The evil lich doesn't care about conquering and just wants to perform experiments

>The evil lich doesn't care about conquering and just wants to perform experiments
His minions who fetch the ingredients/subjects may not be so magnanimous.

>The vampire lord only wants to keep himself fed
He has to eat to live. To do that requires assaulting people and draining them of their lifehood. That's bad. Keeping him fed means someone else isn't living anymore.

>The evil dragon just wants a bed, dwarves just made the comfiest
And how much does it cost? Evil implies selfishness, did he try just taking it? Dwarves ain't gonna like that shit.

>Lich performing experiments, but is cast as a good guy
This could actually be a decent, albeit slightly cliché adventure hook.
Maybe the local village has a benevolent lich that simply requests volunteers, usually petty criminals, in his lab, and while they never leave the premise, they "appear" to be alive and well when friends/family/etc. visit due to illusion magic.
Then, the party might find out that these "volunteers" are being XYZ'd, and they can either opt to stop the lich, or maybe help him, since only criminals/unwanteds are being XYZ'd, and the lich offers a reward for your service.

God I hope not, he could easily bring a fivestar thread to nothing with his faggotry.

The party are a bunch of fanatic assholes.
>Must destroy the lich because it's undead and using magic
>Kill the vampire because its a monstrosity
>Kill the dragon because halflings make the comfiest bed

In their defense, most liches capture souls whose life force they slowly siphon off to sustain themselves, which automatically puts them on 'suspicious motherfucker' radar- to say nothing of a vampire's 'I literally require the blood of sentients to continue functioning and likely became a vampire by bargaining with dark powers'.
As for the dragon, the worst situation is that instead of having one greedy dragon, you have a group of equally or more powerful greedy assholes with the dragon's loot.

>How would you run a BBEG that's not interested in conquest or even extending beyond their sphere of influence?

inadvertent vengeance.

the party is sent to steal a thing from someone and that dragon/vamp/lich is out to get the thing back or get vengeance for the audacity of the party that robbed him. or the man that paid them for the theft.

perhaps a power struggle?
one guy wants to horn in on the Lich's testing grounds or autonomous farming test field or autonomous copper mine.
a crime-lord wants to boot the vampire to upset the status quo.

I have one. She's a Lahmian vampire who is actually largely helping the Empire. Of course, she's doing it at her Queen's behest in the interest of her eventual takeover, but she's fond of the cattle generally and her 'dogs' specifically, and genuinely helpful in rooting out chaos fags and more spergtastic vampires (any non-Lahmians, you know).

Presently she's considering offering the blood kiss to the freakishly skilled knight of the group, weighing up the political cost of siring a man into the bloodline (always a risky move) and what to do about his comrades (it won't do to have them knowing, but she hates to dispose of them or just make them swain).

You mean the kind who just want a quiet life?

a quiet life doesn't mean "not worth a right proper killin"

Give the BBEG something that the players absolutely want/require. For instance, a king may want the party to clear out the BBEG from his lair so that the king can claim the lands (perhaps it is a valuable mountain trade pass that the BBEG refuses to let anything through), but the BBEG refuses to move. Hence, the players must kill the BBEG. For bonus points, you can make the BBEG's position understandable, but still clearly evil (i.e., if it moves off the land, it dies, but it kills everything that enters its territory).

It's not a 'BBEG' but there is a money lich in our game. Not interested in violence or magical conquest. They bought the secrets to lichdom and everything needed, and now uses the powers of undeath and immortality to collect money and perform business acquisitions and grow their bank.

...I like that...

does he manipulate the economy to bend politics to his will?, or does he do all the forensic accounting to track down any individual with the GALL to try and play his bank?

Mostly play with economics. Trying to promote more trade and just make unbelievable amounts of money. Our group has a theory he is like a business Vecna, and is low key trying to become a god of capitalism since there isn't really a god of trade in our setting. But that's pure conjecture.

At the very least we will be visiting him after we kill this edition of 'ancient evil awakes'. My character has a brother who is kept on as his personal butler/chef-on-retainer (even undead economic powerhouses need to host nice dinner parties sometimes)

The BBEG in the campaign im running is a Paladin turned Death Knight who is trying to make a deal with a god of death to bring back his wife and kid.

Unfortunately, the god requires several thousand preserved souls and wont hold up his end of the bargain unbeknownst to the Death Knight.

>letting the evil lich do magical experiements
Who says I shouldn't be allowed to do whatever I want on my own property? Don't tread on me!

>my semi-autonomous wheat farming bone-construct would revolutionize the farming industry !!

>oh sure, you leave my pig-bone breakfast construct alone because it can do perfect eggs bacon and hash, blasted hypocrite heroes

Wrong.

The god DOES hold up his end of the bargain by bringing them back as ghosts that will haunt the Death Knight for the rest of his days unless he continues to sacrifice souls.

That is much better user.

here we go

Wait...I have an idea.

What if these BBEGs are just ingenious plot hooks to provide backstory to the REAL BBEGs...THE PCs THAT KILLED THEM FOR NO REASON?

Let's be honest, how many murderhobo parties are there that look more like villains than the actual villains do?

epic deconstruction subversion of the trope, friendo :^)

>>letting the vampire lord kill people, even if they need to feed
Just get them an everything of sustenance the moment you hear about it. And if they truly wanted to be left alone they would've done that from the start.

>How would you run a BBEG that's not interested in conquest or even extending beyond their sphere of influence?

Don't even joke about that, please.

If the party was tasked with hunting down horrible villains that had magical help escaping justice, and it all leads them to the lich who uses only the worst of the worst for benign purposes, it would be a bit of a dilemma... kill the lich to remove an undead using more (albeit lesser) undead, or let these unredeemable cunts be used for the greater... neutral.

Bloody vicious

My neighbor is a drummer. He practices every day. That's good, right?

He also plays his music loudly while playing just as loud. Sometimes until 2 after midnight. He also slams the door, both his own door and the main door of the apartment complex. He just doesn't care or is unaware of being a giant douche. I need to confront him about this.

The dog of a friend of mine has to be kept away from the coffee table because his wagging tail keeps whipping the glasses or gets into a hot drink. It's not the dogs fault, it's his instinct to do that. Just train it to be aware of the table or keep it away from the thing.

What does this have to do with BBEGs? Sometimes the Giant just has to sit somewhere but is unaware of any location. Sometimes the Purple Worm thinks that the Bardic concert means a lot of food. Sometimes a Golem is told to feed the cat, but not to whom. A mage summons a Magmin to heat up his alchemy set, but then the mage dies in an accident and the Magmin runs free. Accidents happen.

Make him misinterpreted.

I don't think Joseph would be able to keep anonymous. His ego's way too big for that.

When did people turn against him anyway? I used to get called a hipster for saying that he was awful

kek
Calico's the shit man

>>The evil lich doesn't care about conquering and just wants to perform experiments
His evil doesn't come from willing to do harm, but from being a nerd shut off from the outside world for so long that he can't understand that the by-products of his experiments that contribute to world's survival they actually do can harm bystanders and they/their rulers will give him shit for that.

>The vampire lord only wants to keep himself fed
The local populace objects to him killing random civilians and it's really hard to explain that he doesn't need to. OTOH, if he wants to just take their blood even without killing, let him work something out in exchange. What does a vampire have to offer? Plain protection deal doesn't work if there's an active ruler on these lands.

>The evil dragon just wants a bed, dwarves just made the comfiest
Comfiest stuff as in dwarven work not dwarves themselves, but there was a misunderstanding (complete with a few victims) generations ago and dwarves being a stubborn and traditional folk are very good at keeping grudges and will refuse to work for "ancient enemy" until that's untangled, explained and the honor satisfied, good fucking luck with that.

Incidentally, this is the best way to do an eldritch horror themed antagonist while being true to the genre. The sleeping elder god doesn't really give a shit about destroying humanity or ruling the world. In fact, when it gets up from its nap it'll probably just fuck off to space to do its own thing, but it waking up would completely fuck up the world because our civilization is effectively a sand castle built ontop of the chest of some guy who fell asleep on the beach. As soon as he wakes up and gets up, it's going to crumble.

Hell, it doesn't even have to be doing that much. There were some good ideas in one CoC thread about how just the unconcious influence of an eldritch god would screw up its surroundings.

>There were some good ideas in one CoC thread about how just the unconcious influence of an eldritch god would screw up its surroundings.
Care to elaborate?

>The necromancer is just a history nerd

Not sure if it was what he referred, but I did in one thread some time ago present a scenario idea that was based on the influence of an Outer God fucking things up just by its presence.

Basically, small town in middle of nowhere gets mostof their money from agriculture, but for several years the harvests have been bad and it's wrecking the local economy to the point where the town is dying. Then some well-meaning fools think they can help the situation by conducting a ritual dedicated to the Outer God Shub-Niggurath as embodiment of life and fecundity (probably having no idea what they're actually doing, but one of them somehow ended in posession of this weird old book and swore the stuff described in it really works). The ritual actually works, but the would-be cultists screw something up and effectively leave the connection open, so now you have a tiny metaphyscial hole in reality and the influence of Shub-Niggurath is leaking through. And over time the "hole" will get bigger, causing her influence to become stronger and things to start getting weirder.

Initially you'd get innocuous stuff that people probably aren't likely to pay much attention to, or connect to each other:
>This years harvest is actually good. Better than in decades, in fact.
>Trees developed leaves earlier than normal, despite the winter not being particularly warm.
>Local artist gets an inspiration to do a bunch of abstract and rather disturbing paintings, not at all like his usual style (which consisted of realistic paintings of rural landscapes and farming equipment).
>Local hospital notes that there's a small but noticeable upswing in birth rates.

Cont...

However, as time passes, more unusual things start happening. However, initially the events are rare enough that they would not appear as anything more than freak occurrences:
>A farmer claims one of his goats gave birth to a three-headed offspring, gets a mention in the "mad world" section of major newspaper.
>Local woman gains small-time media attention when it's discovered she's pregnant with octuplets.
>The town is shocked when the remains of missing child are found in the woods outside town. Cause of death is difficult to determine as the body has been torn apart by animals. Some eyewitnesses, however, claim that the cuts and bitemarks looked more like they'd be man-made.
>Multiple people, when alone and not concentrating on anything, get an inexplicable feeling of paranoia, feeling as if there was some predatory animal watching them just out of sight and getting ready to pounce on them. Disturbing nightmares have also become more common, but nobody is likely to take notice unless they realise more than one of their friends and co-workers has not only complained about not sleeping well but also described very similar dreams.

As things get worse, weirdness becomes so extreme and prelevant that it becomes obvious something is going on:
>Mutated animals have gone from a rare occurrence to common enough that people are suspecting some company has been secretly dumping poisonous chemicals in the environment. Worse still, some children are also born with strange deformities.
>The entire town is shcoked when the local artist that spontaneously changed his style from rural landscapes to abstract body-horror is discovered to be the leader of some kind of cult that appears to be behind several people having gone missing. He's accused or rape, murder, and cannibalism.
>Ubeknownst to anybody, at this point the veil of reality has also gotten thin enough that creatures have started to break through.

The PCs would be local people who have taken notice of multiple strange occurrences happening lately, and are trying to piece together what's going on an how these events are connected, hopefully before Shub-Niggurath's influence grows strong enough that the entire town turns into something out of a Giger painting, or even worse, the "hole" grows big enough that Shub-Niggurath herself manifests into reality, which could lead into a full-blown apocalyptic scenario.
The people who started the whole mess might get involved in an actual cult, or be unaware that this was all their fault (or they know but are too afraid to admit it). Meanwhile, Nyarlathotep is probably laughing his ass off somewhere since there's a pretty good chance he's set this all up for shits and giggles.

The thing about these villians is that trying to stop the damage they are inevitably doing will cause even more damage.

>The lich wil send the fruits of his research after you if you try to get in his way
>The vampire lord only killed a few people each month, now he is killing lots to get back to the previous status quo
>The dragon went on to burn the neighboring towns so heroes would have a harder time getting to his lair

The main question is, if the sudden burst of death and destruction that is forcing these guys to move is worth the slow trickle that is enduring them to be still.

Why shouldn't people complain about "BBEG"?
It sounds dumb.

I actually did this once a while back. One of the bigger bosses of the campaign was a vampire masquerading as the personal bodyguard of a pharmaceutical company's CEO (he wore a shit ton of concealing clothing to avoid the sun, chalking it up to a skin disease). In public he acted like a moderately polite mook, but the pcs later found out that the two were actually partners in private, him giving the CEO in exchange for her assistance in finding out how to make a blood substitute so he didn't particularly enjoy having to help himself to human juice boxes every month. The guy's actions were harmless enough at first, with bribes to prisons to take deathrow inmates in for experimentation or feeding, but when those numbers dwindled he was later forced to turn to the homeless or junkies on the street, and eventually healthier specimens when the shitty health of the previous ones hampered the experiments. Had he succeeded then his endeavors would have actually helped the world as a whole since the blood would have been mass produced and made universal for ease of development. I mean his goals were ultimately selfish in nature but that was how he justified them.

I mean, he's not wrong, if that works it's A LOT of potential vampire victims saved

>refusing to die for the sake of someone else's profits
>evil

That was one part. Another was to have it mass produced for hospital use, hence the desire for it to be universal. The idea was that the CEO's company made a shit ton of profit, vampire would have a steady supply of food, and the party would be labeled as terrorists if they were caught trying to interfere with production (assuming of course they lacked proof of human experimentation).

Never really been one for cathulu type stuff, but this actually sounds fantastic.

>allowing this sort of moral relativism to subvert your everyday thoughts

But was there any reason to believe it would actually work? Were the researchers actually making progress? They could be killing people for a lost cause. Lives have been wasted for nobler causes.

Why would they even need human victims? The point was to create a blood substitute for vampires that ~wasn't~ made from humans, right?

Progress was slow but it was occuring. Humans were being used mostly as base templates since they had yet to work out how to perfectly recreate all of the little bits that actually made blood viable. They were also used as test subjects to try out batches of the synthetic stuff on to make sure a human body could actually tolerate it. This was addition to some being used as fodder for the vamp.

Can the lich experiment with creating a bed for the dragon out of dwarves and pay the vampire lord for his help with blood?