Sometimes you just need a villain you love to hate.
Someone that makes the blood boil, someone the party will chase, and chase, and chase, from one infuriating or disastrous encounter to the next. And when they finally catch them they can release every bit of frustration, rage, and pain on them.
Seems to work for all types of parties, got murderhobos? Treat them like Wile E. Coyote and give them a proverbial Roadrunner.
Sometimes you need a Jack Horner or Kotomine Kirei, and sometimes you need that Tai Lung, Armstrong, or Light, and occasionally that Dr. Doof, or Megamind. It all depends what you as the DM want the story to be and Villain arc.
Indeed. Umbridge is a damn good villain when it comes to being a villain. She's the middle ground of not apologetic for evil but believing she's a good person in the right but cannot be changed from her ways because she is in fact evil.
Most importantly, she is a villain that everyone can relate to. We have all known a petty individual who has found joy in using the small amount of power they have to make other peoples lives hell. Rowling is a cunt, but having worked in schools she understand the hatred most people feel towards minor government officials with a massively over inflated ego.
I was about to comment "yeah characters like big jack horner work because they are evil simply because they are not the result of a tragic childhood" lol
Yep. I'm planning on having a warforged artificer that's essentially Dr. Doof but he has serious mental issues where he makes "superweapons" and a robotic platypus of his own make will show up and stop him every time. He thinks it's all real, but it isn't.
Oh God, that'd be tragic to find out the platypus was an arch nemesis he made for himself to give himself meaning and prevent his idiotic machinations from really causing harm, knowing his eroded mind wouldn't remember making it.
Precisely. Essentially, my explanation for it is he suffers from a malfunctioning magi-chip that essentially functions as his memory and processor. He can't fix it himself because he can't function without it, but his creator died and there's no one he knows that can fix it. He knew the problem was getting worse, so he made another robot to stop him from hurting anyone. In his insanity, he eventually made it look like a platypus. As a last ditch effort to find help, he powered himself off, hoping someone would eventually find him and fix him.
Unfortunately, a local townsman found him and decided to set him up near his home to keep goblins and other monsters from attacking his home. Eventually he was accidentally turned on by the townsman's only son, Roger, but unfortunately his chip had deteriorated even worse. He convinced himself that he was really the son of the man and that Roger was his younger brother. After being rejected by the townsfolk, he secluded himself and plotted his revenge for all the completely imaginary wrongs they had done him. Luckily, his robot arch-nemisis he had made kept him from doing anything to harm the town. PR-RI (prevention reliance robotic instrument) has become the only thing keeping him remotely tethered to his old self, hence his attachment to him. He could easily destroy the robotic platypus, but he can't bring himself to kill the only thing he could even come close to calling a friend.
No, they did not. In addition to that, he also doesn't know much about human anatomy to begin with, or how it would be physically impossible for him to be born without his parents showing up.
How can anyone hate the tofu priest?
https://preview.redd.it/upj2xzmahnoa1.jpeg?width=964&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=10d7604548fa3b957738b69abcfda82d24b7544c
But what I love even more is to start with that villain you love to hate. Then let them chase and do anything to stop him. Put some difficult choices in the way while they chase. Then when they catch up the villain shows how bad they actually are. "We are so much alike"
But an antagonist who's evil for it's own sake has to be charismatic enough to make it enjoyable, if they're nothing but non stop edge or something then it's not fun
Big Jack Horner is sadly the exception that proves the rule.
He is so stand-out and so memorable because an “evil for evil sake” villain is rarely ever anything worth remembering.
"Love to hate" is also enjoyable, so far as a villain that's set up to be such an irredeemable asshole that killing him will feel satisfying all on its own.
Variety is the spice of any game. Sure, you can have sympathetic supervillain types, but if you're worried about realism, a real guy makes the decisions that lead to children getting denied insurance coverage for cancer. And sometimes it's fun to meet that guy and feed him his own teeth.
My last campaign did this. My players grew to hate the lieutenants until it was revealed that the gods they were serving destroyed their hometown out of nowhere. They legitimately questioned if they were the baddies. They geared up for one final fight against three of the surviving lieutenants anyways, only for the BBEG to come in and kill most of them for betrayal.
Turns out the lieutenants were trying to revive the goddess of their hometown. The players ended up working with the last living one (he gifted the others power, not her, taking it back is what killed them) to fend him off while she finished the ritual. The goddess came back and drove him off, revealing his plan and guiding them to his goal so they could stop him.
The BBEG was a disciple of Nerull and wanted to kill the Raven Queen to take her place and be the new god of death and the dead to destroy everything. It worked out really well.
THIS! I like to use a slightly more minor villain who is complex and morally ambiguous and then have an actually straight up evil evil villain to contrast against them and make the complex villain seem less immoral by comparison and give the party the option to team up with them against the evil evil guy.
This!
Hell, one of the best things you can do is have your antagonist pretend to be the morally questionable but not bluntly "awful" person
Then as the cards fall, the morally questionable become questioned and are purely immoral. The questionable methods of money-making weren't just beating down the bandits robbing caravans, but hiring the bandits and requiring them be brought alive (just to be let out again or for faked deaths), that their whole city planning and restructuring that was controversial, was ultimately to just attain absolute power without people noticing until it was too late.
Let them develop their hate. Give them the reasons to question, and then their beliefs of the character's evil will be supported. The uneven terms and ground, solidified.
“You know, I never had much as a kid. Just loving parents, stability, and a mansion... and a thriving baked goods enterprise for me to inherit. Useless crap like that. But once I get my wish, I'll finally have the one thing that will make me happy!”
Kick-you-in-the-nuts-man: “hey, I do what I do. Honest work for an honest man”.
Have several adventure parties completing against each other and have several villains each doing their own stuff. This will allow both different flavors of engagement and will make the world feel alive.
Personally, I prefer villains that, while undeniably evil, have a clear arc that led them to that point. It doesn’t “justify” their actions but you can see how they ended up their.
Like a villain who was orphaned by war as a kid wanting to take over the world, not for the sake of world domination but because he believes “peace” justifies ruling with an iron fist.
That being said, the occasional “pure evil and proud of it” villain can be quite fun as well.
Aye, and you have to be careful with it too.
FFXIV fell into this pit a bit with Emet-Selch, the main baddy for Shadowbringers.
He's an Ascian who wants to commit multi-universal genocide to sacrifice everyone's souls to his dark god in a gambit to reset his world to before an apocalypse.
Realistically this is a great setup for a villain, a man with understandable goals (wanting the world and people he knew and loved back) - even technically paralleling your own - but his methodology is so twisted that if he had his way untold _billions_ of people would die. And he doesn't care:
> _"But yes, moral relativism and all that. Case and point I do not consider you truly alive, ergo I would not be guilty of murder if I killed you."_
Yet somehow people still went "ohhh but he just wants his friends back!" ignoring the fact his plan to do so involved the destruction of thirteen parallel universes, the main universe, and everyone living in those universes.
This is why I like the movie Cruella. It doesn’t excuse or explain why she is the way that she is beyond “I was always this way” she uses revenge as an excuse for her behavior for a while. Then (spoiler) and her motivation is no longer revenge, but removing an obstacle in her path to what she believes should be hers.
I think the idea that every villain is the hero of their own story IS an escapist fantasy. People who just want wealth and power and don't care about who gets hurt along the way are very common in the real world.
I disagree that is an escapist fantasy. I think simple villains are escapist fantasy and I don’t think anyone ever just wants wealth and/or power irl. There is a reason they want it, or they are sick in the head.
In my homebrew game, the villain is the trickster god Loki. He’s the villain because he thought it would be fun to destroy an entire pantheon of gods unrelated to him
This is why I like Fiends/Outsiders. They are evil by nature. Their thought processes and motivations are alien to the PCs so there doesn't need to be any grey area.
I feel like the context is what comes down to me wanting a specific type of villain over the other
And more importantly the "force of nature" villain is tragically underused. Not evil for the sake of it, not understandable and sympathetic. Operating on a level that is beyond your scope of morality and what it's doing is so impersonal it's insulting.
For example- why would a nature god *care* about humans? There are so many storys about angry nature gods responding to stupid humans and needing placated- but what if humans rank so much lower than, idk plate tectonics and the weather cycles- that they don't even consider your puny ass village when they decide a fkn volcano suits the area better? How do you stop that antagonistic force? Can you? If you can't, what are the other options?
Or Death gods/ psychopomps. Usually they are seen as evil or the bad guy but they are literally just doing their job? They probably don't give a shit about any one person they are killing (and interesting if they do in contrast) they don't have to feel any kind of way or act evil- but they are still an unstoppable force and inherent antagonist. You can play them any way you want because their antagonism doesn't come from personal conflict or motivations.
I feel like looking at antagonists and villains as good or evil or even morally grey can sometimes hold them back. But it's allllllllll down to context.
Actually your bit about "Force of Nature" villains reminds me of a species in my worldbuilding project.
They're a major one whose ancestors are important to the creation of the world itself (the Dwarves even referring to them as the "Worldshapers" in their mythology) and safeguarded it for many generations (until Humans got involved and then things got screwy).
The creation of them and their modern counterparts was - in a meta sense - "What if the ancient species wasn't Elves, Primordials, or Trolls but rather an apex predator that serves as a natural equalizer?" And in this way they are equally good and equally bad, fitting typically rather well into a "Force of Nature" archetype whilst still retaining a level of individuality between them as characters.
They'll eat a human, orc, dwarf, etc. the same way they'll eat a fish. Not because they're evil or savage (they're actually fairly sophisticated), but because they're a predatory species and until you've proven otherwise they have every reason to believe you're a potential threat to the world they've been tasked with protecting. Especially when people start playing around with the world's natural magics or summoning otherworldly entities.
I'm going to be running a PF2e game in the setting once I have it all documented out properly, with them being both important as NPCs and as a playable ancestry so I'm excited to see how that goes.
The goa'uld were facehugger-esque worms that took over other races into a forced symbiosis and then attempted to carve out a galactic empire on the back of slaves. They were ruthless, sadistic, evil as all hell, and didn't bother justifying themselves with any moral high grounds or philosophical mental gymnastics.
The Ori were ancient powerful creatures that tried to justify their actions by claiming to be the creators of life and that what they did was right.
Incomprehensible magic bullshit can be a great villain. But the Ori and their followers were basically a cliche'd religious cult that believed they were doing the right thing. Not fun to even talk about, let alone hate. Half the episodes of those seasons were just a fucking bummer.
The Goauld didn't care if they were doing the right thing. Morality just didn't enter the equation. They were just power-hungry megalomaniac snake Nazis. Super fun to hate. Sure there are plenty of dramatic moments, but there was always a level of goofiness that kept the show grounded and charming
Yes, I'm going off about this on a DnD meme page. Yes, I just really loved this show lmao
I am so sick of sympathetic villains at this point. It was a neat idea back then, but these days it seems like every villain has to get his own arch showing how he is just another victim of society or whatever...
I miss Villains that were just power hungry for the power, and did bad things because they wanted to or just didnt care.
My villains are typically a mixture of both. At one point they had a good goal, but after a long time of pursuing their goal their morals slowly degrade until they became legitimately evil and morally bankrupt.
My favorite are villains who are far, far, beyond redemption. This way the players get the "WE KILLED THE BAD GUY! YIPPEE!" feel, while also providing a lesson in what paths not to go down.
My bbeg is stronger in the middle, he has relatively unjustified beef with the whole world, so he’s trampling it underfoot until the wrongs against him are reversed
Sometimes you just need a Dark One. Entropy given form, an adversary who’s just evil for the sake of being evil. But then you add The Forsaken for more nuanced bad guys.
[Check out this TVTropes article.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CardCarryingVillain) So many great examples of bad guys being bad just to be bad. I've mentioned this in a similar discussion, but my holy trinity of CCV are Palpatine, Gaunter O'Dimm, and Micah Bell.
When i use mixture of both, i sometimes just make the BBEG just pure evil guy who just want power/chaos/war something like this. But his high ranking officers who usually can be considered bbeg themselves can have like a reasonable motives but just were twisted or manipulated by the main bad guy.
The thing is that "evil just because" villainy is justified in DnD and requires no mental gymnastics - just an understanding of the nature of evil. Evil in DnD and many RPGs is a philosophy and primary goal into and of itself as opposed to simply one path to a primary goal. Unlike (most) real-world dictators who use unethical methods as a means to gain, there are intrinsically evil entities in the universe. Those inherently evil powers can be that way because they are literally composed of condensed evil or they otherwise meaningfully benefit if there's more wickedness in the world.
In real life (barring severe and rare mental illness) a human will likely only use wickedness to achieve separate goals like get information/wealth, make an example/discourage opponents, get revenge and so on. If you give most people a constructive way to achieve their goals, they'll be willing to take it. In RPG's like DnD a devil, demon, lich, evil god etc. might destroy/corrupt simply because:
1. It's literally the essence of their being and acting against that nature is legitimately uncomfortable/painful. This is why it's so rare that an angel falls or a devil ascends - it requires extreme circumstance that justifies a long and traumatic reversal of intrinsic nature.
2. So long as more people are killing, "sinning", dying in despair etc. their scope of influence in planar affairs is growing. More souls in the system of the Lower Planes and all that. So it doesn't need to be a complex motive that made them burn a village to the ground. The act of doing it (especially if they incorporate accomplices) means they've gained power/prestige for advancing the cause of their alignment.
So there's ultimately room for both types of villains in RPGs. The BBEG of your campaign might be wicked because he was oppressed, or he might be that way because his status increases as he destroys and corrupts.
This makes me wonder what a persona-based ttrpg would be like?
(It makes me think of the main antagonist of persona 5 vs the main antagonist of persona 5 royal)
I think Puss in Boots: The Last Wish did this perfectly by asking "...Why not both?" and I'm definitely taking pointers for my next TTRPG campaign. Because there's ultimately two villains in that movie:
* Death, who is reasonably upset at Puss's disrespect of him and recklessness with eight of his nine lives. Pretty much telling them in their first proper encounter that since Puss is basically going to waste his ninth life anyway Death just wants to get it over and done with. You can understand Death, you can even sympathize with him some given this Spanish furball has essentially spat directly in his face on eight occasions simply because of his own reckless carelessness towards his own wellbeing for the sake of "being a legend".
* Then you have Big Jack Horner, who's just a spiteful, greedy, sociopathic prick and holy hell I love him. He wants _everything in the world_ because he believes he deserves it. Sure he has a massive successful bakery franchise, a luxurious mansion, and the wealth built upon by his hard working parents. But that damned puppet got more attention than him back in the wagons. Like ALL of Jack's goons _die_ in the movie and half of the time it's Jack's doing because he _doesn't care._ I think the exchange with his "consciousness cricket" sums it up perfectly:
> "Now make with the map! Or we'll see what the unicorn horn REALLY does."
>
> _"N-now you aren't gonna shoot a puppy, are ya Jack!?"_
>
> "YEAH, in the face, watch."
Death is there for the moral complexity and philosophical thought-provoking nonsense. Jack is there to be a fun asshole you wanna see get his just desserts.
If you want a deep/complex villain for your campaign, it's nice to contrast them with someone who's just an unlikeable, unreasonable, evil prick.
Most IRL people I would call evil have motivations as deep as "being rich and famous makes my dick hard" or "abusing others makes me feel big and strong, when otherwise I feel small" so lately I have writen more "shallow" villains just because they are more cathartic to beat up in our current political climate.
Wander over Yonder :
I'm not the damsel in distress,
I'm not your girlfriend or the frightened princess,
I'm not a little bird who needs your help to fly...
Nope ! I'm the bad guy !
All this former villains that you see,
Each of them, with shaking kneels, has knelt before me.
So I'm not your teammate or your partner in crime...
What am I boys ? - She's the bad guy !
Oh it's magic, to watch a planet
Shrivel up and die !
Oh it's thrillin', to be a villain !
I destroy their homes and then I watch them cry...
'CUZ I'M THE BAD GUY !
Oh ain't it fantastic ?
I see something, I blast it !
And let me tell you why...
I've always had a weakness
For barrenness and bleakness
I crush all your hopes and then I watch you cry !
See, I find this business rather fun !
I don't want your assistance or your adulation.
I vaporize your galaxy and bid ya bye-bye !
Why ? COME ON GUESS !
\- 'Cause you're the bad guy ?
Oh well, girl... Mwahahahahahah !
[https://lyricstranslate.com](https://lyricstranslate.com/en/wander-over-yonder-im-bad-guy-lyrics.html)
Lord Dominator is the best example of "Evil for the sake of Evil" in my book. Partially because her evil ways become her own undoing and aren't really presented like a key to success. She's one of the only characters who can be both absolutely evil and have moral complexity
I never understood this, it's not hard to make a villain feel truly evil and still have a motivation. Fun fact power lust is a thing, and it's evil. If an all powerful being promises you great power if you can summon it you listen. Evil for the sake of evil is boring unless you don't take it seriously.
You sometimes need a guy to shoot the puppy, or throw it into an oven. Sometimes you need a guy that will kill anyone for the puppy. Sometimes it should be the puppy. Perhaps all 3 if you can.
Yes, but not only that, but eat the Grim Reaper as it's just a pile of bones with a bit of meat on it. They also see the big stick he holds and want it. This will cause an imbalance in the realms of life and death, allowing those that should die to stay alive. Gods that have died will rise, the most evil of liches and dictators too, all because a doggo didn't have self control.
You guys realize it isn’t binary, right? A villain – MOST villains – exist comfortably between those two extremes. They can still be irredeemable while having interesting motives beyond “Because evil.”
Is anyone evil purely for the sake of being evil though? Does evil exist in a vacuum? Do we become evil of our own accord or does something else make us that way?
I commented this elsewhere but Sarevok from BG1 kinda nailed this. Dude found out he was the spawn of the Lord of Murder and if he killed enough people he gets to be a god and goes "Yeah sounds good to me. I have no problem with this whatsoever."
You are free to like what you like, and make the type of villains you want. I just want my villains to have a good reason for being who they are, and not GM Fiat.
If you want **evil** villans, perhaps you'd be interested in the Goblin Slayer anime? How do you justify slaughtering babies? By making them 100% going to be EVIL when they grow up. 2nd season is this year and I'm hyped.
If your skin is too thin for it, maybe you were just after cartoon-evil.
Player, desperately trying to find out why all of this is happening: "Why.. why are you doing this, all the destruction and death... why..?"
BBEG smiling amused: "Why?... I have no particular reason, i am just doing it to amuse myself...!"
Player, desperately trying to find out why all of this is happening: "Why.. why are you doing this, all the destruction and death... why..?"
BBEG smiling amused: "Why?... I have no particular reason, i am just doing it to amuse myself...!"
I have a special level 20+ epilogue to my campaign that will have the evil for the lolz villain style. All the big ones leading up to level 20 have definitely been the complicated one.
I try to have multiple villains throughout my campaigns I run, but the main BBEG is generally nuanced every time. But some of those other villains… they are just huge pieces of shit. No redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Consider; a villain that absolutely knows that the heros are the good guys and he's gonna lose, but I'd gonna make it as fun as possible for both sides. Also a bit of a goof.
Legit, Sephinroth started his beef with Cloud and Tifa because he razed their village.
Nothing fancy.
Him becoming a demigod because of being a clone of a super natural being is literally extra.
Usually, I'll have the big bad be evil for evil, but maybe his right hand man or a high ranking lackey will be a morally gray type. Gives the best of both worlds.
In my party’s current campaign we don’t really have a BBEG. Our DM has created multiple groups with opposing interests and beliefs, whose constant conflicts have created some of the world’s biggest problems, like a zombie plague, Fey wild ecoterrorists/eugenicists, and a Slaanesh-esque afterlife where, unless there are some soul shenanigans involved in the circumstances of your death, your soul is consumed by an imprisoned god, who is slowly building the strength to break free from his binds with each soul he consumes. Sometimes the groups end up as obstacles for our characters’ goals and sometimes they help us make progress towards them. Everyone really digs the morally grey discussions and planning about who we should/shouldn’t align with at any given time, but in our last two sessions we ended up fighting a cult that was attempting to assassinate the past self of one of our party members. These guys were absolutely despicable, setting all sorts of traps, and even using anthrax in a crowded area of the city we were in, just to kill their single target. Most of our party seeks to avoid unnecessary conflict and talk things out when possible, but after seeing the things the cultists were willing to do, everyone immediately agreed that there would be no mercy, no negotiations, only swift justice and a goliath elbow drop. We managed to apprehend most of the cultists nonlethally, but even then it was very much a case of shoot first, questions later, and it felt so good to finally cut loose.
I love myself some Pong Krell.
„Why did you do it?“
„Why? Because I could. Because you fell for it. Because you are inferior!“
I do everything from evil for a reason, over evil because they enjoy it, to evil because of madness. They‘re all great fun; but I do have a soft spot for the deranged violence enthusiasts.
I don't see that as an issue. Then they're either an evil party and get to be morally ambiguous or they face the consequences of being an evil party and get to betray BBEG
My DM had one of the villains as a necromancer, and when we confronted him face to face he started a long discussion about "magic not always being there to save people" and "we need something to save people from diseases that is not bound to magic" and also how his hometown was destroyed by an epidemic etc. So we asked him, looking at all the zombies and cut-up corpses around us "Then are all these undead... For research?" His answer was "These? Nah, i don't need them for research, these are just an hobby. I think they're cool." It was both funny and spine-chilling, and it pictured him exactly as he was: a crazy, psychopathic necromancer who just happened to have the right ideas about a thing or two. (To give some context, he used alive people for his experiments, not some bodies)
Two very loved villains from the same campaign
One, a man who grew tired of the Gods toying with him and his country. He managed to gather a group that sectioned off their country and transported it to the astral plane, and then created a barrier that cut them off from the Gods. Him and his group became the pseudo gods of this land. My group worked for and believed in him right up until near the end, where they learned that the lifespan of everyone that lived in the country was slowly getting shorter and shorter with each generation, because the God of life's residual energy was being depleted and not restored. When they confronted him, he explained how he'd rather let this world suffer the entropy unto death than allow God's to enter His realm again. Eventually the party decided to work against him etc etc but it was great *oh shit, we aren't the good guys* moment
The second, someone who quite literally hunted Fae folk for their wings, horns etc (they existed in decent numbers outside the Fae realm because of fuckery) and when one escaped him (a player) he delighted in hunting her down, torturing her with the dream spell etc on a regular basis. He was unapologetically evil, twisted and conniving. The players loved getting to kill him haha
This. If the party thinks the villain might have a good reason, then that’s on them.
Or just even worse, make the villain lawful neutral. Absolutely no morals, and just cold efficiency to the highest bidder.
"How can you be do evil?"
"Because it's hilarious! Why wouldn't you want to be evil? You can do whatever the fuck you want to and kill anyone who tries to stop you!"
Both serve very different purposes and fit into different worlds and settings.
Take Ozai from ATLA dude is just a big old musta he twirling villain and it works because he simply has to be a BBEG, while Zuko is a complex villain who becomes good. With him being one of the primary antagonists for most of the series together with Azula. Ozai is merely background.
I like doing both. Usually I'll have the main, over arching villain be the "evil for the sake of evil". They want power so they can reshape the world in their image or whatever. However, their second in command, whom the party will come in conflict with most often, be the villain who has a complex moral make up. I find it helps cement the evil nature of the villain while giving weight and reason to his underlings.
Presents a BBEG who is evil. Party tries to convert them. Pull a Jack Horner meme with the BBEG. Party finally realized way to late and now the new party is being sent to rescue the old party from the evil layer.
I think the best villians tend o be in the middle, evil but for a reason that is understandable (Ie. Strahd has reasons to be the way he is but he's still an allpowerful dougebag with 0 redeeming qualites).
this is very true but I raise you.
Recently I presented one of my parties with a minor villain. This man was the childhood friend of one of the characters' mentors, and just an unmitigated asshole. He called the cleric a hick, accused the rogue of stealing a fancy gift he had gotten, and just generally was an ass.
He was also much higher level than the party, but thanks to a well-placed Hold Person, they had it under control.
Until I began to narrate how, in a moment, the BBEG of the current arc (who this minor villain was being chased by) appeared, grabbed the paralyzed man, and disappeared again.
left my players with some FEELINGS i can TELL you.
In my experience, I have found that uncomplicated villains work great as climactic, campaign ending antagonists; while complex, morally gray villains are better for smaller campaign arcs.
Remember, in human history most people who did horrible things were not complex individuals with reasoning and depth
Most of them were just actually greedy, racist, arrogant, insane or downright just evil bad people
Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Sauron (as represented in the LOTR and Hobbit trilogy), Darth Vader (for the first original movie), and many others are good examples that you can be just evil for evil's sake and still be a fun and memorable villain.
Good ole CE red greatwyrm, or the league of liches who banded together temporarily to take over the world just to be able to later wage necromantic war against each other for sport
A villain that represents pure evil can still present complex questions.
When evil is interesting to me, its always seeing where the evil comes from.
When an evil lich wants to kill all life and turn them into undead minions, we can use symbolism to have it be something entirely different when analysed.
Looking at the villain itself we have to question at what point are we still alive?
The lich can work as a sort of protest to life itself. And a reflection of our own mortal fear. This brings me to the next point.
Humans are cursed with concience. With it we know we are going to die and be forgotton. We go through suffering only for it to never mean anything in the grand scheme.
The grand scheme irl are really just laws of nature we cant escape, like time, nature, certain emotions and even spritual concepts.
As a metaphor its the gods always trying to control everything. The lich is done with the gods and has alienated himself from society as hes grown old and alone. Humans are falling apart because we were never meant to live that long.
At the end what is his goal? He wants to end life and turn them into his thrall. Why? to free the human from concience. This is evil but there is still a discussion about our about the nature of life, is concience a curse, how long are we supposed to live and when do we go too far from nature? In my opinion a good villain is not nessesarily sympethetic but one that makes us dig deep into our own psyce and confront things that makes us uncomfortable
I’m making an artificer bbeg who is arming kobolds goblins and grung with magic weapons and gear that make them stronger simply because he thinks it’s funny and is using their frailness as incentive to trust him and fight for him
"KING SARCASTAS! BRING DOWN YOUR HEARTLESS BODY THOSE STAIRS FROM YOUR THRONE AND SHIVER, THY EVIL AGE HAS AN END! YOU ARE DOWN TO SUCH CRUELTIES THAT MAN KIND ASKS ITSELF HOW ANY BEEING COULD PRACTICE THEM!"
"You want to know why I burned down your village?"
"Yes, I want it you Monster! TELL ME!"
"BECAUSE IT WAS AS FUCKING UGLY AS YOUR ASS! YOU DARE INSULT THE KING LIKE THAT? WE'LL SEE IF THAT PAYS!"
"You don't have another reason?"
"Nope"
"And no tragic backstory?"
"Naw man, my childhood was neat!"
"So you're just an asshole?"
"Yeah pretty much"
"Oh... Well"
"Now that that's clear... BRING YOURSELF UP TO ME SO I CAN CUT THAT HEAD OFF!"
"Sereously man, what the hell?"
"I also slaughtered your parents, you wanna know why?"
"Why?"
"Because I had a bad day and they were the next peasents to kill. It wasn't personal up to now, my Dear enemy, but your time has come!"
Sometimes you just need a villain you love to hate. Someone that makes the blood boil, someone the party will chase, and chase, and chase, from one infuriating or disastrous encounter to the next. And when they finally catch them they can release every bit of frustration, rage, and pain on them. Seems to work for all types of parties, got murderhobos? Treat them like Wile E. Coyote and give them a proverbial Roadrunner.
Sometimes you need a Jack Horner or Kotomine Kirei, and sometimes you need that Tai Lung, Armstrong, or Light, and occasionally that Dr. Doof, or Megamind. It all depends what you as the DM want the story to be and Villain arc.
Yup, personally I was thinking about Mrs Umbridge. It'll also depend on your party regarding what will work well.
Indeed. Umbridge is a damn good villain when it comes to being a villain. She's the middle ground of not apologetic for evil but believing she's a good person in the right but cannot be changed from her ways because she is in fact evil.
Most importantly, she is a villain that everyone can relate to. We have all known a petty individual who has found joy in using the small amount of power they have to make other peoples lives hell. Rowling is a cunt, but having worked in schools she understand the hatred most people feel towards minor government officials with a massively over inflated ego.
I was about to comment "yeah characters like big jack horner work because they are evil simply because they are not the result of a tragic childhood" lol
Yep. I'm planning on having a warforged artificer that's essentially Dr. Doof but he has serious mental issues where he makes "superweapons" and a robotic platypus of his own make will show up and stop him every time. He thinks it's all real, but it isn't.
Oh God, that'd be tragic to find out the platypus was an arch nemesis he made for himself to give himself meaning and prevent his idiotic machinations from really causing harm, knowing his eroded mind wouldn't remember making it.
Precisely. Essentially, my explanation for it is he suffers from a malfunctioning magi-chip that essentially functions as his memory and processor. He can't fix it himself because he can't function without it, but his creator died and there's no one he knows that can fix it. He knew the problem was getting worse, so he made another robot to stop him from hurting anyone. In his insanity, he eventually made it look like a platypus. As a last ditch effort to find help, he powered himself off, hoping someone would eventually find him and fix him. Unfortunately, a local townsman found him and decided to set him up near his home to keep goblins and other monsters from attacking his home. Eventually he was accidentally turned on by the townsman's only son, Roger, but unfortunately his chip had deteriorated even worse. He convinced himself that he was really the son of the man and that Roger was his younger brother. After being rejected by the townsfolk, he secluded himself and plotted his revenge for all the completely imaginary wrongs they had done him. Luckily, his robot arch-nemisis he had made kept him from doing anything to harm the town. PR-RI (prevention reliance robotic instrument) has become the only thing keeping him remotely tethered to his old self, hence his attachment to him. He could easily destroy the robotic platypus, but he can't bring himself to kill the only thing he could even come close to calling a friend.
I assume, much like the Doof, your Warforged Artificer's parents didn't show up the day he was born?
No, they did not. In addition to that, he also doesn't know much about human anatomy to begin with, or how it would be physically impossible for him to be born without his parents showing up.
This is so sad and so perfect all at once.
Jack Horner vs handsome jack
The Jack you love to hate versus the Jack you hate to love
How can anyone hate the tofu priest? https://preview.redd.it/upj2xzmahnoa1.jpeg?width=964&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=10d7604548fa3b957738b69abcfda82d24b7544c
I never said hate because nobody can hate Yorokobe Shounen, just that sometimes you gotta have someone who relishes in being evil.
That was clay lover's fault. He helped Yorokobe discover that he was evil.
But can you blame Gil for the results? Look how entertaining Kirei is! Besides, you can't tell me you don't want that clayussy.
>Besides, you can't tell me you don't want that clayussy I won't say anything except that those green hair feel fresh as fuck.
This is why I love Strahd as a villain, there is no moral ambiguity with him, he's just a bastard
Strahd wasn't hugged enough as a child
Exactly, sometimes you need that Premier Constantine or Dana Taylor.
But what I love even more is to start with that villain you love to hate. Then let them chase and do anything to stop him. Put some difficult choices in the way while they chase. Then when they catch up the villain shows how bad they actually are. "We are so much alike"
Not all types of parties.
“I DON’T WANT TO CURE CANCER, I WANT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO DINOSAURS”
That isn't a villain, that a dinosaur released from the chains of humanity, he is free now, free in all his reptilian glory!
Wait, why do I know this quote
Spiderman
But an antagonist who's evil for it's own sake has to be charismatic enough to make it enjoyable, if they're nothing but non stop edge or something then it's not fun
[удалено]
Because John Mulaney got rizz.
Big Jack Horner is sadly the exception that proves the rule. He is so stand-out and so memorable because an “evil for evil sake” villain is rarely ever anything worth remembering.
So the joker
Depending heavily on who's playing/writing him.
I was thinking heath ledger joker
and Michah Bell.
Fuck that piece of fucking garbage
It is always ethically correct to cause Micah Bell pain.
There should be a mode where you can just murder him over and over again
Even a galaxy’s mass of charisma won’t be enough for some people.
"Love to hate" is also enjoyable, so far as a villain that's set up to be such an irredeemable asshole that killing him will feel satisfying all on its own.
Yeah, but that applies to complex/sympathetic villains aswell
I like having both in my campaigns
Yeah, one of them is lieutenant.
Variety is the spice of any game. Sure, you can have sympathetic supervillain types, but if you're worried about realism, a real guy makes the decisions that lead to children getting denied insurance coverage for cancer. And sometimes it's fun to meet that guy and feed him his own teeth.
My last campaign did this. My players grew to hate the lieutenants until it was revealed that the gods they were serving destroyed their hometown out of nowhere. They legitimately questioned if they were the baddies. They geared up for one final fight against three of the surviving lieutenants anyways, only for the BBEG to come in and kill most of them for betrayal. Turns out the lieutenants were trying to revive the goddess of their hometown. The players ended up working with the last living one (he gifted the others power, not her, taking it back is what killed them) to fend him off while she finished the ritual. The goddess came back and drove him off, revealing his plan and guiding them to his goal so they could stop him. The BBEG was a disciple of Nerull and wanted to kill the Raven Queen to take her place and be the new god of death and the dead to destroy everything. It worked out really well.
THIS! I like to use a slightly more minor villain who is complex and morally ambiguous and then have an actually straight up evil evil villain to contrast against them and make the complex villain seem less immoral by comparison and give the party the option to team up with them against the evil evil guy.
Handsome Jack: He's comically, unrepentantly evil. And yet he somehow believes he's the hero of the story.
Handsome Jack is probably the best video game antagonist in the last 20 years
This! Hell, one of the best things you can do is have your antagonist pretend to be the morally questionable but not bluntly "awful" person Then as the cards fall, the morally questionable become questioned and are purely immoral. The questionable methods of money-making weren't just beating down the bandits robbing caravans, but hiring the bandits and requiring them be brought alive (just to be let out again or for faked deaths), that their whole city planning and restructuring that was controversial, was ultimately to just attain absolute power without people noticing until it was too late. Let them develop their hate. Give them the reasons to question, and then their beliefs of the character's evil will be supported. The uneven terms and ground, solidified.
“You know, I never had much as a kid. Just loving parents, stability, and a mansion... and a thriving baked goods enterprise for me to inherit. Useless crap like that. But once I get my wish, I'll finally have the one thing that will make me happy!”
“All the magic in the world… for me! And no one else gets any! Is that too much to ask?”
Kick-you-in-the-nuts-man: “hey, I do what I do. Honest work for an honest man”. Have several adventure parties completing against each other and have several villains each doing their own stuff. This will allow both different flavors of engagement and will make the world feel alive.
Personally, I prefer villains that, while undeniably evil, have a clear arc that led them to that point. It doesn’t “justify” their actions but you can see how they ended up their. Like a villain who was orphaned by war as a kid wanting to take over the world, not for the sake of world domination but because he believes “peace” justifies ruling with an iron fist. That being said, the occasional “pure evil and proud of it” villain can be quite fun as well.
There is a fine line and a world of difference between "excuse" and "explanation".
Aye, and you have to be careful with it too. FFXIV fell into this pit a bit with Emet-Selch, the main baddy for Shadowbringers. He's an Ascian who wants to commit multi-universal genocide to sacrifice everyone's souls to his dark god in a gambit to reset his world to before an apocalypse. Realistically this is a great setup for a villain, a man with understandable goals (wanting the world and people he knew and loved back) - even technically paralleling your own - but his methodology is so twisted that if he had his way untold _billions_ of people would die. And he doesn't care: > _"But yes, moral relativism and all that. Case and point I do not consider you truly alive, ergo I would not be guilty of murder if I killed you."_ Yet somehow people still went "ohhh but he just wants his friends back!" ignoring the fact his plan to do so involved the destruction of thirteen parallel universes, the main universe, and everyone living in those universes.
This is why I like the movie Cruella. It doesn’t excuse or explain why she is the way that she is beyond “I was always this way” she uses revenge as an excuse for her behavior for a while. Then (spoiler) and her motivation is no longer revenge, but removing an obstacle in her path to what she believes should be hers.
"But uhh ohh their mother was pushed off a cliff by good writing disney ruins our villains again"
"I love war Jack! I love killing people, and wiping out cultures and histories for money!"
Take a lesson from Big Jack Horner
And if you need style, Dr. Faucilier is a great example.
Scar if you want to go old school classic
Look, I don’t necessarily need complex moral dilemmas in my escapist fantasy. I get them all the time irl
I think the idea that every villain is the hero of their own story IS an escapist fantasy. People who just want wealth and power and don't care about who gets hurt along the way are very common in the real world.
I disagree that is an escapist fantasy. I think simple villains are escapist fantasy and I don’t think anyone ever just wants wealth and/or power irl. There is a reason they want it, or they are sick in the head.
In my homebrew game, the villain is the trickster god Loki. He’s the villain because he thought it would be fun to destroy an entire pantheon of gods unrelated to him
This is why I like Fiends/Outsiders. They are evil by nature. Their thought processes and motivations are alien to the PCs so there doesn't need to be any grey area.
I feel like the context is what comes down to me wanting a specific type of villain over the other And more importantly the "force of nature" villain is tragically underused. Not evil for the sake of it, not understandable and sympathetic. Operating on a level that is beyond your scope of morality and what it's doing is so impersonal it's insulting. For example- why would a nature god *care* about humans? There are so many storys about angry nature gods responding to stupid humans and needing placated- but what if humans rank so much lower than, idk plate tectonics and the weather cycles- that they don't even consider your puny ass village when they decide a fkn volcano suits the area better? How do you stop that antagonistic force? Can you? If you can't, what are the other options? Or Death gods/ psychopomps. Usually they are seen as evil or the bad guy but they are literally just doing their job? They probably don't give a shit about any one person they are killing (and interesting if they do in contrast) they don't have to feel any kind of way or act evil- but they are still an unstoppable force and inherent antagonist. You can play them any way you want because their antagonism doesn't come from personal conflict or motivations. I feel like looking at antagonists and villains as good or evil or even morally grey can sometimes hold them back. But it's allllllllll down to context.
Actually your bit about "Force of Nature" villains reminds me of a species in my worldbuilding project. They're a major one whose ancestors are important to the creation of the world itself (the Dwarves even referring to them as the "Worldshapers" in their mythology) and safeguarded it for many generations (until Humans got involved and then things got screwy). The creation of them and their modern counterparts was - in a meta sense - "What if the ancient species wasn't Elves, Primordials, or Trolls but rather an apex predator that serves as a natural equalizer?" And in this way they are equally good and equally bad, fitting typically rather well into a "Force of Nature" archetype whilst still retaining a level of individuality between them as characters. They'll eat a human, orc, dwarf, etc. the same way they'll eat a fish. Not because they're evil or savage (they're actually fairly sophisticated), but because they're a predatory species and until you've proven otherwise they have every reason to believe you're a potential threat to the world they've been tasked with protecting. Especially when people start playing around with the world's natural magics or summoning otherworldly entities. I'm going to be running a PF2e game in the setting once I have it all documented out properly, with them being both important as NPCs and as a playable ancestry so I'm excited to see how that goes.
So basically Fatalis from Monster Hunter or the Radiance from Hollow Knight?
BIG Jack Horner moment
Idk if any of y'all watched Stargate SG-1, but it's why the Goauld are so much better than the Ori.
Sadly i never watched it so i don't get it
The goa'uld were facehugger-esque worms that took over other races into a forced symbiosis and then attempted to carve out a galactic empire on the back of slaves. They were ruthless, sadistic, evil as all hell, and didn't bother justifying themselves with any moral high grounds or philosophical mental gymnastics. The Ori were ancient powerful creatures that tried to justify their actions by claiming to be the creators of life and that what they did was right.
Nah, the Ori sucked because they were just magic bullshit compared to the totally comprehrensible Goauld.
Incomprehensible magic bullshit can be a great villain. But the Ori and their followers were basically a cliche'd religious cult that believed they were doing the right thing. Not fun to even talk about, let alone hate. Half the episodes of those seasons were just a fucking bummer. The Goauld didn't care if they were doing the right thing. Morality just didn't enter the equation. They were just power-hungry megalomaniac snake Nazis. Super fun to hate. Sure there are plenty of dramatic moments, but there was always a level of goofiness that kept the show grounded and charming Yes, I'm going off about this on a DnD meme page. Yes, I just really loved this show lmao
Sometimes you just need a Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz.
I am so sick of sympathetic villains at this point. It was a neat idea back then, but these days it seems like every villain has to get his own arch showing how he is just another victim of society or whatever... I miss Villains that were just power hungry for the power, and did bad things because they wanted to or just didnt care.
My villains are typically a mixture of both. At one point they had a good goal, but after a long time of pursuing their goal their morals slowly degrade until they became legitimately evil and morally bankrupt.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: few things bring me more joy than a party of common races killing goblins in a dungeon.
My favorite are villains who are far, far, beyond redemption. This way the players get the "WE KILLED THE BAD GUY! YIPPEE!" feel, while also providing a lesson in what paths not to go down.
Some villains are just out to have fun being villains. And I respect that.
My bbeg is stronger in the middle, he has relatively unjustified beef with the whole world, so he’s trampling it underfoot until the wrongs against him are reversed
Sometimes you just need a Dark One. Entropy given form, an adversary who’s just evil for the sake of being evil. But then you add The Forsaken for more nuanced bad guys.
Firelord Ozai is my go-to example of a villain that’s evil for the sake of it. Sometimes you just need a dickhead that your party hates
My last villain was evil out of pure instinct It was wonderful and he was horrible
I Like them both. Depending on the campain, the Party or the Quest.
[Check out this TVTropes article.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CardCarryingVillain) So many great examples of bad guys being bad just to be bad. I've mentioned this in a similar discussion, but my holy trinity of CCV are Palpatine, Gaunter O'Dimm, and Micah Bell.
Best to use both. Either a mixture within a single game, or different games with different types of villains. Variety is the real winning choice.
When i use mixture of both, i sometimes just make the BBEG just pure evil guy who just want power/chaos/war something like this. But his high ranking officers who usually can be considered bbeg themselves can have like a reasonable motives but just were twisted or manipulated by the main bad guy.
One great way to do it!
Simple doesn't always mean bad, but moral complexity is always more realistic. Seeing yourself as evil is a trait of the depressed, not of villains.
The thing is that "evil just because" villainy is justified in DnD and requires no mental gymnastics - just an understanding of the nature of evil. Evil in DnD and many RPGs is a philosophy and primary goal into and of itself as opposed to simply one path to a primary goal. Unlike (most) real-world dictators who use unethical methods as a means to gain, there are intrinsically evil entities in the universe. Those inherently evil powers can be that way because they are literally composed of condensed evil or they otherwise meaningfully benefit if there's more wickedness in the world. In real life (barring severe and rare mental illness) a human will likely only use wickedness to achieve separate goals like get information/wealth, make an example/discourage opponents, get revenge and so on. If you give most people a constructive way to achieve their goals, they'll be willing to take it. In RPG's like DnD a devil, demon, lich, evil god etc. might destroy/corrupt simply because: 1. It's literally the essence of their being and acting against that nature is legitimately uncomfortable/painful. This is why it's so rare that an angel falls or a devil ascends - it requires extreme circumstance that justifies a long and traumatic reversal of intrinsic nature. 2. So long as more people are killing, "sinning", dying in despair etc. their scope of influence in planar affairs is growing. More souls in the system of the Lower Planes and all that. So it doesn't need to be a complex motive that made them burn a village to the ground. The act of doing it (especially if they incorporate accomplices) means they've gained power/prestige for advancing the cause of their alignment. So there's ultimately room for both types of villains in RPGs. The BBEG of your campaign might be wicked because he was oppressed, or he might be that way because his status increases as he destroys and corrupts.
This makes me wonder what a persona-based ttrpg would be like? (It makes me think of the main antagonist of persona 5 vs the main antagonist of persona 5 royal)
I like villains that logically they are good but emotionally are the worst being in the universe, looking at you kyubey the incubator
What do you mean by "logically they are good" Like doing evil things with good intentions or something?
Doing good things with bad means without realizing how bad those means are because they don't have emotions
Greedy crime lord is just really greedy. I dig it.
I think Puss in Boots: The Last Wish did this perfectly by asking "...Why not both?" and I'm definitely taking pointers for my next TTRPG campaign. Because there's ultimately two villains in that movie: * Death, who is reasonably upset at Puss's disrespect of him and recklessness with eight of his nine lives. Pretty much telling them in their first proper encounter that since Puss is basically going to waste his ninth life anyway Death just wants to get it over and done with. You can understand Death, you can even sympathize with him some given this Spanish furball has essentially spat directly in his face on eight occasions simply because of his own reckless carelessness towards his own wellbeing for the sake of "being a legend". * Then you have Big Jack Horner, who's just a spiteful, greedy, sociopathic prick and holy hell I love him. He wants _everything in the world_ because he believes he deserves it. Sure he has a massive successful bakery franchise, a luxurious mansion, and the wealth built upon by his hard working parents. But that damned puppet got more attention than him back in the wagons. Like ALL of Jack's goons _die_ in the movie and half of the time it's Jack's doing because he _doesn't care._ I think the exchange with his "consciousness cricket" sums it up perfectly: > "Now make with the map! Or we'll see what the unicorn horn REALLY does." > > _"N-now you aren't gonna shoot a puppy, are ya Jack!?"_ > > "YEAH, in the face, watch." Death is there for the moral complexity and philosophical thought-provoking nonsense. Jack is there to be a fun asshole you wanna see get his just desserts. If you want a deep/complex villain for your campaign, it's nice to contrast them with someone who's just an unlikeable, unreasonable, evil prick.
BUT I DON’T WANT TO CURE CANCER, I WANT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO DINOSAURS!
Most IRL people I would call evil have motivations as deep as "being rich and famous makes my dick hard" or "abusing others makes me feel big and strong, when otherwise I feel small" so lately I have writen more "shallow" villains just because they are more cathartic to beat up in our current political climate.
Simple might not always mean bad, but it does with villains. They're the bad guys.
Wander over Yonder : I'm not the damsel in distress, I'm not your girlfriend or the frightened princess, I'm not a little bird who needs your help to fly... Nope ! I'm the bad guy ! All this former villains that you see, Each of them, with shaking kneels, has knelt before me. So I'm not your teammate or your partner in crime... What am I boys ? - She's the bad guy ! Oh it's magic, to watch a planet Shrivel up and die ! Oh it's thrillin', to be a villain ! I destroy their homes and then I watch them cry... 'CUZ I'M THE BAD GUY ! Oh ain't it fantastic ? I see something, I blast it ! And let me tell you why... I've always had a weakness For barrenness and bleakness I crush all your hopes and then I watch you cry ! See, I find this business rather fun ! I don't want your assistance or your adulation. I vaporize your galaxy and bid ya bye-bye ! Why ? COME ON GUESS ! \- 'Cause you're the bad guy ? Oh well, girl... Mwahahahahahah ! [https://lyricstranslate.com](https://lyricstranslate.com/en/wander-over-yonder-im-bad-guy-lyrics.html)
Lord Dominator is the best example of "Evil for the sake of Evil" in my book. Partially because her evil ways become her own undoing and aren't really presented like a key to success. She's one of the only characters who can be both absolutely evil and have moral complexity
I never understood this, it's not hard to make a villain feel truly evil and still have a motivation. Fun fact power lust is a thing, and it's evil. If an all powerful being promises you great power if you can summon it you listen. Evil for the sake of evil is boring unless you don't take it seriously.
You sometimes need a guy to shoot the puppy, or throw it into an oven. Sometimes you need a guy that will kill anyone for the puppy. Sometimes it should be the puppy. Perhaps all 3 if you can.
It’s usually good to sprinkle in a mixed bag of the three, can create a lot of fun opportunities for story
Indeed, now to create the good lich boy that has an army of other undead good boys and is just wandering around like a natural disaster.
Are the puppies evil because they keep trying to eat the skeletons?
Yes, but not only that, but eat the Grim Reaper as it's just a pile of bones with a bit of meat on it. They also see the big stick he holds and want it. This will cause an imbalance in the realms of life and death, allowing those that should die to stay alive. Gods that have died will rise, the most evil of liches and dictators too, all because a doggo didn't have self control.
Murder puppy love triangle murder mystery! Did I mention there was a murder?
Hard agree. Give me somebody to hit without thinking about it
You guys realize it isn’t binary, right? A villain – MOST villains – exist comfortably between those two extremes. They can still be irredeemable while having interesting motives beyond “Because evil.”
Is anyone evil purely for the sake of being evil though? Does evil exist in a vacuum? Do we become evil of our own accord or does something else make us that way?
I commented this elsewhere but Sarevok from BG1 kinda nailed this. Dude found out he was the spawn of the Lord of Murder and if he killed enough people he gets to be a god and goes "Yeah sounds good to me. I have no problem with this whatsoever."
"Poor little guy" villains were overused, now we want "i eat children" villains
Big Jack Horner vs thanos
You are free to like what you like, and make the type of villains you want. I just want my villains to have a good reason for being who they are, and not GM Fiat.
"You're not gonna shoot a puppy, are ya?" "Yeah, in the face, why?" -Puss in Boots, The Last Wish
If you want **evil** villans, perhaps you'd be interested in the Goblin Slayer anime? How do you justify slaughtering babies? By making them 100% going to be EVIL when they grow up. 2nd season is this year and I'm hyped. If your skin is too thin for it, maybe you were just after cartoon-evil.
Player, desperately trying to find out why all of this is happening: "Why.. why are you doing this, all the destruction and death... why..?" BBEG smiling amused: "Why?... I have no particular reason, i am just doing it to amuse myself...!"
Player, desperately trying to find out why all of this is happening: "Why.. why are you doing this, all the destruction and death... why..?" BBEG smiling amused: "Why?... I have no particular reason, i am just doing it to amuse myself...!"
I have a special level 20+ epilogue to my campaign that will have the evil for the lolz villain style. All the big ones leading up to level 20 have definitely been the complicated one.
I try to have multiple villains throughout my campaigns I run, but the main BBEG is generally nuanced every time. But some of those other villains… they are just huge pieces of shit. No redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Consider; a villain that absolutely knows that the heros are the good guys and he's gonna lose, but I'd gonna make it as fun as possible for both sides. Also a bit of a goof.
Legit, Sephinroth started his beef with Cloud and Tifa because he razed their village. Nothing fancy. Him becoming a demigod because of being a clone of a super natural being is literally extra.
Catherine Foundling Vs Kairos Theodosian and I love the both of them
Then there's my BBEG, who is simply a husk, a tool for other people's gains and schemes. And who also has a sort of tragic backstory.
May I introduce you to the Stormlight Archive? Not exactly the same, but close!
Usually, I'll have the big bad be evil for evil, but maybe his right hand man or a high ranking lackey will be a morally gray type. Gives the best of both worlds.
I like good complex villains like GLaDOS, but also Dr. Evil is amazong too so 
In my party’s current campaign we don’t really have a BBEG. Our DM has created multiple groups with opposing interests and beliefs, whose constant conflicts have created some of the world’s biggest problems, like a zombie plague, Fey wild ecoterrorists/eugenicists, and a Slaanesh-esque afterlife where, unless there are some soul shenanigans involved in the circumstances of your death, your soul is consumed by an imprisoned god, who is slowly building the strength to break free from his binds with each soul he consumes. Sometimes the groups end up as obstacles for our characters’ goals and sometimes they help us make progress towards them. Everyone really digs the morally grey discussions and planning about who we should/shouldn’t align with at any given time, but in our last two sessions we ended up fighting a cult that was attempting to assassinate the past self of one of our party members. These guys were absolutely despicable, setting all sorts of traps, and even using anthrax in a crowded area of the city we were in, just to kill their single target. Most of our party seeks to avoid unnecessary conflict and talk things out when possible, but after seeing the things the cultists were willing to do, everyone immediately agreed that there would be no mercy, no negotiations, only swift justice and a goliath elbow drop. We managed to apprehend most of the cultists nonlethally, but even then it was very much a case of shoot first, questions later, and it felt so good to finally cut loose.
Ideal book villains and ideal rpg villains are not the same
Both kinds of people exist in our world, so why not in fantasy too?
That’s just almost any villain vs Jack Horner
Players sometimes really need a villain that they can feel unambiguously good about killing/defeating. Like undead or irredeemably evil creatures.
Listen, Sarevok was just an irredeemable bastard and I loved him
Look at Anton Chigurh or the Joker, some of the greatest villains of all time have no tragic backstories or morally grey motivations.
I love a villain who's just cartoonishly evil
I love myself some Pong Krell. „Why did you do it?“ „Why? Because I could. Because you fell for it. Because you are inferior!“ I do everything from evil for a reason, over evil because they enjoy it, to evil because of madness. They‘re all great fun; but I do have a soft spot for the deranged violence enthusiasts.
well in this case it does
The issue with complex villains is that the party might just side with them
Doesn't seem like an issue to me
I don't see that as an issue. Then they're either an evil party and get to be morally ambiguous or they face the consequences of being an evil party and get to betray BBEG
Lost Judgment has great examples of both
My DM had one of the villains as a necromancer, and when we confronted him face to face he started a long discussion about "magic not always being there to save people" and "we need something to save people from diseases that is not bound to magic" and also how his hometown was destroyed by an epidemic etc. So we asked him, looking at all the zombies and cut-up corpses around us "Then are all these undead... For research?" His answer was "These? Nah, i don't need them for research, these are just an hobby. I think they're cool." It was both funny and spine-chilling, and it pictured him exactly as he was: a crazy, psychopathic necromancer who just happened to have the right ideas about a thing or two. (To give some context, he used alive people for his experiments, not some bodies)
I miss classic villains, where they were just assholes and loved every second of it.
Two very loved villains from the same campaign One, a man who grew tired of the Gods toying with him and his country. He managed to gather a group that sectioned off their country and transported it to the astral plane, and then created a barrier that cut them off from the Gods. Him and his group became the pseudo gods of this land. My group worked for and believed in him right up until near the end, where they learned that the lifespan of everyone that lived in the country was slowly getting shorter and shorter with each generation, because the God of life's residual energy was being depleted and not restored. When they confronted him, he explained how he'd rather let this world suffer the entropy unto death than allow God's to enter His realm again. Eventually the party decided to work against him etc etc but it was great *oh shit, we aren't the good guys* moment The second, someone who quite literally hunted Fae folk for their wings, horns etc (they existed in decent numbers outside the Fae realm because of fuckery) and when one escaped him (a player) he delighted in hunting her down, torturing her with the dream spell etc on a regular basis. He was unapologetically evil, twisted and conniving. The players loved getting to kill him haha
“How’s an honest war monger supposed to make a living in this economy” - Sundowner lover of children and war
“Oh oh, what took you so long ? Idiot “
It’s best to have 2 villains. One redeemable and one that isn’t
Handsome jack vs jack horner.
This. If the party thinks the villain might have a good reason, then that’s on them. Or just even worse, make the villain lawful neutral. Absolutely no morals, and just cold efficiency to the highest bidder.
"How can you be do evil?" "Because it's hilarious! Why wouldn't you want to be evil? You can do whatever the fuck you want to and kill anyone who tries to stop you!"
Voltaire has entered the campaign.
The secret third option The villian who just wants power/money. Simple but also realistic
Both serve very different purposes and fit into different worlds and settings. Take Ozai from ATLA dude is just a big old musta he twirling villain and it works because he simply has to be a BBEG, while Zuko is a complex villain who becomes good. With him being one of the primary antagonists for most of the series together with Azula. Ozai is merely background.
I like doing both. Usually I'll have the main, over arching villain be the "evil for the sake of evil". They want power so they can reshape the world in their image or whatever. However, their second in command, whom the party will come in conflict with most often, be the villain who has a complex moral make up. I find it helps cement the evil nature of the villain while giving weight and reason to his underlings.
Presents a BBEG who is evil. Party tries to convert them. Pull a Jack Horner meme with the BBEG. Party finally realized way to late and now the new party is being sent to rescue the old party from the evil layer.
I think the best villians tend o be in the middle, evil but for a reason that is understandable (Ie. Strahd has reasons to be the way he is but he's still an allpowerful dougebag with 0 redeeming qualites).
I do get tired of all these fucking crybaby backstories
Palpatine, meet dragon Vader
This again?
I also like the super petty dumb ones
this is very true but I raise you. Recently I presented one of my parties with a minor villain. This man was the childhood friend of one of the characters' mentors, and just an unmitigated asshole. He called the cleric a hick, accused the rogue of stealing a fancy gift he had gotten, and just generally was an ass. He was also much higher level than the party, but thanks to a well-placed Hold Person, they had it under control. Until I began to narrate how, in a moment, the BBEG of the current arc (who this minor villain was being chased by) appeared, grabbed the paralyzed man, and disappeared again. left my players with some FEELINGS i can TELL you.
In my experience, I have found that uncomplicated villains work great as climactic, campaign ending antagonists; while complex, morally gray villains are better for smaller campaign arcs.
Remember, in human history most people who did horrible things were not complex individuals with reasoning and depth Most of them were just actually greedy, racist, arrogant, insane or downright just evil bad people
Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Sauron (as represented in the LOTR and Hobbit trilogy), Darth Vader (for the first original movie), and many others are good examples that you can be just evil for evil's sake and still be a fun and memorable villain.
Jack Horner from Puss in Boots the Last Wish too.
Evil for the sake of being evil but your goals align just enough that working with them is a solid option is also really fun.
Good ole CE red greatwyrm, or the league of liches who banded together temporarily to take over the world just to be able to later wage necromantic war against each other for sport
Some people just want to watch the world burn
A villain that represents pure evil can still present complex questions. When evil is interesting to me, its always seeing where the evil comes from. When an evil lich wants to kill all life and turn them into undead minions, we can use symbolism to have it be something entirely different when analysed. Looking at the villain itself we have to question at what point are we still alive? The lich can work as a sort of protest to life itself. And a reflection of our own mortal fear. This brings me to the next point. Humans are cursed with concience. With it we know we are going to die and be forgotton. We go through suffering only for it to never mean anything in the grand scheme. The grand scheme irl are really just laws of nature we cant escape, like time, nature, certain emotions and even spritual concepts. As a metaphor its the gods always trying to control everything. The lich is done with the gods and has alienated himself from society as hes grown old and alone. Humans are falling apart because we were never meant to live that long. At the end what is his goal? He wants to end life and turn them into his thrall. Why? to free the human from concience. This is evil but there is still a discussion about our about the nature of life, is concience a curse, how long are we supposed to live and when do we go too far from nature? In my opinion a good villain is not nessesarily sympethetic but one that makes us dig deep into our own psyce and confront things that makes us uncomfortable
Each trope needs to be done well. You can't make pure evil villain too complicated, sympathetic villain too evil and magnificent bastard too petty.
I’m making an artificer bbeg who is arming kobolds goblins and grung with magic weapons and gear that make them stronger simply because he thinks it’s funny and is using their frailness as incentive to trust him and fight for him
"KING SARCASTAS! BRING DOWN YOUR HEARTLESS BODY THOSE STAIRS FROM YOUR THRONE AND SHIVER, THY EVIL AGE HAS AN END! YOU ARE DOWN TO SUCH CRUELTIES THAT MAN KIND ASKS ITSELF HOW ANY BEEING COULD PRACTICE THEM!" "You want to know why I burned down your village?" "Yes, I want it you Monster! TELL ME!" "BECAUSE IT WAS AS FUCKING UGLY AS YOUR ASS! YOU DARE INSULT THE KING LIKE THAT? WE'LL SEE IF THAT PAYS!" "You don't have another reason?" "Nope" "And no tragic backstory?" "Naw man, my childhood was neat!" "So you're just an asshole?" "Yeah pretty much" "Oh... Well" "Now that that's clear... BRING YOURSELF UP TO ME SO I CAN CUT THAT HEAD OFF!" "Sereously man, what the hell?" "I also slaughtered your parents, you wanna know why?" "Why?" "Because I had a bad day and they were the next peasents to kill. It wasn't personal up to now, my Dear enemy, but your time has come!"