorceror working as middle-management as part of a clique of necromantic planet-looters

He became known to the party as "The Red Comet" after his first encounter with the party ended with him flying away on the second round of combat bleeding and on fire while his scantily-clad female minions died to cover his retreat. A pattern of behaviour he has continued in subsequent encounters. The party really doesn't seem to like this.

It really should have been Phil the golf-playing Lich. Only Phil kind of ruined his villain cred by lounging around on his throne of darkness in a stained pink bathrobe and bunny slippers, displaying more interest in his putting technique than anything connected with the plot, and becoming the parties employer.

[veti]

I'm going to go with S., the estranged wife of Death, who wanted to destroy the universe because that was the only way of destroying Death.

(Well, that was the basic outline anyway. There were a few twists to it.)

[AxeAlex]

Elg O Wa:
In a time-travelling game, an alien from a doomed planet that had himself robotized in order to become immortal. He found earth and tries to harvest human emotions and organs to become alive again and reproduce with his frozen-in-stasis mate that sleeps in his spaceship. The players really found him fascinating and he was a classic allmighty but not-really malevolent enemy.


Warlord Kurog:
A powerful Orc Warlord, master tactician but most importantly, really genre-savvy. His most famous move, after being villain for a while, was to convince the players he was honorable and that Orcs were persecuted and actually quite noble even if they liked warfare and combat... The players viewed him like a Warcraft Orc instead of a Tolkien Orc, and they even started to like the Orcs under his command, got to see their way of life, etc.

The betrayal was spectacular and horrible, caused the good guy's defeat in a great battle and the theft of an artifact. He justified himself simply with "My actions WERE honorable, I'm a military leader, my greatest duty is to my people, our greatest honor is victory, and I won... twice."

Simply put, even if his people were not pure evil, HE was!


Zankov, the Wolf of the East:
Leader of a mercenary band, Zankov is an evil ranger that is really, really emotionnal. Kills his guys when angry, cries when sad or in pain, jolly when happy, and his past is that of a classic hero. (Ex-slave turned gladiator turned great warrior) He's completely evil but in a very "animalistic" way, is not very smart, physically small and weak because of years of abuse, but still a killing machine thanks to his absurd combat skills.

Since he is almost undefeatable in combat, my players usually have to outsmart him and exploit his emotional weakness, which are both not that hard to do, and they love that.

[FabulousFizban]

It really should have been Phil the golf-playing Lich. Only Phil kind of ruined his villain cred by lounging around on his throne of darkness in a stained pink bathrobe and bunny slippers, displaying more interest in his putting technique than anything connected with the plot, and becoming the parties employer.

I am stealing this.

[Spartakus]

The award goes to the BBEG from "Return to the temple of elemntal evil". After a series of overly long dungeon crawls he was in the first room we explored in the final dungeon. Memorable because he fell in the first round of combat after a single slay living and a natural one on his saving throw.

This last dungeon took us roughly 20 minutes of gaming. Half of the time was spend loughing about the most anticlimatc ending EVER

[TheEmerged]

If the standard is "memorable", there's one that stands head and shoulders above the rest for our gaming group. In fact, I have been threatened by the players to NEVER bring him back, or anything similar.

Genre: Superheroic
System: HERO
The Character: ANNOYING MAN!

He began as a challenge: to create an opponent for the players with below average attacks & defenses, and see just how long I could keep the character alive using misdirection, avoidance, and so forth.

To make a long story short - 5 in-game minutes (>300 rounds in most games) and nearly 5 real-world hours later, he was still alive and the players were spending more time contemplating my slow and painful death than the combat I still use this as an example when explaining the Sunk Cost Fallacy -- "Sometime around the one hour mark, the players were no longer having fun - but even though I offered to just end it, explain what was happening, and call it a failed experiment, by that point the players were obsessed with solving it because they couldn't let their previous effort go."

Spoiler: Longer Version

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So, start with teleportation - he disappears from his current hex and appears elsewhere. Easy enough, a player blasts him - but the attack goes right through him!

Oh, you thought he went desolid? Nuh uh, because he just walked up and punched you!

Well, my teammate with the radar sense just realized he's invisible, because he sees a radar image in THAT hex - but again, the blast goes right through him! And now someone got punched by an invisible opponent! And now there are half a dozen copies of him around...

It gets much, much screwier. Illusions, duplication, invisibility, teleportation, missile reflection, tunneling... I went so far as to have him creating duplicates that were visible only to sight & sound (invisible to radar sense /etc) just to throw people), Images *only* to radar sense and danger sense, and so on and so on.

So yeah, the players barely managed to lay a glove on the 'real' him and I'm under threat to never bring him back.

I look forward to the very similar-sounding character of "Nyah Nyah Can't Hit Me Guy" showing up in the Grrl Power webcomic (he's been teased a few times but hasn't actually shown).

[daemonaetea]

Justice, a gold dragon who'd had the misfortune to pull the Justice card from the deck of many things, instantly changing his alignment to Chaotic Evil. He dedicated his life to villainy of the highest level, ultimately attempting to bring down the entire multiverse. The party got involved in the story towards the end of his plot, and Justice more or less groomed them because winning wouldn't really be fun unless he had someone opposing him. He was committed to full on, mustache twirling Evil, and did everything from kidnapping dragon babies to raise them brainwashed, to setting of a minor apocalypse more or less for funsies, to setting Simulacrums of himself to fight them, more or less so they could taunt them. The party didn't just want to save the world(s), they wanted to personally push his face in while they did it.

[Jay R]

Ask me my second most memorable villain, and I have at least a dozen candidates. But my most memorable villain? No question. None at all.

The game was Flashing Blades. The villain was Cardinal Richelieu.

Nothing else can beat a villain who's been played by Charlton Heston, Vincent Price, and Tim Curry.