The BBEG has been cursed to live until no one speaks his name or knows of his sins

a long a long a long a long a long a long a long a long a long a long a long a long a long time ago
there was a large, hairy, and angry man
he saw a cute girl in the woods and chased her, because he htought she had ruined his life
she ran
suddenly it started to rain, a real storm
and she ran into an orc village to escape the large, hairy, and angry man
the orc homes were small huts and shacks and their chieftains house made of clay.
the large, hairy, and angry man didn't care about the storm, he just ran through every house, destroying everything chasing after the little girl
he chase her to a clearing wear a woodsman was skinning a rabbit, the little girl hid behind the woodsman and the woodsman took an ax the the large, hairy, and angry man. but it didn't stop him, he swung at the woodsman and took his head clean off

the little girl ran. she had found her grandmother's house and ran to it and her grandmother was so happy to see her but just as the little girl got there, the large, hairy, and angry man caught her and choked her

the heartbroken grandmother was angry at the large, hairy, and angry man and cursed him, she cursed Bartholomew Montgomery Von Wulf for what he had done, and to this day he remains cursed to live until no one speaks his name or knows of his sin

i'm bad at telling stories but I hope the point got across

Seek help.

So basically the Nameless One from Planescape Torment

Aside from the memoryloss, which probably can be circumvented, this doesn't sound so much like a curse than the original goal of a proper BBEG that won.

bump for the good thread

tell that to Cain

The twist?

There is no curse and there is no sin, he's the dread pirate Roberts, whoever defeats and kills him becomes the next dread pirate Robert to carry on the facade. Why? Because the world devoid of BBEGs is a world without heroes.

Cain's having a blast, the only suffering he's experiencing is maybe a hangover or boredom.

The thing with scripture is: If you don't destroy it someone might at some point in the future come by it. So either the curse ends prematurely, all fates are predetermined or the curse can be put on hold, which I don't think is very curse-ey.

The first option is, if no person knows of his name and sins for hundrets of years and his curse is lifted, and then someone reads surviving scripture, the curse did end too soon.

The second option is, the curse knows at which point of history no one will know his name and sin, and it also knows that from that point onwards that is true.

The third option is that the curse gets put on hold when people stop remembering him, and gets flicked on when somebody learns of him again. Which is not quite curse like, at least for me.

So having to destroy the scripture and everything else might be a good precaution.

Give hims some quirky companions, like floating skull, redeemed succubus, tsundere tiefling, emancipated robot or a pyromaniac that's permanently on fire.

>PCs discover a tomb with elaborate carvings telling the tale of an ancient world brought to its apocalyptic end by the wrath of a single man's inexhaustible suffering, agony and desire for revenge
>They realize this was carved into the tomb, that they now may notice is indestructible, by a deity of justice in the god's dying moments, a way of immortalizing crimes so primordial and vast that they can never be forgiven regardless of the danger of remembering

>Now the PCs remember

>Now the demon god of slaughter suffers again

Why is the third not curse-like for you? It seems perfectly within the MO of curses. You're thinking of science, not magic.

No? Not at all?
Have you even played PS:T?

Couldn't he just build some kind of eternal suicide machine until he forgets everything?

What exactly would that accomplish? Someone else would know, probably.

Feel like you need to add on the fact that this guy suffers when he is alive and is always in unbearable pain otherwise letting him live forever is not really much of a curse if his only goal is slaughter

He only slaughtered everyone because of the curse, was what I figured.
Maybe his crime was just creating the phenomenon of Entropy and therefore cursing the gods with mortality, I dunno, the OP just asked what extra twist might be neat.
The PCs being the only ones who know about him might be a cool twist is what I was trying to say

Accidentally bringing back ancient evils is kinda Curses 101, really.

After reincarnating so many times he has grown to like immortality and in order to defeat him the pcs need to erase all memory of him including eventually themselves

The big twist is he cursed himself and the rest of humanity.

Even after he dies, should anybody learn of his sins, he will be dragged screaming from oblivion and thrust back into the mortal coil.

For a horror twist: He knows who learned of his sins, and he will hunt them to the ends of the earth, so that he might sleep again.

So now he's just a guy who lives forever with no memory?

Then why is he a villain? Wouldn't he just go live a mellow eternity in peace until people forget about him?

Give him a journal that various versions of him have written as notes to himself later. Some of the earlier versions want to betray him, some want to help.

Update his journal frequently.

...

Who's Cain?

So like the Lich King?

all I'm saying it, make his sins into a fairy tail like the big bad wolf, that way nobody can ever forget

The only way to completely destroy any memory of him is to commit such atrocities that the same curse will be leveled on the party.

For every death he suffers, a servant of a god dies. For every kill he acquires, a lord becomes twisted into a monster that will devour anything in its path.

Rip of PS:T more.

It says "until no one knows of his sins", not until no one will know ever again. As soon as there isn't a single person who knows, the curse is completed. Anything that happens after that is irrelevant.

Sorry, went to bed shortly after posting.
I don't know. I think once a curse is lifted it should be lifted. And not come back. Or something along that line.

Fair points.

Abel's brother?

>BBEG's sin is an important part of modern case law, frequently referenced by lawyers

I like this idea but how would anyone learn of his sins but how would you make it clear to the party that he is hunting them because of that because if you say that while they remember he is going after them then a high level group would burn the notebook and erase their memories

>He also is a die hard Nicholas Cage fan
Absolutely diabolical

That kind of makes him sound like Shade from the Dragonrealm novels. Flip-flopping between good and bad every time he dies.

>after he kills all the lawyers, the thankful population builds hundreds of statues of him and declares an annual holiday with festivities

Why?

>because of his legendary badassery, a common flower with a blood-red include his name in its own common appellation, and so his name would be remembered even when he is not, unless those plants are driven extinct or the name changed somehow

Why would anyone put such a curse on him? "Oh, he's evil, he'll have to reincarnate until he's done enough good to offset the evil he's done. I mean, no guarantee he won't just keep being evil or anything, I'm sure it'll work out somehow though." Only a filthy utilitarian could come up with such a massively retarded plan.

Revenge.
Spite.
Hate.
It's quite possible the one who cursed him wasn't exactly a nice person.

Why add the repentance angle then?

...

The inner voices in my head keep saying "Updated my Journal". Not sure if related.

false hope to drive home the misery.

What if he cursed himself?

He's a BBEG from ages long past who succeeded in his plan for immortality and he figured he could handle the side effects. Turns out he can't and the partial memory wipes have long since erased all knowledge regarding him doing it to himself.

Now he jumps between trying to find the being that cursed him and trying to erase all knowledge of his existence.

Or perhaps the memory wipe was added on after the fact by outside forces as a means of punishing him for his hubris.

That'd be neat.
This too.

What's false about it when he could just do it and be done with the suffering?

Why add such strange clauses like "being forgotten means I die" if he wanted immortality? Or is this a whole thing?

*whole new thing

Maybe he knew that immortality would eventually get boring, so he threw in a way to end it if he has to.

The man was thinking ahead.

Have him eventually end up as a party member as people know his name but over the years the association between his name and his crimes has broken down

He may also have been imprisoned in some kind of hellish torture prison from which he later escaped.

Why such a roundabout way then? Why not something more simple and intuitive? "Once I've killed myself in despair five times I die for real" or something like that.
Or he could change his name.

Dunno, I'm not familiar with how magic works. In folk lore and mythology a lot of curses and spells have seemingly random conditions.

Maybe that's the way it has to be.

Those curses and spells are usually there to illustrate a point, even if that point may not be obvious hundreds of years and two translations later, ten thousand miles away.

Maybe the person cursing wasn't fully aware of the curse's power when cursing the cursed, just that it was The Worst Curse

This is a curiously engaged thread, for something that is so close to yet another >greentext thread

The BBEG isn't evil at all, it's a young prince/princess/noble who was completely harmless. However his/her father angered a god who placed a curse over his child : Evil shall spawn around the child and punish all of his subjects and their descendants as long as the child is alive. The child himself will live until no one speaks of his father's sins, and if he's killed he'll be eventually resurrected.

The sins in questions are part of a popular folk about an arrogant king who angered his god and brought the downfall of his kingdom. Everyone knows it.

In the ol' days, before the days of darkness, before the days of Nazimod, Veeky Forums handled trolling and shitposting much like it handled legitimate threads: by trying to develop the topic through creativity. Not saying this thread was shitposting, but just saying. I'm too tired to be creative, and may even have forgotten a little about being it, but I can at least try to point out inconsistencies in a way that doesn't discourage anyone from addressing them or developing the idea.

False was too strong a word I suppose.

It's a task meant to punish, but not condemn for eternity. The one who cursed him wants him to suffer, along with the rest of the world, but isn't enough of a bastard to do permanent damage.

For such an unreasonable person and action, that seems like a strangely reasonable consideration. Perhaps someone else tried to break the curse, which had no exit, or interfered with it during the casting, but only had enough power to add a "However" condition?

Or, the curse was placed in the realm of ideas, and once his sin no longer exists in the present, there's nothing to curse and it breaks. It's magic, it affects the intangible, not the real.

This would be a world where you can grant strength to every man in an army, and as soon as he deserts, he loses the strength because he's no longer part of the army.

Such a clusterfuck of a curse has the makings of an amazing mystery.

1.BBEG gains immortality
2.Someone interferes and places the memory loss curse
3.Someone tries to break it, fails, but manages to place the end condition on it

Players would need to figure out the first and third to actually beat him. The second is a minor point of sympathy or a 'the fucker deserved it' sentiment depending on how you execute it.

Depends on the settings' magic style, but a good idea.

Idea I got from the thread would be:
In ancient times, the "BBEG" was a spy for a kingdom, set to act as a high ranking official in a second. Both go to war with each other. BBEG fulfills his part of the plan but his employers botch their side of it. Revealing himself would be blatant suicide and accomplish nothing, stays quiet as the second kingdom wins. Rulers from the first now place the curse onto the BBEG.

For the first couple of cycles, the BBEG takes on his infamous reputation. While not actually a bad guy, he grows desperate to break the curse and tries EVERYTHING, whether it be good, ir bad to break the effect. This proves near impossible since he apparently proved to be a key figure in all of history. After failing several dark crusades, lifetimes of hermitage and seeking holy repentence, something snapped.

BBEG decides to simply accept his fate and that he will be immortal forever. Looking back on his lives he feels that rach always filled out a different "role", and that he realizes he forget who he himself was. Besides being straight up evil never worked.

Now the BBEG erases his own sense of identity. Each revival he only knows to pick a "role" in the world until he ends up dying, carves a mask to fit that, and only identifies by that role. The role can be anything, "Justice", "Carpenter", "Dog", etc, and he fulfills it as faithfully as possible, this is his service to the world.

Whether or not his identities as concepts counts as remembering "him", and how roles are selected, is up to the DM.

>In ancient times, the "BBEG" was a spy for a kingdom, set to act as a high ranking official in a second
Nitpicking here, but I think it'd be better if he was legitimately an official, but became a turncoat. Planting someone and just hoping he'll be able to become an official thirty years down the line isn't realistic, or rather not worth the effort when you can just bribe an already established official. I don't think it's reasonable to be so harsh on a spy who couldn't have turned the tide for either side, either. Perhaps he did enough as a spy to make the whole invasion possible in the first place. Perhaps he then had a good shot at turning the tide to the benefit of his employers, but doing so would have put him in harm's way, so he balked and let them be defeated instead.

At this point, he's basically led two countries to the brink of ruin, one by helping it spend its resources to invade the other but then dooming the invasion by failing to risk anything of his own to see it through to the end, and the other by selling it out to an invading force in the first place.
Gonna need some more time to come up with a coherent idea for who cursed him and with what rationale.

Cont: Perhaps he decided, wisely enough, to flee the country the moment he became a double traitor, for fear of repercussions. Good thing, because soon the invading country let the invaded country know about his betrayals. On bad terms but united by their loathing of him and desire for vengeance, they sent two champions, one from each country, to track him down and dispense retribution. They did, and succeeded in bringing him back. He was then cursed by wizards, priests, or whatever, from both countries: if he was so concerned with personal power and riches that he'd betray one country to increase it, and then so concerned with his life that he'd betray the other to avoid risking it, then he would be given a chance to live forever, however, because his betrayal had been made public and spread far and wide, everywhere he went people would know about his actions, and so naturally he'd be despised and treated horribly no matter where he went. And perhaps the "if forgotten he can finally die" aspect was added simply because there'd be no purpose in prolonging his life eternally if nobody was interested in making him suffer for his crimes any longer: in fact, immortality without suffering would mean it eventually might turn into a sort of blessing, and give him time to fulfill his aspirations in the future. So they made it so that his life would suck for a long time, and if it'd stop sucking he'd die.