A cursed Goblin Villain that was once sinister, but now everything they say or do just comes out cute (fueling their rage and making them more sinister...and more cute).
To make themselves look scarier, they have a really big orc as their henchman. Unfortunately, he's just a baker's son trying to pay his way through college, so he's got the cute personality and can't stomach violence.
A villain I am planning right now is a love struck murderer. He is a former assassin who broke away from that life when he fell madly in love with a sickly frail noble girl. He stalked her family for months before getting rid of and impersonating her fiancé, befriended her brother whom he then caused the accidental death of, just so he could use the grief in the family to get closer to them all, when the father was getting wise to his deception, he pushed him down the stairs. Systematically he eliminated the house hold, from nosey servants to family members and friends until he had isolated the person of his affection, forcing her to become entirely dependent on him without realizing it. When the party arrives in town, they will know something is off, but finding anyone willing to believe them will be difficult, as the town thinks the stalker is a pillar of the community and is a kind hearted man who takes care of his sick fiancé. "to bad about all the misfortune she has suffered but at least her fiancé is there to take care of her." He is by no stretch a main villain, he is however supposed to be an unsettling encounter on their quest to save the world.
I had a villain npc who lied her way into the party and a relationship with the party's druid only to betray them and reveal she was using them to release an imprisoned archdevil for revenge for something another player did in the previous campaign. The party met this villain about a year in real time before this reveal and she traveled with them for about seven months (including 15 years of a life with them that wasn't real like in that Star Trek episode The Inner Light)
@@twistedpinttavern They forgave her (why lmao) and the druid married her. Long story short, she left at the very end of the campaign because she couldn't forgive something he did.
While not a "Villain" per se, my players encountered a very interesting antagonist in the city of Athkatla in Amn. After hearing about a story of Lord Delryn damaging his family's honor by stealing a legendary artifact from an Emerald Enclave ranger, and losing the item when he reclaimed it in a duel, the players learned that he collects magic items. They got the idea to perform a heist, and steal the family's Shield of Missile Snaring, and then stage the theft as though the same ranger stole from him. The heist did not go as planned, to say the least. To describe it in terms of soundtracks, it started off as the Mission Impossible theme, progressed to the Pink Panther theme, then devolved into the Benny Hill theme. One of the players is captured, and then persuaded in his cellar while tied up, to rescue his daughter's "puppy" after it was stolen from her. He promises that if he is successful, he will call off the Shadow Thieves that will be tracking them down. Unbeknownst to them, the "puppy" is actually a Gray Render that was taken to an illegal animal fighting ring. I had a lot of fun roleplaying Lord Delryn as a smart, calculated, but very arrogant and devious, almost villainous noble.
The best, and I mean the BEST villains are usually the smart ones. You can have people who are just evil, or maybe less intelligent, but the feeling of thoroughly being duped by the villain in a way that is, despite being negative, satisfying? That can't be beat.
A villain that I am currently in the late stages of planning is actually the mcguffin for my party;s current arc. For context, he is a necromancer who was on the verge of resurrection, but the party and my old Character, who is the Adventurer's guild master, stopped it. Now they are sailing across the world and attempting to stop it. What they most recently encountered was a burst of necromantic magic from the phylactery that caused a skeleton ship to rise from the grave. This will occur every few sessions in between their regular adventures of sailing and will even occur on land when they start that stint of the journey. Potential plans for them to have to fight an avatar of the necromancer when they finally toss the phylactery into the forge at the settlement they are traveling to.
@@twistedpinttavern for context, I use a supplement from DMsLair for ship combat and creation. But it went well. Boarders came in waves, snipers shot at the crew from afar, and the captain was tied to the ship so if the ship went down it would reappear 1D4 days later. But if the captain was killed it would not regenerate.
This was a cool villain that I planned to be a one-off but was enhanced by one of my player’s interactions. Anontana was it’s name. Anontana was a giant sea serpent who was worshipped by a cult who dwelt in a lighthouse. The lighthouse had been cleared out by some other adventurers and was now being used as a base of research for several wizards trying to invent new water-based spells. When the party came across it, they discovered that it was abandoned. They split up (always a bright idea… right?) and the Wizard and Sorcerer found a journal by one of the Spellcasters who’d previously dwelt there. It described as they all went mad one by one after discovering and studying this eldritch underwater being, and how they ended up k*lling each other. The last remaining one hid while the others fought, but felt himself called to the sea, presumably devoured by the beast. The journal ended there, and both PCs felt a strange presence touch their minds. They ran to the window and peered out, seeing two glowing lights emanating from the depths. The Wizard decided to try to contact the force she could feel inside her head, and when they leveled up after the session, she worked out with me about gaining a level in Warlock. We went Great Old One for the telepathy, and there was a lot of fun rp as Anontana’s alien mind collided with the Wizard’s, while the rest of the party wondered where these strange powers were coming from. (Always love a cooperative party who rps right. The players were in the know about the warlock multiclass, but their characters they kept in the dark.) All was not as it seemed, and Anontana used them to fight and weaken enemies for it to take over. A final fight was held on the edge of a beach, as Anontana took control of a war cube from Acheron. It was a fight to the death, and the Wizard actually decided to go through with losing their character. Blinded by the power of her patron, she allowed herself to be destroyed by the monster, who gained a boost in power. The team only survived by using some connections to a Green Dragon they’d met much earlier in the campaign (another fave villain of mine, but that’s a story for another time) to swoop in and save them at the last second by calling a Tarrasque from under the island. It was an epic conclusion to a campaign arc I’d never imagined would happen, especially with the Cleric, who’d mentored the Wizard, being completely emotionally shattered by her death. Lots of fun with the players. Couldn’t have asked for a better campaign direction. Always best when the players understand their characters and the world well enough to make choices that take the initiative in the campaign (pun intended)
Also, it makes me mad, but that should just be *its for the first use in my comment. Another case of me getting the grammar right, but being destroyed anyway by Autoincorrect. Ugh.
I had very interesting villains one was the bbeg who was a sorcerer for the king he was serving but when the party discovered he had plans of causing a war they confronted him when they saw him go into a room that had he’s plans they fought and subdued him while doing the first mission they were on which was to slay a small dragon. When they got back to the king’s room there was a box waiting for them the king ever curious had one of his men open the box and put came a character I named spinarax who was a metallic armor set that resembled a thri kreen and went to bust out his master who was the sorcerer the party tried to go after them but spinarax left a bomb in the box and the sorcerer said “It’s either you come after me or you let the bomb go off!” And with little time the party threw the bomb away but the sorcerer got away. Fast forward ahead and apparently the sorcerer was a immortal who had no real name and any damage dealt to him was instantly regenerated the reason he wanted to cause a war was that once it was done the war would leave the entire planet uninhabitable for a long time and the gods of this world fed on whatever they were in charge of, so for example a god of plague of no one is suffering a disease then that god would slowly starve to death. The party being very confused why he’s doing this in the first place at all asked why and he revealed that this has happened before and was trying to stop it from happening because the gods had decreed that the life on the planet was too chaotic and needed to be snuffed out so he basically said “alright you want to kill everything then I’ll kill you all first!” The party didn’t really want to die and saved the planet by having a greater being step in and basically snapped him away toward the end
So long post, the campaign is fun and cheesy where major themes of the game is in the power of friendship, using power given or cultivated to make the world better than where they found it, creativity being a necessary part of doing such, bla bla bla etc etc. To make the big bad of the campaign, I could go boring field with a mustache twirling villain because evil is fun, but instead, I wracked my brain and this is what I came up with. Once a prophesized child, to bring peace and prosperity to the kingdom of his birth, he was placed on a pedestal, and locked in a guilded cage, as losing him to anything would endanger all that they were given. Eventually he tried to escape in any way he could, trying to unlock his cell, begging his retainers for help, even trying to sewer-slide himself, but that only made the chains tighter as to prevent him from trying again. Eventually his cries are heard by The Cruel God, and they promise to free the kid, and grant him immortality so he can live a life that was stolen from him, and they would give this blessing until "it was just the two of them at the end of oblivion." He agrees, and is given the power of sympathetic magic. He can inflict anything upon himself, and have the same happen to everyone and everything around him (this does appear as a mechanic in the game where he discreetly attaches connections to people, and can start debuffing or injuring himself to inflict the same on whoever doesn't remove those connections. Bottoms up on a vial of poison, barely flinch as someone launches a fireball at him, he eventually gets back up, the others don't). The Cruel God takes over, targets the entire kingdom, and makes the kid open his throat like a Pez-dispenser, killing the entire civilization in one quick slash. However, immortality is a hell of a thing, he rises again, and slowly develops the mission that all the pain and suffering hes seen and caused can only end, when everything is completely gone. He didn't want to kill his entire people, he just wanted freedom, but he already made his choice. In this, he's untouchable by the party by their usual means, as his only goal is omnicide, he must be stopped but can't ever be permanently downed. TL;DR villain is made to be the party's antithesis, someone who can't be saved or talked down from their ambitions, and weaponizes their sympathy in a very literal way.
@@caracal429 By all means, I worked hard on him. In fact, I did have a one-shot idea where you basically play the inciting incident. Guards trying to make sure the kid arrives to the new capital safely, you're carrying this giant cart and can occasionally hear something through the insulated walls and various spells to make sure he's safe at all times. But when you get there, the cage explodes and you fight the kid as he's become avatar of The Cruel God, this was meant to be a way to dive into his backstory diagetically, maybe your party found a memory in a magic book or a divination spell goes wildly wrong, as well as meant to test the limits of how the mechanics would work. Naturally he has a lot of health and or heal options since he's hitting himself to use his abilities, and with the system, he got a lot of movement and keep away options to make sure he was the only one hitting himself.. This was for Pathfinder 2e, but with some gumption could be translated to basically anything.
"Sympathetic Magic" honestly feels like it should be a sorcerer subclass or something. Like, one of the features is "when you take damage from a source, a target takes the same damage" or something. Definitely could be developed into a full thing, I like it!
Wizard: "the device is unstable and can't be used" Alchemist: *uses it anyway* Device: *doesn't work* Alchemist: "How could you do this to me, Wizard?!" Me: "bruh"
"The door is unlocked, but has a glyph of warding on it with fire crackling at the lines as you approach." "I open the door. GAh! Why would you detonate a fireball right on my character?!" "My GUY."
So if anyone knows daud From dishonored I was planning on making Him a Villain in one of my Dnd campaigns Daud is a General that In secret runs a Assassin cult that want's to take over the empress her Kingdom to become a power house of a nation framing a royal guard as the assassin of the empress He was made to be Taunting Calculated and Cold and have a hand in each of the PC's Backstory's if they made backstory's
Public vote: Cute Goblin Villain or Sinister Evil Villain, which is better?
Yes
The true best option.
A cursed Goblin Villain that was once sinister, but now everything they say or do just comes out cute (fueling their rage and making them more sinister...and more cute).
To make themselves look scarier, they have a really big orc as their henchman. Unfortunately, he's just a baker's son trying to pay his way through college, so he's got the cute personality and can't stomach violence.
@@twistedpinttavern Pacifist uwu orc 😂
A villain I am planning right now is a love struck murderer.
He is a former assassin who broke away from that life when he fell madly in love with a sickly frail noble girl.
He stalked her family for months before getting rid of and impersonating her fiancé, befriended her brother whom he then caused the accidental death of, just so he could use the grief in the family to get closer to them all, when the father was getting wise to his deception, he pushed him down the stairs. Systematically he eliminated the house hold, from nosey servants to family members and friends until he had isolated the person of his affection, forcing her to become entirely dependent on him without realizing it.
When the party arrives in town, they will know something is off, but finding anyone willing to believe them will be difficult, as the town thinks the stalker is a pillar of the community and is a kind hearted man who takes care of his sick fiancé.
"to bad about all the misfortune she has suffered but at least her fiancé is there to take care of her."
He is by no stretch a main villain, he is however supposed to be an unsettling encounter on their quest to save the world.
There's two good types of evil: merciless slaughterer, and deceptive, manipulative, horrible person. You've nailed that last one, lol
Welp, I’m stealing this.
I had a villain npc who lied her way into the party and a relationship with the party's druid only to betray them and reveal she was using them to release an imprisoned archdevil for revenge for something another player did in the previous campaign.
The party met this villain about a year in real time before this reveal and she traveled with them for about seven months (including 15 years of a life with them that wasn't real like in that Star Trek episode The Inner Light)
That is brutal, I love it.
@@twistedpinttavern They forgave her (why lmao) and the druid married her. Long story short, she left at the very end of the campaign because she couldn't forgive something he did.
Ahh, player sympathy. There when it doesn't make sense and completely missing when they're murdering a shopkeeper lmao
While not a "Villain" per se, my players encountered a very interesting antagonist in the city of Athkatla in Amn. After hearing about a story of Lord Delryn damaging his family's honor by stealing a legendary artifact from an Emerald Enclave ranger, and losing the item when he reclaimed it in a duel, the players learned that he collects magic items. They got the idea to perform a heist, and steal the family's Shield of Missile Snaring, and then stage the theft as though the same ranger stole from him.
The heist did not go as planned, to say the least. To describe it in terms of soundtracks, it started off as the Mission Impossible theme, progressed to the Pink Panther theme, then devolved into the Benny Hill theme. One of the players is captured, and then persuaded in his cellar while tied up, to rescue his daughter's "puppy" after it was stolen from her. He promises that if he is successful, he will call off the Shadow Thieves that will be tracking them down.
Unbeknownst to them, the "puppy" is actually a Gray Render that was taken to an illegal animal fighting ring.
I had a lot of fun roleplaying Lord Delryn as a smart, calculated, but very arrogant and devious, almost villainous noble.
The best, and I mean the BEST villains are usually the smart ones. You can have people who are just evil, or maybe less intelligent, but the feeling of thoroughly being duped by the villain in a way that is, despite being negative, satisfying? That can't be beat.
A villain that I am currently in the late stages of planning is actually the mcguffin for my party;s current arc. For context, he is a necromancer who was on the verge of resurrection, but the party and my old Character, who is the Adventurer's guild master, stopped it. Now they are sailing across the world and attempting to stop it. What they most recently encountered was a burst of necromantic magic from the phylactery that caused a skeleton ship to rise from the grave. This will occur every few sessions in between their regular adventures of sailing and will even occur on land when they start that stint of the journey. Potential plans for them to have to fight an avatar of the necromancer when they finally toss the phylactery into the forge at the settlement they are traveling to.
As someone running the flying Dutchman in my game, I'm excited to find out how the skeleton ship encounters go!
@@twistedpinttavern for context, I use a supplement from DMsLair for ship combat and creation. But it went well. Boarders came in waves, snipers shot at the crew from afar, and the captain was tied to the ship so if the ship went down it would reappear 1D4 days later. But if the captain was killed it would not regenerate.
This was a cool villain that I planned to be a one-off but was enhanced by one of my player’s interactions.
Anontana was it’s name.
Anontana was a giant sea serpent who was worshipped by a cult who dwelt in a lighthouse. The lighthouse had been cleared out by some other adventurers and was now being used as a base of research for several wizards trying to invent new water-based spells.
When the party came across it, they discovered that it was abandoned.
They split up (always a bright idea… right?) and the Wizard and Sorcerer found a journal by one of the Spellcasters who’d previously dwelt there.
It described as they all went mad one by one after discovering and studying this eldritch underwater being, and how they ended up k*lling each other.
The last remaining one hid while the others fought, but felt himself called to the sea, presumably devoured by the beast.
The journal ended there, and both PCs felt a strange presence touch their minds.
They ran to the window and peered out, seeing two glowing lights emanating from the depths.
The Wizard decided to try to contact the force she could feel inside her head, and when they leveled up after the session, she worked out with me about gaining a level in Warlock.
We went Great Old One for the telepathy, and there was a lot of fun rp as Anontana’s alien mind collided with the Wizard’s, while the rest of the party wondered where these strange powers were coming from. (Always love a cooperative party who rps right. The players were in the know about the warlock multiclass, but their characters they kept in the dark.)
All was not as it seemed, and Anontana used them to fight and weaken enemies for it to take over. A final fight was held on the edge of a beach, as Anontana took control of a war cube from Acheron.
It was a fight to the death, and the Wizard actually decided to go through with losing their character. Blinded by the power of her patron, she allowed herself to be destroyed by the monster, who gained a boost in power.
The team only survived by using some connections to a Green Dragon they’d met much earlier in the campaign (another fave villain of mine, but that’s a story for another time) to swoop in and save them at the last second by calling a Tarrasque from under the island.
It was an epic conclusion to a campaign arc I’d never imagined would happen, especially with the Cleric, who’d mentored the Wizard, being completely emotionally shattered by her death.
Lots of fun with the players.
Couldn’t have asked for a better campaign direction.
Always best when the players understand their characters and the world well enough to make choices that take the initiative in the campaign (pun intended)
Also, it makes me mad, but that should just be *its for the first use in my comment.
Another case of me getting the grammar right, but being destroyed anyway by Autoincorrect.
Ugh.
If any of my pirate campaign players are reading this, stop. Totally putting a cult in a lighthouse in my game now.
@@twistedpinttavern And that's an added subscription.
Always love it when people interact with commenters.
Makes me feel welcomed.
I had very interesting villains one was the bbeg who was a sorcerer for the king he was serving but when the party discovered he had plans of causing a war they confronted him when they saw him go into a room that had he’s plans they fought and subdued him while doing the first mission they were on which was to slay a small dragon. When they got back to the king’s room there was a box waiting for them the king ever curious had one of his men open the box and put came a character I named spinarax who was a metallic armor set that resembled a thri kreen and went to bust out his master who was the sorcerer the party tried to go after them but spinarax left a bomb in the box and the sorcerer said “It’s either you come after me or you let the bomb go off!” And with little time the party threw the bomb away but the sorcerer got away. Fast forward ahead and apparently the sorcerer was a immortal who had no real name and any damage dealt to him was instantly regenerated the reason he wanted to cause a war was that once it was done the war would leave the entire planet uninhabitable for a long time and the gods of this world fed on whatever they were in charge of, so for example a god of plague of no one is suffering a disease then that god would slowly starve to death. The party being very confused why he’s doing this in the first place at all asked why and he revealed that this has happened before and was trying to stop it from happening because the gods had decreed that the life on the planet was too chaotic and needed to be snuffed out so he basically said “alright you want to kill everything then I’ll kill you all first!” The party didn’t really want to die and saved the planet by having a greater being step in and basically snapped him away toward the end
A great story and villain!
These are all absolutely brilliant and I'm not sure which one I like the most!
that alchemist didnt really have a good reason to go after his master, the master tried to warn him and he did it anyways.
I get his motive, but yeah, the wizard straight up said "no, don't it's a bad idea" and then the dude was pissed when he turned out to be right.
So long post, the campaign is fun and cheesy where major themes of the game is in the power of friendship, using power given or cultivated to make the world better than where they found it, creativity being a necessary part of doing such, bla bla bla etc etc. To make the big bad of the campaign, I could go boring field with a mustache twirling villain because evil is fun, but instead, I wracked my brain and this is what I came up with.
Once a prophesized child, to bring peace and prosperity to the kingdom of his birth, he was placed on a pedestal, and locked in a guilded cage, as losing him to anything would endanger all that they were given. Eventually he tried to escape in any way he could, trying to unlock his cell, begging his retainers for help, even trying to sewer-slide himself, but that only made the chains tighter as to prevent him from trying again. Eventually his cries are heard by The Cruel God, and they promise to free the kid, and grant him immortality so he can live a life that was stolen from him, and they would give this blessing until "it was just the two of them at the end of oblivion." He agrees, and is given the power of sympathetic magic. He can inflict anything upon himself, and have the same happen to everyone and everything around him (this does appear as a mechanic in the game where he discreetly attaches connections to people, and can start debuffing or injuring himself to inflict the same on whoever doesn't remove those connections. Bottoms up on a vial of poison, barely flinch as someone launches a fireball at him, he eventually gets back up, the others don't). The Cruel God takes over, targets the entire kingdom, and makes the kid open his throat like a Pez-dispenser, killing the entire civilization in one quick slash.
However, immortality is a hell of a thing, he rises again, and slowly develops the mission that all the pain and suffering hes seen and caused can only end, when everything is completely gone. He didn't want to kill his entire people, he just wanted freedom, but he already made his choice. In this, he's untouchable by the party by their usual means, as his only goal is omnicide, he must be stopped but can't ever be permanently downed.
TL;DR villain is made to be the party's antithesis, someone who can't be saved or talked down from their ambitions, and weaponizes their sympathy in a very literal way.
Welp, I’m stealing this.
@@caracal429 By all means, I worked hard on him. In fact, I did have a one-shot idea where you basically play the inciting incident. Guards trying to make sure the kid arrives to the new capital safely, you're carrying this giant cart and can occasionally hear something through the insulated walls and various spells to make sure he's safe at all times. But when you get there, the cage explodes and you fight the kid as he's become avatar of The Cruel God, this was meant to be a way to dive into his backstory diagetically, maybe your party found a memory in a magic book or a divination spell goes wildly wrong, as well as meant to test the limits of how the mechanics would work. Naturally he has a lot of health and or heal options since he's hitting himself to use his abilities, and with the system, he got a lot of movement and keep away options to make sure he was the only one hitting himself.. This was for Pathfinder 2e, but with some gumption could be translated to basically anything.
"Sympathetic Magic" honestly feels like it should be a sorcerer subclass or something. Like, one of the features is "when you take damage from a source, a target takes the same damage" or something. Definitely could be developed into a full thing, I like it!
Wizard: "the device is unstable and can't be used"
Alchemist: *uses it anyway*
Device: *doesn't work*
Alchemist: "How could you do this to me, Wizard?!"
Me: "bruh"
"The door is unlocked, but has a glyph of warding on it with fire crackling at the lines as you approach."
"I open the door. GAh! Why would you detonate a fireball right on my character?!"
"My GUY."
So if anyone knows daud From dishonored I was planning on making Him a Villain in one of my Dnd campaigns Daud is a General that In secret runs a Assassin cult that want's to take over the empress her Kingdom to become a power house of a nation framing a royal guard as the assassin of the empress He was made to be Taunting Calculated and Cold and have a hand in each of the PC's Backstory's if they made backstory's
I absolutely LOVE Dishonored. I, uh... Maybe have the mark of the Outsider tattooed on my arm...
i'm considering to get the mark on my right hand since left if my dominant hand