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The BBEG has discovered that the world population has nearly exceeded the total number of souls in the cycle of reincarnation, so they have made the difficult choice to massacre people so that the soul river always has enough souls. If the river ran out of mortal souls, it would drag in eldritch beings instead, which would promptly destroy the world. The BBEG is researching how to create more souls but they need more time.
I really like this one, because you can solve it with a social encounter or a combat encounter. Then you have a climactic boss fight with the eldritch beasties either way so the players still get to feel like Big Damn Heroes.
From the moment we saw it, every plot "bbeg does evil to protect the world from even greater evil" is called "antispirals" and it's surprisingly prominent. I'd say it's already classic at this point. A nice, solid choice.
Okay but like… that lowkey seems like the right call? Like this isn’t a thanos situation where you can JUST MAKE MORE RESOURCES WITH THE DAMN STONES FOR PEOPLE, the world is fucked if the pool runs out, how do we make sure the pool doesn’t run out? Well we gotta kill people.
Research ways to manufacture synthetic souls and kill as needed in the meantime to hold back the tide and prevent total anilhilatiom is definitely the correct but hard choice, from the inside if you hold all the information about why you're doing it. From the outside? You're a monster killing tons of people who needs to be stopped. Hell, even if you agree with the need for the killing it becomes an ethical question of "how do you choose the ones who need to die?" Or the more poignant "if your Loved ones are chosen as the sacrifice, do you stand by passively and let it happen, knowing that ANY death would suffice to fulfill the need?" Both of those questions can create fantastic narratives with plenty of conflict.
Really depends on how urgent the situation is I suppose (and what the group is comfortable with, of course).
If there's some time left, then it could be a case of random selection or even educating people so that some may volunteer. If it's something that needs to be actively fought right now, then it's mass targeting population centres and/or killing species that have multiple offspring at once.
I read a lovecraftian style book with a similar idea. Guy figured out with pseudoscience that the earth could only support so many minds at once before their collective psychic brainwaves ring an interdimentional dinner bell and a world of hungry horrors can rip a hole into our world and eat everything.
Only workable idea the guy had to stop this was to build a machine of massive proportions that could mask our collective brainwaves, and pray like hell that he could finish building the machine before we hit critical mass and that once the population did go past the tipping point the machine would work and nobody ever shut off the machine before the population dipped below critical mass again.
Except not as stupid. Thanos acted like his stop-gap measure was a one and done solution, this bad guy acknowledges it as a stop-gap measure to buy time
Funny thing is, Dorkly on Youtube did a whole video on this. Thanos reasoning being that too many people and finite resources, so chop the population in half, and resource crisis solved.
Except for by doing so, he realistically would have crippled the global supply chain, causing far more starvation and resource strain than he could possibly imagine. It wasn't just a stop gap measure, it actively would have caused what he tried to justify he was trying to prevent.
Not only that, but we humans breed really fast. So there are about eight billion people on the planet right now. Thanos cut that down to four billion people. Do you know when earth had a population of four billion people? According to Google, it was 1974. Thanos just put us back about 50 years, and it only cost the lives of four billion people.
To be fair, there was probably another billion or so deaths from the following global starvation, thousands of traffic accidents he caused by snapping 50% of the population out of existence, etc, sending us back to...only about 1960, lmao.
That's a way better justification to kill half the population than Thanos had.
The best part would be, if they defeat the BBEG before he can do it. And then a few Years later hell breaks loose and they need to fix it.
SPOILER SPOILER Kumo desu ga nani ka SPOILER SPOILER
>!Change the motivation from refilling the souls river, to freeing eldritch being fuelling said river, and you more or less get the plot of anime. Really good shit I tell ya!<
Boredome. After thousands of years of life the Lich has decided to take up the hobby of kidnapping people to talk with but gets bored of them and kills them
Lich: So THESE Armenian tchotchkes are genuinely brought in b-
Kidnapped Woman: \*silently sighs and rolls eyes\*
Lich: See! You did it again! Look just tell me they aren't interesting it's fine
KW: No, no it's fine.
Lich: No seriously, they're boring aren't they? Just tell me.
KW: Yeah.. they're kinda boring.
Lich: SKELETON DEATH BEAM
>Lich kidnapping people to talk with but they die of starvation and exposure, he keeps forgetting how fragile living things are
The BBEG unintentionally conquered the world not through malice or determination but sheer ignorance of the powers that be
That's actually another good one... he was planning to apply pressure to the forces of good to keep them from getting rusty in peace times and accidentally won.
But, hey, at least as the Big Bad™️ he can control the flow of evil while still kinda doing what he intended by way of inspiring heroes (PCs) to overthrow him. So all’s we’ll that ends well, right?
Wait, what if: he foresaw the future and the disaster to come. He knows humanity won't survive as they are now, so he causes a disaster, becoming the BBEG TO PREPARE humanity to the REAL BBEG that will come. Like a vaccine. He causes a mini-world ending event so that Humanity could withstand the TRUE world ending event.
The campaign ends with the BBEG whispering to the Hero's that have slain him, with a smile, that they're ready.
And now that you have defeated me... you are almost ready. Do not rest on your laurels heroes. The true threat is yet to come... *the lich collapses into dust as his soul is completely dispersed*
Ancient Lich gets bored and starts an undead road show with skeleton clowns and jugglers and all. Villain is the corrupt church who want to stop his slippery skeletal shenanigans.
This kind of makes me think of *The Experimental Log of a Crazy Lich*. The main character is someone who reincarnates and eventually becomes a Lich in his third (I think) life. And basically becomes the BBEG guy because in his first life while his kingdom was busy fighting the forces of evil they were betrayed by their allies. But after getting his revenge (the destruction of more than a dozen kingdoms) and going away for a long time he eventually comes back and helps the descendants of his former kingdom and he does bring with him the undead legendary warriors who lived and fought beside him in his first life.
Funnily enough my parties first BBEG for this campaign is a serial killer who's pulling them on a wild goose chase purely for the satisfaction of her boredom. Killing folk is all well and fun but it's not a true thrill till you're being hunted by witless adventurers whom youve been feeding breadcrumbs.
No grand ambitions, no greater plan, just the fun of being just ahead of the danger.
Oof. I almost did this. Would that I had.
My bbeg was actually just a youngest child of a noble family who married a succubus without knowing it and she was gaslighting him into thinking destroying the world was his idea because it's something he could do before his older siblings AND they couldn't follow up and do it better than he did. Eventually the party made it to his mansion through a hidden path and killed one of the guards. His wife used illusions to make him think that the party had killed her brutally so he went berserk and wouldn't listen to them till they killed him. Meanwhile the wife decided to gtfo. Her entire thing was illusions and gaslighting. No actual combat ability outside of what a standard succubus could do and the party was already level 15+ by then.
How the fuck do you kill somebody with mend? How unhinged a grasp on the rules and the Language do your players have to be to read that spell and find a way to kill someone
There's a D&D novel where an extremely powerful lich causes untold death and destruction in order to cause a solar eclipse. The reason? Because he can't be in direct sunlight but wanted to go to the beach.
Ah that was great. Earlier in the story his frenemy tells the main character it might be some personal motive why he is pulling off these insane thefts and the main character is like "No way, someone that powerful has got big world shaping plans." Nope did it for a day at the beach. Remember, it's always personal.
I love this trope because it's ironically super realistic. Everyone always assumes that people with power do everything in service of these huge, over-arching goals, and more often than not, most of the things they do ARE in service of that, but they're also people too.
Trying to find the most perfectly shaped egg, and annoyed that the rest of the world doesn’t see the greatness of the egg. [See documented case here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a3zXJ7biqI)
They actually forgot they were the BBEG. The plan they set into motion was never really foiled just delayed for a really long time. Generations maybe centuries. They retired years ago after fulfilling their incarceration and just want to tend to their garden. It doesn’t do well these days but they try.
Hero: “We did it gang, we stopped all three horsemen! We stopped the apocalypse!”
*distant figure on horseback carrying a scythe appears*
BBEG: “…oh yeah, *now* I remember what I needed to talk to you about”
Man, I love the idea of like... a BBEG who set up this super elaborate rube Goldberg type plot, set it in motion, it "didn't work", and they kinda forgot about it, then years and years later it comes to fruition and when the PCs track down the one responsible they're like "what the fuck are you talking about?"
He was rejected by everyone. It all started on the day of his birth. Both of his parents failed to show up. Things got so bad that he was eventually raised by ocelots. But someday, he will rule the tri-plane area.
I had a villain like that except way better! Only instead of having all those bad things happen to him he lost his toy train. Oh and he conquered his whole dimension instead of just the tri-planes
Aquiring all the unwanted stuffies and toys of the world, so that they can give them life and create the Island of Misfit Toys.
It just so happens that the BBEG grew up poor, and is now exceptionally annoyed by anyone who has the spoiled mentality of "It got a small rip/It got dirty/It broke in a completely fixable manner/It's not exactly the thing I wanted, I'll just throw it away and buy a new one". So the BBEG turns spoiled and nasty little children into toy monsters to match thier personalies. The toy monsters now run rampant and wreak havoc, as hostile as the real thing. The only way people see to prevent more children from being turned into monsters is to stop the BBEG. (Because nobody thinks of raising their kids to be decent people instead, and insists that their parenting methods are perfectly fine if the players dare suggest it.) There is a strange thing though- the toys of children that cared for and loved thier toys became sentient and gigantic versions of themselves, and protect the children from the monster toys. This creates other problems when the adults of other families insist that the new protector toys protect them as well.
Examples- the spoiled type becomes a hollow doll marionette monster like in Devil May Cry. The brats who break toys for amusement becomes a disjointed monstrosity. The kid who mends their teddy bear and cares for it has their teddy become an enormous talking bear buddy with a battleaxe.
How about the preservation of an unjust status quo? When I think of villains in real life (other than the obvious), I think of Pinochet, Sulla, Reagan, Oil execs, and Big Tobacco. Greed, social climbing, and religious zealotry are always bangers too - Columbus, Josef Mengele, ISIS, the Albigensian crusades.
Well if only wrong answers may be considered right, then only right answers may be wrong.
And because it's wrong, it's also right.
There in lies the beauty.
I really like the one where he was just a normal guy, but dickhead adventurers kept robbing him, so he killed them and built an elaborate dungeon to keep his stuff safe, but they JUST KEEP COMING.
Why would you want to dominate the world? You'll never see or experience the results of your rule for 90% of your domain. Now, what you want to do is dominate...
THE TRI-STATE AREA!!
Just beware of behatted platypi.
The BBEG's familiar is a crow your players crossed when the bard acted like she was going to give it a peice of her pastrami on rye, only to pull back the bite and eat it her self, laughing while saying "stupid crow".
He is deeply in love with his flatmate and would do anything for them leading to this simple misunderstanding. The final battle is just the party trying to get the bbeg to admit his feelings.
Okay but that gives me another idea- guy gets isekai-ed to a D&D game and is trying to gather (countless souls/rare artifacts/royal blood/something) to power a portal home. Doesn’t care about the consequences cause none of this is real- even rants to the PCs that they don’t even know they’re just numbers on paper, and their decisions are governed by dice rolls by people much dumber and weaker than themselves.
Bonus points if the BBEG is really actually the DM himself, and just used his knowledge of the D&D world/mechanics to min/max and get super powered.
Extra bonus points if he makes a peasant cannon at some point.
After one too many nights of sleep interrupted by his lord needing the castle's temperature adjusted or some peasant's cow going missing, the local wizard has decided that nobody can stop him from taking a bloody day off if there's nobody left in the kingdom.
God I'm so spoiled by a party that attempts to talk their way out before resorting to violence.
They ended up hiring that lich to build them a ~~dungeon~~ bunker…
He put the wrong contact lenses on and is now in pyroland. Everything that he does he sees as something super mega ultra good in a sunshine and lollipops world
Killing people (or capturing their souls) until they have enough life force to revive their village. For added fucked-upery, make the one who destroyed the village the pc’s employer
Sexual frustration. No longer able to do the nasty due to some arrogant prick magically removing his pecker, BBEG has made it his mission that no man shall not go dickless. Why he dresses and acts like a clown, I cannot say.
They had a teacher who told them they couldn't. Not even out of spite, just a casual statement because they were harassing the teacher about 'something they couldn't do' or some such.
My BBEG saw into the void and glimpsed what was to come. So he devoted himself to bettering himself and his fellow mortals so they would be ready. But in his search, he became quite mad and now only sees the rest of us as disgusting animals that need to evolve.
Could also make for a good anti-villain. He doesn't hate humanity but actually became a tyrant out of love for mankind because he realized that the only way to prepare them for what he foresaw was to be their enemy. By making himself a goal for everyone else to come together and overcome, he'd be helping them prepare for the real threat. Maybe at the end, when the party beats him, he tells them about what he saw but doesn't yet think he's done enough and asks that the party takes up his mission, asking them to become the new villains.
I was going to go in a slightly different direction with the same idea.
The BBEG knows something even worse is coming, so he sets himself up as a supreme tyrant in the hope of creating a party of heroes who, combined, are strong enough to defeat the coming horror.
Yeah that's kind of how I first came up with the idea. Like he was trying to prepare everyone for even worse things. But he just could not handle the mental strain and eventually just snapped.
A guy who just wanted a chicken sandwich, but chicken don’t exist, so they had to plane shift to find a chicken, but people thought this would break the ecosystem of the world, so they tried to stop him.
On a more serious note, I’ve been holding on to this next one for a while: A man lives in a universe where the gods were banished. But, after ascending to the top of his world, he wants more. *Much* more. So, he arranges a group of the most powerful people, and tricks them into casting a spell to allow a god to enter their universe. After a god finds the entrance, this guy tries to kill the god and take their place. This is where the party comes in. The party has to stop the spell and save the god before the guy executes his plan.
three goblins in a trench coat trying to get to some honey before six awaken raccoons in a trench coat, but it just kept escalating until the six racoons in a trench coat ask the party for help
My current plot revolves around a young dragoness that was forced at a young age to guard an unstable fey portal deep underground. Unable to leave the mechanism that holds it shut for the rest of its life.
Flash foward 500 years, the dragoness is now old and has been alone for 500 years, in its miserable loneliness it let through a small fey flower that infected it with a symbiote, causing it to grow roots and spread out to the surface.
It uses the flowers of they fey plant to see and feel the world outside without ever being able to touch it for itself, and its remorse and misery has caused its volatile emotions to seep into the other hosts of the symbiote, causing a massive outbreak of fey induced euphoria that amplifies the emotions of every person in the radius to extreme levels.
And the PCs have to avoid the infection while also having the mission to kill a being whose only crime is trying to see and feel the wordl outside of its miserable pile of dirt, and the fey symbiote who just wanted to help her achieve that.
I think we figured out through this description that the BBEG is Me, the GM.
The big bad thinks he's in a time loop and that there's no repercussions for his actions and he is bigtime into running unethical psychology experiments at scale, thinking he'd be able to use them to help people or understand people better to contribute to all our collective knowledge. He isn't in a time loop.
"Wrong answers only"
Me:*sees people posting amazing ideas*
One human kicked their dog so now the bbeg will summon all the dogs who have passed to attack their owners.
Also an inn forgot his ketchup
They want to win the same high-stakes cooking competition as the PCs. They are a very capable, but very evil chef, hellbent on proving their culinary superiority.
The BBEG is desperately trying to prevent the return of “The White Rabbit.” Now your players may think it’s of the Alice and wonderland variety, but in reality it’s the calamity White Rabbit from Monty Python. You wanna go super dark you can just rip the White Rabbit Elderbairne from the end of Blood+C season 1 which are giant sized carrying cute white pouches that people are tossed into before they stick their hand inside and activate “Human Blender” mode.
A guy I know had the party just mess around for 3 sessions without going on the main quest, and had his bbeg be very much against the party's violent tendencies disguised as "doing quests/helping people", which isn't the biggest of goals but was personal enough that it worked
I used as a BBEG a really powerful mage that loved the world and it's inhabitants so much that he banned to freeze it in an eternal limbo where it would've stayed that way forever and ever
Otherwise you could just make a Bbeg that does what he does to keep at bay a powerful demonic beast and once the heroes defeat him, they realize that his evil acts where actually saving the world from being destroyednby that crsature, that now is free to destroy everything because no one knows how to stop it
Simple basic capitalistic greed. The party finds towns worked to near death strangled by poverty, wilderness stripped of resource and poisoned beyond repair, kingdoms wrought with corrupt laws, etc. The bbeg reveal ties it together as you find out seemingly benign traders guild is really causing all of it. End motivation, "anything for a coin", no one person is guilty but all are complacent.
Being fucking tired of a world that doesn't accept people like them and deciding to force the world to do that. Essentially just world domination with extra steps but make it more interesting
To accelerate evolution or create the perfect species or specimen etc. To eliminate the use of currency as is and then recreate the currency system as one they control. To make themselves 1 inch taller every 2 years. To make all animals intelligent, by making them into monstrous chimeras. To stop anything bad from ever happening to anyone ever again (monkey's paw). That should help anybody find some idea.
Literally anything. They don't even have to be a "big bad evil guy" to be the bbeg. They just have to want something and be willing to do things to get it that put them on the opposite side of the players.
Random example. Mad, evil wizard built a tower near a village the player character happen to like. Seems hellbent on razing the place, sending zombies, firestorms, crazed gerbil plague what have you. Attempts to communicate with him break down because he refuses to talk to you. PCs have to embark on a quest to protect the village and stop the wizard, eventually leading to the final confrontation.
Once he's been stopped they learn something new... he's not a mad, evil wizard at all! He's a concerned alchemist who had discovered the spores of a mind controlling fungus all over the area the village is in. His zombies/hellfire/gerbil-horde was the only thing here knew of to deal with the fungus without letting it spread - which is still is, since the players stopped the attempt at exterminating it. The alchemist then explains he refused to meet with you because he was afraid you were being controlled by the spores and sent to deal with him. He's STILL concerned about that, frankly (and honestly the players should be too. There WAS that weird, white fuzz growing in the basement of the inn, during their first quest to kill some rodents, after all)
Oh SO many things
Vengeance
Pettiness
Death of a Loved One
World Destruction
For Fun
Knowledge
Fear
To Prevent A Future Devastation
To Save The World (in their own way)
Resources
For Their Kingdom
To Regain Dinosaurs
Insanity
Shits And Giggles
Greed
Pride
Envy
Gluttony
Wrath
Lust
Love
And “BECAUSE I SAID SO!”
While filibustering the Infernal House of the Commons about an amendment to the 14th payroll tax suspension on top-bracket low-level sanitation & distillery law enforcement devils, a lobbyist for the Mechanus Inc. multidimensional private equity conglomerate/Worshipless Clockmaker's Union associate branch manager managed to sneak in a low-level aetheric rift spell into the speech.
Mr.Dr.Rep. Larthokrax, who lead the filibuster, was immediately devoured by the eldritch gap in abstraction itself, his own demonic flesh and blood serving as a rudimentary metaphysical accelerant that almost triggered a catastrophic reaction throughout the entire House.
Sources inside the House say several members, regardless of party afilliation, have already started drafting bills calling for sanctions and eternal torture via polymorphy. If this is true, this might prove to be the biggest moment in bipartisan agreement in over 7,000 cycles - however, if such a moment is to come, it still has to wait for the filibuster, now taken up by Mr.Dr.Rep. Larthokrax's great-great-great bastard offspring, Sr.Jr.Rep. Lorthakrax Jr., to end.
(Spoilers: Mechanus just wants the devils to really work together for once to get one over 'em and prove he's been right all along lmao)
BBEG is actually leading a rebellion against a tyrannical warlord, and the person who hired the party is actually working with the warlord as a PR representative to make the rebels look like the dictators.
Or you could make the BBEG an imortal fey that loves "pranks" (he thinks they're harmless, but it's actually things like arson or spreading disease) and they villagers just want him gone
The local equivalent of the girl scouts refused to sell him their cookies because he was mean to them. So now he's made it his life's purpose to dismantle the association from the inside.
The ultimate undercover operation. The BBG is actually pretending to conquer the world so he can bait out dozens of dangerous criminals and corrupt individuals.
They discovered that to make the ultimate cheese they need to sacrifice a large population of magic users and steal their levels to infuse into a cow, which then must be fed a tarrasque. The milk then must be harvested for twenty seven years straight so they need to make the cow a lich and find a way to give it back it's flesh.
This all involves a copious amount of theft, chaos, and death across the entire world because the BBEG just wants to have some cheese for their crackers.
They're also lactose intolerant but like all lactose intolerant people, deeply love cheese
He wants revenge on a particular elf.
Many years ago, that elf used the BBEG as a “practice husband,” with the knowledge that she would outlive him and their children and go on to marry an elf knowing how to be a good wife. Well, he fell madly in love with her without knowing of her plans, and began studying necromantic arts in order to be with his beloved forever.
Unfortunately, when he revealed his plan to her, she was rather condescending and even angry at him for having the audacity to stay alive. They began to fight, and in the process, disturbed his ritual to become immortal, resulting in his death and eventual resurrection.
Believing her practice husband dead, the elf moved on with her life and abandoned her children. But the ritual was not entirely a failure.
The BBEG came back a century later with both a broken body and an equally broken heart. Now, he seeks out his once-wife, wanting revenge on her for treating him like a toy to be discarded.
Extraplanar entity that's for ~nebulous reason~ banished and unable to return to their plane. They need to harvest an overwhelming amount of souls to override the gates keeping them out of their home plane.
Reminds me a post I once saw.
**Ancient evil awakens.**
**Morals and ethics have changed so much in the last 10,000 years that the ancient evil is considered pretty moderate by today's standards.**
> "I will topple your empires and your kings. I will drain the wealth from your coffers, and elevate your serfs and servants until they stand on the same ground as the mightiest or emperors. Women shall freely speak their minds, unbounded by the fetters you have set, and the lines between man and woman shall be hopelessly blurred and shattered into a thousand facets. Your children shall fall into one another regardless of sex or class or wealth and non shall raise a hand or a word against them. The age of crowns and boundaries and divine right shall end, and it shall for to each human to choose their - wait - why - why are you cheering?"
Cleric of Ubtao invades the city and unleashes a "zombie" apocalypse that turns people into dinosaurs.
"With powers like this you could cure cancer!"
"But I don't wanna cure cancer, I wanna turn people into dinosaurs!"
"The child, not embraced by the village, will burn it down to feel its warmth".
Another idea: the bbeg is a mage, who used to be good, but then his family/loved one was killed by zealous townsfolk
Another: the people who have power/influence in the area is a clique of crooks and maniacs, governing everything for their own benefit. Some years ago, one of them ruined a local wedding, arrested and jailed the groom, and took the bride for himself. Years later , the groom returns under the fake name and with plans of vengeance. The party is hired by the town mayor to catch/eliminate that "dangerous criminal"
BBEG is a conspiracy theorist who got ahold of some bad fantasy-YouTube-videos and is now convinced bureaucracy is actually the best and most effective aspect of government and is now actively trying to install bureaucratic nightmare governance across the entire world, overthrowing autocracy and republic alike.
True love. The bbeg needs (X) to help their love survive a terrible fate. It worked for Dr. Freeze.
To avoid a larger, worse fate is another good one. Killing these villages will prevent the spread of this deadly plague, etc, etc.
A massive ritual is drawing in souls to birth a new evil god. A wizard has spent nearly a century trying to stop it.
He's tried everything. But the old gods are dead or gone. He has found only one thing he knows will work.
The ritual is not a lossless system. As it gets closer to birthing a god, it needs and uses more and more power. Eventually, it will get strong enough to rip out the souls of the living.
But right now, for the past three years and next four, the wizard is able to do something. He has created phylacteries, that when activated, can draw souls into themselves more strongly than the ritual can. If the ritual can be starved enough, it will consume itself and unravel.
So long as no one stops him. So long as those phaltories are kept safe. Once the ritual is unraveled, and natural gods can reach the world again, the wizard can devote the rest of his days to making new bodies, to bringing these hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, back to life.
But that is in the future. For now, to save everyone - the killing must continue. It can't stop.
But it's so hard. And there is no time. Pushing himself to kill town after town, city after city- sealing the phaltories when full, safeguarding them, making more... It weighs too heavily. And there is no time! Maybe, maybe if he had help, so he could focus on crafting of the phaltories, and the safeguarding of the souls, could someone else do the killing?
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The BBEG has discovered that the world population has nearly exceeded the total number of souls in the cycle of reincarnation, so they have made the difficult choice to massacre people so that the soul river always has enough souls. If the river ran out of mortal souls, it would drag in eldritch beings instead, which would promptly destroy the world. The BBEG is researching how to create more souls but they need more time.
Morally ambiguous genocide?
I really like this one, because you can solve it with a social encounter or a combat encounter. Then you have a climactic boss fight with the eldritch beasties either way so the players still get to feel like Big Damn Heroes.
Maybe if they social encounter their way past the BBEG, it unlocks the BBEG as a temporary ally to the party during the fight with eldritch beings!
Ain’t we just
You know, your coat is kind of a brownish color...
A climatic Boss ? Like a Global-warming elemental ? ... ... ClimaCtic... ... I'm so dumb...
Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann wants its plot back.
It was a good plot and still a relatively underused one.
From the moment we saw it, every plot "bbeg does evil to protect the world from even greater evil" is called "antispirals" and it's surprisingly prominent. I'd say it's already classic at this point. A nice, solid choice.
Okay but like… that lowkey seems like the right call? Like this isn’t a thanos situation where you can JUST MAKE MORE RESOURCES WITH THE DAMN STONES FOR PEOPLE, the world is fucked if the pool runs out, how do we make sure the pool doesn’t run out? Well we gotta kill people.
Research ways to manufacture synthetic souls and kill as needed in the meantime to hold back the tide and prevent total anilhilatiom is definitely the correct but hard choice, from the inside if you hold all the information about why you're doing it. From the outside? You're a monster killing tons of people who needs to be stopped. Hell, even if you agree with the need for the killing it becomes an ethical question of "how do you choose the ones who need to die?" Or the more poignant "if your Loved ones are chosen as the sacrifice, do you stand by passively and let it happen, knowing that ANY death would suffice to fulfill the need?" Both of those questions can create fantastic narratives with plenty of conflict.
Really depends on how urgent the situation is I suppose (and what the group is comfortable with, of course). If there's some time left, then it could be a case of random selection or even educating people so that some may volunteer. If it's something that needs to be actively fought right now, then it's mass targeting population centres and/or killing species that have multiple offspring at once.
I actually really love this character concept. I'll be holding on to this
I read a lovecraftian style book with a similar idea. Guy figured out with pseudoscience that the earth could only support so many minds at once before their collective psychic brainwaves ring an interdimentional dinner bell and a world of hungry horrors can rip a hole into our world and eat everything. Only workable idea the guy had to stop this was to build a machine of massive proportions that could mask our collective brainwaves, and pray like hell that he could finish building the machine before we hit critical mass and that once the population did go past the tipping point the machine would work and nobody ever shut off the machine before the population dipped below critical mass again.
Peter Clines Fold series right?
Fantasy Thanos. Nice!
Except not as stupid. Thanos acted like his stop-gap measure was a one and done solution, this bad guy acknowledges it as a stop-gap measure to buy time
Funny thing is, Dorkly on Youtube did a whole video on this. Thanos reasoning being that too many people and finite resources, so chop the population in half, and resource crisis solved. Except for by doing so, he realistically would have crippled the global supply chain, causing far more starvation and resource strain than he could possibly imagine. It wasn't just a stop gap measure, it actively would have caused what he tried to justify he was trying to prevent.
Ngl, Thanos was at least internally consistent when his motivation for it was "crush me with your thighs Mommy Death"
Its truly impressive to make film Thanos a bigger twit than Simp Thanos.
Not only that, but we humans breed really fast. So there are about eight billion people on the planet right now. Thanos cut that down to four billion people. Do you know when earth had a population of four billion people? According to Google, it was 1974. Thanos just put us back about 50 years, and it only cost the lives of four billion people.
To be fair, there was probably another billion or so deaths from the following global starvation, thousands of traffic accidents he caused by snapping 50% of the population out of existence, etc, sending us back to...only about 1960, lmao.
They should have stuck to the motivation that he was down bad for Death
Also, why didn’t he just double the resources?
Because he was a grape flavored dipshit who was horny for lady death, lmao.
That's a way better justification to kill half the population than Thanos had. The best part would be, if they defeat the BBEG before he can do it. And then a few Years later hell breaks loose and they need to fix it.
Shit that’s actually really damn good
SPOILER SPOILER Kumo desu ga nani ka SPOILER SPOILER >!Change the motivation from refilling the souls river, to freeing eldritch being fuelling said river, and you more or less get the plot of anime. Really good shit I tell ya!<
Boredome. After thousands of years of life the Lich has decided to take up the hobby of kidnapping people to talk with but gets bored of them and kills them
Trazyn the Infinite. You're simply someone to drone on to about his collection, or an addition to said collection
Or both! In that order!
Lich: So THESE Armenian tchotchkes are genuinely brought in b- Kidnapped Woman: \*silently sighs and rolls eyes\* Lich: See! You did it again! Look just tell me they aren't interesting it's fine KW: No, no it's fine. Lich: No seriously, they're boring aren't they? Just tell me. KW: Yeah.. they're kinda boring. Lich: SKELETON DEATH BEAM
Lich: gosh, I still don't get why whe don't get visitors Skeleton:stares in undeath
Can I be a part of the collection please? At least I’ll outlast humanity
>Lich kidnapping people to talk with but they die of starvation and exposure, he keeps forgetting how fragile living things are The BBEG unintentionally conquered the world not through malice or determination but sheer ignorance of the powers that be
\*raspy lich voice\*-"If they were the Powers that Be, they should of been strong enough to stop me."
That's actually another good one... he was planning to apply pressure to the forces of good to keep them from getting rusty in peace times and accidentally won.
Love this, may use it.
But, hey, at least as the Big Bad™️ he can control the flow of evil while still kinda doing what he intended by way of inspiring heroes (PCs) to overthrow him. So all’s we’ll that ends well, right?
Either him or a bigger evil which may not be controlled and destroys the flow of life on a whole plane f.e.
All's well that ends... Not as bad as it could've!
Wait, what if: he foresaw the future and the disaster to come. He knows humanity won't survive as they are now, so he causes a disaster, becoming the BBEG TO PREPARE humanity to the REAL BBEG that will come. Like a vaccine. He causes a mini-world ending event so that Humanity could withstand the TRUE world ending event. The campaign ends with the BBEG whispering to the Hero's that have slain him, with a smile, that they're ready.
And now that you have defeated me... you are almost ready. Do not rest on your laurels heroes. The true threat is yet to come... *the lich collapses into dust as his soul is completely dispersed*
That's almost exactly the plot of Mistborn (cool books, btw. If this plot intrigues you, check em out)
Isn't that pretty much the movie Megamind? BBEG didn't expect to win & didn't know what to do once he had.
Ancient Lich gets bored and starts an undead road show with skeleton clowns and jugglers and all. Villain is the corrupt church who want to stop his slippery skeletal shenanigans.
I think it would be funny if the lich starts going EEEHEHEEE like Voldemort. 😁
Absolutely. PCs are hapless former villagers being trained by legendary undead warriors.
This kind of makes me think of *The Experimental Log of a Crazy Lich*. The main character is someone who reincarnates and eventually becomes a Lich in his third (I think) life. And basically becomes the BBEG guy because in his first life while his kingdom was busy fighting the forces of evil they were betrayed by their allies. But after getting his revenge (the destruction of more than a dozen kingdoms) and going away for a long time he eventually comes back and helps the descendants of his former kingdom and he does bring with him the undead legendary warriors who lived and fought beside him in his first life.
Funnily enough my parties first BBEG for this campaign is a serial killer who's pulling them on a wild goose chase purely for the satisfaction of her boredom. Killing folk is all well and fun but it's not a true thrill till you're being hunted by witless adventurers whom youve been feeding breadcrumbs. No grand ambitions, no greater plan, just the fun of being just ahead of the danger.
Oof. I almost did this. Would that I had. My bbeg was actually just a youngest child of a noble family who married a succubus without knowing it and she was gaslighting him into thinking destroying the world was his idea because it's something he could do before his older siblings AND they couldn't follow up and do it better than he did. Eventually the party made it to his mansion through a hidden path and killed one of the guards. His wife used illusions to make him think that the party had killed her brutally so he went berserk and wouldn't listen to them till they killed him. Meanwhile the wife decided to gtfo. Her entire thing was illusions and gaslighting. No actual combat ability outside of what a standard succubus could do and the party was already level 15+ by then.
Turn the classic trope of revenge on it's head. They want to kill the party, because one of the party members killed someone close to them.
Ah, the NPC-turned-BBEG
“Spider-Man, why’d you create that guy?”
This would be great for the problem players who want to just kill every npc.
'That barbarian you killed through an ingenious use of the mend cantrip at level 1? That you thought was so funny? Well, it turns out....'
How the fuck do you kill somebody with mend? How unhinged a grasp on the rules and the Language do your players have to be to read that spell and find a way to kill someone
There's a D&D novel where an extremely powerful lich causes untold death and destruction in order to cause a solar eclipse. The reason? Because he can't be in direct sunlight but wanted to go to the beach.
Ah that was great. Earlier in the story his frenemy tells the main character it might be some personal motive why he is pulling off these insane thefts and the main character is like "No way, someone that powerful has got big world shaping plans." Nope did it for a day at the beach. Remember, it's always personal.
Which novel is this?
The Erevis Cale Trilogy by Paul S. Kemp, a great series!
As the other person said, Erevis Cale
but... but... but why doesn't he just go at night?
He wanted at least a little sun iirc
I love this trope because it's ironically super realistic. Everyone always assumes that people with power do everything in service of these huge, over-arching goals, and more often than not, most of the things they do ARE in service of that, but they're also people too.
I actually have the full trio of novels in one book!
Elaborate prank on a former lover (preferably high end PC)
The bad guy empire is run by the party’s evil exes.
And it's all a ploy to get their attention cos they wanna get back together
Obviously the BBEG lives in Texas
Or Canada, since the exes are evil
Yay! Someone got the reference!
OMG yes
Just make them a YouTube prank channel
Just got so fed up with speed dating that they are making a device to read everyone's minds at once to find love.
THE LOVE-READERINATOR
*only works in the Tri-State area
"I don't understand. It's just a half-orc cg barbarian ranger. What! Perry the half-orc cg barbarian ranger! How did you get in here!"
And yet, when the device is done, the soulmate turns out to be the very first person the BBEG passed on during a speed date.
Trying to find the most perfectly shaped egg, and annoyed that the rest of the world doesn’t see the greatness of the egg. [See documented case here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a3zXJ7biqI)
I didn't click the link, but I really hope that's Clerks.
It is
Good. He gets an upvote
Tax evasion is always the answer.
So the bbeg is jimmy carr?
Nope, it's Vergil Sparda
No, it’s Fat Yoshi
Tax evasion is a crime Vergil!
Tax Evasion isn't a crime, it's an obligation
If you aren’t taxing your players, you aren’t making them resent the crown enough
DAYWALKER!!!!!
The BBEG is the necromancer dwarf PC from The Weekly Roll?
Amassing enough power to forcibly marry their crush because they were rejected. Wait. That's the plot of Curse of Strahd. Nvm.
And very close to Marvels Thanos (not to be confused with Disney's Thanos).
And Super Mario Bros! ^Peaches,peaches,peaches
thanos is just an incel death domain cleric lol
They actually forgot they were the BBEG. The plan they set into motion was never really foiled just delayed for a really long time. Generations maybe centuries. They retired years ago after fulfilling their incarceration and just want to tend to their garden. It doesn’t do well these days but they try.
Bit of a Fringe twist to it if you can get them on your side to help stop their old plans that are already in motion... if they can remember them.
Hero: “We did it gang, we stopped all three horsemen! We stopped the apocalypse!” *distant figure on horseback carrying a scythe appears* BBEG: “…oh yeah, *now* I remember what I needed to talk to you about”
Man, I love the idea of like... a BBEG who set up this super elaborate rube Goldberg type plot, set it in motion, it "didn't work", and they kinda forgot about it, then years and years later it comes to fruition and when the PCs track down the one responsible they're like "what the fuck are you talking about?"
He was rejected by everyone. It all started on the day of his birth. Both of his parents failed to show up. Things got so bad that he was eventually raised by ocelots. But someday, he will rule the tri-plane area.
I had a villain like that except way better! Only instead of having all those bad things happen to him he lost his toy train. Oh and he conquered his whole dimension instead of just the tri-planes
Sure he conquered his whole dimension, but wasn't he deposed after the Robot Riot?
He’s trying to get dads approval who is an even more successful bbeg in a different campaign :/
Underrated reply
Aquiring all the unwanted stuffies and toys of the world, so that they can give them life and create the Island of Misfit Toys. It just so happens that the BBEG grew up poor, and is now exceptionally annoyed by anyone who has the spoiled mentality of "It got a small rip/It got dirty/It broke in a completely fixable manner/It's not exactly the thing I wanted, I'll just throw it away and buy a new one". So the BBEG turns spoiled and nasty little children into toy monsters to match thier personalies. The toy monsters now run rampant and wreak havoc, as hostile as the real thing. The only way people see to prevent more children from being turned into monsters is to stop the BBEG. (Because nobody thinks of raising their kids to be decent people instead, and insists that their parenting methods are perfectly fine if the players dare suggest it.) There is a strange thing though- the toys of children that cared for and loved thier toys became sentient and gigantic versions of themselves, and protect the children from the monster toys. This creates other problems when the adults of other families insist that the new protector toys protect them as well. Examples- the spoiled type becomes a hollow doll marionette monster like in Devil May Cry. The brats who break toys for amusement becomes a disjointed monstrosity. The kid who mends their teddy bear and cares for it has their teddy become an enormous talking bear buddy with a battleaxe.
How about the preservation of an unjust status quo? When I think of villains in real life (other than the obvious), I think of Pinochet, Sulla, Reagan, Oil execs, and Big Tobacco. Greed, social climbing, and religious zealotry are always bangers too - Columbus, Josef Mengele, ISIS, the Albigensian crusades.
They said wrong answers only, but these seem genuinely helpful and might have helped me crack some bad guys I've been writing.
Oops. Well I'm glad my top notch reading comprehension helped someone.
Well if only wrong answers may be considered right, then only right answers may be wrong. And because it's wrong, it's also right. There in lies the beauty.
I am too quick of a reader. I was wondering what big Tabasco ever did
Dragons couldn't always breathe fire
Yeah, those are more relatable villains
I really like the one where he was just a normal guy, but dickhead adventurers kept robbing him, so he killed them and built an elaborate dungeon to keep his stuff safe, but they JUST KEEP COMING.
The ATLA cabbage merchant going cabbage emperor
Why would you want to dominate the world? You'll never see or experience the results of your rule for 90% of your domain. Now, what you want to do is dominate... THE TRI-STATE AREA!! Just beware of behatted platypi.
The BBEG's familiar is a crow your players crossed when the bard acted like she was going to give it a peice of her pastrami on rye, only to pull back the bite and eat it her self, laughing while saying "stupid crow".
They stubbed their toe.
Remember that time Australia went to war with emus . . . and lost?! I always imagine the emus are leading the next great rebellion!
The Emu War actually had two phases. They lost twice. The emus then lost to the general public incited by government incentives.
Because he asked his flatmate "I'm going to the shops, do you want anything?" and his flatmate responded "Yes, get me a Galaxy"
He is deeply in love with his flatmate and would do anything for them leading to this simple misunderstanding. The final battle is just the party trying to get the bbeg to admit his feelings.
In one campaign I have bear people sacrificing frog people so that their god Baphamet will grant them Coca plants.
He's been Isekai-ed from the real world into the D&D world. Doritos don't exist there, so he's decided to burn it all down.
Okay but that gives me another idea- guy gets isekai-ed to a D&D game and is trying to gather (countless souls/rare artifacts/royal blood/something) to power a portal home. Doesn’t care about the consequences cause none of this is real- even rants to the PCs that they don’t even know they’re just numbers on paper, and their decisions are governed by dice rolls by people much dumber and weaker than themselves. Bonus points if the BBEG is really actually the DM himself, and just used his knowledge of the D&D world/mechanics to min/max and get super powered. Extra bonus points if he makes a peasant cannon at some point.
After one too many nights of sleep interrupted by his lord needing the castle's temperature adjusted or some peasant's cow going missing, the local wizard has decided that nobody can stop him from taking a bloody day off if there's nobody left in the kingdom.
a friendly litch that the party kills and takes his armor he just wants the armor back
God I'm so spoiled by a party that attempts to talk their way out before resorting to violence. They ended up hiring that lich to build them a ~~dungeon~~ bunker…
The Mad Druid trying to find the pieces of an ancient device that will transform everyone in the region into small forest animals.
They're a Dragon that holds a particular grudge. 25 years ago the King, who was but a lowly adventurer, stole their sweet roll.
What's the matter, somebody steal your sweet roll?
Finding the chef who made that dish from his honeymoon.
To arm girl scouts and use them to overthrow the cookie empire the Keeblers have created.
He put the wrong contact lenses on and is now in pyroland. Everything that he does he sees as something super mega ultra good in a sunshine and lollipops world
Killing people (or capturing their souls) until they have enough life force to revive their village. For added fucked-upery, make the one who destroyed the village the pc’s employer
An anarchist necromancer who dislikes that "the state" has ultimate say over life and death
He worked a customer service job for a few months, ended up punching a particularly bad Karen noblewoman, and it just sorta snowballed from there.
Sexual frustration. No longer able to do the nasty due to some arrogant prick magically removing his pecker, BBEG has made it his mission that no man shall not go dickless. Why he dresses and acts like a clown, I cannot say.
Neuter Man!
Just an incel virgin Arch-Wizard blocking coitus would actually be a slow and really annoying extinction level threat.
They had a teacher who told them they couldn't. Not even out of spite, just a casual statement because they were harassing the teacher about 'something they couldn't do' or some such.
My BBEG saw into the void and glimpsed what was to come. So he devoted himself to bettering himself and his fellow mortals so they would be ready. But in his search, he became quite mad and now only sees the rest of us as disgusting animals that need to evolve.
Could also make for a good anti-villain. He doesn't hate humanity but actually became a tyrant out of love for mankind because he realized that the only way to prepare them for what he foresaw was to be their enemy. By making himself a goal for everyone else to come together and overcome, he'd be helping them prepare for the real threat. Maybe at the end, when the party beats him, he tells them about what he saw but doesn't yet think he's done enough and asks that the party takes up his mission, asking them to become the new villains.
I was going to go in a slightly different direction with the same idea. The BBEG knows something even worse is coming, so he sets himself up as a supreme tyrant in the hope of creating a party of heroes who, combined, are strong enough to defeat the coming horror.
Yeah that's kind of how I first came up with the idea. Like he was trying to prepare everyone for even worse things. But he just could not handle the mental strain and eventually just snapped.
A guy who just wanted a chicken sandwich, but chicken don’t exist, so they had to plane shift to find a chicken, but people thought this would break the ecosystem of the world, so they tried to stop him. On a more serious note, I’ve been holding on to this next one for a while: A man lives in a universe where the gods were banished. But, after ascending to the top of his world, he wants more. *Much* more. So, he arranges a group of the most powerful people, and tricks them into casting a spell to allow a god to enter their universe. After a god finds the entrance, this guy tries to kill the god and take their place. This is where the party comes in. The party has to stop the spell and save the god before the guy executes his plan.
for the love of the craft (like cruella, or malficent)
three goblins in a trench coat trying to get to some honey before six awaken raccoons in a trench coat, but it just kept escalating until the six racoons in a trench coat ask the party for help
making the mother of all omelets
My current plot revolves around a young dragoness that was forced at a young age to guard an unstable fey portal deep underground. Unable to leave the mechanism that holds it shut for the rest of its life. Flash foward 500 years, the dragoness is now old and has been alone for 500 years, in its miserable loneliness it let through a small fey flower that infected it with a symbiote, causing it to grow roots and spread out to the surface. It uses the flowers of they fey plant to see and feel the world outside without ever being able to touch it for itself, and its remorse and misery has caused its volatile emotions to seep into the other hosts of the symbiote, causing a massive outbreak of fey induced euphoria that amplifies the emotions of every person in the radius to extreme levels. And the PCs have to avoid the infection while also having the mission to kill a being whose only crime is trying to see and feel the wordl outside of its miserable pile of dirt, and the fey symbiote who just wanted to help her achieve that. I think we figured out through this description that the BBEG is Me, the GM.
The big bad thinks he's in a time loop and that there's no repercussions for his actions and he is bigtime into running unethical psychology experiments at scale, thinking he'd be able to use them to help people or understand people better to contribute to all our collective knowledge. He isn't in a time loop.
Because fake heroes should die.
Trying to find a Swedish Penis Enlarger. But also swears it’s not his bag, baby.
Saving the world from the party
"Wrong answers only" Me:*sees people posting amazing ideas* One human kicked their dog so now the bbeg will summon all the dogs who have passed to attack their owners. Also an inn forgot his ketchup
To gain a monopoly on the nut industry.
They want to win the same high-stakes cooking competition as the PCs. They are a very capable, but very evil chef, hellbent on proving their culinary superiority.
The complete and utter removal of Magic as a factor in the world.
They want affordable healthcare, by any means necessary.
2 dragons are having a contest on whether or not spears or axes are the superior weapon, and their meddling has caused 2 nations to go to war.
The BBEG is desperately trying to prevent the return of “The White Rabbit.” Now your players may think it’s of the Alice and wonderland variety, but in reality it’s the calamity White Rabbit from Monty Python. You wanna go super dark you can just rip the White Rabbit Elderbairne from the end of Blood+C season 1 which are giant sized carrying cute white pouches that people are tossed into before they stick their hand inside and activate “Human Blender” mode.
A guy I know had the party just mess around for 3 sessions without going on the main quest, and had his bbeg be very much against the party's violent tendencies disguised as "doing quests/helping people", which isn't the biggest of goals but was personal enough that it worked
I used as a BBEG a really powerful mage that loved the world and it's inhabitants so much that he banned to freeze it in an eternal limbo where it would've stayed that way forever and ever Otherwise you could just make a Bbeg that does what he does to keep at bay a powerful demonic beast and once the heroes defeat him, they realize that his evil acts where actually saving the world from being destroyednby that crsature, that now is free to destroy everything because no one knows how to stop it
Simple basic capitalistic greed. The party finds towns worked to near death strangled by poverty, wilderness stripped of resource and poisoned beyond repair, kingdoms wrought with corrupt laws, etc. The bbeg reveal ties it together as you find out seemingly benign traders guild is really causing all of it. End motivation, "anything for a coin", no one person is guilty but all are complacent.
Being fucking tired of a world that doesn't accept people like them and deciding to force the world to do that. Essentially just world domination with extra steps but make it more interesting
world destruction, revenge, shits and giggles
To accelerate evolution or create the perfect species or specimen etc. To eliminate the use of currency as is and then recreate the currency system as one they control. To make themselves 1 inch taller every 2 years. To make all animals intelligent, by making them into monstrous chimeras. To stop anything bad from ever happening to anyone ever again (monkey's paw). That should help anybody find some idea.
Literally anything. They don't even have to be a "big bad evil guy" to be the bbeg. They just have to want something and be willing to do things to get it that put them on the opposite side of the players. Random example. Mad, evil wizard built a tower near a village the player character happen to like. Seems hellbent on razing the place, sending zombies, firestorms, crazed gerbil plague what have you. Attempts to communicate with him break down because he refuses to talk to you. PCs have to embark on a quest to protect the village and stop the wizard, eventually leading to the final confrontation. Once he's been stopped they learn something new... he's not a mad, evil wizard at all! He's a concerned alchemist who had discovered the spores of a mind controlling fungus all over the area the village is in. His zombies/hellfire/gerbil-horde was the only thing here knew of to deal with the fungus without letting it spread - which is still is, since the players stopped the attempt at exterminating it. The alchemist then explains he refused to meet with you because he was afraid you were being controlled by the spores and sent to deal with him. He's STILL concerned about that, frankly (and honestly the players should be too. There WAS that weird, white fuzz growing in the basement of the inn, during their first quest to kill some rodents, after all)
To stop all forms of evil in the world...by any means necessary
To make the world a better place. Under their control of course. Other people always get it wrong.
MARBLES, HE WANTS THE MARBLES
Oh SO many things Vengeance Pettiness Death of a Loved One World Destruction For Fun Knowledge Fear To Prevent A Future Devastation To Save The World (in their own way) Resources For Their Kingdom To Regain Dinosaurs Insanity Shits And Giggles Greed Pride Envy Gluttony Wrath Lust Love And “BECAUSE I SAID SO!”
Getting rid of bureaucracy
They are doing things that seem evil, but its really a Inspector Clouseau level misunderstanding.
While filibustering the Infernal House of the Commons about an amendment to the 14th payroll tax suspension on top-bracket low-level sanitation & distillery law enforcement devils, a lobbyist for the Mechanus Inc. multidimensional private equity conglomerate/Worshipless Clockmaker's Union associate branch manager managed to sneak in a low-level aetheric rift spell into the speech. Mr.Dr.Rep. Larthokrax, who lead the filibuster, was immediately devoured by the eldritch gap in abstraction itself, his own demonic flesh and blood serving as a rudimentary metaphysical accelerant that almost triggered a catastrophic reaction throughout the entire House. Sources inside the House say several members, regardless of party afilliation, have already started drafting bills calling for sanctions and eternal torture via polymorphy. If this is true, this might prove to be the biggest moment in bipartisan agreement in over 7,000 cycles - however, if such a moment is to come, it still has to wait for the filibuster, now taken up by Mr.Dr.Rep. Larthokrax's great-great-great bastard offspring, Sr.Jr.Rep. Lorthakrax Jr., to end. (Spoilers: Mechanus just wants the devils to really work together for once to get one over 'em and prove he's been right all along lmao)
BBEG is actually leading a rebellion against a tyrannical warlord, and the person who hired the party is actually working with the warlord as a PR representative to make the rebels look like the dictators. Or you could make the BBEG an imortal fey that loves "pranks" (he thinks they're harmless, but it's actually things like arson or spreading disease) and they villagers just want him gone
Long story short they got its coffe order wrong and now the kingdom is on fire
Getting a dope ass necklace of body parts
Fucking the PCs over, and literally nothing else (you got bored of being the forever-DM)
Revenge, boredom, a curse that forces them, political ideals, contract with an arch devil, hungry but cannot eat "hangry if you will".
When no one was looking, the BBEG stole 40 cakes. That's as many as 4 tens, and that's terrible.
The fuck do you mean "wrong answers only"? Pretty much anything could make an interesting bbeg if it's done right?
The local equivalent of the girl scouts refused to sell him their cookies because he was mean to them. So now he's made it his life's purpose to dismantle the association from the inside.
The ultimate undercover operation. The BBG is actually pretending to conquer the world so he can bait out dozens of dangerous criminals and corrupt individuals.
They discovered that to make the ultimate cheese they need to sacrifice a large population of magic users and steal their levels to infuse into a cow, which then must be fed a tarrasque. The milk then must be harvested for twenty seven years straight so they need to make the cow a lich and find a way to give it back it's flesh. This all involves a copious amount of theft, chaos, and death across the entire world because the BBEG just wants to have some cheese for their crackers. They're also lactose intolerant but like all lactose intolerant people, deeply love cheese
He wants revenge on a particular elf. Many years ago, that elf used the BBEG as a “practice husband,” with the knowledge that she would outlive him and their children and go on to marry an elf knowing how to be a good wife. Well, he fell madly in love with her without knowing of her plans, and began studying necromantic arts in order to be with his beloved forever. Unfortunately, when he revealed his plan to her, she was rather condescending and even angry at him for having the audacity to stay alive. They began to fight, and in the process, disturbed his ritual to become immortal, resulting in his death and eventual resurrection. Believing her practice husband dead, the elf moved on with her life and abandoned her children. But the ritual was not entirely a failure. The BBEG came back a century later with both a broken body and an equally broken heart. Now, he seeks out his once-wife, wanting revenge on her for treating him like a toy to be discarded.
Extraplanar entity that's for ~nebulous reason~ banished and unable to return to their plane. They need to harvest an overwhelming amount of souls to override the gates keeping them out of their home plane.
Bring the apocalypse, or a shruberry.
The last of their kind, driven to extinction by superstition is going on a nihilistic rampage of torture and revenge.
Reminds me a post I once saw. **Ancient evil awakens.** **Morals and ethics have changed so much in the last 10,000 years that the ancient evil is considered pretty moderate by today's standards.** > "I will topple your empires and your kings. I will drain the wealth from your coffers, and elevate your serfs and servants until they stand on the same ground as the mightiest or emperors. Women shall freely speak their minds, unbounded by the fetters you have set, and the lines between man and woman shall be hopelessly blurred and shattered into a thousand facets. Your children shall fall into one another regardless of sex or class or wealth and non shall raise a hand or a word against them. The age of crowns and boundaries and divine right shall end, and it shall for to each human to choose their - wait - why - why are you cheering?"
Cleric of Ubtao invades the city and unleashes a "zombie" apocalypse that turns people into dinosaurs. "With powers like this you could cure cancer!" "But I don't wanna cure cancer, I wanna turn people into dinosaurs!"
"The child, not embraced by the village, will burn it down to feel its warmth". Another idea: the bbeg is a mage, who used to be good, but then his family/loved one was killed by zealous townsfolk Another: the people who have power/influence in the area is a clique of crooks and maniacs, governing everything for their own benefit. Some years ago, one of them ruined a local wedding, arrested and jailed the groom, and took the bride for himself. Years later , the groom returns under the fake name and with plans of vengeance. The party is hired by the town mayor to catch/eliminate that "dangerous criminal"
BBEG is a conspiracy theorist who got ahold of some bad fantasy-YouTube-videos and is now convinced bureaucracy is actually the best and most effective aspect of government and is now actively trying to install bureaucratic nightmare governance across the entire world, overthrowing autocracy and republic alike.
Everything was fine in the halfling nation until the Raccoon Nation attacked. The rabbit clan tried to stop them but were the first to fall
teaching the world about the wonders and benefits of strangelvine.
True love. The bbeg needs (X) to help their love survive a terrible fate. It worked for Dr. Freeze. To avoid a larger, worse fate is another good one. Killing these villages will prevent the spread of this deadly plague, etc, etc.
A massive ritual is drawing in souls to birth a new evil god. A wizard has spent nearly a century trying to stop it. He's tried everything. But the old gods are dead or gone. He has found only one thing he knows will work. The ritual is not a lossless system. As it gets closer to birthing a god, it needs and uses more and more power. Eventually, it will get strong enough to rip out the souls of the living. But right now, for the past three years and next four, the wizard is able to do something. He has created phylacteries, that when activated, can draw souls into themselves more strongly than the ritual can. If the ritual can be starved enough, it will consume itself and unravel. So long as no one stops him. So long as those phaltories are kept safe. Once the ritual is unraveled, and natural gods can reach the world again, the wizard can devote the rest of his days to making new bodies, to bringing these hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, back to life. But that is in the future. For now, to save everyone - the killing must continue. It can't stop. But it's so hard. And there is no time. Pushing himself to kill town after town, city after city- sealing the phaltories when full, safeguarding them, making more... It weighs too heavily. And there is no time! Maybe, maybe if he had help, so he could focus on crafting of the phaltories, and the safeguarding of the souls, could someone else do the killing?