Villain was doing these evil deeds in order to produce a force stronger than himself...

>Villain was doing these evil deeds in order to produce a force stronger than himself, in order to stop some nebulous threat
Decent villain motivation?

Villain motivation thread.
BBEG.

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That on its own is a bit tired.

I had a villain once whose plan was to awaken an ancient inventor who had been sealed in stasis, in order to have him build weapons to make his empire strong.

His motivation was simply to be the best leader possible - to get ancient knowledge to expand his empire, to make the empire prosperous. Admittedly he was doing this by restarting an ancient magical Manhattan Project, but if you've never used a nuke before a nuclear war seems a great idea.

He actively encouraged the heroes to fight him, because if they were stronger than him he was, by his own logic, not worthy to rule.

>BBEG
Ugggh

Also can't villains just be villains for selfish reasons anymore?

No. That's a shitty excuse for making some kind of tragic or relatable villain. You could argue such a person isn't even a villain, which probably wouldn't hold consistent with their actions to that point.

Sorry, that's no representative of reality and needed to be deconstructed. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of people obey social rules and laws simply because that's the right thing to do without some greater alternative, and every truly despotic leader in history has been such for incredibly selfish and self-motivated reasons, alright? It just doesn't work that way, sweetey. Good and evil don't exist, despite obvious signs that isn't the case simply because we can recognize that people aren't perfect and that intention exists.

Immortality is always a good motivation. Or the villainn just wants to find out how far he can make it.

I like villains that are not interested in power games but in intellectual questions and he is willing to go any length to solve this riddle.
How does one defeat entropy?
Why is there something instead of nothing?

>I do not plan for the next year, or the next ten years, or the next budget cycle. I prepare for eternity.

That motivation is always undermined by the villain never explaining the problem or showing any sort of evidence if they do bother to explain it. Worse still is when they rig their scheme to reveal the problem only after they've been killed and their plan has been dismantled, so the people left dealing with the greater threat can't even piggyback on it.

That gets a bit stale because it's so often been done, but there are ways to work with it.
For one, "villain" is the wrong term. You're looking for an "antagonist"--they do not necessarily have to be particularly villainous at all, just opposed to the protagonist group. You can easily write a Lawful Good antagonist who has beef with the way the players roll.

The only good motive for a villain is to make a profit
all else is just edge-lord wankery

>needed to be deconstructed
Fuck you.

Sure, why not? The nice part about such a villain - or rather, antagonist - is that once (if) the PCs stop his plans, it just means that whatever he was trying to actually fight off automatically comes into play and is believably a bigger threat.

I unironically miss the days when Lex Luthor planned to nuke population centers as part of a real estate scheme.

I miss when he stole forty cakes.

He isn't a villain then.

do you have a problem with the idea of a BBEG, or the term itself? because honestly it doesn't matter which it is, you're just being contrarian.

I like it, although my personal favorite take on that is

>villain wants to be a "true hero" (someone so utterly good they can fix the world, but after realizing he couldn't be one himself settled for being the catalyst for such a hero to appear

>does something inherently evil have the right to exist

>>Villain was doing these evil deeds in order to produce a force stronger than himself, in order to stop some nebulous threat
>Decent villain motivation?

Only if it turns out that, unbeknownst to the villain, the party themselves are this greater force, and that in rising to defeat his evil they have become the heroes they need to be in order to stop the nebulous threat.
Anything else will make your players feel like shitheads for trying their best to be the good guy, which is never a good asspull.

>Plans
>Within plans
>Within plans
I'm pretty sure the hand of thrawn crisis was deliberately engineered by then to get Luke and Mara together

>unbeknownst to the villain
but thats his whole plan

he wants to create a force strong enough to beat him (the party) so that they can face the true enemy- if anything he should be somewhat pleased when he loses

Profit it's only a way to power
Unless money it's the greatest source of power in your setting then villians should set their ambitions higher

The villain in my story started like that but it's now consumed by the obsession, since he is a sorcerer full of power it manifests as his magic releasing as constructs that attempts to disuade or destroy any distraction the sorcerer has in his obsession, in a way he is a victim of his wild magic obeying his subconscious

i see you too are a man of taste

youtube.com/watch?v=EIKZiQLnS4c

Ran a low level game where the big bad was just some Fae with dominion over the territory the party resided in.

She was just trying to enter the big leagues and started making some moves

It's a meme you dip

It's all about presentation.

...

and yet their parts of the story were the least interesting.

Obligatory Nox since someone posting him is just a matter of time.

Villain was compelled to commit evil by his own political system. Lack of evil would have led to empire loosing territory. Loss of territory would have resulted in being replaced and\or assassinated.

Villain has been conquering so long that he has run out of fucks to give. Burning down some villages is just easier than administrating them.

Villain had a pretty horrendous upbringing and doesn't think she has done anything wrong.

Villain is utterly convinced that the Party is the bad guys trying to throw the kingdom into chaos.

Dr. Mengele is a top tier villain.

He was right

I get that it's his whole plan.
But he doesn't realise that the force in question is the party. He's banking on something else saving the world, and probably only realises at the very end what he's done, in his final moments.

>a matter of time
ayyyyyyyyy

I unironically think Kirei is a great villain

Well fuck I love this character now.

I once had a powerful wizard raise an army of the dead.

The players just see the dead rising and want to stop it not knowing the wizard had made a deal in his youth for great power, and that a demon would own him once he died. In old age he read in tomes that the demon was going to use his body as a vessel to return to the mortal plane and rule the world.

Raising an army of undead in preparation so they will fight and hopefully kill the wizard's body once the demon takes over. The better the players do at killing undead, the harder the second part of the campaign will be.

Jesus. Was there actually a good reason for killing the lady at the end or was he just bein lol CN?

I like villains who are true believers. They serve simply because they have found the Great Old Ones to be real. Such a cultist finds nothing behind the faith and ritual of organized religion, but when he calls out to the Great Old Ones, something answers. He cares nothing for his own empowerment - he simply feels that it is his proper place as a mortal to live or die at the whim of the gods, no matter how horrible they may be.
Also seekers of ultimate truth make good villains as well even if your players are seekers as well. youtube.com/watch?v=QxY90mMFodk

Give your villain some human pettiness and failing, it will work quite well.

Sometimes all that is needed to make a mediocre antagonist into a great one is just making a few minute differences in the plot

John Xanadu is in my opinion a supreme example of CE.

he is, hes bot a legitimate villain while having some human elements

much better than zouken "summon satan for cup pussy" matou

I think having him view the party as a possible contender and purposefully presenting greater and greater challenges for them to overcome is better, since it makes the villain seem both less incompetent and justifies enemy progression in a natural way

Being a Chosen One and follow one's destiny is a viable villain motivation.

...

What about stabbing the chosen one in the back just before they gain their ultrapower, stealing the ultrapower for yourself, and then just flailing around making everything worse because you're utterly incompetent?

Good old Lord Ruler. What a pillock.

It comes easy to him.

Sauce?

Aaron's Punisher MAX series.

This Frank is gonna get franked

Frank's Frank got Franked.

Thanks dude.

>yeah, here's the guy you need to fight
>BUT SHOULD YOU???
>maybe he's not that bad
>maybe he has a reason
>maybe he's actually trying to do something good


Hard fucking pass. Nothing is more trite than "They did nothing wrong" villains.

I want to see a villain that's only that way because he wants to be evil.
I want to see a villain self-identify as evil in a setting where that doesn't usually happen, I want to unravel his motivations just to find out that he's a very bored noble or wizard who always wanted to be the monster in the heroic tales and I want to explore the full range of implications.

oh, good to know. i'm on edge because i saw someone actively arguing against the term bbeg recently.

Boredom

That was quick.

There aren't any good secular arguments for objective morality but you're right that there are people that are pretty much irredimably evil as would be typically defined

Hate is motivation enough.

>Matou is inferior to much better example within their own source material

That's pretty much them all over really.

I've always liked the idea of wild magic. I know it skews just a hair from going over the edge of LolsoRandumb land but there's something about attempting a magic missile and not knowing whether it's going to be an arcane blast, a pebble, or a fucking glacier that just appeals to me. Then again I unironically loved playing TES role-playing as Sheogorath.

...

Fuck you duck

but sakura>rin?

admittedly sakura isnt best girl either,
but still

>Decent villain motivation?

I mean, this was basically King Vendrick's[/Spoiler] motivation in Dark Souls II, and realizing how all of that came together was one of my favorite parts of experiencing that game, so sure.

I really like the Shin Megami Tensei sort of villain, where their whole goal is to turn their world into a paradise of their own making, but their version of paradise is starkly at odds with that of most normal people. That, or the former hero who beat up their own final boss in their own time, but is now just living out of habit, unable to understand that their idea of what the world should be doesn't jive anymore, but nonetheless clinging to their castle of authority until a new hero to rises up to destroy them.

villains you could conceivably win over to your side in the end are the best.

(OP)
>Decent villain motivation?

I mean, this was basically King Vendrick's [/spoiler] motivation in Dark Souls II, and realizing how all of that came together was one of my favorite parts of experiencing that game, so sure.

I really like the Shin Megami Tensei sort of villain, where their whole goal is to turn their world into a paradise of their own making, but their version of paradise is starkly at odds with that of most normal people. That, or the former hero who beat up their own final boss in their own time, but is now just living out of habit, unable to understand that their idea of what the world should be doesn't jive anymore, but nonetheless clinging to their castle of authority until a new hero to rises up to destroy them.

It can be, but like so many other things it often isn't.

Myself, I tend to play that as 'they looked over the potential fixes and every other option is worse'. The current game I'm running one of the NPCs the party is stuck dealing with is currently working on bringing back more than a few extinct gods of pointless evil because they serve as channels for the collective asshattery of humanity, and if they aren't there to give it purpose it slowly pools everywhere and stresses reality enough to let the things that live between the walls gaps to enter the material plane. The NPC in question is banking on how the gods in question just need to exist, they don't need to be effectual, and has put a lot of work over the centuries into making sure they won't have any servants or other cool god stuff when they reincarnate.

The other two options for dealing with reality shredding itself are either waiting for enough people to die in said reality shredding that the giant pools of stagnant evil are no longer being refilled and reality starts recovering until the population grows again, or to start killing all the excess humans themselves to speed the process. It's not good, but it's the best of a terrible set of choices.

Why did the extinct gods of ancient evil get killed in the first place? Well, they had no shortage of enemies, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

ummmm, she just got carjacked by the guy and was going to tell the cops and justice league asap. he's giving himself time to get away moron.

>Jhul al Hakim - better known as the Chosen - is the leader of the terrorist cult known as "Altariqat Alqadima," or "the Old Way" in English, and better known simply as "Altar." This slang term has given rise to adherents of the Old Way being referred to as Altar Boys.
>His teachings are based on the writings of an enigmatic figure known as the First Chosen, who lived in modern day Syria, and predate the spread of Islam by at least a century, likely more.
>The religion was more or less confined to the same region as modern day Jableh, practiced by no more than a few thousand at its height. After the death of the First Chosen, adherents to the Old Way remained in the area until the first Muslims put them to the sword. What few texts remain were lost to history for centuries, but were unearthed by archaeologists in 2018. Among the investors of the excavation was Jhul al Hakim himself.
>It is unknown how or why a devout Muslim would convert to an archaic, dead religion, nor is it clear why so many would flock to him and his teachings. Even more troubling is that al Hakim had no connections to any known terrorist organizations - in fact, he and his partners funded their own paramilitary force to combat ISIL in the years prior
>After founding Altariqat Alqadima, al Hakim effectively disappeared until 2020, when he was tracked to northern Syria and was assumed to have died in a drone strike. However, a whistleblower has come forth and submitted photographs showing a very much alive al Hakim in Iraq - a revelation that coincides with the discovery of yet another tomb containing ancient Altariqat Alqadima literature

>tl;dr - religious zealot and terrorist

Pic related, El Sueno served as inspiration.

The villain wants to destroy the world because the world IS shitty and destroying the world actually will cause it to come back less shitty.

wow that's cool.

...

Revenge my boy, revenge is the sweetest poison of them all

What does a hag want? For the evils is a boring motivation.

To meet the wonders of her youth again? To see the unicorns and the fairies again.

a nice loving husband

Crazy Cults are always good. The weirder the better.

I always had a weakness for Pride. The villain does what it does because he thinks he knows better then everyone else. It's very simple, but at the same time very satisfying when in the end he is defeated.

I agree, his pride is also a good reason why the villain blinds himself by overestimating himself and that he denies reality for his own opinion. And worse of all, he has people that believe him. It's classic storytelling and if you keep human company also quite usual in real life.

Why even bother creating your own fake religion when you can just use Islam?

Ayy, Mistborn. Lord Ruler is probably the best subverted expectations for a BBEG I've had in recent memory.

>Villain was doing these evil deeds in order to produce a force stronger than himself, in order to fight it and prove his own superiority

FTFY

The current villain in my campaign experimented on her daughter to eventually be a force of absolute destruction to tear down the walls of a shadowy illuminati group that keeps the world in order.
The father has enlisted the party to help his daughter by gathering artifacts of technological advancement despite knowing that they could be the very thing to tip his daughter into becoming the very force of destruction he's trying to save her from, but has no other choice as he cannot reverse her modifications without the knowledge they provide.
The party is also pretty good friends with this npc daughter as she accompanies them on the very quests they go on to save her and is in general just a nice person which stops them from just out right mercy killing her and prolongs their attempt to find a cure.

it works if he is say, trying to create a unified empire powerful enough to deal with the threat.

if it's going around razing villages in hopes that a young peasant boy will grow up to be an epic level hero powerful enough to defeat him then it's nonsenical

>The villain is attempting to overthrow the rightful government and the benevolent monarch because they're also incompetent and completely fail to maintain law and order within the Kingdom
>The party is literally an armed military force outside the justice system committing unsupervised violence like all the other bandit groups the evil Duke is attempting to exterminate

It always bothered me how much fiction never lays any shit on the feet of the incompetent benevolent monarch.
Guild Wars 2 was a great example of it, where Queen Jennah is unironically shown to be in the right and the militaristic noblemen conspirators in the wrong when there are bandit nations and centaur enclaves just kidnapping, murdering and enslaving citizens without challenge.

>oh, good to know. i'm on edge because i saw someone actively arguing against the term bbeg recently.
That's also part of the meme, ya dip

I thought he shot himself

How is his philosophy different from Islam though? Any chance it could convince your players to get on his side? Or is he just a cliché terrorist guy you could have as a baddie on a CoD?

Seeing as it's my first campaign I wanted to go relatively simple.

It's not one single villain but it's a group called The Nine. They're hiding in plain sight replicant style, and when they meet in one place, they're gonna cause an eclipse followed by some crazy shit.

Pic related they want to make a paradise world, but their paradise is really fucked up

I've always liked the businessman types myself. The idea of a charismatic guy with insane levels of power in the physical, financial, and potentially political sense who, while not above doing shady shit to keep his interests afloat, doesn't necessarily go out of his way to cause trouble, always amused me. Evil is best conducted when one goes at it from a buisiness standpoint rather than from a noble or chaotic one methinks.

Because him being an ex-Muslim is kind of an important deal.

For now, cliché terrorist man. The campaign isn't for another month and some change, so hopefully I'll have enough time to really flesh him and the Old Way out. I know I want it to be distinctly different from Islam, while also being a monotheistic religion.

I also thought about it being atheistic (or nontheistic or whatever), but I have this strange feeling ancient man wasn't the type to not ascribe everything to a god.

Same user here.

I also batted around the idea of eschewing the probably supernatural elements of the whole thing and simply having al Hakim be just another Middle Eastern terrorism boy. I don't particularly want to go that route.

Here's the key to making a good religion: Make it plausible. There should be some kind of logically defensible crux for why it makes sense to act in accordance with the religion's rules as a baseline with all the magic bullshit sprinkled on top to make it palatable to the masses.

For example "Do not eat pig." made total sense at the time it became a rule because people would get parasites from that shit, but it had to be framed as "Do not eat pig because God says it's dirty." so John T. Peasant-Chucklefuck would listen. But there's a meaning to it, the bullshit is just a veil that got out of hands.

>humans are fighting a losing war to bandits and centaurs and are undoubtedly the race in the worst position of the main five
>lol let's make a giant battle arena filled with clockwork sexbots in the giant sinkhole that opened in the middle of the city :^) if you adventurers kill them we'll give you sick loot

Guild Wars 2 was a mistake.

Man, if they weren't weird chop-shop radicals that grafted mutie parts onto themselves like psychoes, they actually WOULD have a decent point.

With all the costumes running around, why shouldn't the average American have the right to buy himself enough superpowers to protect himself?

Hell, anti-psychic shielding and techniques ought to be available for everyone and their dog at the very least.

My last BBEG was an arms merchant who was selling off shit he raided from ancient ruins and keeping the kingdoms in a state of perpetual conflict just so he could keep raking it in.

Im all for complex motivations as well, but what I hate is when they try to force a sob story or good motivation in at the last second when if the "villain" was so "actually good" they would have made more obvious efforts to come across as desperate instead of callously carving murder canyons.

That's called The Revan, and makes you not a villain.

Pretty sure Palpatine was doing the same thing to stop the Yuuzhan Vong, before they all got Squatted.

Same here, I love business men villains, especially when the fancy suit and tie are just a sleek veneer to hide the monster under it, and when the jacket comes off they can go toe to toe in a fight, or even curbstomp.

In my old days of deviant art OCs, I had a businessman villain who was actually a cyborg that could kick the shit out of anyone, and his personal assistant was actually a giant robot T-Rex disguised as a normal human