How do you present a BBEG as an irredimible monster?

I feel like you guys are referencing something, is it Star Wars?

Creating a villain whose mere name invokes fear and panic is a different matter entirely. First off, you need to know if your players are willing to show fear. Players who have never lost a battle will show no fear, and rightfully so. Players who have actually lost a fight or a character now and then are far more likely to show caution.

If your players do show caution, you need something that embodies all of their fears. What is it that leads your players to be cautious? Overwhelming numbers? Deadly traps and poisons? Mind-warping magic? A certain monster type? Your villain should embody all these things and more, and they should hear about his reputation for such long before they get to meet him.

If your players have yet to feel the taste of defeat, you can use the villain to instill it. Simply introduce the villain early on in an encounter the players had otherwise won and have him stand his ground and utterly wreck anyone who approaches until he loses interest or is otherwise called away, dismissing the survivors as not worth his time. This will let the players know how dangerous he is and how out of their league they are right off, and they will pay attention when his name comes up again. Note it's more important to show how powerless the characters are than to actually harm the player characters; a mage who, after being stabbed, laughs and tugs the sword out of the bloodless wound will make more of an impression than one who just did lots of damage. It's also better to have the villain use effects that are slow acting and sinister, such as curses, over ones that are quick and deadly. A death spell just forces someone to resign themseves to reviving/rerolling their character. A curse that slowly turns the character into a shadow monster starting at the fingertips both gives them a chance to save their character and leaves the players struggling to overcome the results of the encounter long after the villain has actually left.

>would i fuck a robot?
>yeah, i'll fuck a robot!

Jesus fucking christ, user.

I used a BBEG named Shadis once built around easy, devastating crits because his weapon was a scythe.

Mechanically, he was terrifying, because on top of that I built him with the same resources as a party of 4, so he was gestalted fighter/cleric+splat and had all kinds of custom crafted contingency items that gave him two characters worth of extra actions for several rounds.

The story behind it was he used to be a mid-level military official who uncovered The Ancient Evil and decided to create a conspiracy to cover up his descent into evil and madness, and right about the time the PCs enter play he's forced into a game of Xanatos Speed Chess.

The kicker? He was the party's quest liason and there one of the groups of people he threw under the bus.

The secret? Hes only the MidBoss.

He isnt unstoppable, but so difficult to touch he inspires dread. He didn't just bully the pc's, he made it look EASY, and then executed a neighboring district's peasents witchunt style. The characters have suffered both in character and through the metagame.

He poses a respectable, credible threat, and their fear is genuine.

>not to be confused with a railroad bbeg powered by plot armor. I mean scary-because-it-shouldnt-be-fair-but-it-is

I came here to dispense advice, but I don't think I could do a better job than this.

The only thing I can add is that it is more or less impossible to frighten a player that doesn't want to be scared.
The players need to be invested and willing to be engaged emotionally for anything approaching fear to occur.
I'm simply saying you need to be aware of that going in.

You need a lot of build up. You need to see others in fear. You need to see the results of where he's been.

I did run a game with the BBEG that was like the OPs pic in powers, not personality though. He was basically a walking conduit of the plane of fire and he was known as "The Ashwalker"

They ended up near the area where he ascended to power, which was a frozen wasteland due to the ash clouds from when his ascent destroyed half the peninsula; a thousand years earlier.

The main antagonists for the game were actually a previous set of heros that had bound him away and linked their souls to the seals, but they were waning; so they were basically antagonizing the shit out of people to raise up new heroes.

It took all of that party, with each member being able to nearly 1v4 the players, to seal this guy away and now it's their job to actually finish him off.

First, create a normal town, and get the PCs involved with the town. Have them help friendly farmer Fred, brutish blacksmith Bob, and Magnificent Mayor Meyers out with fighting off a bunch of goblins off. Get them to celebrate with the town, and make friends with the townsfolk. Get them interested in Fred's simple problems, and make them feel good as Fred finally has his plow fixed and can start growing crops again. Make them feel Bob's relationship issues with his Wife and daughter, and have the party try and ship them back together (players love sudden NPC romances). Lastly, make sure to express Mayor Meyers' concerns with addressing the damages caused by the goblins, and be sure to show his graditude when the players help rebuild homes with him.

Then, have the party take up a quest to kill the BBEG, preferably a huge fiend or monster of some sort. Give it a smug and petty personality, and paint it as some ambiguous evil at first, that "the terrible BBEG is a walking catastrophe, and that it leaves only destruction in it's wake." The usual stuff. The party will probably act serious, but they'll just feel like its another quest. They then go back to the previous town, since they have to go through it to get somewhere else. Make sure the party feels welcome when Fred shows the party how his crops are doing, Bob, his wife, and his daughter give the party fighter a specially crafted weapon, and Mayor Meyers host a little party for them. Hopefully by this point, the players have grown to know and like them.

Now, when they leave, have them show up at a village where the BBEG has been. Mention two charred corpses, a normal one and a small one, holding hands, and how a broken skeleton is a few dozen feet behind them. Have them continue their search for the monster, and find out that the BBEG is doing this for some petty (but not silly) reason, such as showing off to his fiendish friends in hell how much he can get away with on the mortal plane.

Then, for the finale, have them reach the town a third time, but this time, have it be just a few minutes after the BBEG has already arrived. Be sure to have the party run past Fred's burning cropfields and the mangled body of Mayor Meyers, who has been bent in half. As the party reaches the BBEG, describe in detail how the BBEG snaps Bob's daughter in half with two massive hands as he forces a half-dead Bob to watch while restrained in the BBEG's other set of arms, then turn to the party and give a big, toothy, and truly happy grin with his small, beady eyes looking down on the party. If the party hasn't realized how powerful the BBEG is yet, have him throw the dead daughter at the party as a Ranged Weapon Attack and throw Bob in front, then casually breath burning ash on the party, enough to down half of the party. Then, believing that the party is dead, the BBEG will meander off to destroy more things.

Hopefully, by now, the players should thoroughly hate the BBEG, as he has defeated the party easily, graphically killed beloved NPCs, and given absolutely 0 fucks while doing it.

Does this seem enough like an irredeemable monster that gives the players "don't fuck with this guy" vibes upon hearing his name?

One time, I introduced a villain that specialized in sundering. He could destroy magical armor in one attack. He got 3 attacks per turn
That was one of the few times my players showed real worry over an enemy.
This tactic works best on murderhobos

Make the BBEG, literally, an irredeemable monster. Something who, by its every nature, opposes the goals of the players.

A good one for this is typically an eldritch horrir from realms beyond comprehension, who only wishes to devour everything in its path. It has no morality you would understand. From all perspectives that mortals could understand, it exists only to eat, and it has a hunger that grows with every second.
Bonus points if it threatens and eats even the things native to its realm, causing them to flee to [your setting here] and terraform the local areas into something that can support their extradimensional physiology and being unfortunately brutally corruptive to normies.

Make him do something purely sadistic which the PC's have to have input in. Make the BBEG force the PC's to sacrifice one of two cities. Or make them kill someone important to the plot.
Make them want to kill them for nothing but pure satisfaction - who would sacrifice everything in their quest just to kill the bastard. When you can do that, you've created the scum of the earth.

It really depends, I like to integrate my player's backstories and make a bbeg kind of specialized around each one of them, for one player who is playing a very devout cleric, his bbeg is his family member who is slowly changing their home for the worse and he doesn't even know it, the way I have this bbeg written out is essentially kingpin but with magic backing him up as well as money and outside supporters, he wants to remake the city in his image.

For one other character who is a mercenary that left his war torn country his bbeg is going to be the one who triggered said war which claimed his friends and families lives.

I still haven't gotten bbeg's written out fully for the other two players but I have an idea for one of them since they are a custom race I implemented which essentially is an artificially intelligent slave that has been mass produced and sold.

One thing I do know however is that there will be one supreme bbeg who is essentially a forgotten god of time that has been messing with the course of history which has effected basically affecting them to the point where it makes their own BBEG's, any form of input is appreciated though, this is my first time DMing outside of pre-written one shot AP's.

I botched that last sentence, sorry I meant to say it has essentially fucked with every one of them which has crafted their own BBEG's.

How to make players not care about the game world.

This guy is based, though.

The most intimidating enemy my players have ever encountered never harmed them once. In fact he was very nice to them. It didn't matter. They fear him to this day.

He was Modain the Fleshweaver, from the Eberron setting. Sure, it's a pre-existing character, but it's how I played him that got it going.

On their way to parlay with him for the three Hags called the Daughters of Sora Kell, they approached Mordain's keep.

First they had to get through the forest of flesh, that is, the skinned flesh of all sorts of creatures, humanoid and otherwise, trying to rip their skin off too.

Then they reached an incredibly normal looking tower. When they entered, everything was also normal. Cheerful, even!

However, the thief had been permanently blinded earlier in the campaign, and had a bandanna of blindsight around his head.

I made him roll a saving throw and he got nauseous. He refused to tell the party what he had seen. But it was evidently everywhere.

Nobody else dared try to undo the illusion.

In the end, they saw several rooms full of, ah, experiments Mordain was in the middle of. One was a group of people literally Human centipede'd, like the movie. The one at the front begged for death. They didn't dare.

They finally met with the man, a seemingly middle-aged elf, even though he was well over 700 years old.

For his help, and treasures to boot, he asked to merely take a cubic inch of each of their flesh, so he could clone them for experiments. They did it. It didn't bite them in the ass. Yet. The reason he would take this offer was because they all were given aberrant dragon marks, even the warforged, D due to an artifact ring. The clones and flesh was to help him experiment more on the whole dragon mark phenomenon.

They lost nothing other than their peace of mind. But those players still tell newbies, when someone new comes in, about Mordain in hushed voices. They legit feel he's the most threatening entity they ever met.

What's the mechanics of dragonmarks on clones anyway? As far as I know basically all meddling fails with the marks; you can't graft it on yourself, from someone else, and the moment you die it goes inert. It stands to reason that the clone's dragonmarks wouldn't be active until the original died.

Fuck with the player's everything. If players have a connection with NPCs, have the BBEG mentally break and physically maim the NPC but keep them alive to communicate the situation.
If the players get a base of operations or a home BBEG destroys it, along with any items, money, or people inside.
Make him taunt the players, maybe even show up just so he can test their strength and run away.
Make him use mimics liberally, every dungeon he has contains tons. The doors, the walls, the lanterns, the loot, hell the coins and mortar between bricks can be mimics. Make them know they aren't safe.
If a player dies he appears in person to taunt the party, mutilate the body (Or finish it off).
He undoes the player's work, if they protect a village he sends minions to raze it. If they find a safe haven he finds it and fills it with monsters.
Never let the players be save from him. This bastard could show up and do anything to them but chooses the most inconvenient times.
Make him generally fuck with them. Not even lethal to them; the people or things around them will do. Can be anything from stealing some mundane gear like food or tents to setting fire to wherever they're sleeping. Hell maybe he uses dream spells to give them nightmares, maybe he spreads bad rumors about them and the chaos they cause where ever they go.

Basically make it personally seen. He harasses them, doesn't give up, and always runs away alive. He plans so no matter what they do the players can't win, even if they kill him he has an heir or plan in place that if he does die they're looked at as the bad guys. Though always make sure when he does appear in person they have get to at least land a hit on him, it makes them hate it even more when they know he's touchable but at the same time unkillable.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure 4th story. The villain is an insane serial killer who "just wants a normal life" but also is a heartless monster and murders men wantonly and woman to go on "dates" with their hands.

NTR.

Just NTR. Have him fuck one of the PCs women, and have that woman LIKE IT. Then they'll kill his ass, no questions asked.

A DM once tried this on my character but I out-edge'd him.

He made me watch unseen as my NPC partner cheated on me with her lover, the BBEG's lieutenant, but I didn't do anything right when it happened despite him clearly telling me she loved every moment of it and was not sorry in the least.

Next time I met said girl I faked ignorance and secretly infected her with a highly lethal, slow-killing and sexually transmissible disease while she was sleeping.
Days after, the lieutenant contracted the disease while NTRing me and both him and the girl died a week after.

The best part? I faked being deeply in love with her and thoroughly devastated by her disease and since she and the other characters still thought we were in love and deserved to remain alone with each other in those last moments, I got to remain alone at the girl's death bed when she was about to die,

A few minutes before she drew her last breath, I slowly whispered to her everything I had done with a devious grin on my face.
She was too weak to scream, tell the others, leave the room or do anything.
She could only look at me, as I stood there watching her die, with her knowing that not only I knew everything, but that I was the one who killed her and I would be the last thing she saw before leaving this world, and the last person she'd have to share her last moments with.

Maybe it was a bit of a disproportionate retribution, but still I got the lieutenant killed and taught my DM not to use NTR.

Unless one of your players is into that so in that case you just walked into his magical realm

I'm a little surprised that so far no one has suggested the way to inflame the players' passions, without forcibly hunting down their backstory NPCs.
Go after their loot. Have the BBEG show up personally to steal their dungeon-treasure, have a minion do it, have him leave them a jaunty note.
I admit it's a murderhobo stereotype; but nevertheless in even the most RP-hungry player, it can't hurt it all to force them through a little loot-fuckery.

>Maybe it was a bit of a disproportionate retribution

Bruh, it was NTR. You gave her a merciful death. The real punishment would be doing this, then curing her and locking her up in a rape cave or something.

He also has NO WEAKNESS

>Age 33
>Not married, Single
>Always gets 8 hours of sleep

>makes your players shit their pants by only listening to his name?

Big. Meaty. Crits.
Players don't fear OP bullshit, but there's a definite dread when facing something that's pretty fair most of the time that can randomly cut your head off with a single strike.

The party face should have a big flabby butt

Well I could have just dumped her instead of going full deadly revenge keikaku

>How do you present a BBEG as an irredimible monster?
1. Make his motivations simple. There is no higher sense of justice, no vengeance, nothing that can evoke even the slightest sympathy. Keep it unjustified but incredibly easy to digest. Something among the lines of "I enjoy hurting other people", or "I want to see the world burn" or even "I want to be Sultan instead of the Sultan".
2. Make the BBEG show no remorce for his actions. If the PCs remind him that he has killed hundreds of people over the past month, his most emotionally involved reaction should be something among the lines of "Only hundreds? Sheesh, I'm getting sloppy!". The BBEG feels no mercy for his victims, and perhaps he doesn't even feel mercy for his own men. He might even use strategies that put his own mooks in mortal danger purely because he's impatient. Like directly assaulting a heavily fortified position instead of surrounding it, because it takes less time.
3. Make it personal. Have him do something the PCs either directly see or feel the consequences of. Make sure that it's incredibly taunting and exists purely to provoke the PC as well, and make sure the BBEG is incredibly nonchalant about it. I'm reminded of that Bison quote from that horrible, shitty, live action Street Fighter movie. Something among the lines of "for you, the day Bison graced your village with his presence wa the most important day in your life. For me, it was tuesday".

Interject varying degrees of comedy as appropriate to the setting of your campaign. You can have a legit sadist, or you can have a "sadist" that chews the scenery.

this
basically, make them a player character acting against the player characters.

bump

Have him destory something sacred. Think about what things in your world are untouchable and safe and loved, then have your bbeg violate it in some horrific way.

Have him butcher a well loved king/queen in a public and grotesque fashion. Burn down a beautiful city. Impale a population Vlad style. Have him resurrect long dead heros (who the population know as myth and legends) and just send them out to maim/kill/burn.

Also you could just walking dead season 7 episode 1 it. Lucile is hungry.

Ha. This actually happened in the background of my setting where the not!Pope was assassinated during a religious festival where anyone could feast for free. Absolutely nobody who wasn't in on the plot saw it coming. The hierophant's paladin bodyguard had actually been given the day off BECAUSE it was so unthinkable and said bodyguard really needed the day to destress because he was so tightly wound all the time.
Needless to say, the bodyguard was mad as fuck and eventually was promoted to godhood after helping avert the near-apocolypse that followed.

Healer, keeps killing/nearly killing victims and then healing them back, til their minds completely shatter. Then releases them to their families, physically fit. The poor souls are always disturbed and often become raging murderers and the like.

Hilariously in the evil PCs campaign I'm in the bbeg is just a bigger dick than the PCs, and it works, if only because his motivations are straight forward and has insulted them enough to make it personal, so now the gods have a group with an nutty Lich as their leader to save the multiverse.

Yes the story is about as convoluted as you'd think.

Make them wander upon what's left of his passage. And it's nothing like they expected. it's not ruins and burned houses and dead or dying people. It's a fucking grey wasteland, like the moon surface for two square kilometers in the middle of Green Forest land. It's a dessicated sea where every living thing is a solid shell of ash.
It's a molten craters as wide a two cities, the ground still cracking and burning through your PCs shoes. It's an empty city where the only "living" thing left are the heads of children, still conscious and talking, while some kind of hermit crab lives inside, slowly closing on the PCs.

Something that says "you just can't take this guy, you just leave him happen".
This is how you BBEG

And 'bites the dust' is one of his powers

Unlike the vast majority of such claims, its worth noting this is actually true. Motherfucker is speced to broke.

The Lich is a massive jobber tho

Negan is a meme villain

I already took care of this in my campaign last session. The PCs are delivering an important package carried by an important NPC to the BBEG, who they do not yet know is the BBEG. When they get there he takes the package, which is a Metatron Cube (insanely powerful focii for the highest level of magic, or a near boundless energy source for magi-tech, the PCs still don't know what it is or its significance), inspects it for a moment.

He seems content, and then snaps his fingers and then the NPC they were escorting's head just falls off his shoulders and both it and his body start rapidly turning to ash. The party mage was the only one able to see what happened, the BBEG has a fallen angel bound to him and currently phased only partially into this level of reality and it used its flaming sword to decapitate the guy they had escorted for knowing the actuality of the package (The angel in question existed fully only for the fraction of a second it took for the blade to part head from shoulders). So the party starts unsheathing weapons and the Mage has the good sense to tell them to stop considering how much sanity damage he took just perceiving the thing. The BBEG calmly explains they are going to walk out of the building while he goes the other way(unpaid since their charge was obviously dead) and not to bother alerting anyone because by the time they do he will already be off doing more important things- not to mention no one will believe them anyways considering other circumstances. He didn't kill them because he has already set them up to take the fall for the cube going missing, which will put them in eventual pursuit of him as well as keep others off the BBEG's trail.

He skullfucks people for fun

Yeah and he fucked those two guys up.
Then seemed momentarily apologetic about it, then kept doing it because hes a man of his word.

What a dick.

...

Generally, by making him akin to a force of nature. No mind, no aim, just unstoppable force that is aimed in the PCs general direction by chance or through the wile hand of much more cunning foe.
There is nothing to redeem and no way to stop "it". The damn thing just rushes through the general vicinity, raising hell and setting all the PC's plans tits up by simply being there.

Naturally, it's not like he's going to always be in their way. Sometimes the players will hear rumours of him ploughing through fortresses or disrupting military conflicts by crashing his way right through all of the participating forces. There will also be times when they will personally witness him wrecking havoc nearby, overcoming seemingly impossible odds by breaking through traps and ambushes of other heroes, making their seemingly full-proof plans burn down simply because of how much they underestimated the brutal force and fury contained within that single body.

It's fairly simple and might seem primitive, but it's always nice to see players panic when I mention approaching screams of rending metal and rising pillars of shattered stone. The looks of disbelief and consequent satisfaction on their faces when they realize the seemingly immortal foe has finally been felled are also great.

Myself I plan to make one of my most experienced players knowingly make an extra-likable throwaway character that would last them through the early campaign till the BBEG throws him to grisly death in an unexpected moment.
Then he starts sending them on dangerous missions undergound. He can not be escaped as a government official so his men will always be there, frustrating, intruding. I will maybe not make him nonredeemable but I will make the players hate him guts

There's two possibilities for BBEGs:

BBEGs who are not relatable to players (i.e. different species, completely alien, things of that nature) and BBEGs who are in some way relatable (i.e. players can at least understand BBEG's way of thinking, same race/species, in vague way familiar in the way that hitler is more relatable to us than Cthulu)

If the BBEG is the first, understanding the BBEG should be immensely difficult for the player. This can make it easy to make the BBEG unredeemable because there is now way to reason with it, or compromise.

If the BBEG is the latter, you need to show that the BBEG has no desire to be redeemed, that he/she is devout in their convictions. You can still give them a sympathetic back story, but show that the BBEG is entirely devoted to it's path.

Well I mean, he does genuinely want a quiet life. He has no greater ambition, he's not gonna try to conquer the world or blow up parliament or anything. He's no threat to the world at large, he's just a little self contained ball of psychotic crazy.