ITT: Best villain concepts that aren't "evil magical man who wants to see the world burn"

No he already saved the world before you have the chance of murdering him and he is too proud to tell.

Not-evil magic person who lost their identity as they ascended to godhood. After repeated creations and recreations of the realm to try to find themselves, they're going with the "destroy it and themselves" route after regaining power.

good magical man who wants to see the world burn.

...

Was her son gay or what?

Evil world who wants to see the magical men burn.

An undead plague, ever burgeoning. Turns out the afterlife is shit, and the dead people, now nameless and with little memory of their original lives, are amassing an army to conquer Death's palace. Every undead warrior summoned by a foolish necromancer has been trained to raise others, so that they may feed their armies with fresh conscripts.

Somewhat-overzealous magical woman who wants to restore magic to prominence

No, he'll be too busy saying "But that sword is for monsters!"

A king who saw into the void and wants to destroy everything he created while it is still pure

Dinosaur that has unfrozen, somehow mutated intelligence, and has now begun secretly reproducing his race in Antarctica via Jurassic Park-style cloning. His kind will inherit the race

I pulled that one once on my group. Dwarf with The Book Of Grudges and he went around killing, ramsacking and sabotaging anyone and anything that ever was put in the book. Made for an interesting villain until someone started watching Dan Vs. and realized the common name between the titular character and the dwarf.

The major villain from the last campaign I ran was

>Foolish but fairly powerful shaman from a shitty backwards almost irrelevant tribe of tundraniggers who stumbled across a ridonculously powerful artifact that he only has the vaguest idea of how it works but thinks he can use it to parlay his tribe into relevance. He is very blind to the rather large possibility of enormous disaster with what he's doing.

evil banker man who wants to see the world burn

...

Hello Kingslayer.

Just a rival party of adventurers who's only claim to fame is having survived as much crazy shit as the PCs.

Well-intentioned extremest is trying to save mankind was an apocalypse or very bad future event that is clearly evident as a likely possibility but is still decades off. His plan involves killing people or taking over the world.

Examples:
>Gilgamesh [Fate/Stay Night]
>The Nine Traditions [Mage the Ascension]
>Al Gore [Real Life]

Self insert or reincarnation from a post-scarcity society broken by the transition wants to civilize these idiots, rights and decency be damned. He will be the hero who invented indoor plumbing if these backwards lordling retards would stop inbreeding and stabbing each other long enough to listen to him. So he'll just have to make them, for the children's sake.

someone get the greentext of the guy who's BBEG was a slippery escape artist who ran from every encounter and pissed off all the players

Yeah, he was. When his mom offers him a bride and he throws a fit, it's already suspicious; but then Larn attacks him and his reaction is "you interest me" and then there can be no doubt.

Might've. Probably why she wanted to freeze the world in the first place.

Best done if the guy is totally genuine in his mercy if you'll just submit. Look, someone has to run the show, I believe I'm the best at it and I'm going to be the benevolent dictator. Just peacefully be assimilated and everythings gravy, ok?

...

Nice. Villainy that is good hearted but ultimately deluded is fantastic. He is trying to do something good, but is totally ruthless in the 'ends justify the means' and he's also completely wrong.

Ginpika wasn't trying to prevent an apocalypse, it just so happened that his plan would prevent it.

I've wanted to run something similar to that, where the players spend their whole campaign tracking down an old man who is supposedly responsible for all the evil in the world, and when they finally get him he'll die in like 2 hits and they'll have a collective "oh fuck" when they realize something alot more sinister is going down

But usually they just wanna fuck around and pants ogres

The one in my current campaign is a wizard who realized that the universe has no meaning, and that life is pointless and has decided to be the embodiment of 'evil' in order to create an artificial sense of purpose for everyone else, to defeat him.

Good Guy BBEG

>the warlord rises from the dead to complete his unrealized ambitions
>he cant rest until his conquest is complete

I like this

What a fucking disappointing villain, metaplot, and ending.

A morally void ruler that is, and has been, taking whatever actions they deem necessary and most efficient to keep the realm/nation/world in order. His actions are constantly hindered groups of adventurers but never are quite stopped. They truly believe their actions are the only thing keeping the world from being destroyed by the powers of change/chaos and they may be right.

>The orphanage contains a child is foretold to be the next prophet of a cult that will take over a quarter of the world and try to conquer the demon plane.
>There is no way the would win, the reforms they expose will weaken the nations they control to the point that they would never have the industry, magical knowledge, or even spirit to succeed.
>The ultimately victorious demons would take revenge on the rest of the world, causing even more destruction then the cult.
>Can't figure out which orphan is the one.
>Liquidate them all... with fire.

BBGG, then.
Sounds like an appropriate enemy for a band of murderhobos.

>"evil magical man who wants to see the world burn"

"Evil martial man who wants to see the world fight."

I played a pathfinder game and the BBEG was a leader of a rebellion. He was burning and looting villages, robbing people and fighting a guerilla war. Most of his things were justified by greater good stuff but he was pretty cool. He looted villages to sustain troops, killed people because they could report him etc etc.

I would say for most games you really don't need a logical BBEG unless you want to do a lot with it.

The game I'm currently running has no villains, but it's turned out pretty interesting thus far. I'm concerned about an unsatisfying TPK or at least a PC bloodbath toward the end, however.

Pick a deity from the Greek pantheon, play down their "good" roles or doings, play up their "bad" or "dickish" doings. Mortals are either playthings or beneath notice.

Most of the shit a party is trying to fix/avenge/acquire stems from one god being a dick to another god and the vengeance between gods.

Evil magic man who has achieved everything he's wanted, and so entertains self by causing, watching, world burn

>Bad guy

Are you, but any chance, a nuclear powered Android?

>from the Greek pantheon, play down their "good" roles or doings, play up their "bad" or "dickish" doings.
Are we counting Pluto/Hades in this? Because that was done to death a while ago, and makes me feel like a dick

An animal, being an animal and following its nature, even if that nature destroys the world.

My current BBEG is a fallen goddess who swore vengeance on the God who cast her out. Now she live among mortals, who are insects to her. she's figured out how to reincarnate and continues to do so into powerful positions (think Hao from Shaman King). Her end game is to destroy her rival God by genociding all of his mortal followers.

My current villain is a heir to an ancient magical cult.
Being the last true adherent, he reintroduces the rites and knowledge as head of new church, focused on wicked transmutation of human flesh, sacrifice and cannibalism. The ultimate goal is his apotheosis as the most powerful deity, so that he can create a new paradise.

Kinda like Lavos from Chrono Trigger. I've always liked that idea especially if given some sort of Lovecraftian twist. A particularly powerful otherwordly creature shows up and starts wrecking shit non stop. Crazies see this and have multiple reactions like it's a new god to worship or that their own evil god needs more power to defeat this curse so they start doing evil shit in an attempt to get their god to stop it. You got stupid mages and wizards trying to commune with it and figure out it's motivations only to become mindthralls whose only purpose is to help it devour the world even quicker so that it can move on.

Even better is when it's a slow destruction so people have time to process it over years and years. Some people hope it will eventually stop it's spread while others are being more active. Nobody knows quite why it's doing what it's doing, but that's the beauty, neither does the monster. It's just following instinct.

A villian who knows he is just a puppet for a greater evil.

Fallen hero who hasn’t actually fallen; the organization just got corrupted and he fled with his remaining power base somewhere else to oppose them. The party is a group of brainwashed organization members who’ve been lied to about the “villain”, which they slowly learn over the course of the journey.

Shitty, contrived villain of the sort beloved by people who think they're a lot smarter than they are. If there's a worse fate coming, why doesn't he, you know, tell anyone about it?

I've actually been trying to do something like this with a campaign I've been tossing around the back of my head for a year. The issue I'm running into is how to describe this to the players without the story being overtly narrator heavy. Here's an example of a problem I'm having. This campaign is almost entirely homebrew and has some different rules. For example, in this setting gods are more like hyper powerful mortals that exist between realms. Their physical forms can be killed and connections between the devout and their deities can be severed, but eventually they'll always return given centuries or millennia depending on the severity of their death and how much power they allotted their avatars. Gods are immortal and they're not in this setting with god killings being recorded in the past. Part of the story I'm trying to develop is about a priest and his god who fell in love and the god took part of this priest into himself (gay), this ends up having an inverse effect though and neither become what they once were as they become something else entirely, but still the same in name. How the fuck do I get this across to my players without talking their ears off about the mystical, the planes, the gods, and the different realms they inhabit for hours before the campaign starts?

Villains who are just evil for its own sake are shit, but there's nothing wrong with a villain who just wants power and who the players can actually feel good about defeating.

A being whose very existence is a poison to the reality but who desperately wants to live.

>I'm concerned about an unsatisfying TPK or at least a PC bloodbath toward the end, however.
Tell me more.

The perfect combination of the heroes & past villains put together. Especially if he came from the future & spends most of his time gathering strength rather than start off at his strongest.

>insert obligatory /pol/ response about hitler

The funny thing is, my dear user, that one of the earlier player characters in the party had already done something similiar as your cleric (druid fusing with the most powerful elemental of her favourite element, fire, and marrying god of sun), so I kinda had apotheosis precedent given on the plate.

What I can advise is to do similiar, show them things on smaller scale, maybe affect them or make one of them repeat what the cleric had done. If you want to avoid exposition, you need to give players opportunity to experience the thing first(second)hand.

Hitler wasn't exactly quiet about the Jews.

No, my point is that maybe he the villain 'does' say whatever about a worse fate but he's still the villain.

Imagine a hobo with a "The end is neigh" sign. They're right. It goes against all preconceived notions of how the world works, but they're fuckign right.

They just lack the social skills to communicate things in a way the average folk will actually understand and take seriously. Stopping the thread to existence requires a massive change in society and at least in the now a decrease in the standard of living of everyone, especially the nobility.

Nobody believes the baddie, and even if they do they're too cocky/unwilling to change. After all they and their children will be long dead before the world potentially, if this hobo is right, suffers some calamity.

To elaborate on my drunken idea. This is going to work best in a low magic, or more gritty setting.
Hobo - Is actually a hobo, maybe he has some ancestry that's important for this, maybe not. But right now. He's a bum. Now if you've ever met a bum, you'll know that they're a bum for a reason. That reason is often a lack of interpersonal skills. They can't support themselves because they can't hold employment, and they lack the people in their life they can rely upon for support in times of need for the same reasons. (I worked in a shelter for a good while, 90% of homeless people are homeless for a very good reason, and that reason is they're assholes).

Anywho. This bum has a vision. Could be real, could not be. Depends on if you want him to actually be doing the right thing, or just think he is. This vision is of the gods punishing the city he's in for its wicked ways. Either way this is like 2 generations in the future, and it is a very local smiting. Not all stories need to be about the fate of the world.

Now he can't really communicate this properly, because you know bum. But he is absolutely fucking obsessed with the idea. Maybe that obsession above all else drove him into the spiral of bumness.

By the time the players encounter the chosen bum, he's attained enough power, or at the very least luck and drive, to start negatively impacting the city (in the short term). He believes that the ritualistic and thematically appropriate murders of key members of society can and will result in the gods delaying their plans. He knows full well he cannot stop their will, but it is his hopes that he can delay things enough generations that someone else might. Each murder sates the gods for a few more moments, but the impact on society pushes things back by months if not years.

Was he right?
Was he just an insane murderer?
The players will literally never know if they did the right thing, but hopefully they'll think they did.

This user is right.

Lowbirth officer trying to start a revolution in a corrupt system from within while emulating his childhood hero by chronically backstabbing his friends and employing ambitious child soldiers as his attack dogs.

You could take a page from the Dark Souls book, and basically have your characters discover tiny bits and pieces from random items and places around the world, and basically leave it to them to put that shit together.

Fantasy French Revolution with Fantasy Napoleon

Because no one would believe them

"You don't know what I do for mankind."

It's only shitty if there is 0 build up, like if literally the first time he does tell someone is as he's being killed by the players.

youtu.be/InsuBdkyoqQ?t=42s

You need no other villain than the Dastardly, despicable, disturbingly inexplicable, and imminently kick-able, dirty rotten rat: THE MUSIC MEISTER~

Is there a more stylish villain?

A once lauded emperor known for nearly uniting the world wakes up to find it fractured and at war. The descendants of his subjects are either cowardly or prefer destroying the land and any chance of prosperity over loss. The general populace are ignorant at best and apathetic at worst to the sins of their leaders.

He Is Not Happy About This.

What story has a character like this?

A wizard who took advantage of the Clone spell and other spells to live for millennia has something go wrong with his last clone. When he awakens, he discovers that he's been asleep for a thousand years and all of his treasures, arcane secrets and knowledge have been claimed by adventurers.

He is mildly upset.

Unstable, eccentric tyrants like Nero, Caligula, Caesar, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong-Un and the bad guy of the first half of Dishonored 1.

And uh, others...

>main man trump wants to get rid of illegal immigrants, make sure that people don't have to pay for a service they're not receiving, and vocally calls out the Islamic state and North Korea on their horse shit
>dictator
>kimmy boy is firing missiles over Japan and testing so many nuclear weapons it's starting to shake his country apart
>somehow not the villain in this timeline
We're in a very surreal story, friends. I think we may all be the product of a scathing satire.

Will it make you feel better that I think every American after FDR is a murdering imperialist? Including the ones liberals circlejerk such as Obama and JFK. Hell, Trump is the lethal American president of the 21st century so far...

*American president

So there's this king, you see, and he was irresponsible in his youth, but now he's decided to shape up and do what's best for his people. Except he was betrayed by an ally and had to bargain with infernal powers for his life, so he could protect his wife and their twin princesses.
Grudglingly, he goes through with the deal, but a paladin who hates the source of the king's powers and believes he'll be corrupted by them refuses to stand aside and delays him for too long with the numerous knights the paladin rallies to his side.
The paladin's treacherous wizard ally, who fooled the righteous warrior into trusting him, kills the queen and princesses. Thrown into despair by his loss, the king is overwhelmed by enemy numbers, loses his fight with the paladin as a result, and becomes a servant of the infernal lord he struck a deal with.
His wife, in her last attempt to recover something from all this, sells her own soul to serve beside him in exchange for the princess's lives. They know nothing of their parentage. The king's side wins the war, and his people consider him a hero, but he's lost almost everything he loves and succumbs to his anger.
Seeking revenge on his former ally and the wizard who killed his loved ones, he truly becomes a body and soul monster and refuses to let anyone but his infernal lord and said lord's equals challenge his authority. Furthermore, he is consumed by the idea of turning his daughters to his side and his deepest wish is to be forgiven for what he sees as his failure as a father and a moral agent- both of which he views as impossible.

See God-Emperor of Dune

Give them good motivations with amoral means, or just make them someone with a grudge. Someone who wants to "improve" the world by any means necessary. Someone seeking power at any cost, etc.

>Foolish but fairly powerful shaman from a shitty backwards almost irrelevant tribe of tundraniggers who stumbled across a ridonculously powerful artifact that he only has the vaguest idea of how it works but thinks he can use it to parlay his tribe into relevance. He is very blind to the rather large possibility of enormous disaster with what he's doing.

Reminds me of picture related, except he goes full Chaotic Evil after the artifact ends up in someone else's hands.

An assassin who kills the protagonist's loved one in order to save the world.

Friendly "eldritch entity" that sees something of its younger self in humanity, and benevolently wants to uplift humanity to its level as an act of what it perceives as altruiss: largely without concern for the ignorant animal-like whines about pre-uplift concepts like "free will" and "the value of independent non-gestalt thought"

Manbearpig is real, i'm super cereal

...

Sorry but what cartoon us this?

Evil magical man who wants to extinguish the fire he started when he defiled the seat of god and brought a corrupting plague upon all life

Fire&Ice

Be thankful.

Livestock gets turned into a humanoid. Sees the treatment of his people and views it as slavery, rape, and genocide. Seeks to get justice upon the various industries of the world which abuse "His people".

Squealer?

youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI

Did nothing wrong