Villain Thread

>high tier and above aren't bad guys at all
So what you're saying here is that you don't like villains, and prefer stories with basically two opposing protagonists like Legend of Galactic Heroes?

>Villains whose motives are hard to find fault in and arguably better than the hero's
>Villain

>Machiavelli
>a villain
I think you have something mixed up, there.

Veidt? Vauclair?

Unless we're talking about high level fantasy, LOTR or Disney movies, the line between Villain and Opponent is very subtle. No Villain would ever have minions and supporters if they were in it just for the sake of being evil - evilness is more of a way of doing things rather than an obejctive purpose.

Of course, sometimes plain evil is funny too. It heavily depends on the nature of the plot. In my current campaign my players believe they're doing bad stuff for the greater good and opposing an evil tyrant - which is totally not true, but sorta fine as long as there's no magic to tell.

It doesn't say anything about their methods, so I'm pretty sure they can still be a villain.

I like it when people decide who the villain is based on their own views. Depending on your beliefs, they could be the villain, the hero, or something in between.

For the record, that's how you do moral ambiguity, and NOT by making everyone an asshole. That's just stupid.

Where would "villain's plan is based in good intentions, but those intentions are misguided and not worth the collateral damage" rank on that?

This is a pretty limiting list.

Great tier. Give a counterexample.

So Fallout.

Elder god tier:
Villains who know that the society they're trying to create will have no place for someone who's done what he's done. The ends justify the means, even if they can never be in their utopia by necessity.

Por no los dos?

The problem with Elder God Tier is that your players will just join them and then you're stuck with a lower tier.

I was thinking about the American Civil War, but yeah Fallout works too.

...

Honestly, favorite villain is this guy.

In my games, though, a decent campaign will run the gamut on this scale.

but Jar Jar was actually a Sith Lord, but Lucas fucked up the reveal & then audiences hated him sothat important plot line was cut. thus the pointless addition of Christopher Lee.
Jar Jar = Yoda
Palpatine = Kenobi
Annie = Luke

por-que no los dos?
for-why not the duo?
you had forgotten th question word.

Best villain of all time, coming through.

Superb taste, user.

Elder God/Great Tier

That's pretty what those two "tiers" are filled with. People doing bad things for the right reasons.

>villain
what

Exactly.

>Unless we're talking about high level fantasy, LOTR or Disney movies

I mean, the hyenas in The Lion King just wanted to eat regularly.

>in Tyler we trusted

While this doesn't really pertain to the thread, I feel like it pertains to your pic quite well.

This isnt crazy original but I was thinking of a subvertion of the captured princess thrope.

The idea is that the party gets hired to save a captured princess, which all goes pretty predictably except that upon escorting her back to her country, the party will notice how spoiled and annoying she is.

Once the princess is returned savely, she becomes ruler of her nation and emmedietly starts abusing her power and warring with neighbour nations, casting her as the actual BBEG of the campaign. I'm also thinking of making her an actually pretty powerfull caster.

>Villains who are in it for the money, or whose primary motivation is money.

Gee, I wonder who could be behind this post.

Personally, I have a soft spot for villains that are willing to cause immense suffering to others in order to achieve their goals, and have a goal that puts them into conflict with the party. Other than that, I like my villains manipulative, cruel, arrogant and while intelligent, much less intelligent than they think they are.

>Absolute undisputably best ascended god slayer tier

Villainous heroes who commit attrocities in the name of waifufaggotry.

Wait, so he had his illusionist trick the Emperor into thinking he slaughtered the surrendered army, or that he evacuated the city he intended to slaughter?

The former. I just don't know how he kept the illusion going for multiple years after the fact.

>Other than that, I like my villains manipulative, cruel, arrogant and while intelligent, much less intelligent than they think they are.
I have a villain who thinks he's a peerless genius, and though he's pretty damned intelligent, he has no common sense and his boss (who is THE goddess of rusing, among other things) basically leads him along like he's the master planner when he mostly just makes sure her much better plan executes correctly.
He has a canonical Wisdom of 6.

>Personally, I have a soft spot for villains that are willing to cause immense suffering to others in order to achieve their goals, and have a goal that puts them into conflict with the party.

Good taste. It's always interesting to see a character struggle with whether or not their end goal justifies their actions. Pic related was a great example.

>Cosmic Horror tier
>Villains who are objectively just Someone whose interests put them at odds with the interests of the protagonist with no party having any form of moral high ground

always be looking at Roman emperors/consuls for villain material.

Lawful Good villains represent.

>My Communism, pic related

I actually bought this a week ago, knowing most of the plot hasn't made it any less enjoyable. He's an interesting character and I can get why he pulls the shit he pulls.

I have a few villain types that I really have a soft spot for.

One of my favorite villain types is the villain who has motivations that are completely understandable even sympathetic, but their methods go way too far.

Bonus points if they were like the heroes once, but the world has broken them; made them twisted and cruel.

The Governor is a great example (the TV version at least. The mustachioed weirdo from the comics not so much,) His primary motivation is to look out for "his" people. Unfortunately, the world he lives in has taught him that the best way to protect those you care about is to be an absolute monster to everyone else.

Also, as a result of his broken psyche, he's deeply paranoid. You're either one of "his people" or you're an obstacle.

He began as a good villian but then just went in to full retard territory in the movies. Have no idea what he did in the comics. The more I watched the more I thought, he is doing better than Rick at protecting his people. Though they went too far with the derangement and made him too paranoid and stupid to be taken seriously, if they reigned it in and showed it in more subtle ways, in the end he was saturday morning tier at best.

>Show
>Not movies

>what ideas do you have for cool villains?

For D&D/pathfinder, I had the idea for a gnoll paladin of slaughter, basically championing the concept of hunger as the source of her unholy powers, and who would claim her mission was to raid and despoil across the lands with her army of mixed evil humanoids and monsters to teach the peaceful races what it was like to live with constant unfulfilled need gnawing in their guts. And while she was at it she would trash churches and museums and lord's houses and basically destroy anything made to be beautiful, on the basis that such things were made with effort and resources that could have been spent to feed the hungry, and were "hypocrisy" from those who "called themselves good". The idea was that she should be clearly wrong but that you could still sort of see how it made sense to her, and that she would be crazy enough to believe what she was saying.

Sort of started with trying to come up with a divinely powered villain who was evil but who actually had faith in their cause rather than just cutting deals with greater beings for personal power.

I was thinking of giving her this elf prince and princess who she'd captured, the former of whom she would be raising as a sort of dark squire by tormenting him and "training" him by taunting him into trying to kill her and then beating him down, and giving lessons in her philosophy while simultaneously keeping him in line by threatening his princess sister and eating her fingers off bit by bit every time he misbehaved in a way she didn't like.

Also partly the classic "I'm gonna fucking eat you" brand of fairytale villainy.

why am I erect

Morality in LotR is copypasted from christianity

Like I'm going to share my ideas with someone who posts such stupid images.

I've had an idea for a setting and a storyline bouncing around my head for a long time.

I'd love to run a setting in the not too distant future where Genetic Engineering is perfected. Humanity begins to modify itself, all manner of gene-splicing and extreme bio modification become the norm. However, the public responds with panic. Human genetic modification is banned and those who are already altered, so called Transgenics, have all sorts of repressive laws passed against them and become second-class citizens.

The villain is the charismatic leader of a new political party that has so much wealth and influence that it rivals the Megacorps and has even attained extra-legal status just like them. He's a fanatical believer that human genetic modification needs to be utterly discredited and any modified genes removed from the gene pool and prevented from propagating in order to ensure mankind's long term survival. However, he has a problem. The only way to do this for sure is to kill all the Transgens, but the public will never accept genocide. So he hatches a plot to make Genocide palatable to the public at large. He ORCHESTRATES HIS OWN ASSASSINATION making sure the assassin is a Transgen and the terrorist group the Transgenic Liberation Front are responsible.

It works. Incensed by the assassination of their president, the Norms vote overwhelmingly to "resettle" the Transgenic population outside the Mega-Cities. No-one stops to consider what is actually meant by "resettle." I'll give you one guess.

I love Neutral Evil villains. My favorite villain was a somewhat blatant rip-off of Shishio Makoto from Rurouni Kenshin, see pic related.

>published falsified versions of history to suit his agenda
From the Greek sense, he is pure evil.

I've got to be honest, this just reads like the fanwank of someone who honestly believes the Vatican should be torn down and the resources used to buy food for the starving.

Nah, see, the VILLAIN is supposed to sound like the kind of person who honestly believes the Vatican should be torn down and the resources used to buy food for the starving.

Isn't this just inverted Hitler?
Swap "killing the genetically inferior" with "killing the genetically superior", and swap "assassinating my political rivals" with "assassinating my self to destroy my political rivals".

bottom one makes the least compelling villains, but the most badass villains

top is not a villain

this image is dumb

This.
Machiavelli was much more of a realist than people give him credit for. "The Prince" details how to retain control as a new ruler, not how about ideal society should be. People get some stupid ideas that nobility was some heroic force, or that the renaissance was somehow better than today. The reality is that times were brutal even then, and the nobility in the Italian states were just fucking brutal. War wasn't a pretty thing where one side uses missiles and the war is finished in seconds. We're talking about a ton of bodies over a long periodperiod of time with quite a bit of pillaging and disruption going on, so suppressing rivals who would almost certainly raise an army in a succession war is actually FAR less brutal than the alternative (see England throughout half the kings from here to Hastings).

The real world is NOT the same as a fantasy realm, real people do much worse things for much less gain. Hell, people have invented tortures that WoTC couldn't print in a D&D book, sometimes to punish people for believing in a different creator than them who might or might not exist. In many fantasy realms people are too scared of being "evil" to consider the many forms of immortality. Christ, if any one of those existed in real life people would be murdering each other to get their hands on it.

Basically your chart sucks bruh

And then at the end, when all is lost for him, he resurrects himself

Also, if you read Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, he's a lot more in favor of democracy and republics than the Prince would lead you to believe.

People just judge him entirely on the Prince because it's shorter and easier to read (as it would be, as he made it for an actual Prince who he probably had a low opinion of).

Copypasted makes it sound like a bad thing. It's basically the closest thing to a national epic you can get from a British Catholic writing in the early-mid 1900s.

Leto would be pretty hard to implement as the villain for a campaign. He's practically omniscient, for one. His character can be summed up as "all according to keikaku".

The point of Leto's Peace is to make everyone that isn't directly in his service a bunch of powerless, mediocre, emasculated pieces of shit for several thousand years so that a hatred of tyranny and centralized power structures will be ingrained into the whole of the species' genetic memory. It's mentioned that anyone strong enough to gather the strength of will to oppose him in those conditions has his beliefs torn apart at their core, if not downright mindraped by being shown the Golden Path like he does with Atreides descendants, and is integrated into the government. The PCs would most likely fit into that unless they want to play a one-shot about how a Fish Speaker fucks them in the ass with a strap-on for 3 hours while they quietly look to the stars wondering if the world was always that awful

I just like the idea of a villain who's so utterly devoted to their cause that they are willing to DIE in order to ensure that their endgame is successful. Such a person can't be bargained, reasoned or negotiated with. It's like a perfect combination of a Knight Templar villain and a Force of Nature villain

I pulled a similar gambit with Inquisitor Soldevan in Dark Heresy 1st edition.

Soldevan manged to decode the true nature of the Tyrant Star. It was the harbinger of the birth of a new Chaos God.Malal

Such an event would have cataclysmic repercussions for the Imperium. After all, the birth of the last Chaos God tore open the Eye of Terror and destroyed the Eldar civilization. If the prophecy of the Hereticus Tenebrae was to be beleived, it would mean the collapse of the Imperium and the doom of mankind. The only hope was to confront this new dark god in its infant form and force it into a pact. Forcing the dark god to leave the galaxy for another. In effect, Soldevan planned to willingly damn himself in order to save the Imperium from certain doom.

Like any good Inquisitor, Soldevan was deeply paranoid. He did not trust any of the other members of the Tryantine Cabal with what he had learned. In his mind, ensuring the success of his plan meant eliminating anyone who could possibly interfere with it.

Including the PC's own Inquisitor Vownus Kaede.

>bottom one makes the least compelling villains, but the most badass villains
a villain being compelling and a villain being badass are two very different things. It's just as easy for a villain to be both as it is for a villain to be neither.

>top is not a villain
Ever read Watchmen, user?

The prince was meant to be a satire, an indictment of the plotting and backstabbing which dominated the nobles in Italy.

You goofed.

It is hard to implement good villains, yes.

This meme is about as bad as needing Renaissance-era mathematics to navigate boats when the coast wasn't visible.

Jon Irenicus.

youtu.be/Wdy-k_qLdQg

jstor.org/stable/41208453?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Memes can't back themselves up with reputable sources, you fucking toad of a human being.

>Lord Draconis- A mighty warlock who has delved into the darkest depths of magical knowledge, and intents to use his knowledge to step into the realm of lichdom. Lives in a large flying tower

>Vann Doran- Barbarian warrior of great merit, taken in by a local king who saw great potential in him, and trained by his guards and knights, eventually killed the city guard and tore through the royal knights, abandoning the kingdom that took him in. Wanders the land in a suit of menacing armor, searching for battle.

>Kieng Dragn- A dragon, given the moniker King of the Dragons (which is where it took it's name) Desires to break the bind of accursed substance that traps all dragons in their bodies. Has the power to control the hides of dragons (In setting dragons are shape shifting horrors)

>Ink Burner- A mysterious young man who possesses the power to erase true-names and undo form. Holds a desire to undo all of creation

>Warlord Baska- An Orc warlord who possesses unnatural aptitude for tactics

Dr. Demento

Superhero campaign, one of the PC's voluntarily got sealed into a sub dimension where he was basically immortal, to seal a pair of ancient evil gods with him. the character made a deal with some sort of fate witch or another, broke out.

Freshly tortured by evil gods and bound by contract to protect the order of the world, uses a combination of super science and magic to invent some crazy awesome new stuff. Becomes convinced he can only maintain order and peace by domination.

Teams up with Robos, the Robot King of Sweden, and Ravus, the Dark Sorcerer. They invade Not!NYC with fleet of airships, cyborg super-soldiers, and radioactive robot T-Rexes.

Ended up being combination of Cobra commander, Dr Doom, and Krieger from Archer.

Last time we played that campaign he was caught by the team in the secret science vault underneath the home of the owner of WWE, stealing back and destroying imitation cloning technology the players accidentally stole from him for the US government.

Sorry for going on so long, but... I'm rather fond of Dr Demento.

Saturday morning cartoon evil fun villains a best no matter what the edgelords say.

I want to make a villain who follows the PCs out of desire for vengeance or similar, not in order to try to kill or kidnap or hurt them at every opportunity, but from a distance to study them and their alliances, in order to do things to distance them from their allies, to put their allies in debt to him as well by helping them so they become torn between debts, or to make their allies too busy with other matters (like invading orcish hordes) to help the PCs, until the PCs stand alone with their secrets laid bare and he can move in for the kill. A shadow, whose manipulations aren't evident until the PCs have to backtrack their steps and find out they've been abandoned in their time of need by those they've helped.

There is an example from Heroes of Horror which I rather liked: a nobleman on a quest to find a cure for his daughter's illness, willing to kill anyone and do anything to get it.

What's a good motivation for a age-old and recently-resurrected necromancer?

"man, I wonder what the guys are up to"

All he wants is to recreate the land of his youth as best he can, so he must enslave or destroy everything in the surrounding lands and reform it to be the way it was thousands of years ago. He makes the living dress and act in ancient ways, and summons phantoms from the past.

Yes, I've been reading a lot of Clark Ashton Smith lately.

www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-mattingly.htm

Satire doesn't mean false, dumbshit, and yes Machiavelli was much more a republican than an advocate for tyrannical methods.

Palestinians.

---------------> /pol/

youtube.com/watch?v=OO8To_XZsFE

>Posts a thread asking people's opinions
>Creates bias immediately by posting one of a million stupid fucking charts tiering things.

He didn't make that book for Princes. Anyone with an education would already know everything that was in that book, and the only people with access to formal education were the ruling classes.

The reason that people gave Machiavelli his reputation, throughout history, is because he said that the pope could have managed his shit better, when the pope was infallible and that was heresy to say.

Machiavelli was an advocate of a stable, unified and above all lasting government. If that government happened to be ruled by a tyrant so be it.

>t. Plebian

:^)

He's saying he likes villains people can sympathize with. Villains with 3-Dimensional agendas are good villains tbqhwyf.

ie.
>"I'm so evul and i going to burn down le town for le moneys! xDDD"

Vs.

>"All that I love hath withered in plague, while I, but man, am no God to save that which I love with bleeding palm. If time but a yoke, I would hoist thy burden upon thy back and undue the fields of nature; yet man am I to be victim. Thus, with primal beating of human willingness, Devil shall I become."

...

holy fuck you got him bro

A lot of Disney movies (especially the newer ones) have had some pretty Patrician-tier kino for villains.

>Big Hero 6
>Lion King

...Um...There are others, but yeah. Those two have some pretty well thought out villains in them.

Well written and fun villains, such as Pagan Min, who arguably did nothing wrong.

The personification of the concept of tyranny laughs at your shitty tier list. What matters is not a villains motives, but how well he or she is written.

Sounds like it makes for a good movie, but if you're looking at it from a "tier" point of view, it's objectively Disney-tier.

Doesn't mean it wouldn't make for a good story though. Just means the motivations behind the character don't seem very, uh, emotionally critically.

>when the pope was infallible
The pope being infallible is a 19th century thing, m8.

He did plenty of things wrong, it's just that the alternatives were just as bad, if not worse, than him.