Share your BBEGs with me anons

In my opinion cliches are cliche for a reason. Need a monster with brains? Get yourself a demon or ancient beast like a dragon king. Want a thinking man? How about a liche with a tragic past or a bishop heading a corrupt church. If you fancy a smart enemy but don't want an anticlimatic boss fight have them get a powerboost later, a crazed king after an ancient artifact that gets it and must be stopped or a raving cult leader that is granted the power of an evil god just as your party enters the room. You might not use them word for word but starting with something simple and then giving it a twist might be enough to get you started. Once you have that let them evolve as the story goes on. if all goes well by the end you won't have just a cookie cutter badguy anymore.

this is all well and good

but there is some "horror" in a nonstandard enemy, take the beast in OP

imagine that instead of some unthinking beast its actually an intellect that rivals human

What if... there was no beast ! Only the IDEA of a beast ! And a carefully crafted cover-up, with victims and destructions and adventurers recruited to defeat it etc... all that to cover up the need for a beast, because it's great for the kingdom or something

Well my players are currently working for a rakshasa, so it's really not clear who they'll side with (or oppose) in the end. Suffice to say, he is cunning, cruel, and already suspects them of betrayal - or at least, is wary of their ambition. Most people know him simply as a mob boss. Only the select closest agents know of his demonic heritage, but everyone knows that he's know for always sending agents in pairs or trio. Never alone. What the players don't realize yet is that he uses the more loyal agent to spy on the other. They already don't like the talking raven that helps them out, but I think they trust it. It's going to be interesting to see how long trust of any sort lasts.

Mine might need some tweaking for a fantasy setting, but

Basically, it's a dangerous megalomaniacal AI that's been split in several pieces and put into place a long complex plan to get the PCs to put it back together again without knowing (largely by having raised the PCs' bodies from the dead and installing sub-AI in them as well as parts of her own code, though the PC AIs accidentally became the people they were pretending to be as the main AI's power waned).

It's pretty specific, though

My BBEG is the called the Dark One, he's the manifestation of evil and has many names given to him by many different people.

>BBEG

Just say villain or antagonist. Some of the people in this thread already have decided to talk about antagonists rather than actual BBEGs.

I am coming up with a WFRP campaign and depending on what my players do, they might fight different BBEG

>The leader of a Cult belonging to the God of cattle rustlers and bullies (yes it's a real thing), who is establishing his power in the region, effectively chocking the cattle market and fencing what he steals to different cattle lords he's plotting with
>The Leader of a smuggling ring of stolen dwarven relics, who has ties with a Skaven clan in the World Edge's Mountains, trading with them warpstone in exchange of the rarest artifacts. The Skaven leaders are much more ambitious than this, but what is their plan?
>An ancient dwarf lord, the last of his line of his fallen hold, that has gone completely mad with grief. he is now a vampire but under the guise of an old and venerable dwarf he's trying to gather enough resources and power to learn how to raise an army of undead to reconquer his lost hold (and possibly all of the dwarf kingdoms)

You don't know what a BBEG is.

Literally Malekith the witch king if he was also an anarcho-capitalist
>Pic not related

>BBEG

Ugh.

In agreement with this user. There are greek heroes who did the same and worse as dream lurker up there.

>droolingfrog.jpg

Sathon is a very powerful wizard owing to hard work and some magical "genetic mutation" to boost him along. But mostly he's the leader of a coalition of island countries off the northern part of the continent where most of the shit is happening and is directing an army of conquest.

He would tell you that he does it to put an end to the system of tyrants bullying around smaller powers for their own gain forever, that this is a War to End All Wars, and he even convinces himself it's true most of the time. But he's become indistinguishable from the villains he's sought to depose.

Brotherhood of the Wolf?

so what is a BBEG?

Big, burly, exotic gentlefolk.

Magic engorged ratling with an army of enlarged rodents and a library of scrolls

Intelligent, sympathetic person who loves you, but has starkly different views from the players as to what's good for them and the rest of the world.

Example:
I ran a sci-fi game in which the characters were sent to repair communications equipment within a space station that had been giving audio, but not visual, feedback in a few months.

There was a spore-bearing alien creature that had infected the members of the crew onboard, assimilating all the crew members onboard, adding their minds to it's large, collective consciousness and keeping them in a permanent state of ecstasy, free from pain in a perpetual, dream-like state.

Downside is that the create didn't understand consent, and tried to take the players against their will. Being in perpetual happiness, to them, wasn't worth having the majority of their bodies stripped away and their brains added to a giant mass of flesh and positive feelings.

Well my setting has several parallel plotlines going on, each with their own respective villains. I'll list them all off and see if that gives OP any ideas

>Baphomet (Main Antagonist)
I won't go on for too long about him because he's almost exactly as described in the 5e monster manual & OotA books. In my game he's locked in war with Graz'zt in the Abyss, so in order to get an edge he's planning to create a mortal champion in the Material Plane, an act that would also grant a foothold to spread his influence of mindless savagery among the mortal world. In order to create this champion, Baphomet has reached out to well over a dozen individuals with great ambition and potential to destroy anything in their way (including one of the PCs). He granted these individuals power (ie. gave them all Warlock levels) and commanded his sparse cult worshippers in the area to assist them in their goals, in the hope that their individual quests would challenge them and push their abilities to their potential greatness. In addition, Baphomet plans to eventually make the warlocks encounter each other as opponents (if they have not already done so) and kill each other off as part of their own ambitions. Once one "victor" has been claimed - who has not only outlasted the other "contenders" but also reached the peak limit of their mortal might, Baphomet plans to whisk them away to the Abyss and grant them a special demonic form to accompany their new role as the Champion of his armies in both the Abyss and the material plane.

None of these warlocks are fleshed out characters yet (besides the PC) since I'm pretty much focusing the story around the players' progress, but I still have a few other antagonists in mind with thought-out goals and personalities

Main BBEG is a former paladin who was fucked over by his god because of other planar alliances.

He went a bit crazy and is hell bent on closing the material plane to the gods, ending magic on the world.

Thing is the BBEG is technically right. As the world is now any competent mage could kill 100s if he so chose to, before being stopped.
On the other hand so much of modern civilization relies on magic use and godly intervention that it'd plunge the world into dark ages.

I'm running a slow burn 3.5 homebrew game for my wife where there are 3 main BBEG's for her.

The actual main enemy for her until about 10th level is Slenderman, which was created by witches, the leader of which is an elf lich mystic theurge, who is the real BBEG of the higher levels. There's also a corrupted Yggdrasil root which is kind of a red herring BBEG for her, but does actually need to be dealt with eventually.

Slenderman is a sneeky-deeky mindfucking aberration that I probably don't need to explain. Likewise with the lich. The root is one of these:
giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=7637774&postcount=4
which is corrupting parts of the big elven forest (wifes characters is a half elf druid), which is especially bad if it gets to the tree of life (might be the tree it spawned from; haven't thought that far out yet). Lich bbeg intends to use that tree to become a god, so she's somehow involved there too.

I enjoy this. Please continue and elaborate.

The games sandbox is this sort of faerun dalelands/frontier america area (called "the Freelands") between the big elven forest and the more regular medieval human realms, and it acts as a sort of buffer. The elves raised a culture of humans in their forests and have been slowly having them go out on their own from their little pocket nations in the forest. There are a lot of half-elves in this area. Over a millenia ago, the BBEG lived there and survived a raid by orcus-worshipping human cultists, which drove her to evil and hating both humans and the elves who let it happen. She became a witch who haunted these lands for centuries, eventually becoming a lich.

In the more recent past, all the witches of the forest (who all share ties to the "witch serpent" which kind of got their little witch culture going; the thing is dead now) pulled what is called the "witches rebellion" and started a secession war after this other big war when the elf nations were weak. They took over a mountain range called the Ramparts (because it blocks the elf forest from the dry plains where savage humanoids live) which had a few small dwarf realms which have since fallen. They took a bunch of humans who were unhappy with their elf overlords and created this savage/druidic/witch-rules society I call "The Forsaken" (picture the forsworn from skyrim and you're pretty close). The elves have never really regained the strength to go and wipe these fuckers out, and now the witches are pretty strong.

The Forsaken turned all the places adjacent to their new realm to shit by raiding, cursing, and releasing monsters and plagues and shit like that. The adjacent areas are now called "the Darklands", which are full of ruined homesteads and villages and such. The humans of the Free Lands are slowly resettling these areas. My wifes hometown is one such resettled area. Her elf scout mom and human ranger dad were key to the victory, which cost many of the townsfolk and all...

>BBEG

Ugh.

of the druids and fey of the Shadewood (the forest the village is built up against). They had fought this proto-slenderman the witches created. Mom struck the killing blow, which triggered this curse the head witch put on the creature that affects whoever kills it. The curse makes anyone near her increasingly sick until she leaves their presence, and they become sick again if she ever returns, so mom left (wifes character was a little kid) to find a way to lift the curse.

When we started playing, I asked my wife what she wanted to do with her character, and her choice was to find out why her mom left, so right now it's kind of a "follow the trail" mystery. Her dad died right before the start of the game, and he never spoke of it, and nobody in her town knows either. Before they knew she was cursed, they traveled to other areas with better healers before somebody figured it out, so she's going to those areas in their footsteps.

Anyway, the BBEG lich's ultimate goal is to usurp the Tree of Lifes power to become a god. The Tree of Life is a huge magical tree in the heart of the elf lands which has some big magical significance to the planet, and the elves have built one of their main cities around, on and in it (which outsiders aren't allowed in to). I like the idea behind the binder class (which isn't represented in my rules), so I fluff these witches as using a kind of binding to get some of their powers (they're all druids, sorcerers, and clerics). I'm using slenderman, so I decided I also wanted to use Zalgo. Zalgo is this formless lovecraftian near-godlike evil being from outside the three planes (homebrew cosmology), and she intends to bind it to merge with and take over the tree of life. Zalgo kinda just bleeds into reality and corrupts shit, so that's her inspiration. To do so, she needs a bunch of weird powerful evil shit, and her Slenderman is key, but her slenderman is a bitch to create, so as of right now she just has various...

component beings that are each like slendy in some way. The other witches just think the slendermen are being used to kidnap children and depopulate the areas around the Ramparts for the Forsaken to use, which is happening, but the BBEG has these bigger plans.

The yggdrasil root (might have a different name in game) has corrupted this one region of the big elven forest, which is now dark and has a bunch of weird plant and/or ghost monsters and other strange magical effects like shit moving around on it's own. This is kind of a red herring because as the wife starts to have to deal with the slenderman, it'll seem like its connected to this region thematically.

Not sure yet, but the root is probably the result of one of the BBEGs early attempts at using the tree.

Dunno what else to add. Any questions?

Yeah guys, we need better sounding jargon. I suggest No Good Meanie Head (NGMH)