Villain is working to awaken an ancient pantheon of elder gods

Nah this guy knows whats up.

cheers for the feedback all, it helps a lot.

This guy is right. You, OP, are wrong. Having it turn out that he's "just" the craziest motherfucker in history is a dramatic de-escalation. You started it with something exciting and wild and would be ending it with something dry and human. I guarantee you are not a skilled enough writer to make that anything other than disappointing for the players.

Sounds like a disappointing end to a fun campaign. You're essentially pulling the "some call me...Tim" joke from Monty Python off on a large scale. Though that joke was funny, it was only entertaining because it didn't require a long term investment for such a boring reveal.

You don't have to play it straight, but make your subversion rewarding. Maybe the whole pantheon of elder gods think is still bullshit but the BBEG has a different hidden motive for his actions that isn't just because he thought it would be neat.

Why not make him do all that so he can exact revenge on the gods for what they have done to him throughout the ages or something?

I think this is great.

IN addition, the BBEG should be the only one with enough insight into these elder gods to really know how to take each of them down. Assumedly they would take position in the kingdoms, and the party now has to work alongside a psychopathe who doesn't want the world to end. Because if the world ends, the fun ends.

So Bloodborne?

He thought he was using the cult, but the cult was actually using him all along.

He laughs at the party, saying it was all fake. Everyone went along with it, he's the smartest, and now everyone else looks like a fool.

A cultist finishes ritual in the background, and the elder gods awaken. (Option here is to have him side with the party to try to close the gates again in a last, desperate battle. Or just leave that for the next campaign...)

>>he's done everything he's done because he's a sick fuck, with too much time and money on his hands and he was bored
This is terrible.

>The only thing that makes gods any more real than others is whether people believe in them
This is simplistic tripe that has rarely been done well.
I liked it in Paranoia Agent.

>I'd recommend either giving him something to strive for other than amusement, or a good reason why that's all he cares about.
This is good advice but very thin.

>He thinks the summoning ritual is totally bullshit, and yet it turns out he's a conman who actually tapped into some deep shit.
>He thought he was using the cult, but the cult was actually using him all along.
These are better if done well.

>This is good advice but very thin.
Well, I'm not in a position to get all that specific about it. I don't know much about the campaign so I don't know what specifically would constitute a thematically appropriate motivation for the main villain. It's a matter of what works with the setting, the character's established traits, and the story so far.

>This is simplistic tripe that has rarely been done well.
>I liked it in Paranoia Agent.
It also works well in Mage: the Ascension and some Discworld novels. The main reason is that those stories are all about the way reality is shaped by belief. It's the core defining feature of the settings, not just something mentioned as an excuse to make lots of different fantasy creatures. Like I said, I wouldn't recommend it unless it was already an established (or at least foreshadowed) feature of the setting, especially not as a last-minute plot twist.

If the OP wants to stick with the idea of subverting the genre convention, I'd recommend something other than having the elder gods be real after all. What the bad guy really needs is a good motive, like... revenge against the feuding kingdoms. He could be one of the last survivors of a religiously-motivated genocidal campaign carried out ages ago by someone in the players' home region; this would give him an immense hatred of religious faith and zeal, and a desire to destroy all those who are blinded by it; he'd consider it ironic justice that the kingdoms would destroy each other for the same reasons that they destroyed his people. Would that work with the campaign's backstory?

I would do it as this

HE THINKS it's all a huge joke

Turns out he was wrong.

He's not laughing anymore.

>Well, I'm not in a position to get all that specific about it.
I just meant you could have provided some recommendation, even if it turned out to not fit.
Which you did.

>What the bad guy really needs is a good motive
Motive is one of the pillars of a good villain.
As always, I recommend the Complete Book of Villains for developing any BBEG.

dnd.rem.uz/Advanced D&D (unsorted)/AD&D 2E - Accessory - DMGR6 - The Complete Book of Villains.pdf

>he's done everything he's done because he's a sick fuck, with too much time and money on his hands and he was bored

This sounds like "...the adventure was just a dream!", but way worse.

You'll make the campaign a story on futility, as the characters probably have sacrificed lots of things to stop a resourceful person that was bored.

Very few people enjoy the idea that the big reveal, the end of the story, is "Waiting for Godot, the Campaign."

Lots of people enjoy stories and storytelling because it helps them experience a narrative with meaning, because sometimes it's really hard to lead a fulfilling life on the real world, as meaning is elusive.

I'd avoid it.

I tried doing this sort of subversion myself

My take was "the PCs learn the enemy want to awaken a sealed evil but most people don't know the exact details of what it is."

The legends around it were fairly vague cautionary tales of something so evil it nearly destroyed an empire.

It turned out, and the villain knew this and the PCs didn't, the story referred to a legendarily ruthless general and engineer who had started building magical superweapons that had, at the time, been deemed unacceptable. So his nation had frozen him in a magical prison.

The campaign villain had found the warlord's prison, heard him out, realised he was a tactical genius and expert weaponsmith, and offered him a job as No.1 henchman.

It would have been really fucking bad if the guy had been released mostly because he would have been given free reign by the villain to start the fantasy equivalent of a nuclear war, curbstomp every other nation and end up with thousands dead and the villain ruling an entire continent. Just not, as the PCs initially thought, Cthulhu bad.

Alternatively, turns out that while the Elder Gods he claims to try to awaken are bullshit, the villain was the real Elder God all along, specifically not-Nyarlathotep. Pulling shit like making up bullshit cults and convincing people to joint them to further his own agenda/because he was bored is exactly his MO.

I like the idea that he's a conman that hasn't tapped some deep shit, but whose religion just spiraled out of control. The lie got too big, and it had to get bigger as his followers kept on reading into his words and getting more and more radical and you have to keep in front of them to maintain even a little control otherwise its your head on the chopping block.

All he wanted to do was live out in the desert and build dune buggies, but these motherfuckers just had to take that Helter Skelter bullshit seriously.

Eh, I liked what had to say. So fuck you.

Or you could play the Discworld god rules.

The villain doesn't believe in any of the stuff he is saying and is just doing it for power and curiosity.

But his followers do believe, and because they believe then the gods they believe in do exist.

Literally the plot of "Guards! Guards!".

Did you play in Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened?
It's very similar plot. But in the end
>Once at the lighthouse, Holmes and Watson have a final confrontation with the cultists and their leader Lord Rochester, whose fortune finances the sect. Holmes manages to stop the 'summoning', but a fierce storm appears, which Rochester (cult leader) assumes is the coming of Cthulhu. Despite Holmes' attempt to stop him, Rochester jumps to his death into the raging sea below.
So you should help PCs to stop ritual and nothing happens, and it's a mystery ending. Do elder gods even exist?

I don't know why you are so much against the fact that the simple nonsense of the act and the rage and frustration of the players can also be a nice thing, a campain can give you a vast array of things, why not rage and frustration on a guy that created such a mess for nothing?

But, in that case, there is my take:
>The Ritual is useless, like the BBEG knew.
>But there is another problem, the war between the two factions that is destroying the land and everything.
>The conflicts continues, either by itself, or either by cultist that thought that the ritual would require more bloodshed and destruction to succeed.
>This basically destroy the world by the fires of war, without the need for a ancient evil to appear
OPTIONAL
>After the fires of war becames ember, a figure arise claiming to be a god and that everyone shall serve under its rule, so in the end the ritual "succeeded" in some way, the fact that he may be a real god or not is up to interpretation.

I've run a campaign where the villains were about to perform a great ritual.

The twist was that the ritual wasn't the one they expected. They thought it'd infuse them with the power of the Aether. Instead, it would feed THEM to the Aether.