Tell me about your best villains, GMs. I await your answer. You have a full day to decide

Tell me about your best villains, GMs. I await your answer. You have a full day to decide.

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there spooky,
there scary,
there skelley skullies/

bump, I want to make a compelling villain, so to see what people think a good one consists of would help a ton

">be GMing 5e for first time"
">have random necromancer"
">was just supposed to die"
">party begrudgingly spares him for reasons that I do not understand to this day"
">he becomes an impromtu annoyance until the party gets tired of his shit"

he wasn't really that compelling, but he stands out in my mind because he was created out of natural circumstances. It's something I wish I could recreate with a bigger villan, the lack of the railroady feeling was amazing

Well, "Villain Designing 101" is that everyone is a hero in his own story. My best shot has been a two-part campaign - first part has been about PCs trying to save the world despite great sacrifices, yadda-yadda, cliffhanged right before the final confrontation, while the second part has been about the guys following their trails, watching the destructive consequences of their actions and genuinely trying to stop these murderhobos while there is still a world to be saved.

I offered the players to choose between characters before the final showdown (they split almost evenly). It has been one of the most fierce PvP fights I had the honor to witness. They fought their own mistakes.

Does it have to be strictly Veeky Forums-related? Because I had some good general fiction villain ideas, but that's about it.

>First ever game hasn't had a session since last December
I doubt we'll ever be able to meet up for some D&D ever again, but if we did the final boss would've been either the dwarf king or the elf king, whichever side of the war they decided to take.

well in the most recent arc, every major villain they've killed has been resurrected/cloned, and they're out for blood.

in order:
Pirate captain who can control the seas, but also has enough fine control to pull pressure washer/aqualung bullshit. the real issue is that he's dangerously charismatic and has a lot of support in the party's home turf

a biker with a zippo lighter that can convert nitrogen to a highly flammable/toxic gas, tons at a time. and for some reason is strong enough to tear steel apart with his hands and is way tougher than he has any right to be. he's a problem because the party just barely killed his gang the first time, and the area he claimed is already in a bad state since it was the subject of the last arc.

One is a... well I guess the closest equivalent would be a business man? he's technically a healer, capable of restoring anything and anyone vaguely near him to pristine condition, with precise control over what is and isn't affected. regarded as impossible to kill, because his power affects himself, and is constantly in effect. Side note: his power can bring back the dead. He's not actually the issue so much as the people he's surrounded himself with.

a mad artist ("social scientist") who's hat is capable of mind control. to elaborate, if you can comprehend the concept of his hat, he can give you a command. still images of the hat give simple static orders, videos can encode more complex information but its still set, in person he can vary the command on the fly and it's much stronger. The sound of tearing the hat's threads, the smell and touch of the hat also work. The hat's effects are transmissible over mass media (internet/TV). Probably the character I have to play the smartest.

then there's about 12 other villains who the party has heard of in passing, but were written off since they were "solved problems", in addition to a constant stream of assassins, vigilantes, and people they've pissed off in the past.

there;s a ton more, last count had about 74 villains and a shit ton of other NPCs, but post limit

well, there was that guy trying to justify the actions of his horrifying-, sociopath mother who ditched her childhoodfriend/husband and daughter for immortality and money.

That's pretty fucking villianous.

There actually were several, however, let us just forget that flaming pile of horseshit.

It's the damnedest thing when something unexpected and unplanned gets over while your carefully laid out ideas don't. I've been there too. I mean, I'm glad I got the PCs to give a damn about something but still...

I was brand new DM. Running a campaign on a brand new system for 5 friends that we never got to conclude. Played this campaign for over 6 months (we were probably about 3 sessions away from the end).

The villain was a guy who started off as a human shape-shifted into a small black cat that I created on the fly to help the party rouge. She was absolutely terrible at successfully doing anything rouge-like (rolled 1's every time it mattered). So I just made him up to help her figure out an alternative way to stealthily break into a house owned by the local crime lord to steal some incriminating ledgers.
The rouge ended up proclaiming the cat as her pet and carried it around and slept with it for several sessions.
Eventually the cat ended up stealing a crucial item the characters needed and shape-shifting back into his human form as big reveal and escaped. He later came back as a business liaison for a Lord and was manipulating the players into performing jobs so that he would feed them intel.
I fleshed the villain out to the point where he was the twin brother of a npc priestess of a religious order that the party paladin belonged to. He was sickly as a child and close to dying so the priestess used her divine magic to heal him but it also left the siblings soul bonded, so whenever he/she was injured the other would also feel it. This created some interesting dramatic tension between the party because the paladin loved the priestess so he had to stop the other players from going murder-hobo on the shape-shifter or his love would also die. The rouge also still kinda liked her former pet.

TL;DR
Pulled a temporary rando shape-shifting npc out of my ass to provide hints to a player but it ended up creating awesome RP and story moments. He was pissing the players off constantly where they were't mad at me but hated the villain and wanted him dead- it was great.

P.S.
In this campaign I also rolled on a random table for events while the party was camping at night and created a wild smelly old hobo npc who ended up being an escaped prisoner who was a brewmeister that was falsely imprisoned and specialized in making prison wine.

One of our friends came over for 2 sessions and I let him RP the character. The old hobo fought with a broken bottle (improvised dagger) and somehow evaded every attack and scored critical every time he rolled. It was insane.

Let me tell you about Remal the would be god
Remal was a 20th level monk and servant to my bbeg, a resurrected ancient dragon from times of old. in PF, 20th level monks are immortal. This monk had deigned to find all the manuals of stat boosting, fuck off to a time accelrated dimension, come out with 1000s in each stat, and kill the party. I never got to run him, as my players had manufactored a way for the kobold cult that would have ressurected the dragon to die, by collapsing the tomb on them.

An awakened horse dread necromancer/fiendblooded. He attacked the parties with a line of different cohorts; the players assumed the cohorts were unrelated villains and I just had a thing for that specific colored horse.

Not mine but here is one I'd like to throw at my players one day

>Be GM
>Party rolls all monks
>Not a wuxia setting but they play it as such - ignoring my main quest (travel across a desert to find a tomb where a bandit king is trying to bring about the end times) and challenging random people to duels for honor to prove their kungfu is da bestest
>fuck it. I roll up some (four) rowdy soldiers for them to fight
> they fuck up and die hilariously
> players feel bad (they invested more into this damn joke than I realise), so I feel bad
> have them awaken being tended to by the local wise woman
>"Well that serves you right you know, going about challenging The Four Dragons"
>players: wat.gif
>She explains that they are four of the most ruthless, terrible martial artists in the land
>Party perks up, wants more information to avenge their HONOR

And that's how four random mooks became the four bosses of my campaign.

I used a heavily modified version of Temple of Elemental Evil as a jumping off point for a campaign. Basically, my players took forever to do anything and kept having to leave dungeons to rest up and come back to fights they left half finished. One time, the lost their barbarian to some grunts guarding a door and I thought it would be a good time to introduce Lareth the Beautiful.

Lareth convices the barbarian and then the whole party that he's actually a good guy despite the fact that he does and says ethically questionable things, surrounds, hires thugs, ogres, gnolls, and bugbears and worships Lolth (PCs have an High Elf Fighter in the party who asked to do a Religion check and got a natural 1)

Anyway, he's supposedly vaguely opposed to Zuggtmoy, the demoness that cultists are trying to resurrect in the Temple of Elemental Evil. He's given the barbarian a cursed helmet and a couple communication earrings and has been fucking with the party as they explore the Temple

My Dark Heresy party unwittingly spent their entire campaign serving Ahriman.

Those poor bastards got him the black library.

Neat!
Our crowning moment in Deathwatch was the last session reveal that the Ravenguard who was always suggesting ruthless, destructive measures, constantly recording everything, and had an utterly ludicrous back story prior to joining the Watch was an Alpha Legionary. He got away, too.

Well, in the above Deathwatch game the ultimate villain turned out to be a rogue Inquisitor who was basically Don "The Predator" Frye. He was a former guardsman turned Inquisitor and had spent much of his life fighting 'Nids. Eventually, he became disenchanted with the Imperium's prospects of victory in the Jericho Reach, and with the Astartes in particular, whom he basically started to see as a dangerously uncontrollable element and a massive waste of resources, not to mention basically useless against the Tyranid's sheer numbers. Long term, he wanted the Imperium to withdraw from the Reach and find a more controllable replacement for the Astartes that could be mass-bred instead of taking years of training.

He wound up in bed with a lot of awful people (including the space marine hunting Magos Phayzarus) and became involved in a scheme to create CYBER-GENESTEALERS to act as shock troops against the Imperium's enemies... which was about as successful as you'd expect. After capturing the party and bringing them to his secret experimentation ship, they busted out of their cells and had an epic final battle with Inquisitor Frye and his Cyber-Stealers, which ended with Inquisitor Frye's twin powerfists against the Space Wolf's frost axe. It was a near thing, but in the end he was bisected by the Fenrisian. By that point the rest of the kill team had been slain, and the Wolf died in the following explosion that destroyed the experimentation ship and all of the CYBER-GENESTEALER data that had been collected. The only survivors were Magos Phayzarus, and the aforementioned Alpha Legionary who returned to his dark masters with all the Inquisitor's knowledge.

I took a lot of my inspiration from Darkest Dungeon and have my BBEG not even a living anymore. I role play as the ancestors descendant that hired this misfit gang of rowdy boys to basically clean up my name sake and right the wrongs my ancestors did.
They get glimpses into the thoughts of my family and their motives behind what they did.
Im still working it in that my character is going to betray them for some hidden power beneath the town but not entirely sure how to write it as compelling madness and not just a guy being a dick
>also sorry for making the bbeg basically a dmpc. I know that's shitty

So 'That Guy', lets call him Karl, decides he's going with the cheesiest CHR build possible. Bard, all buffs and diplomacy, absolutely nothing offensive and he's taken it in his head to basically ERP. Now Karl's not a bad guy, he's just 'That Guy' more often than not and he's got a hot sister so what can I do?
My BBEG was already going to be an ancient cat deity awoken thousands of years after it's cult died out trying to rekindle some worship. As Karl is putting his dick in everything from barmaids to fence posts (not kidding) I get an idea. A series of seemingly unrelated quests later one of the mini bosses lets slip it's a demi-god trying to restore it's patron to power. Cue ominous music and a short while later poof, here's the cat goddes to explain in purist Bond Villain fashion her evil scheme.
The twist was simple, unbeknownst to the group, they had met the Cat early on and due to Karl's bullshit stats she had become infatuated with him. Every barmaid, every whore and rescued princess and wounded ranger Karl had put his dick in had been the Cat in disguise trying to figure out what Karl sought in a mate. Every sub boss they had killed had in fact been one of Kar'ls half god children. As was every other major opponent along the future gauntlet that would lead to the final confrontation.
cont.

I had kept track of every awkward moment Karl had used our free time to put something in his personal spank bank and I rubbed his face in it. Remember that time you convinced that alchemist to accept a butt fucking in lieu of payment? No you have to tackle an earth golem immune to potions.
The best part was the glee the rest of the party took in murdering his children right in front of him. To the point of using holy light to torture the loli vampire daughter he didn't know he had to death while she begged him for help.
Finally, to make a long story short, Karl was forced to sacrifice himself in order to keep the Cat and his new incestuous harem busy with dick in the higher plane in an attempt to birth a kinder, gentler new religion. One based more on kitsune and less on the jaguar jungle god I'd originally intended. I made it clear the next character Karl made should be a smelly druid or asexual monk.

Villain, you say? Pic related is how I villain

Give it a go user. Who knows? Maybe it could work in Veeky Forums

I'm still gonna use the daughter revenge plot in a game, it was too good to let go.

So, evil for evilulz?

You have never watched Hellsing have you?

I've read the manga, dummy.

The Pheonix King

Basically a a fire themed badass warlord who was 'cursed' to be trapped in stone for 333 years. He is stuck in a cycle of being released, unleashing his army of ash warriors and smoke knights, and being defeated and trapped in stone for another cycle. His coming is heralded by weird toxic goo monsters that corrupt everything they touch. Those killed by his armies are cremated, becoming more ash warriors, with a special few becoming smoke knights through unknown means that retain their powers and skills.

Since this happens like clockwork, ancient walls have been built surrounding his kingdom to try and keep his army contained.

The party was just one of many groups sent in to try and assassinate the Pheonix King, fighting their way through his fleshless armies and making it to his capital to face him directly. Along the way, at certain monuments or rallying points i his lands, the players would come across statues of the Pheonix King that showed him in various stages of his legend. Usually they would end up coming to life and the players would fight them/talk to them.

Once they reached the capital, they became trapped and the statues started explaining why they were REALLY here in stages. Essentially, the goo monsters are a recurring threat to the world, the Pheonix King bound himself with powerful magic to purge them across time. The Pheonix King has foreseen a time when the monsters attack the world in full force, and he is preparing for the final battle. Slowly growing his army across cycles, picking out worthy warriors to become smoke knights, and using the opportunity to make sure that the mortals within reach are prepared for epic sieges against a seemingly endless tide of nigh-unkillable enemies. Indeed, HE build the walls the surrounded his kingdom in ages past. One day, they will be used to protect against an outside threat instead of an inside one.

By making it to the capital, the players had unknowingly joined the ranks of many past heroes. If they died here, to his traps and bound guardians, they would become Smoke Knights. They had already earned that distinction. But if they could make the way to his throne room alive, he would grant them the 'honor' of becoming one of his chosen few, imbued with his power and set to sleep in stone until the final battle at the end of the world.

Along they way, they fought a number of smoke knights that bore descriptions and weapons similar to famous heroes that had fought the Pheonix King in the past, and they started piecing together the paths and fates of different groups of heroes that had been through this ahead of them.

There was a lot of disagreement among the PCs about whether they believed his grandios story or not, since they really only could take him at his word on it.

Stealing this

Exactly. Those villains tend to get the players invested more as well, since it's the result of their own actions on the world.

>Running 3.5
>Need the party out of town for plot reasons
>Give them sidequest to kill an evil baroness or something, wasn't really thought out, just took it from one of the books
>Reason for evilness is evil wormwizard grandpa trapped in baroness basement.
>wormwizard pretends to be fragile old man, locked in his basement by his cruel grandkids, spins a sobstory full of holes that I'm sure the party is smart enough to see through.
>Surprise, they're not.
>No worries, the vault is full of magical wards, there's no way they're getting past those
>Yes they do.
>Free evil wormwizard, who honestly thanks them and lets them live, commenting on the decades worth of revenge he has to get to before leaving.

Though my campaign is derailed, the players find this a lot more interesting of a villain, since it's 100% their fault that he's free.

>500 years ago
>war
>someone sets of magical nuke
>it was tampered with
>does that thing where it doesn't stop exploding, corrupting the entire world
>one scientist was against this magical nuke and instead was focusing on magical germ warfare
>experiments on himself because no funding
>when the bomb goes off, he is sealed in his lab
>between the taint from the bomb, and his self experimentation, his body breaks down and eventually he turns almost fluid
>present day, his lab is coated in slimy plant growths
>his consciousness lives on, though he has gone mad
>enter the party
>they unseal the lab while searching for parts to try and remove the taint from the world
>they are sprayed with foul smelling, muggy air and find the lab overgrown with something, and the room is obviously tainted
>they leave and head back to base
>every 6 hours, the fighter loses a constitution
>they don't know why, and the character would never let on that they were feeling awful
>fighter is sleeping at base two days later
>wakes up in a cold sweat with awful stomach cramps
>she tries to get up, falls to her hands and knees in pain and starts heaving
>vomits up a lot of blood and a black ooze
>after evacuating, fighter is physically unable to do anything
>the blood and ooze start to move, forming a tall humanoid with a bone scythe growing out of his elbow
>he taunts the fighter, thanks her for helping him get a new body, calls her mom sarcastically
>he stabs her through the back with his scythe and then leaves, letting her bleed out
>her screams wake up the rest of the party throughout the keep
>party gets involved, in the courtyard the baddie is cutting down their guards
>he fireballs some towers
>explodes some minions into zombies
>the fighter down, the paladin tending to her
>in the courtyard, the dragon shaman and warmage are battling and getting stomped
>the paladin gets into it, and the party's pet NPC gets on the scene and the tide of battle shifts
>turns into spores and flies off

>the fighter recovers after some time and is pissed
>they continue their mission and keep running into this guy
>they run away every time, eventually piece his plan together
>he wants to further corrupt the world because his version of life is superior, and the party will be his champions
>they keep running into his experiments
>he kills some of their friends
>corrupts the already corrupted elves and rekindles a 500 year old war between mortals and elves
>breaks the magic shield that saved the main city and kills half the population (this was actually handled by the b-team)
>find and kidnaps the fighter's family
>almost corrupts a giant red dragon to use as a mount, but the party intervened to save him
>eventually he orchestrates the construction of a sky fortress, it's really just the elven capital city strapped to really big airships
>the party gets their many friends together and calls in the rest of their favors
>charge into the flying fortress as it heads for the main city again, this time with an entire fleet and an army of super soldiered corrupted elves
>the battle is massive, eventually the party makes it through to the castle that the bad guy is using as his throne
>the front door is guarded by two black knights radiating with corrupted energy
>the party kills them dead and loots the corpses
>the fighter goes for the armor
>it's her brothers, horribly corrupted and disfigured, but she can tell it's them
>they storm the castle, the fighter in a blind rage
>the party is doing well, but still losing
>the warmage backs off and hides in a corner, letting his friends distract the baddie
>between some scrolls of sending and lucky rolls he is able to finagle together the parts they have been finding to create a short range version of their anti taint bomb
>charges back into the fight and the party continues getting decimated
>paladin (actually a bard/warblade) goes down, party loses their buffs

Well, i'm not my GM, but as a player i'd say the best villains my group has faced were an assimar ranger and his wife, a tiefling sorcerer. wo fucking years trying to perma kill those fuckers. Honestly, it ended being our personal quest and way better than the main plot of stopping a Devil Lord.

Ivan the Mad. Absolutely batshit insane. I'm usually a pretty logical person who maps who characters heavily, so it was pretty hard to create this, but basically the closest I could get to an actual madman. His first meeting with the party ended with him trying to knife them mid sentence. I tried really hard to make him seem like an actual psycho; he wasn't playing by any rules whatsoever. When they came up again him, he really could be about to do anything.

He was basically a standard warrior with a few modifications. He had a magic dagger that could pierce through anything, he had no qualms about playing dress ups and he was stark raving mad. Would appear at random moments, and the party would basically have a tough fighter on their hands, but not one who would be too powerful or pull out some sort of weird power shit. If the party was working as a team, he was relatively easy to deal with; if they were fractured, he became some of the hardest fights they had.

I was pretty proud of him, since I used to get told I had really predictable, basic villains. THat all stopped after Ivan.

The greatest villain I ever created was an evil Indiana Jones for a Call of Cthulhu game. He was always one step ahead of the investigators, taunting them constantly. He wasn't particularly good at anything, just ludicrously lucky. Scoundrel, womanizer, cocky, and loud. He was a blast to roleplay and my group loathed him, in a good way. One of my players was bleeding out in their final confrontation, moments from dying, and he put everything he could into stabbing the fuck out of this guy and mutilating him. It was a good bout of roleplaying, I think I made the player a little insane with how badly he wanted to kill this guy. I loved every second of it.

I really wanna run Orcus but it's just not possible, you'd need like 16 pc's to stand a chance. Anyone ever got to that point?

>party discusses doing the thing, they know it's suicide, but it'll probably save everything, so they do it
>the anti-taint bomb goes off and there is a flash of white/gold light, enveloping everything
>the fighter and the warmage wake up at about the same time
>they survived the blast for some reason, and they check on their friends
>everyone else is unconscious as well, nobody is sure what happened
>where the baddie was lays a scrawny, naked human
>he's still alive as well
>they use their last few healing spells to get almost everyone on their feet
>blast a hole in the wall and the dragon shaman turns into a dragon (magic item)
>they ride him out
>many are dead on the airship, which is slowly falling out of the sky
>the mortals/untainted start retreating and flee
>party stops to get the bodies of the fighter's brothers before leaving
>ships falls from the sky into the eternal forest, it didn't get very far
>many many elves are dead
>one brother is dead for good, the other gets saved
>there is a trial for the baddie who is now human again since his taint was destroyed
>he loses and is sentenced to death
>the fighter chooses to be the executioner, nobody can or wants to stop her
>he mocks her, saying he was only so weak because he came from her
>she kills him and they burn the body
>the dragon shaman and warmage bask in the glory of saving the day and prepare to continue the search to get rid of the tain
>the paladin restarts his order
>the fighter is offered lordship, but declines, instead choosing to just defend the city and be with what is left of his family
>the elves, no longer corrupted or under the control of the baddie, return to their senses
>there are so few of them left, and their reproduction rate is so low that they know they are likely going to be extinct soon
>some of them start plotting revenge for this

the campaign ended there, went on for a few years.

>you'd need like 16 pc's to stand a chance
No.

>Power word kill as a lair action
you're right maybe even more

You mean 5. 6 at most.

I love the doing good to commit evil trope, and also the evil church trope, but I'd have a tough time framing this one in a context the party would learn about and care about. If it takes hundreds of years to align societies as she wills, and she legitimately acts the saint in that time, how would one go about presenting this as a threat to the players? I'm struggling to think of ways to bridge such a threat into the PCs day to day adventuring.

The closest example I can think of is Mass Effect with the whole harvesting everyone thing, but they don't veil the villains in a shroud of goodness. The reapers make a pretty clear statement that they are aggressive and evil, with a big angry fleet to back their words up, and people are only ignorant of their threat because they were elsewhere for eons.

One of my PCs flat out betrayed the rest of the party because he was sick of them being murderhobos. He wound up becoming the main "villain" for most of the campaign. We were playing online, so I had his sessions separately. It was pretty great, because he always got a strong reaction from the players when he showed up. Whenever they saw that he was there during one of their sessions, they knew they were in for a rough time.

>Kills your wizard and your sorc on initiative 20
down to 3 now, probably a fighter a paladin and maybe a rogue or something, good luck

>120 hp
No
Also, why the fuck would you have a sorc on top of a wizard. A cleric, druid, or bard.

Orcus gets a piddly +5 to saving throws. Lets kill him with a Wizard. Toss a spell on him that incapacitates him with save end. Any status condition that makes him lose his turn will do, even the level 1 Wizard daily sleep. Use your orb of imposition for -6 or so to his saving throws with a decent wisdom score. Finally, use your level 26 daily utility power Golden Mean (Arcane power, lord of fate epic destiny, page 147). Congratulations, he is now stunned for 5 turns if you sustain minor. Don't forget spell focus for an additional -2 to the save. Now the save fails even with the +2 his allies grant with a successful heal check.
Your allies should be able to finish him in 5 turns of non-action and combat advantage. Also, you still get standard actions to hit him with in the mean time. I suggest taking an additional implement mastery with a wand to make sure your stun/sleep hits. Combine this with your 'Turnabout ability' (at the start of the combat you designate Orcus, until the end of the combat any condition he applies to your allies is also applied to him). This guy is going to be stunned, weakened or asleep for most of the combat.

>Use your orb of imposition for -6 or so to his saving throws

Orb of Imposition was errata'd to only apply to a single saving throw. That happened very, very early in 4e's history.

But he can just save any of that, hes has advantage so it's highly likely if he fails he has L/res and if you don't kill him on that first round (somehow you're all going before the lair action) then your wizard is super dead Plus he has an army of minions (animate/create undead lasts indefinitely not to mention the regional affect

You're not being serious
>fight begins
>L/action Tail attack 7d8+8 Avrg. 21 dmg
>Takes wiz to 99 hp
>in count. 20
>Create 6 zombies
>Time stop
>Spends 3 turns creating 9 zombies a turn
>33 zombies
>Power word kill
>Wizard dead 5 party members vs 33 zombies and orcus

I made an antagonist who was the king of another world and overreacted a bit when some other asshole (the REAL big bad) started fucking with and weakening the boundaries between the various world, and he jumped straight to "Someone on the other side must be preparing an invasion, I'd better strike first." The campaign he was going to be a part of never happened, sadly.

> Hypothetical scenario where the wizard has all the right tools and uses them at the right times and nothing misses or goes off plan the entire time

Hilarious. None of these "wizard does xyz and wins" arguments are ever remotely plausible.

Which fucking edition are you talking about cause i can't tell if you're trying to discuss 4 or 5 orcus.

It doesn't even actually work, as mentioned . 4e wasn't 3.5 where the wizard was a god-king (Or at least, not any more than any other class was). Wizards had impressive control but save-ends is VERY unreliable against big guys. The wizard was notable because he could actually make it work briefly, more than most people could hope for against orcus.

5th man can he Pwk twice a turn in 4th?

The party would need to find notes on the sacrificial ritual and a link to the villain or some way to learn the villain's thoughts. A mentor, a record of their younger years, an oracle.

A merfolk noble from the capital of Tritonia. He's gathered a motley pirate crew with the goal of raising his own empire, to combat the two land empires closing in on the island nations.
He's charismatic but smug, able to unite the lesser native tribes, like bullywug, under his banner. He intends to raise Atlantis, an ancient, massive city that was sealed away in the distant past.

To do that, he intends to collect the 7 artifacts belonging to the Priest of the Old One. Donning them all, and performing a ceremony, will raise the ancient city. Currently, he has only two, and the party only knows of one he has, since he stole it from them. The party has 2 of the artifacts.

There is also Larsa'aia, who appears to be a mind flayer. She's aiding a monstrous cult in service of a kraken, but seems to have her own agenda. She wants to raise Atlantis to recover her soul jar, which was sealed away along with the city tens of thousands of years ago. She is an alhoon, in actuality, and needs her soul jar to ascend to lichdom. She cannot use the artifacts herself, though, so she needs someone she can trust, at least temporarily, to use them on her behalf.

>The best part was the glee the rest of the party took in murdering his children right in front of him. To the point of using holy light to torture the loli vampire daughter he didn't know he had to death while she begged him for help.
You were That Guys more than he was.

>>it's her brothers, horribly corrupted and disfigured, but she can tell it's them
This is why so many people play orphaned loners, because if they give their characters family a shitty DM will kill them off for cheap drama. You don't deserve players.

the player liked it

So, you were doing an evil campaign, right?

Good riddance. Also, stop DMing you fucktard.

My players most hated villain, like many others, was memorable because it was their fault he was around. Originally just a mini-boss, Alak Xarann, was a Dark Elf Necromancy focused Bard. They infiltrated his base, offed his minions, and defeated him in battle. Problem was, they captured him instead of killing him. He escaped, and returned to plague them again and again, escaping every time. Eventually he took down the intended original big bad after stealing the Big Ritual's power for himself. Ended up as the final battle of the campaign. I miss running him, so he may come back someday.

I've got two right now that I'm terribly fond of.

>Lord Lucerne, Lord of Light... Fixtures
>an imposing man, speculated to be an elf or have discovered some secret to immortality, has declared himself fit to be worshipped as a God
>regularly kidnaps those he deems to be a threat to his cult and throws them into his winding labyrinths deep in the mountains
>the labyrinths are filled with chandeliers and candelabras, magical artifacts and strange creatures
>most importantly, they're all guarded by living statues modeled after his likeness
>the statues can only be defeated by dimming the light around them
>Lord Lucerne hasn't been seen in an age, but it's speculated that he's deep in hiding, studying and gathering strength to overthrow the four other Lords of the realm

Post was too long so I'll split it

Otho Friarwort, the Arian Arbiter
>a halfling bard who's murdered seven nobles and frame the clergy for his crimes
>handsome, courteous, unfailingly polite but appears on the surface to have a terrible drinking problem
>in reality, his long nights on the town and increasingly poor appearance in the mornings come from overextending himself as a spellcaster
>raised by a terribly violent and corrupt nobleman for a father, and an obsessively devout mother, Otho's only reprieve from having the word of God literally beaten into him was music
>his mother also being a musician, the young bard was devastated when his father began to exploit his mother's position in the church
>resentment turned to horror as his father's actions grew worse, and reached a breaking point when he permitted systematic assault, rape and debasement on the mother by other wealthy patrons and clergy
>her reputation in the church shattered and no end to the horror in sight, Otho resolved to do anything he could do stop the corruption and violence
>he tried preaching from the highest echelons of the court to the lowest common folk of the corruption and heresy
>time passed
>nothing changed except for the intensity of Otho's growing hatred for the men who were destroying the only good in his life
>at his absolute limit, Otho did the unthinkable, and killed his father, framing the clergy
>unable to stand what the crime would do to his mother, he took to the streets
>word of the murder traveled fast, and for the first time in his life, Otho saw change
>a full investigation was launched by the castle guard
>he did it seven times in all before a party of courageous heroes arrived in the city and took up the case
>they not only solved the crime, but delivered justice, crippling the halfling's right hand so he may never play again
>currently imprisoned in the castle's dungeons, being tortured for his crimes while the Lord of Aria decides how to deal with the unrepentant killer

My best villain was this bratty teenage girl. She was a complete narcissist and sociopath, who stole a pile of money from her family before running away to the backwater the PCs inhabited. She gained the loyalty of a massive, 8ft tall, half-ton man she affectionately named Thunk, who acts her personal servant and bodyguard. The two amassed a band of mercenaries and lowlifes to commit acts of banditry and pillaging through the countryside.

The players wanted to get the sweet reward of catching her (she was wanted, dead or alive, with the latter being worth more money). It felt like she really stood out to the players, since her brattiness, spoiled nature, and general doucebaggery made her a fun and challenging obstacle early on.

This is adorable.what happened to her?

That's pretty cool.

That'd only be a DMPC if the descendant was tagging along and fully acting as a regular part of the party. Sounds like he's more of a quest giver.

Also, if you're cribbing on the Ancestor, just have blood run true. Ancestor sentenced more than a few people to eternal torment for slightly inconveniencing him.

Yeah this is because planning a villain ( or really anything too much ) is utter bunk. Players don't want to be railroaded. They want choice and emergent gameplay

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36383/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots-you-will-rue-this-day-heroes-the-principles-of-rpg-villainy

This is a great article on the concept. Essentially as a rule you don't have any one obvious main villain you have lots of different characters and groups and see which one emerges as the most adversarial to the party through gameplay.

the party was supposed to stop him befor he got the artifacts you absolute nigger, if they failed, they could still kill the man casting gate.

And what happened then? Did they get there and join him? How was the end of the world?

That's just a sad story. That's great, but I hope the players feel bad because he clearly did nothing wrong.

The one who crippled him- who met the bard by outperforming him in his most frequented tavern- doesn't give a fuck because Otho tried escaping from pursuit by stealing the fastest looking horse in the tavern's stables.

The PC's horse. His best and only friend. Right after he had all of his gold stolen from the prior town. He actually wanted to kill the halfling outright, but the other PC talked him down to just horribly mutilating and crippling him instead.

The other PC feels terrible and wants to straight up rescue Otho from the dungeons. I've left everything very ambiguous for them and am super curious to see how they handle things in tonight's session.

I swear to God, the old trope have gone. Absolute dickass bards seem much, much more common and offensive these days than dickass thieves, damn.

I'm interested too. Please post about it once it's done or tomorrow if this thread lives, or make a whole new storytime thread about it, sounds like something people would find interesting.

Oh to clarify, the PC that did the mutilating is a cleric. The serial killer is a bard, and the empathetic PC is a warlock.

I'll be sure to post the story's developments. Probably will be able to sometime tomorrow. Hope the thread lives that long, but if not I'll storytime it.

I don't know of he was an antagonist per se but the most rage inducing NPC I ever introduced or used was a Dwarven bard who fell in love with the party's sorceress. It started off with the Dwarf turning up randomly at the inn where the party was staying and singing love songs in the sorc's direction. Annoying but harmless. Things escalated and shit got real when the bard formed his own adventuring party and started trying to beat the party to objectives and trrasure.

They're trying to sneak in and steal an artifact from a dragon's hoard? The other party kicks down the door and challenges the dragon to a rock off mid infiltration. They're about the breach a corrupt noble's sanctum to dispense some justice? Right before they kick the door down they hear a muffled explosion as the other team comes in through the ceiling and initiates a three way cluster fuck. This bard caused fustration and blind rage in the party, all so he could prove his devotion and prowess to the sorceress.

In the end the party doomed a small kingdom when they used a Wish not to defeat the undead overlord as planned but instead make the Dwarf forget they'd ever met or seen the Sorceress. It didn't work though, as soon as the Dwarf heard one of the songs praising her beauty and skill (that he'd wrote but forgot about) he decided he just had to see if the stories tales were true.

The game ended before they ever got rid of the Dwarf once and for all.

fpbp

>It didn't work though, as soon as the Dwarf heard one of the songs praising her beauty and skill (that he'd wrote but forgot about) he decided he just had to see if the stories tales were true.

Alright, you're just a faggot for that one, you're that DM.

>biker could make literally infinite money by being an energy baron

Tina Turner was a better villain.

Not him, but maybe they should've worded the Wish better.

>player minmaxes to shit
>plays unshackled robot/ai with amnesia and darkpast and 10 dots in mortal connections
Dm Had to make up a shadow organization bigger and more powerful than the illuminati to explain how op his body was.
Not really unshackled, it just never came up because he did what they wanted anyway.

Anyway. The villain they never got to because the game dissolved: The illuminati2 want to ensure mankinds survival at all costs, so they created this ultra robot (that the minmax player is modeled after) and unleashed it on the galaxy to subdue any aliens that could be considered threats. So mankinds later explorers never found competetive aliens. Sometimes some chumps that could be easily beaten down or were just like retardedly stupid compared to humans. Besides that they would find completely ravaged worlds.

The player would start to have nightmares as his murderhoboing synced his soul up with his xenocide brother.

The players would decide if it was time to shut the system down, and kill the xenocide brother, or just kill the brother and instate the pc as the newest version.

Like I said, they never really got there and that was just the broad strokes.

That's always fair, but for fuck's sake, you give players Wish and then do that?

Literally, think of that, that's a DM shoving some shit down the players' throat that they clearly didn't want. Whether they were good sports about it and laughed through it, or were straight-faced about it, the intent was clear: We're done with this Dwarven faggot. This is is, we're done, we are literally (Apparently) dooming an entire kingdom just to get rid of this dude. So you describe him as rage inducing (Not fun) and when the players finally get rid of him, after what is a sort of interesting dynamic, you bring him right the fuck back with some bullshit excuse that is tenuous at best. No, that's just obnoxious.

Nobody with taste should like forced shit like that.

>The game ended before they ever got rid of the Dwarf once and for all

I wonder how soon after. I wonder if it was "I am going to stop showing up after two more sessions because he brought the fucking Dwarf back and this isn't fun."

If it were me, I would've Wished him to be in love with someone else.

I mean, shit, who knows the party morality, but it's a wonder they didn't just Wish him dead if they were gonna use it.

The exact wording of the Wish, made to a malicious Fae Lady, was "Make the Dwarf bard, just, forget about me or something!" They knew she was a bitch of the highest order when they made the deal for the Wish, and had intended it to destroy the undead lord's method of returning to life but decided at literally the last minute to use it to try and get rid of the dwarf. One more line in the wish or a different wording would have resulted in the desired outcome. As it was they left an opening big enough to ride an Eldar Dragon through. They did it to themselves.

>malicious Fae Lady
wow I have no more sympathy for your players.

Nah, you're a faggit and that's why the game ended, I agree with the other fag.