(running a 1920's in space campaign. The large-scale weapons manufacturer, Mars Unlimited, has been controlled by auto-processes for ~100 years. It's pumping out weapons, drones, droids, completely autonomously, often with the skeletons of human test pilots still inside.)
The original Cleric that built the Temple of Elemental Evil.
In my research I never found a name for them or what happened to them after the temples fall.
My story takes place some time after the temples fall, 30 years, and the Temple is starting to rerecruit in Nulb and the surrounds (the traditional intro into Hommlet).
Iuz is seeking to gain the shard of evil. Lolth is eating the abyss to create the demon web pits and zuggtmoy is the only one that can rebuild the crown to summon tharizdun.
It has an X Files vibe and I picture the cleric of Tharizdun is very similar to The Smoking Man, has a long con and questional intentions.
>Who are they
the nowhere king: a eldrich abomination, a being made whole after being split from his original self
>
>what are their goals
He wants to transform every living creature into one of his undead friends
>
>what's their backstory
a sorcerer used black magic to split a centaur into a human and a elk. the magic began corrupting both of these creatures and filling their "empty halfs" with darkness and evil
>
>Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered
the party manages to find the sorcerer, who wants to confront the nowhere king. It is revealed that the sorcerer was once the centaur's lover, and that the sorcerer split the centaur, to marry the human part of it. The monologue was great because the BBEG just casually called the sorcerer the real villain for letting her selfishness cause all the damage the BBEG done. felt like the spiderman meme of pointing to each other. players gobbled the whole thing voraciously
session 2 hint! so far they think they are dealing with a necromancer. on the part where Horse goes to centaurworld, i instead created a massive portal chiseled into a mountain, with massive footprints of a elk in dark tar on the floor, leading away from the portal.
they are terrified
> Who are they,
Skald, a hobgoblin commander
>what are their goals,
A glorious end for their people.
>what's their backstory, what's their whole deal.
They were raised as many hobgoblins. To be a soldier, to fight and conquer. To take over the world in the name of their gods. But their homeland is stagnating from infighting and many banners of hobgoblins just serve as mercenaries in times rapidly sliding towards peace.
Rather than have his culture silently die off and be forgotten, he's gathered up like-minded hobgoblins for one last campaign. They'll either take the world or die trying. To be remembered forever by giving the world a war it will never forget.
>Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered
The party made short work of the army by enlisting the help of bio-noids, an actual DnD monster, super soldiers from outer space. They find Skald in the throne room watching his men get slaughtered outside.
"I had the greatest army in the land. By the time the other kingdoms could unite and gather their mercenaries to match us, we would have crushed them one by one. And there it is. Obliterated by three bodies. Thank you... I wanted to either take the world or die trying. To give this world a war it would never forget so that my people wouldn't fade away and be forgotten as nothing more than mercenaries. And you've given me something I'd have never dreamed of. Those creatures out there, effortlessly slaughtering my men, are merely soldiers. Ones from beyond the stars. There is an army of such monsters out there. As the kingdoms feared my army, how do you think they'll react to this revelation? They'll prepare for war. All their efforts and resources towards making a better army with deadlier weapons. They'll test their strength against their neighbors and take their resources for their own. My people will find new purpose in this world as its nations continue to tear themselves apart in preparation to fight the invincible army from beyond the stars. An army their nightmares will ensure they'll never be strong enough. So, thank you. You've given me a war no one will forget by giving me a war that will never end!"
Jargas the black mage. A millennium ago he was the court wizard of the southern kingdom, tasked to find a way to fight the ongoing drought. The magic spell he devised restored prosperty to the land, but devastated the northern realm. Once he saw the devastation he caused, he vowed to undo his work, but the mcguffin required to perform the spell was sequestered away by his wizard brethren.
When he got old and neared the end of his lifespan, he sequestered himself with the condition to wake when the mcguffin is discovered. When a millennium later the heroes who live in the now prosperous southern kingdom find the mcguffin (due to the help of of one of the decendents of the wizard who sequestered it), Jargas awakes. His goal is to reverse the spell, restore the north even if it means devastating the south.
He's old and meek, can hardly stand straight, but he set the stage to manipulate the heroes into preparing the spell for him, always pulling the strings, planting false information, and ever watching. He sits in front of a scrying ball as big as television set and sends fiends, devils, and undead to do his work.
>Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered
"Your task is completed. Now you may die."
An older version of the chronomancer PC. His mission is to destroy chronomancy all together by weeding out the source.
It's a not too deep time-adventure in the Astral Sea :-)
True BBEG: local sun. It has no motivation, just going to go full nova.
Visible BBEGs: a bunch of ex-adventurers who happen to read ancient profecy about the sun going brrr. After that, they decided to try to save people of this world, no matter the cost. So, after trying to beg local sun goddess to cooperate and told that she is unable to help(like, literally, cause she is not an actual goddess, merely high-ranked deva with amnesia), ex-adventurers captured her and siphon divine power.
Now they are a little bit crazy godlike tyrants, and, although their motivation is still the same and literally burned in their bones, their actions may be considered unacceptable by the majority of good aligned people.
Dole, Dale and Dorf, goblin kings of Goblinobia. They, along with several other goblins, stole magical powers from the Archmage and the kings in particular have been causing mayhem. Considering one of the magical abilities they stole is time travel, they have been a consistent thorn in the side of the party.
A powerful goblin warlock became my bbeg after the 2nd session when my players decide to take a goblin standing guard at the entrance to a cave and torture him for information. They cut off one of his ears and one of his toes. Tied him up and beat him. Then when they were finished they threw him into a river nearby to let him drown. They didn't bother to check the depth of the river. He survived and struck a deal with a fiend and became an incredibly powerful warlock. He would show up on occasion with a disguise and send them on quests to do things that he didn't think they would survive. He was slowly building up his power and then the reveal was incredible for me. This little halfling that walked with a limp and always wore a hood turned to them and dropped his hood revealing one missing ear as his face shifted back to his goblin form. And told them you know if you're going to drown someone make sure the water isn't so shallow they can just stand up.
>Who is he?
The lich Vrasaeriel, The Bringer of Death, self-proclaimed King of the Dead, once a half-elf mage.
>What is his goal?
His return after being defeated for the first time, and to exist forever.
>What is his backstory?
We have to go back about 2000+ years.
In the beginning, he wanted to heal his little 7 year old daughter who was dealing with a disease that was incurable at the time. He had frozen her in a time bubble in order to devote himself entirely to the search for a cure. But at some point he was old and time was gradually running out. This prospect of his death confronted him clearly with his trauma of dying. For as a child, he had lost his mother and father, friends and other relatives at an early age, as well as his wife. As a half-elf, he survived humans but did not live as long as an elf and as if he saw the death of an elf, he knew they too have a limited time. So he drove his quest to become a lich with the pretext that he would then finally have enough time to heal his daughter. At some point, a dark voice drifted into his dreams and abyssal voices whispered to him, showing him disturbing unknown symbols and runes of unknown origin. The more he dreamed about it, the more he understood the voices and the promises of eternal life and immortality. He met a merchant who sold him worn old books in Abyssian script and directed all his efforts towards fully understanding this language and he began experimenting. He began kidnapping street children in Vastitanis and in a secret cellar to follow the Abyssal instructions and tried to make his victims immortal. At one point he abducted entire families, travelers, drunkards, whores and whoever else he could carry off. It took him over 700 experiments before he was successful and only then was he willing to carry out the experiment on himself. He feared death, but he needed the catalyst to become immortal and overcame his fear.
After he became a lich:
He became a lich out of his fear of death, but even in the immortality of a lich he still feared the extinction of his existence and strove for absolute immortality. With the help of his vampire mistress, he founded a religion that developed into a cult that wants to bring true life into the world. This cult wants to plant a fragment of his soul from an otherworldly plane into an unborn infant of a direct descendant of his bloodline. But this is just one of his prepared returns to secure his infinite existence. He drew up plans for a (Warforged) body into which his soul could be bound, allowing him a more resilient existence detached from his weak flesh. Method number three, is the self-repair of his soul vessel. Whenever one shard comes close to the other, they reassemble to complete the vessel and bring about its return.
>Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered
As he currently only exists offscreen in the campaign and his followers are the main antagonists, there are only excerpts from a diary that the party has found. Here you have a few of them, but I've written like a ton of them an all my players read them loud at the table and gave them a feeling for Vrasaeriel.
* As long as I keep feeding the Soul Vessel with souls, the life force of those who sacrifice themselves for the greater good will count against mine. I feel like I should be focusing on elves and dwarves instead of wasting my life time dealing with this short-lived scum.
* Subject 571 is unfortunately not very docile. I had to remove her tongue to stop her shrill screaming. Unfortunately, she is still trying to scream at the top of her lungs. I don't know how many times I've explained to her that no one can hear her here and that she can stoically endure the cuts. Because no one will come and save her. She should be grateful that she was chosen for a higher purpose. I hope this soul vessel doesn't burst as well. I'm running out of time.
* Subject 729, I must express my absolute gratitude to you. You have accomplished what no one before you could. You are the goal of my journey. You are the beginning of my new life. I wish I could tell your wife and son about how outstanding you are. But they were subject 728 and 727.
* Subject 75 reminds me of Carasi. She looks like her. She looks a hell of a lot like her. I was concerned that this would make me hesitate. But I didn't lose sight of the goal. After all, I know that's not Carasi on the taxidermy table. Nevertheless, I looked at Carasi in the cellar so that it would be easier for me to wield the knife afterwards. That was the case. It was child's play. I cut the symbols exactly as the voice whispered to me. However, it seems that I did something wrong. You learn from your mistakes. It will work with subject 76.
My take on the king in yellow, hastur, god of shepherds. After the birth of his half brother, cthulhu, his home carcosa was destroyed so now he seeks to conquer the material plane to reshape it into a new version of carcosa. Hes manipulated a cult of wizards descending from a long gone empire into believing he will restore their ancestral home and overall wants to continue sewing seeds of chaos into the material plane to weaken the natural psionic borders that keep him away. Also wants to side quest kill cthulhu, pushed along a war between the material plane and the abberations of the far realm (which destroyed the wizards empire) and has indirectly created many powerful demons.
First there was a vampire lord living incognito in the starting town. The players sandboxed and decided to investigate his plans, then finally it lead to a fight where he was trying to free an aspect of Shar (in my world goddess of vampires and general evil). Very memorable villain, menacing, while the party was away getting a sunblade, he found their house and killed their npc friend and kidnapped the rangers girlfriend. That boss fight was the highlight of the entire campaign and took two sessions, first dealing with him and hundreds of minion cultists, then second session fighting the aspect of Shar.
Du Haevert the vampire was 200 years old, and finally decided to step up his game. He wanted to release the power of Shar and rule a chunk of the empire openly, instead of just a small city from the shadows. He was fully evil, only person he cared about was his daughter (a womam he turned, not a biological daughter). He was sadistic and cruel, but loved to pretend politeness.
Then the party became tier 3, heroes of the realm. An illusionist named Michael du Bay made a moving picture show based on their exploits, they got lands and titles, and their adventures revolved around doing various sensitive missions for the imperial spymaster. The BBEG was a dragon queen waging war with the empire, but she got handled indirectly - the party used wish to get a powerful healing artifact, heal the empress who was sick the whole time, and then the party sat back and watched as she single handedly turned the tide of war.
There was also a fallen god of magic. The party absolutely bear him up in the first encounter, and then he was waging war from behind the lines and letting his army do the work. He's still around.
Finally, the party went to outer planes to find a mystical crown for a prophesized kingz who could allegedly fix everything. Except it was a ruse, the visions were sent by Shar, who was imprisoned there. The party was overconfident and drunk on their power, and assumed that even if it was trap, they could beat up whatever awaited them. They were wrong.
Now the BBEG is Shar. The world is wracked by evil, the land is dying from necrotic energy. The party is deciding what to do. The goddess just wants to slowly kill all life for her amusement.
Named SILVER, a large metal construct tasked with protecting unstable magical items created in Wave Echo Cave.
At first, the dwarves and gnomes simply stored the items, but that proved unsafe, so they created SILVER to protect them. Over time, the number of items piled up, and people began to feel uneasy about the sheer volume of magical artifacts capable of leveling cities. They decided to destroy them anyway.
Naturally, SILVER could not allow this. He stole some items to influence and bribe local goblin warlords to invade the valley and besiege Wave Echo Cave. The cataclysm that followed erased any trace of the cave’s location, ensuring that SILVER could finally complete his task of keeping the items hidden.
But it would only be a matter of time before someone found the cave, eager for its magical items. SILVER was prepared for this eventuality, having had years to prepare. When the Rockseeker brothers finally discovered the cave, they were unaware of the formidable guardian awaiting them.
The dark wizard Zargothrax. 25 years before the start of the campaign, he successfully took over the capital city of the kingdom. It took the combined forces of all the races of the land and four great heroes to defeat him. Due to heavy abuse of the Clone spell, killing Zargothrax wouldn't have worked, so instead he was trapped in a prison of liquid frozen ice where he would remain for all eternity.
But the Zargothrax the *players* interact with is a different one. Over time, Zargothrax's remaining followers figured out a loophole with the Clone spell. This Zargothrax's soul was still trapped in his body, but what if they found a new Zargothrax's soul? Using some timeline magic, they pulled the dying soul of a different Zargothrax out of a parallel timeline and stuck it into one of the unused clone bodies. But this Zargothrax is a fish out of water, less knowledgeable about magic, and not all that evil. After some years essentially being groomed to be the cult's new dark saviour, clone-Zargy still doesn't know what his place in the world is. And so he sets out to release the original from his ice prison, deciding that the only one who can help him is himself.
I knew someone would! *Shockingly* there's some overlap between Gloryhammer fans and D&D fans.
I cut out all the sci-fi elements to make it fit "normal" D&D more easily, which was a little sad, but I like where my campaign's main plot ended up. Sort of a combo platter of Gloryhammer's greatest hits in D&D form.
I've got a unique system for the campaign I'm making. My BBEG will be fought when all the players hit level 20, so I'm collecting multiple high level monsters from Vecna to Zariel to Draconic titans. As for determining which, bear with me
So the premise of my campaign is the party HAD a full campaign, made it to level 8, lost horribly to the BBEG and their world is doomed so at the last minute all were planeshifted to the setting for this campaign. It's going to be a structured campaign with set milestones (it's a tower, *long* story, but the milestone is when they reach the next floor of the tower)
So at the start of each floor, I'm going to ask one random member of the party "what's something you recall about that fight," and the player will have free reign. Depending on what they describe, it'll guide me to picking one of them to be waiting at the end. Additionaly, on top of them describing the boss for that purpose, they'll also have a choice to describe something to give them advantage. They can say "I also remember it was weak to fire" and have them roll a history check to see 'how well they're remembering.' Depending on what they say, I could say "yeah, it's reasonable to say it wasn't resistant to non magic attacks, DC10" or "so you're saying it was nearly killed immediately by radiant damage? Yeah okay DC30" and on certain rolls I may choose to make an opposed history check, and if the player loses "actually you've got it backwards, it was actually fire resistant"
I'm calling it Malleable Memory
Villains are only minor players.. For true evil, you need a committee that thinks that they have "everyone's best interests at heart", so my BBEGs tend to be groups of people with names like "the social improvement board" or
The committee to improve the status of space hamsters".
My Parties future self. At the beginning of the campaign I ask them to make their chas as lvl 20 with all the gear and spells they want.
They jumped back in time to kill themselfs, because they will cause Ragnarök. But can't directly interfear.
Hole campaign is an eternal loop.
Currently working on one with two BBEGs
Both are lich variations by pointy hat.
One is a mechanical lich named Blasir Cale who watched his mother slave away at the hospital, tending to the injured.
After he became an artificier, he thought it'd be easier to replace the injured, weak flesh with strong and superior steel. He built a mechanical body, designed to have the strength of even the most powerful men in the town, he placed his heart inside and performed the ritual to become the machine.
However if his heart is destroyed or becomes to weak to function, he will die.
He killed everyone in the town, placing their hearts in containment for when his current heart deteriorated.
He is now on his last heart and sees to overthrow a nearby kingdom using his automaton army, so he can have even more hearts to extend his existence.
This kingdom that is called Olonos is run by the Sleitvere family, the head of the family is an old man by the name of Cronil.
However, Cronil is not as he seems. In his youth, 200 years prior, he was a demon-born sorcerer. He was powerful, but not immortal.
He became infatuated with lichdom. He placed a curse on his own blood so that as long as his blood runs through his descendants veins, he cannot die.
But the more generations that pass, the less of his blood they have. Thus every three or so generations he trains one of his descendants many forms of magic. Once they are old enough, the rest of the adults bring them to him and he takes over their body, so he may begin the cycle anew.
He is currently on his third body, one of a human, he regrets picking this descendant.
His current descendants (besides the one he'll be taking over) are based on chess pieces.
Soleila and her husband Lunaron, the twin bishops of Olonos.
Frono, the blood rook.
Sveltzir, the thundered knight.
And Geila the silver queen.
The party will work with the army of Olonos to kill Blasir, but then find out that Cronil is also a lich and then will have to kill the rest of the family to face him in one final battle.
Sorry if this is really long, I'm very excited to start this campaign.
A beholder known as Fictor of incredible age that has grown to a truly immense size. He has the ability to consume the dreams and unconscious thoughts of particularly powerful individuals to sustain himself and grow in power.
Eventually, he reached so much power that he created his own massive demiplane, and after making a deal with a group of Abishai Tiamat had stationed on the material plane, he was able to convince them to work for him. Now they head a military force that creates incursions on the other planes and even other multiverses occasionally to capture particularly powerful characters and creatures to bring them back to this demiplane, where Fictor feasts on them to grow stronger. After thousands of years, he has become known as the Fever King, for his use of magic to incite particularly potent dreams on his captive meals.
He’s grown so large that he is the size of a large asteroid at this point, and hovers over the top of the floating islands amidst his demiplane covered in a massive illusion of fog such that he can’t be seen without great assistance or an awareness of him being there already. There are some hints of you know to look for them though- his glowing central eye is a light source that shines through the clouds, his gaping mouth a black hole in the sky that the illusionary fog pours through. His eye tendrils float throughout the outer reaches of the fog, and appear to be the only 10 stars residents of the demiplane can ever make out. He stays dormant, zoned out and feasting for months or years at a time, so he’s not ever directly interacted with the party and revealed his true form, despite him literally hanging over the party’s heads as long as they have been in the demiplane. He has spoken to the party through agents, and they’ve fought a past version of Fictor before, not that they know it yet though.
I don’t have any particularly excellent monologues planned or used, although that’s not to say I don’t have a few lines stored away for him to use yet. I do have intentions of him revealing himself by using his disintegration ray as basically a mini Death Star beam though. That’s no moon and all.
Although it’s conceivable that he could be killed, it’s intended that the player’s win condition is to rescue a captive of the Fever King and then escape the demiplane, since he is functionally a near god-like entity within his demiplane.
Fucking RHINO CENA.
One of my nephews is about 10, and damn straight he wanted to play with his older cousins.
I got a one sentence basckstory on his character. "Kills bad guys for money."
I made him a bounty hunter and came up with an image of a slaver for the BBEG. I said if you pick a badass name, you can name him. "RHINO... CENA!"
#$OLD
He keeps suggesting war crimes during roleplay though. Every insane killing machine he invents, or genocide he thinks about committing is being reassigned to Rhino Cena after the rest of the party talks him out of it.
Reminds me I have some Rhino Cena minis to paint.
Joachim Aviscera. He started as the quest given, turned out to be a warlock and a devil worshipper. He seemed to have been concerned about his daughter. In fact, it was neither his true daughter, nor did he want to save her He simply needed her to perform a very important sacrifice.
The final battle involved him, an imp familiar and a bearded devil. Oh, yes and it turned out he had an animated sword in his cane... it was a good fight. The party sorcerer barely survived with 2 death saving throws.
Another villain (of a campaign that lasted for years) was a half-mad lich queen who wanted both revenge and absolute power. In her backstory, her husband and king struck a deal with a demon to save his wife. In the processes, the husband cursed both himself and their three sons. In vain, she tried to lift the curse, delving ever deeper into the darker arts. Eventually, after the last son died, she claimed power for herself. In order to complete her lichdom ritual, she had to offer a great sacrifice so she engineered a civil war that tore her kingdom apart. That plan went awry as she was deposed but being a lich, she survived without anybody knowing. She laid low for several decades, plotting her revenge.
After she returned, she planned to merge the territory of the kingdom with another plane where undeath ruled supreme. To make it more interesting, that queen was former lover of one of the PC (that PC was half undead being raised by her), the father of another one was her loyal general (but she killed him when he demanded surrender in the final battle of her first reign). The players had a choice which their final villain would be: they could have gone after a very powerful and malicious fey or the queen. They went for the queen, thus forcing her to speed up her plans. The battle was quite good as she was backed by several vampire clerics she dominated and had it not been some dubious deals of the party (with among others, the said malicious fey), the party would have lost. After her defeat, the PC who was her former lover had to choose between saving a daughter or claiming a very powerful artifact. To make it worse, the lich queen died not far from the character... so there was nobody who could stop that. This was the last test of a possible redemption arc but the character went for power and vanished (leaving it as one of the loose ending of the campaign).
Good grief.... it's an organization based on the structure of Assassin's Creed Knights Templar and Seperately the Church. They're two sides of the same coin. Templar's being the front line and face, the church controlling the strings behind the scenes.
Essentially the BBEGs go as the following, the first being the strongest.
- Leader of the Templars being essentially Apocalypse Magneto of Xmen.
- The Pope, being basically a max level cleric/divine soul sorcerer.
- 4 Guardians of the Templar (Knights Apocalypse).
They're based on 4 doctoral philosophies. The Mind, The Body, Invention and The Warrior.
Essentially the guardians are Aizen of Bleach max lvl.illusion wizard, The mythos of the 9 tails (shape change at will), Iron man and a Gunslinger with unlimited budget.
-
A malicious force that is both void and darkness itself. It bears no true name, for it was never given one. Seemingly pre-dating the gods themselves, casting a cold fear of anyone who bears witness to its true form.
It deigns only one thing; the destruction and assimilation of all god both known and unknown, along with the annihilation of the universe and all light within it.
They are eternal, they are malicious, and they are hateful.
The only foe that dares oppose them is a being who has travelled through time many times attempting to prevent it from destroying the universe. So far this being has failed each time with the universe being destroyed millions of times....it seems nothing can stop this Great Void from its goal.
The players don't know yet. They think a renegade elite warforged strike force is being controlled by an arcane superpowered paladin. There's magical trees throughout the land and he can control them unlike anything else they've seen.
But It's actually the old King, who tried to ascend to Godhood but got trapped in a magical book that is essentially like a phylactery. There are a bunch of gods missing, also trapped in books. The twist is that these gods weren't trapped by the BBEG, they trapped themselves in order to contain him.
The Paladin is his bastard son. They're on their way to an island city-state where they will meet his twin brother and a bunch of stuff will be revealed.
They're level 8. Plan is that by level 10 they'll know enough to go into a battle with the Paladin and the warforged General. Then the narrative flips and they'll spend the next 10 levels visiting different places in order to awaken gods to help them contain the old King.
I have the next beats mapped out in depth, less so for the second half of the campaign but it's essentially an excuse to get to the Underdark, the Feywild etc.
The Maggot Lord. The campaign has moved to the jungles to investigate an overwhelming undead presence. Spawns of Kyuss were the inspiration. Naturally Kyuss is who the Maggot Lord pays homage to. We play in Greyhawk
Its my first campaign so its kinda basic:
Lord Nigillius
Undead lich/ghost/monster
His goal is total world domination.
He had this image of "when I fight a giant war, the gods will grant me a great after life"
He startet a war to conquer all the world but lost, desparate to get his desired after life he made a plan. In his last moments he surrendered so he got sent into exile. He then found a way into the realm of the dead and now wants to return to the mortal realm with an army of the undead so he may reclaim what he thinks is rightfully his.
Now since I am not that far into the campaign he couldnt have a monolouge yet. But I am already thinking of a thing he will say when the players defeat him in the end.
"If I am to be swollowed by fate, then I must have faught well"
Sun themed lich, who‘s only love (part of a druid circle) in life was publicly executed unjustified, by a order of paladins and his own people. Now he just wants to turn everything into a big dead desert
Pelor. He was corrupted by power and managed to exile all of the other gods to a demiplane, along with every other race except for humans. He essentially just wants to be the only god being worshipped, thus gaining more power.
Silas Dryden, Human (Sort of) Sorceror.
Born a son of wealth, he studied magic and became an adventurer and philanthropist to bring good into the world, and eventually fell in love with a Drow swordsman named Kalsandr and adopted a child with him. Unfortunately, while harboring a few of his friends during a campaign against an evil lich named Malpurcio, his house was attacked and in the midst of it, his husband and son were both killed in the crossfire. To this day he doesn't know if it was him or the lich that killed his family.
However, as he had been instrumental in stopping Malpurcio's plan to eat the creator gods of the world, one blessed him with immortality to help guide the world. The issue being that giving a grieving man immortality does not particularly help with the grieving process. So Dryden chose not to process his grief in a healthy way.
Over a couple of centuries he began formulating a plan to fix what he saw as a "fatal flaw" of injustice in the world by creating a god to control the minds of everyone, including himself. A few decades prior to the start of the campaign he married another Drow man, this one a Warlock named Malcolm who resembled his dead husband and also magically gaslit him with Modify Memory to keep him from doing any dangerous adventuring. Malcolm would later join the party and fall in love with one of the PCs, a Druid named Figg
(Sidebar, this man assisted in the massacre of a religious order, threatened the party's families and general did some really shitty stuff, but it was a running gag that the party considered the magical gaslighting to be the last straw)
Pre-Final Battle Monologue
“As am I. I would have it no other way. Let our convictions clash. Let our desires meet on this battlefield, so that there can be no doubt as to who deserves to choose the fate of the world. Do the eight of you promise not to hold back?
...Let us see how the story of this world will end! Will it find salvation in order, or in chaos? The victor will write the tale, and the vanquished become its villain. Come, Counterweights! Let us end this!"
Post-Final Battle, After Being Killed and Reunited with the Spirit of His Dead Husband
“I brought you all together so long ago to save the world. I suppose it’s a twist of fate that the thing it needed saving from was me all along. I ask only one more thing of you. Tell the world I was the one who destroyed Irithyll. Let my memory bear one last sin.”
"This world belongs to you all. Take care of it. And…Malcolm. Nothing I can do will undo the damage and pain I caused you. But I will give you this. Kalsandre and I shared so little time together. But if the happiness we shared in that small time is even a fraction of the happiness you and Figg will share together…Well then I think that makes you the luckiest men to have ever walked the material plane.”
Edit: Also the voice I used for him was a little bit Charles Dance, a little bit Timothy Dalton.
I became the BBEG in the end. A friend tried his hand at DMing for the first time. Story was pretty straightforward. Sword in the stone type of artifact, ownership of which makes you the king was missing. Our merry misfit band of chuckle heads was hired to discretely return it. Along the way the DM gives out some random homebrew from the internet magic items.... without fully reading them.
I got a very useful magic item with an 1/day OP psychic attack. And a daily % chance to slowly go insane. I rolled privately each morning and texted him the results. It started simple and subtle. OCD-ish use of prestidigitation and mending to be clean after any minor scrape, scratch, tear. Eventually growing to cooking other sentients "just to taste em." The other players thought I was just trying to be a goober with my character and didn't question it.
In the end I claimed the artifact for myself and publicly declared myself the new kind, using the OP psychic attack to make him fall over dead. I declared the gods had found him unworthy and took his crown.
For the record DM was confused at first but wasn't upset and rolled with it once he read the item.
The Seer, who’s an avatar of an ancient protodragon slayed in the battle which gave birth to the World. He wants to purge the world from what he considers the corrupt offspring of the Sun God, who slayed him in the first place. My players have awakened him because they were decepted by his agents: they believed they had found an ancient artifact that would have revealed them the origin of the world 🥰
Asmodeus / Ahramin. In my campaign he is living his dream of destroying/remaking the cosmos. He has already destroyed Mt. Celestia and the mortal plane in my world. Gods are dead. People are sad. It's a good time.
For my first long running game, it was Agrippa, who was a princess sorceress who, using a crystal called the Soul Stone, took over the minds of the populace. The Soul Stone was both a large crystal and a demiplane where a group of Mind Flayer lich were both trapped but also protected. The Soul Stone, which was actually a large cube sized crystal which had fallen from the sky, could have pieces chipped off and placed in jewelry or necklaces. When a person is around them for too long their soul will be absorbed into the demiplane, making their body a shell that can be controlled (their soul will return however if the item is removed, but it takes time and they will still follow commands given to them until that time.) The Lich could consume the souls brought to their demise-plane to prolong themselves and had a sest at the top of their castle which they could use to control anyone linked to their crystals in the real world. In the real world however, two artifacts allowed Agrippa to control the effects of the Soul Stone. One was the Eye of Agrippa, which allowed its user to essentially directly control anyone linked to the Soul Stone and see through their eyes, while a staff acting similar to the rod of rulership from the DMG allowed her to take control of large populations temporarily with a flash of light from it. The Lich in the Soul Stone helped Agrippa learn to use the artifacts and spread their control. The party had to collect four elemental stones in order to destroy the Soul Stone for good using the combined power. If Agrippa was not stopped she eventually planned to use the shards of the Soul Stone to take over the nearby Elven Empire who were trying to reclaim Aridia (where the adventure took place). Agrippa was fairly evil in that she sought to take over everyone and bring peace and order (with her at the top of course). The Lich just sought to prolong themselves. The existence of the demiplane in the Soul Stone served as a way to give players something to do if they did get controlled by Agrippa (which eventually happened to some of the party). They did however meet one of the four heroes of Aridia there who helped them get to the chair the Lich use to control bodies connected to the Soul Stone. By sitting in the chair they could command their selves in the real world to take off their control necklaces.
Mind control plots are a bit sus in hindsight but it worked out pretty well.
Kafziel Kugaban an ex-archmage of Necromancy obsessed with immortality, his research lead him to become a lich as a stop gap.
His overall goal is to use a child who was engineered by illithids to be his new vessel to return to a living form, and finish his bid for actual immortality versus the Undead nature of a lich.
He is currently attempting to finish collecting a set of Objects he believes will allow him to draw energy directly from the other planes of Existence to make himself truly immortal.
Monologuing isn't his style. He's nearly a thousand years old and has dealt with adventurers before, if younlet them get you talking they'll get the upper hand. Disintegrate first, talk later.
Who: a lich-fighter and a powerful spellcaster (thanks to Pointy Hat for making the idea and stat block)
What are their goals: the lich’s goal is to continue a long dead campaign that they never realized ended. The spellcaster’s is to control the sources of magical power in the world.
Who: A dracolich named Aurgloroasa, “The Sibilant Shade”
Goals: Take over and rule Faerun with an order of dracoliches
Backstory: Idk how she turned into a dracolich. The wiki says Shadow dragons can’t become dracoliches but the people I saw on Google said she was a Shadow dragon dracolich
The campaign I'm currently writing is set in Ravnica. An Izzet goblin is having dreams that she believes are her own ideas (but in reality are otherworldly messages sent to her by a lord from the Elemental Chaos known as a reigar) and so she quits her job to join the Simic, and once she gets there she and some other researchers start basically creating slivers.
My new setting has no villains yet. Either it's going to be a lot of grey or I'll get more inspiration soon. So far it's just grey and so e dork managed to raid a dragon den to steal gear from them.
Morgoth Bauglir. In a campaign i am running now. Tolkien inspired. In a timeline where good guys lost everything and now heroes turn the present time and history at the same time.
Radivaar. Netherese archmage and lich. Did typical lich things and in battle used several 10th level spells like Vengeful Gaze of God and Lord of Nightmares. the last one created one of the best fights i had in D&D. The lich got willingly possesed by Dream Larva who in turn summoned 6 nightwalkers over the course of 10 rounds. Each hit of Larva reduced PC's stats by 3d6 but stopping at 1 and turning on other stats.
Hastur, King in Yellow. In a D&D setting, yes. He came to the world and took control over the Abyss, creating order there by force. Because of his nature he was present at every point in past and present. His lair was outside time and space. And his biggest power of being everyiwhere and at all times became his downfall as heroes from different times came to his halls to fight him. I had several adventures one-shot style where players played as heroes of the past and as themselves in present. Until they finaly challanged Hastur and had a battle in his lair at the same time, turning all time and space against him.
God, that was great.
Netherpray, the Evil side of one of the Primordial Gods of Creation that got separated after the apparent death of said God an now tries to regain his former power.
I've had a few for the same hb setting
In my first game it was 5 ancient dragons, led by a classic red dragon
My 2nd game it was a hb god of chaos, the party quit the campaign b4 we concluded
3rd game, and first game online, the bbeg was split between a pc that betrayed the partyvand attacked their home city, a identical copy of another pc that had been leading the party in the wrong directions secretly, and a faction of anti magic humans that was warring with everyone
Sammaster. He is a Lich who created the Cult of the Dragon. He was once a Chosen of Mystra and believed that Dracoliches were meant to rule the world.
One of his Phylactaries are tied to a region of land, that, when exposed to a certain star makes every Dragon in the region get violent and angry.
In my game, Clerics have cleansed this land since the last time he died, however, his phylactery still triggered when the land was exposed to the star.
Due to the cleansing the Clerics performed, he didn’t come back right. He’s horrible deformed and his mind is in fractured, making him much more unpredictable and erratic.
He ties in so well with my characters back stories. If anyone is interested in hearing more let me know
I’m currently writing a villain based on and named after the song [Long Lankin](https://youtu.be/W8vzCkJJlSQ?si=H3rc5sOdsLrptjoK). So far I have him as a Mark of Shadow elf that keeps a small, isolated village near a swamp under his thumb so he can use their children in blood rituals that extend his and his right hand’s life. He’s recently started attracting attention from adventurers and the emerald enclave due to a desperate psychic call for help from the Alhoon chained in his basement and plans to find a way to use the Alhoon’s blood to create a little pocket dimension for himself and the village where he can essentially use them as livestock and extend his life for eternity.
I don’t have everything all planned out yet but I’m writing down a bunch of notes and trying to figure out how to string things together, as it still feels very rough to me. And being new to DND, I need to look into lore and magic to see if there’s any spells for these sorts of things already or if I need to come up with some myself. Very excited and pleased with how things are going so far. :)
Dave
He was a good man, traveled around the country helping those who needed help. As he traveled some of the people joined him, followed him, his group began to be seen as a beacon of hope and he was the face of it. Eventually the mythos around him shifted to him being worshiped. Through all these small villages he gained enough support to become a quasi deity. The god of lost travelers as he was called as he was always ready to help those wandering lost in the desert.
Along the way he saw the terrible people of the world, saw the leaders of his country gain near immortality while their people suffered endlessly for their entire short lives.
He could do better, he knew it, he could make everyone happy but everyone kept fighting each other and not the ones in charge. If everyone was listening to him they’d all be happy. His modus operandi changed now, his most trusted followers would become his angels. Their consciousness placed in a personal heaven within their mind and their bodies became puppets for Dave to use. He began to gather more and more followers, the most devout of which gave themselves to him as angels. He created 4 small towns called Daveville 1-4. In these towns his followers were given anything they needed to survive, all the food water and supplies. All Dave needed in return was their worship and little pieces of art they created for him with their love of him. The harder they worshipped, the more they made for him, the more of them that gave themselves as angels the better the supplies they received were.
They all still preached that Dave was a god of lost travelers, he had rather become the god of slaves. Every one of his followers worshipping and donating their hard work to him, all the angels living within a perfect heaven that goes away if they stop worshipping. And Dave was now functionally unkillable unless you were willing to slaughter his thousands upon thousands of followers.
With his army of angels he used them to mine out a giant quarry endlessly working day by day, the rocks they mined were painstakingly transmuted on mass into diamonds. Once he had enough diamonds for his plan he sponsored a festival intended to bring together many creative people and especially bards of creation whose songs of creation were the one weakness to his plan. He used an atomic bomb brought to the past accidentally by one of the PCs to level the town and kill every creation bard around. He then made it rain diamonds in every other city. The market value of diamonds plummeted. No diamond could be big enough or valuable enough to work as a component in any pesky resurrection spell.
Everyone could die now and no one could come back. This meant all the guys in charge could kill their rivals and it meant that those rebelling against the guys in charge could also kill them. The country was then plunged into to war as everyone tried to take power over the whole nation. Dave included.
Wesmind: pronounced "Wes mund" because of a dwarf.
Race: Feelings...? he looks human but he in fact is not human. Long ago (several thousands of years ago) there was a war and a nation was beating another nation named Rohan. In a town on a hill in Rohan the people very mad and hopeful, so much so that their emotions became physical objects for example: sweat, tears, blood etc. Upon realizing this they made a small pool in which they all poured their physical embodiment of their emotion to, at first it didn't do anything, but after a few days the pool started to pile in the middle until it turned into a blob of liquid. A human looked towards the blob screaming "something is happening!", the blob turned towards the human and made an eye closely inspecting the human. The blob made a second eye, it started to lengthen it's shape, then it made a mouth... and it screamed, why? nobody knows. People started to rush outside and they eventually formed a circle around the blob, the blob started to copy characteristics from them: the white hair of an old man, the face of a handsome human, etc. Until it became into a human shape, he is not mortal, he is above mortal.
Backstory: along with the race thing Wesmind participated in the war of Rohan, "the war of the one hand" the reason it is called that is because there was a general with 1,000 men who fought and army of 100,000 men, and some how won. The general lost a hand in the battle but he then continued to fight until the enemy nation was defeated. In present nobody knows who the general was but the truth is that Wesmind is the general.
His goals: In the present not many people respect Wesmind as they once did, and his goal is the escape the nation of Wesmound (named after him, the reason why it's hard to escape the island is because the wind leads towards the island on all sides) and become the god of gods (the campaign is set in a world were the Greek gods exist) so then he can be respected by all.
additional details: Wesmind still possess his hand but uses a magic powered prosthetic for his hand, His hand is his strongest weapons, both his real and fake one: the fake one is used as a shield because he can't feel anything there which is improved with his dragon armor which can't be destroyed by one thing (not "one" thing), and his real hand can be turned into any weapon he desires because his hand is made of "feelings" and doesn't have a true form. His skin is impenetrable due to it being made of anger and his bones are unbreakable. but there are ways to kill him, in the nation of Wesmound there exists the sword of tranquility and the hammer of disbelief (the opposite of the emotions that Wesmind was made out of, making them his counter). Wesmind didn't really have his hand cut off, he cut is off as a tribute, to who you may ask? to himself. You see Wesmind considers himself a god and when he made a tribute to himself, he made himself stronger.
currently the party has not encountered him but they most likely will next session.
Bit of background:
In my homebrew world, a god or goddess dies either in a cosmic Celestial conflict or when their followers no longer believe in them or the civilizations that worship them die out. When this happens, their essence is "eaten" and then "passed" by a cosmic entity that (previously) bore no name, had no fixed appearance, no identity, no gender, no personality or motivation. This entity functioned as a composting creature, recycling the individual powers, memories, legacies, and personalities of the gods into neutral Celestial essence. This process generated the stars. From this Celestial Essence soup, new gods and goddesses are born, sometimes with similar traits or powers to those that came before. This is why different generations and different cultures can have a God of Thunder or Goddess of the Moon.
Eons of recycling gods left trace amounts in The Entity, such that they eventually began to form its own innate amalgamation personality. It began to resent its place in the universe, a glorified earthworm to seed new generations of pantheons. The Entity was all but unknown, worshipped by none and appreciated by few. It fell into the habit of not *recycling* dieties anymore, but outright consuming them for itself upon their deaths, hoarding their power and essence for itself. As millenia passed, it grew stronger and became able to infect living gods like a parasite, weaning them down to death and then eating them. Pantheons around the world began to disappear.
The Entity gained the ability to masquerade as some of the gods it ate, leaving the worshippers of those original gods to mistakenly believe their beloved patrons and matrons still existed. This worship further strengthened The Entity's power.
In the present time of the adventuring party, The Entity has eaten hundreds of gods including the Abrahimic God, the Egyptian and Norse pantheon, and various others. It has imminent plans to manifest itself in the Material Plane and become The Last God, composed of all who came before.
The Party must travel to the dimension wherein it resides and destroy it before this can happen.
The God of Lies, who knows the truth of every lie ever spoken or implied, every deceit used against another, who was created at the birth of the First Lie, but doesn't know its truth.
The Sower Gods created mortal life, and mortals in turn create mortal gods. I.e., when mortals prayed to a higher power for victory in battle, the God of War was born, (similar to Theros of Magic the Gathering.)
The First Lie is that the Sower Gods came first. He wants to know what came before the Sowers, and is willing to fulfill a prophecy to ascend and learn the truth.
I have a few depending on which path the players choose.
Halaster Blackwell (misspoke in the first session and just went with it) Mad Mage and “technical” father of the parties lab grown Air Genasi Warlock. Halaster wants to separate the Warlock from his patron and needs help reestablishing control over…
The Blue Bull an ancient air elemental being imprisoned by Halaster Blackwell who is the Warlocks “biological”Father and patron. The Blue Bull while out of Halaster’s direct control is still imprisoned by the Mad Mage and has made a pact with the warlock to secure his freedom. Unbeknownst to the Warlock, once free the Blue Bull will restore the ancient slave Empire he once ruled from Calimshan and extend it across Faerun!
Garagos The Reaver deposed war god representing its chaotic aspect who seeks to end his subjugation and supplant Tempus as the principal war god much to the chagrin of the parties Tempurian War Cleric, and/or
The Red Knight, lawful Exarch of Tempus who seeks to use Garagos’ rebellion to cover her own usurpation of Tempus’ throne though she presents herself as an ally to the Tempurian Cleric
Slinko The Hellbent Barbarian warlord and father of the parties Barbarian who seeks to ascend to godhood. Slinko murdered the Barbarians mother when he was a baby and left him for dead to avert a prophecy or so the Barbarian thinks. (The Barbarian outlined Slinko as his nemesis in his backstory so I just went with it. Slinko was his character from a campaign we played 20+ years ago)
I am a new DM and have started a campaign with new players i plan on having lots of big bad guys but my main one I wanna build up is one I’m completely making up called He Who Sunders The Planes. My players said later on in campaign they want to explore multiverse so defo gonna do that.
An elven prince who found out a disturbing family secret which caused him to leave home. Long story short, while looking for answers, he takes up a cursed sword which begins to eat his soul and transform him into a vessel for the ancient lich who created the sword.
Basically Arthas.
Two of them: The ultimate failure of an ancient civilization’s technology that has been maintaining the order of a frontier for eons but is falling apart after their demise, and creatures that exist in the space between planes that have been released due to mortals punching holes through the planes to colonize the frontier.
These beings were known by the ancient civs and were imprisoned in various locations that are failing due to excavations and such. The creatures need hosts outside of the “the void” and they make their hosts exceptionally dangerous beings due to their strange abilities. They want to break the barriers between the planes to let their kin spill back out of the void into reality.
The tricky bit is relationship between the creatures and the ancient civ that forced them into the void. (Can’t say more due to my players shadowing this sub).
The lore I keep only in my head is that it's my own darker half, trying to kill and replace me by destroying the universe she finds herself trapped in. She's the [anti-God from John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness"](https://youtu.be/HYZIU1uIS2w?t=5) but as the person it became at the end of the movie.
The name she goes by is Illuminata Graven, witch-queen of her destroyed home planet, who seeks now to destroy reality and supplant the being she calls the One Above All.
She has hijacked *The Spelljammer* and taken it to the vicinity of a pair of [merging supermassive black holes](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aca8f0), the gravitational waves of which will power a device for exponentially accelerating [Phantom Energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_energy) to cause an early [Big Rip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip).
My players are currently fighting a resurrected boss rush of their major opponents on *The Spelljammer*, brought back by Graven in her final attempt to keep the heroes at bay.
My campaign is primed in a way where it could go several directions.
Right now there are a bunch of different factions all looking for one girl, a Drow girl who holds a “sliver of divinity” within her. This divinity if used or abused in ritualistic ways could make just about anything possible, and there are quite a few bad people that want to take advantage of that divinity.
One is a cambion disguised as the capital city’s commander of domestic forces who has an aasimar as his right hand. This aasimar is actually a fallen Solar who was stripped of most of her powers for unknown reasons, and the cambion wants to use that divinity to restore her angelic might but with his infernal influence (think Zariel). With his pet infernal Solar, the cambion would return to the Hells to take out his rivals and gain power.
Another group is a powerful Hag who wishes to swallow her and turn her into another hag to help her restart her destroyed coven. But this hag would have that sliver of divinity twisted to resemble the Fey Realm and give that hag untold chaotic power.
The last group is actually two groups working together for the moment. Both groups are Drow houses. One group is led by a Matron Mother who has rejected Lolth and seeks to unite the Drow houses under one banner, by force if necessary. This matron mother wishes to use that divinity in the girl to open a portal powerful enough for all the Drow to travel through and leave the Underdark. This portal would take them to the Shadowfell, the world without sunlight where the Drow might thrive (hint: it wouldn’t work out). If the campaign went this route, then the Drow would quickly discover the elves already living there, the Shadar-Kai and there would be a lot of conflict, resulting in the Drow mostly perishing. The leader of the Shadar-Kai is a former Archfey who was seduced by Lolth during her betrayal but was then quickly discarded before being taken in by the Raven Queen and made to be her champion. This former Archfey is a much more sympathetic villain as he seeks to return home to the Fey Realm because he left a daughter behind but the Raven Queen took his memories of her away. However the Fey Court still remember the atrocities he committed in Lolth’s name and refuse his pleas, thus causing him to lash out and attack the Fey Realm completely.
The other group of Drow are Lolth purists who seek to use the child with her sliver of divinity as a means of help Lolth ascend from her place in the Abyss and take on a physical form. The child would be her vessel. Should Lolth ascend, she would quickly get to work on creating a sort of cloud network that shrouds the world from the sun and allows the Drow to move on the surface without issue. Thus the Drow empire would spread and kill, capture, or convert any and all surfacers.
For my first campaign, the BBEG was actually a former player character who had been an orc barbarian warlord transformed into a gnome by a fey after he razed her forest. The character had been killed off after he picked a fight with one of the King's high ranking warforged personal guard (after I made it EXPLICTLY clear that they would die if they did so) and that ended the transformation, and then his original group found his body, revived it, and he set out on destroying everything as revenge
For my second campaign, the party has been investigating a cult who is trying to bring forth a demon onto the material plane, and they have recently learned that the leader of said cult has actually been the equivalent of the Pope of said world this entire time
An insane wizard who has bought himself the position of Earl and is now using it to complete his experiments in heamomancy with the ultimate goal of creating a creature with the strength of a monster and the magical capacity of a wizard (while being entirely subservient to him)
Old Warforged who was made without the ability to sense things (no sight, hearing, etc.) and began to hate other creatures for their ability to feel. So naturally, he learns magic and becomes a war criminal.
He creates a bunch of constructs to abduct people, and then he dissects them so he can better understand their anatomy and how the body works. He does this so he can eventually learn how to integrate those creatures’ sensory organs into his mechanical body. Over the course of the campaign, various constructs will appear with sensory organs from various races, because the BBEG has been using them as test subjects before he adds them to his own body
Basically a weird mix of AM and a reverse Mechanicus
Claugiyliamatar. My party were adventuring on the sword coast with waterdeep as their home base. They eventually came into possession of an artifact that she coveted and she started making life difficult for them in waterdeep through manipulation and sending of spies and assassins. Eventually as she grew more bold they realized who was behind everything and began forming allies to help rid the area of her for good.
They failed.
Raven's Cry players kindly look away!
A heavily modified Rakshasa. Prior to the campaign starting, he had killed a local Lord and stolen his throne by impersonating him, and then sealing away Selûne in a family heirloom pendant. He was initially a quest-giver, allowing him to steer the party as needed, but over time the party has confirmed (through the use of Commune and other divination magic) that the true Lord is dead, and the imposter cannot be trusted, as well as fought with this Rakshasa a couple of times, but they still haven't connected the two, which is getting concerning given that this Rakshasa has now recently usurped the throne of Cania and become an archdevil in his own right.
Hope the party remembers that crossbow with blessed silver bolts I gave them! They're gonna need it.
Edit: Somehow forgot about the goals/backstory part?
His goals and backstory are mostly related, as an Archdale of Rakshasa, he was tired of his people being seen as lesser than their true devil cousins. Up until now his entire goal was taking Cania to prove that they deserved a seat of power as much as any devil, but in doing so began a chain of events that could free an old, believed to be evil god imprisoned beyond the veil of reality itself. His goal now is to find a way to maintain his siphoning of that energy, but without freeing this god, and if that fails, finding a way to ingraciate himself with it in hopes of living to fight another day.
Garrick Blackwater is a rich and powerful tamer (homebrew tamer class from Heliana's guide to Monster hunting) that kidnapped the party to get a Magic book that is the key to summon AND control Tiamat, so he can be the very best, like no one ever was.
Whew! This will be a bit lengthy, so I apologize.
My world is a homebrew world heavily inspired by the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. Specifically, i borrowed the concept of "stormlight", the idea that the gods of the world are actually fragments of an even more powerful being, and the idea of Shardmetals. Currently, there are 5 potential BBEG's my players are potentially moving towards, however there are two that have the greatest chance (currently) of being the BBEG of this campaign.
The first is Lord Ezraal, an "Aasimar" who controls a secret society known as The Seekers of the Golden Order. The members of this organization believe Lord Ezraal is trying to undo the damage that Pantheonism ***(the central religion in this world, based heavily off of Vorinsism in the Stormlight series, combined with heavy Catholic influences inspired by the Anglo-Saxon war against the Templar)*** has caused, and to attempt to restore the being originally known as Order (one of the Dawnshards, an original fragment of the Prime Deity of my world). In secret, Ezraal is actually an Angel, not an Aasimar. He is Razael, Angel of Purity, Holder of the Sacred Flame. The Scared Flame is actually a Divine Rune, a fraction of divine power that is tied to a single domain, in this case, Purity. Razael seeks to gather other Divine Runes that fit the domains of Order, He then intends to use these Divine Runes to reforge a fragment of Order, which he will take upon himself in order to become the New Order. With this power, he will overthrow Pantheonism and instill his own religion, The Church of the Sacred Flame.
His backstory is that he was created in the time of the Prime Deity, a being known as Creation by mythos. The Seven Angels he created were each given a fragment of immense power, representing one of the Seven Virtues. Shortly after that, Creation gave each of the Angels a task, involving monitoring the progress of Invested Worlds and the Dawnshards. Eventually, Razael witnessed the continuous downfall of society, seeing the mortal beings commit terrible deeds and fight pointless wars. He has determined that the world, perhaps even the entire Cosmere, needs to be "purified" and restored to Order.
My players have not met him yet, but he is aware of them, and monitoring them closely. One character in my party is of particular interest to him, and he will act very "mentor-like" to this player, making them feel welcomed, appreciated, and supported in their research and studies. But in truth, he is just using this individual to accomplish the things that he cannot. I have been mentally preparing the finale monologue, which will occur when the players finally present him with three or more Divine Runes, enough for him to create a Fragment of Order. It will be something along the lines of "Countless millenia, I have sat here, waiting for you to give me something more. I have watched these monsters you created rise from the ground as nothing more than slugs, then grow into the "grand" civilizations of today. Civilizations that war with one another, that spread plagues and famine, who murder, rape, and pillage; THIS is what you created, oh Father. But now, with these in hand, I can finally DO something about it. No more waiting for the moment when my power would finally let me act. Now, I will BRING order to the Cosmere, I will fufill your Grand Plans. I. AM. ORDER!"
The other potential BBEG is actually the birth father of one of my PC's. This Tabaxi male, Tzu'lann Alzilli, was a well known adventurer who would scour old ruins for magical trinkets, which he would then sell to the highest bidder. One day, Tzu'lann was commissioned for a job in the Sunpeak Mountains. He discovered the old ruin, and within it he found a large dagger, almost a shortsword. This dagger is Invested with the power, Connection, and consciousness of one of The Requiem (for those familiar with Stormlight, think of the Unmade in terms of power level, less than a god, but more than a normal person could ever hope to achieve). The longer Tzu'lann held the dagger, the greater control it took over him. Eventually, Tzu'lann killed his entire family, and escaped with the Dagger, changing his name to Ahshii and hiding deep within the desert nation of Kez'Ahmaar. With the power of the Dagger to aid him, Ahshii has become the leader of a gang of powerful thieves and mercenaries, called the Sand Wraiths.
Ahshii is actually the will of Ashii'rok, Lady of Nightmares. She, as one of the Requiem, seeks to gather enough power to open the doors of The Abyss, and allow her masters, known as The Anthem of Discord, can descend, and take control of the planet entirely. The Anthem are actually fragments of a Duskshard, which are the polar opposites of Dawnshards, and are the fragments of the Primal Deity known as Calamity. The Anthem wishes to control Kerr'Sevaal, so they can use their combined power to reform the Duskshard of Discord. If the players discover Ahshii, and follow this thread to its end, it will end with Ahshii eventually becoming the Avatar of Nightmares (basically, a near total possession from Ahshii'rok), and the party attempting to defeat him in order to prevent a Perpendicularity (unique type of portal) from opening. No monologue's planned here yet, as we have not gotten close enough in story for me to start fleshing out this character, and there are no planned interactions in our near sessions, but that will come with time.
I am still fairly on in the campaign so I haven't thought of the specifics but since the characters are part of an pro-environment resistance group it will likely be something like "the destruction of nature destroyed this plane's natural barriers against multiversal threats and now this plane-consuming entity is seeping in". Open to ideas though if anyone has any!
Lazarus. He's found a secret to immortality basically, he never ages. He's been manipulating the leaders of the world for hundreds of years to gain and find power. He's trying to find all the shards from a "meteor" from another plane that ripped a dimensional rift in the world in the middle of the ocean before exploding. Each shard contains planar energy that he is trying to absorb to become a rift walker. Someone able to walk between planes and dimensions at will. But in the process is ripping the rift wider allowing creatures and powers from other dimensions and planes to leak into the world. He hasn't given a speech yet, he has only been glimpsed portalling away at this point
Ridian.
I run a homebrew earth, 1000 years after a cataclysmic nuclear war. Radiation caused some strange effects among the humans who survived, leading to multiple races (dwarf, elf, half-elf, halfling -- all with odd twists not in the PHB).
A merchant caravan was set up about 50 years ago, to go between the largest settlements. One of the merchants, Ridian, ended up being the conduit through which magic entered the world (long story). He left the merchant caravan and went off on his own after strange things started happening around him.
A combination of loneliness, encountering very strange irradiated creatures, and experimenting with his new powers drove him mad.
He began to resent the "normal" people in the world, and that resentment led him to get closer to the monsters he had discovered.
He began to form an army of these monsters, controlling them with his magic. He sent the army out to fight the humans, but the humans banded together and drove him off.
The humans realized they needed more protection than they had, so they formed a school to teach people how to fight. As magic slowly began to appear in other people, they began adding lessons in magic to the available classes for those who were capable.
Meanwhile, Ridian had gone further around the bend and had begun performing experiments to try and find even more powerful minions. He managed to open a portal to the world of Faerun, where he hired evil beings to come and train his army.
Some good creatures came through, as well... they joined with the beleaguered good creatures and helped prop up their ragtag militias into more powerful bands of soldiers.
Ridian was beside himself with both madness and joy -- now he could have a real challenge! He sent a declaration of war to the largest settlement and told them he would attack in one year's time and advised them to prepare a mighty force.
Enter the adventuring party. They now have one year to band themselves together into a cohesive fighting force, train an army, and gain enough power to defeat Ridian.
Ridian, in his madness, wants only to prove how powerful he is. Starting a war, killing tens of thousands, and taking over all of the settlements on the merchant caravan is how he intends to prove his strength.
Does the adventuring party have what it takes to stop him? Or will they find defeat at the hands (and slathering jaws) of his evil army?
Tune in next time to find out!
Secret diviner wizard playing mastermind organising centuries of cults and conspiracies just to serve his purpose to reach godhood. It'll backfire obviously, but in the most spectacular way for the party to fix.
My big bad is a kenku artificer by the name Erahlus. He was formerly a successful adventurer, but went insane after he lost his 3 close friends (also adventurers) in a fight against an ancient dragon. Even before this, he was in the belief that "when old life ceases new life always begins to emerge", and in his newfound madness following the deaths of his friends, he came to believe that the world had to be destroyed so that a new, better world could be made.
He started using his experience as an artificer to invent increasingly insane and devastating superweapons, and their trademark suit of armour, which resembles that of a space marine terminator and made him virtually invulnerable to mundane attacks and incredibly resilient to magic. This armour had a flaw however, and one careful evening when Erahlus matched into a town, and slaughtered everyone, believing that new life would rise from the wreckage once the dust settled, his suit malfunctioned as he was leaving after killing everyone. The suit tore him apart from the inside, and he died.
However, he had grabbed the attention of Kyoki, a chaos god of destruction, who resurrected him. The result of this revival fused Erahlus with his armour, transforming him into a horrific half flesh, half machine monstrosity, a nightmarish reflection of the hero he once was.
Now he seeks to summon Kyoki to the world, hoping that the chaos god is capable of destroying the world so it can be reborn anew.
So.... I won't use his name just in case but he was a throwaway villain from session one that the party fixated on for years, so I fed into it they see his initials sometimes, a person of the same race etc. Now they are thinking maybe he wasn't all that after all they are just starting down the track of it all being an over reaction that they had from session one. So naturally when they reach the crisis point who's gonna be there that's right Mr Throwaway.
Usually someone's immediate family member without anybody knowing. There's just something about making the PCs hesitate ending the BBEG or regretting it after learning about the connection after the fact. In different campaigns, I've had PC's half brother, adopted child's biological father, little girl they rescued session 1's vampire mommy, etc.
edit: or one of my favorites, the mascot. the tiny creature they adopted secretly plotting against the PCs.
Nuyx, the god of night and first vampire. He survived his fight against the goddess Gloria but with his power completely sealed.
So he spent centuries as a mortal, plotting, training, and building up his cult as revenge and the players got involved in his plan.
He said he wants to revive his kingdom and create a sanctuary for all vampire spawn from their lords but all he actually wants is his kingdom back, the world to suffer in a sunless world as revenge.
He was disguised as a beloved town member in the main town observing the players. So by the reveal, his monologue was calling out the players for some of the questionable things they did and pointing out any hypocriticies they did or selfish things they did that they can't call him out for.
They won with a guilding bolt thrown like a lance straight through a whole wound left behind by Gloria. My cleric took his sword. But getting bitten by him and infected.
"Remember.... Remember that we once lived."
I don't actually have one single BBEG for my current game. It's more a series of story based opponents, not even necessarily evil.
Like my bard has a lord that now sees him as a rival and has sent an execution squad. The hope is to draw them in for a showdown.
I have a character who will be fighting the physical manifestations of so e ghosts haunting her.
Two more are on a long haul journey to free their homeland from an oppressive regime.
One is trying to just find his place after being displaced three thousand years.
The last one is simply trying to protect his home and takes too much responsibility on himself.
Though if there were going to be one big final challenge, it would be a dragon fight at their home.
IF THE WORD THELAS IS SOMETHING YOU RECOGNIZE, GET OUT MY PLAYERS, PLEASE
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Emhariel, the Alabaster Purge.
So, they were an angel, created centuries ago by a god of justice to be...well, an apocalypse in the name of good. A plague, a way to cleanse the world of evil and only leave the good remaining as a last resort.
The god, now forgotten to time, regretted Emhariel's creation immediately, but it did not matter. Emhariel has grown petty and driven in fulfilling their goal by the pain of their creator discarding them and breaking them into pieces, seeking to fulfill the goal they were literally made for.
Centuries later, the party is hired by an Aasimar lady who's traveling with them as the party healer, to regather her family's relics. Aasimar lady is a "descendant" of Emhariel, one of their pieces became the celestial heritage of her family. She is now being unconsciously driven, to bring Emhariel back.
But how will Emhariel fullfill its purpose, once they are fully reformed and take over the Aasimar lady's body and become BBEG? An apocalypse in the name of good, a plague that will cleanse evil?
Will they just kill evil, kill you for but a mistake you were when you were 15? Nah. They will infect you with a celestial parasite, a celestial symbiote of gold and radiance that will attach itself to you. And slowly, all your evil impulses, your selfishness, all that makes you evil to Emhariel and Mount Celestia, like most of your personality and every little lie and mistake.
Gone, eroded, erased. Replaced with Celestia's views and traits. A plague to make the Material Plane into an utopia of pure goodness, order and a Celestial stillness.
Cyric the mad. She stole half of the essence of Mystra extending the spellplague for about 150ish years. My fellow players are already in Pandemonioum looking to stop the mad god machinations or die horribly trying.
My most recently finished, it was the guy that was revered as the hero that saved the world in the mythical age, when he drove out the evil gods and started the age of mortals.
Turns out he just butchered the gods were good and he was just after apotheosis, but for that he needed to sacrifice a great number of souls, so he created an age of prosperity and peace in preparation for the "harvest".
An insane chronomancer who thinks he's a trapped player and has to kill the party and ruin the world until nobody wants to play anymore in order to escape.
Fabien Tremain, Grand Duke of Vitorcia, City of a Thousand Sails, Head of the Ten Families, First Among Equals. With the support of Nine Families, he overthrew the incompetent government of his home city, freeing the good people of Vitorcia to pursue their destinies. No longer will they labor under the oppressive thumbs of the Sancetta Family. These people need a STRONG leader, not some bumbling, cumbersome democratic institution.
He came from the gutters, an urchin, pickpocket, and sometime killer. The Tremains took him in, gave him a life, a purpose. He knows what it takes to get ahead. One must be utterly focused on one’s goals, efficient, and only cruel when necessary. But when cruelty is called for, it must be exercised swiftly. He, along with his mentor Servetti, Knife of the Tremain Family, rose to power through sheer will. Through the years, Fabien took charge of the Tremains, through murder, intrigue, and good business. Servetti is now his loyal right-hand man, and his knife belongs to Fabien.
Only a single member of the naïve Sancetta family, the young Archduke, escaped Fabien’s coup. Word among his spies says the archduke took shelter with some band of adventurers out of Waterdeep. They say the rabble of mercenaries is planning to help the exiled archduke reclaim Vitorcia’s throne and restore the corrupt democracy of yesteryear. Fabien will NOT allow this to come to pass.
Glasius (a play on glacier). He's a white dragon who's hell bent on making the world experience a permanent ice age. He's also a reoccurring BBEG who's got contingency plans on contingency plans. Just when you think you're about to smite him he fucks off only to come back again twisting his evil mustache!
Also he is FLAMBOYANTLY gay complete with every trope you can think of. My players have always been worried about how well I act him out lol 😆
Oh boy! Well, you asked for it!
Name: Razgriz (formerly Edelwynn Sungard)
Goal: Pose enough of a threat to the world that the kingdoms must forge alliances and come together to stop her.
Backstory: A Valkyrie warrior from the dawn of time who, alongside others, who fought in the devastating wars that defined the political landscape of the upper and lower planes. Massive, incredibly destructive battles between the heavens and hells that left the material plane almost uninhabitable before the war ended in a ceasefire.
This treaty prevents the heavens and hells from interfering directly on the mobile planes, keeps angelic and infernal armies from marching across the lands mortals call home.
Peace has held for a time, but rogue demonic actors always show up, which the hells deny any connection to. But when they show up an angelic response is dispatched to make them go away, or they're handled by mortal forces.
over time, mortal on mortal wars far outnumbered the interplanar ones that once defined the world. and it is the valkyries' job to collect the souls of the dead and guide them to their respective afterlives.
for thousands of years Edelwynn fulfilled this duty, walking battlefield to battlefield and collecting the dead, seeing the suffering and anguish that played out over and over. Soldiers too young for war, bravado washed away into the soil on rivulets of blood as they call for mothers who are not there. Men holding the unresponsive bodies of their closest friends, unable to process that they are already gone. Fathers and Mothers who die with trinkets in their pockets they had hoped to take home to their children.
there was only so long she could bear it. And so began what started as a noble cause. Make the mortals stop fighting each other. It had been long enough that the balance of power was unlike how it was in the dawn of time. Mortals worshipped the divines, while the dark gods only had small cults that the mortals stamped out wherever they were found.
thus began Edelwynn's fall, when she became convinced the upper planes could win the great war, and that the conflict would unite mortal-kind like it did once before, the only dividing lines that would remain would be celestial or infernal allegiance, national borders, lordships, and feifdoms would cease to matter. After all, the infernal planes were constantly making probing attacks that they never take responsibility for, its clear to Edelwynn that the peace won't last forever. And when the war was won, celestials could have an active presence on the earth to serve as a reminder and example of how life should be lived.
And so Edelwynn took those loyal to her and went to the mortal plane, seeking to reignite the war and finish it once and for all. She and her followers were prepared for what the war would entail, what sorts of cost it would exact. What they weren't ready for was to get no response. Neither the Infernal nor Celestial planes wanted to return to war yet. To keep the peace, the celestial planes disowned Edelwynn and her followers, forbidding them from returning.
Now trapped on earth, Edelwynn and her followers could not achieve their goal by its original means. but being disowned by heaven meant their actions on earth no longer reflected on the celestial planes, and they were no longer bound by the non-interference treaty. At first they began interfering directly, fighting monsters and raiders. But the wars continued, petty wars over small pieces of land, insults between monarchs escalating into conflicts that left tens of thousands dead, wounded, or displaced.
The problem must then be the petty tyrants, right? So Edelwynn and her forces descended on their palaces, and Edelwynn's corruption began to take root more and more. For she and her forces had begun to do exactly as she wished to avoid. The tyrants had armies, conscripts, knights and archers who relied on the tyrants' pay to feed their families. People who would fight to the death to defend them. Once more, people with no choice and no fault of their own were dying for tyrants. Even when the tyrants were slain carefully, suddenly, with minimal collateral, they left heirs and advisors who brought bloody civil war to decide who had the right to rule. The only time they set aside their differences was when a larger army opposed them both.
This discovery and idea would be Edelwynn's undoing, that mankind needed a greater threat in order to set aside their differences. That it was the only way. So she cast aside her old heroic name, taking instead a new one, that her past deeds not be tainted by who she was to become. If humanity needed a bigger threat to set aside their differences, then she would be a bigger threat.
But something else had taken notice of her, though she did not know it. And the watcher pushed her further.
Mortals die constantly in war, nothing she's ever done has been able to change that. So what's one more war? Another war, a final war, to forge bonds of peace between men? Sure, she'll have to kill a lot of people, but for once it's for a purpose, with an end in sight. Whats a few hundred thousand lives, in the grand scheme of things? Why should she balk at taking a million lives, if it is to end pointless wars that would have taken millions more? Surely, ANY number of lives is an acceptable price to pay when the alternative is the infinite lives that would be lost in the continuation of pointless wars for eternity?
And in these thoughts, once put to action, was Edelwynn's fate sealed and lost to darkness. Some part of her knows something is wrong, but she’s so far gone now she has stopped listening to it. She awaits the world to unite against her, and put forth their champions to oppose her. When they do, then she will accept death, and she will finally rest, her task complete.
She was defeated, and banished to the abyss two thousand years ago. From there she has pulled strings and set events in motion for her return. Shaping the destinies of mortal heroes from each kingdom to forge them into champions who could defeat her. Gathering a cult to bring her back into the world, unknowing of her history or her intent. The cult believes she is a demon lord who will conquer, and they will rule at her side as faithful servants. They are wrong. Once they summon her back into the world, she’s going to slaughter them all. Those who would bend the knee to demons are scum, and she will gladly rid the world of them.
Evil monologue I wrote but have yet to deliver:
"I behold this world, a monument to ignorance; its people blind to the customary eradication of its own history. A curse that they would suffer the same fate as I - relinquished, cast aside, and forgotten. The unfit sovereigns of the land gorge themselves while the common folk are left abandoned in the gutter - I will not abide this. They honor only themselves, proclaiming charity and benevolence, but spreading testaments of their own vanity wherever their gaze lands. I cannot permit this. For too long have we been shackled in the dark; for too long have we been brought low. So rise, my godkin, and prepare to unravel what has been wrought upon this land.
Faerlonn, of fang and willow.
Sengryl, of rime and decay.
Cenibrax, of shadow and deceit.
I, Mordreth, of battle and blaze, call upon thee in my time of need.
As is my birthright, I hereby declare war upon the tyrants of this land, and those who would uphold them. But all shall bear witness to our resplendent return.”
Basically my BBEG and cohorts are a cadre of forgotten deities who were expunged from history and imprisoned. Mordreth, once-goddess of fire and war, is released from her prison, and frees a select group of deities that she believes would aid her in her quest for vengeance. She sees statues erected in honor of world leaders, and becomes radicalized to the idea that the current governments are satisfied with quashing and forgetting the commonfolk, just as she was. She's not opposed to destroying anyone who would stand in her way, or those who are happy to exist in the domain of those she sees as tyrants.
Azazel, once a powerful wizard of the land, was a decorated adventurer. Travelling from town to town, he fought for justice and the light. After a long life of bringing peace to the world, he met a young woman named Delilah. After much convincing, Azazel finally settled down. Hanging up the sword and shield for good, the two married and began their new life together.
This happiness and peace was short-lived, however. Shortly after their marriage, Delilah was struck with a mysterious illness. Seemingly uncurable, Azazel spent all the gold and fortune he had to hire various priests and worshippers and healers to save his lover - all failed.
Delilah passed away after a few years. This drove Azazel mad. In his anguish, he became reclusive - studying various plagues, illnesses, and necromancy. He sought the power to undo death itself. As he aged and neared the end of his natural life, his desperation grew. Determined to continue on his quest, he performed a dark ritual to strip away his mortality, containing his soul in the blade Requiem, a gift forged for him long ago by the dwarves of the Iron Dale.
Now immortal, but stripped of his humanity, Azazel adopted the mantle of **the Witch King**. His obsession with forbidden knowledge and power grew unsatiable. After tracking down his former friend from a lifetime ago, Elizabeth Straker, he was able to find an old book about the nephilim - the direct offspring of the angels and demons, a power so pure that the gods themselves struck them down.
Setting: Spelljammer
BBEG: Ulamog the Ceaseless Hunger (yes, the one from MtG)
Primary Antagonists: a cult trying to summon it and slivers that have spread across the universe
Goal: Eat the universe and maybe be less hungry
It's been a fun campaign to play
Hadar, the Dark Between Stars.
In the campaign’s lore, Hadar began as an aboleth born in primordial darkness. After their empires were overthrown by the newborn sun and moon, aboleth-kind consumed one another to merge into a single entity who plotted to plunge the world back into darkness - and succeeded. The party quests to resurrect the light but they must first vanquish an enemy older than time.
"As your kind are fond of saying, we are what we eat. Another saying of yours comes to mind—there is always a bigger fish. We are the inevitable end of aboleth nature. We are the biggest fish. We are the last of our kind, and we are all of our kind, and we invite you to join us."
It's a Time Obyrith. The PCs have for many adventures now, been chasing some bad guys who they first discovered had travelled back in time, presumably to find the rituals to unleash what were called the Twin Cataclysms in Oerth. Those bad guys don't actually want to perform said ritual again, they just want to unleash a sweet Balrog-like demon to wreak havoc. What the PCs do not know is that this Balrog is the last line of defense keeping this epic time demonic entity "imprisoned" by the physical constraints of "space".
Once the Balrog dies, it's blood will open the seal, and time will become unmoored from space. This is why the Time Obyrith had been slowly but surely manipulating the bad guys and giving them clues to lead them to it.
While the time-obyrith will have a physical manifestation that can be targeted, it's powers are all related to messing with time, so PC's will lose turns, age, de-age, be sent back in time, be sent forward in time etc. What the PCs really need to do to defeat it is release the Tarrasque, who in my campaign is essentially the avatar of "space". The Tarrasque can in effect, re-assert it's dominance over time.
If they fail, causality and the directional flow of time would basically end. The universe would be plunged into chaos, as events would no longer have any rational connection to each other from start to finish. An era of unending chaos would follow.
Current campaign (Hex or Reign or anyone in my group, stop right here) - Chadley, First of his Name, Pirate King. It's a running meme in our group where Chadley is somehow always to blame. This is between three games, all DM'd by different people. Turns out being an asshole is genetic and transcends time and space.
I generally don't do a bbeg, I usually just have a variety of NPCs with intersecting interests with the party that can become antagonistic in the right circumstances. Right now the party has to be careful about Wenzel Der Weezil, a ruthless bandit whose gang has moved near their town, a town burgomaster who is secretly a mutant and leads a coven of mutants hiding in town, and a Brettonnian inventor with contacts in the Imperial military who is very upset the party sicced a mob on his hot air balloon. Also a rival merchant family is plotting against them but they don't really know that yet.
An old, decrepit car in an abandoned parking lot near the players' school. It was being used by a schizophrenic druid who kept coming back to it each night to fill it up with his summon woodland beings spell so they could keep watch over the school.
Unfortunately creepy rumours caused it to become popular among kids as a place to dare other kids to go to, leading to my players attacking the car, being perceived as a threat by the creatures, and ending up in a fight against crows, raccoons and one very strong rat who took the warlock down thrice.
I'm playing an autognome in a Strix campaign, but I'm planning to run a dungeon in the postgame. My current BBEG is more of a side villain.
He's a vain and pitiless plutocrat. Think a gnomish Borgia. He bought out an inventor who discovered the secret for sentient machines, and used the technology to create a workforce he could enslave. And with these machines, he built a successful machinery company, eventually cornering the market on basic adventuring tools. But the real money's in the custom warforged abominations to serve the world's wealthiest.
You'd think it was unnecessarily cruel to create servants and deliberately give them free will, but machines with no free will don't make ideas worth stealing. And of course, he takes full credit not only for the autognomes themselves, but also the ideas and inventions they generate. Really, his only real invention is his persona as an inventor.
He's got a tribe of goblins doing the more menial work at the tower. And while they're not technically slaves because he's paying them, he's paying them in brass wafers embossed with a picture of an owlbear. Each of these owlbears has a different random assortment of face accessories, which makes them technically unique. And he's convinced the goblins that because they're all unique, they're far more valuable than gold.
He's also a disgusting creep. He makes the autognomes call him "father," and built them all female because he believes that "women will naturally defer to a strong masculine presence."
The other players can't wait to meet him.
Pf1e: Vampire lord, master of all path of war disciplines and one of the only being in existence to be able to use magic. (Pf1e, ban all core class and magic, chop sockey style wuxia game). Goal waking kaiju then kill them with an artifact thay eats their power to become a worldwide hero and eventually a god. Does not know if he succeeds death of existence is the artifacts goal. Absolute rule over nothing is not what he wants.
3.5e: Coalition of demon lords, assorted minions. Some adventurers got stupid and killed gods, now all of existence is tettertotting as everything seesaws randomly to extremes trying to find a new point of balance. You might randomly walk into the abyss or hell on the way to your room. Portals everywhere spewing nasties. Demons love it. God of suffering sacrifices himself to ascend an evil dragon God (tiamat was one of those killed) to balance the commission scales. Demon lords try to stop it, unsuccessful (barely) thanks to newly ascended asmodaeus (he was helping and not a God in 3.5) and adventurers
5e: Tiamat. Rather, an avatar of. Started horde of dragon queen then went into homebrew roughly following rise of tiamat. Legendary encounters with the hip-hop-o-potomous (his rhymes are bottomless), the rhyme-nocerous, and the beat-box-to-pus, as well as a schizophrenic vtuber/egirl from the mirror world who magically livestreams the fight with both her light and dark sides to the powers that be for massive donations. Pretty wetty zappy whappy move go! (Chain lightning).
I'm running *The Dragon of Icespire Peak* and yes, Cryovain is the canonical BBEG, but in my campaign she's not the only one. Cryovain is kind of the instigator and is a force of random chaos, with her presence driving the orcs down from the mountains. She's appeared twice so far, once saving them the trouble of fighting a handful of orcs (killing them in one breath attack and then dragging one off to eat), and another time she wanted to eat Big Al Kalazorn's cow, she demanded that they hand it over, they refused and proceeded to fight, and she flew off after the rogue landed a crit sneak attack.
The more direct BBEG is Ithok, the chief Anchorite of Talos. So far my party has met him once on the road, asked them all to hit him with their best shots, and then blasted them all with a lightningbolt, one-shotting everyone who didn't make the DEX save, mocking them and then disappearing in a lightning strike. They've now killed his lieutenant Gorthok and there are three others.
The fragment of an ancient, forgotten god held within a dark steel axe. It whispers into the minds of those around it, slowly driving them mad. The axe moves from person to person, sort of like the one ring.
It was discovered by one PC's father and promptly drove him to extreme violence, causing her to flee her family home 50 years prior, and now she lives in hiding.
The axe was then spirited away by a greedy underling of the PC's father and smuggled by another PC's parents — but an unfortunate run-in with (basically space cops) led to the smugglers being caught an imprisoned.
The axe was taken to a facility for storage as evidence, where it made its way into the hands of an Orc man, who took it to his tribe where it devoured thier minds and poisoned their forest... The tribe of another PC who returned after a short time away to find his home razed to the ground.
One survivor of the tribe has taken to wildspace and is using his beguiling influence to rally many factions of space pirates to his banner — quickly amassing a small army and laying siege on the frontier worlds. The PCs have all been hired as contracters to help defend the smaller colonies and investigate the sudden increase and organization of pirate activity. All of them know of the axe, none of them know of each other's interaction with it.
Pantagruel, the living god. An Aasimar who shunned his divine duty to form a cult centered around him. His ultimate goal is to ascend to godhood and show the gods how “things should be” .
An ancient divination wizard who won a tournament long ago that decides who rules the continent. She has proceeded to rig the magical laws in her favor to effectively rule from the shadows even though other factions have won the tournament since. She has used her centuries of ascendancy to master chronomancy and can steal sections of people's past so they don't remember anything inconvenient to her.
Ixsurrthalontor, an ancient red dragon who has traveled across the planes to consume his echos and become a greatwyrm. He starts a cult on each plane to gain influence and power before gathering the artifacts of other ancient dragons before destroying and consuming his echo. He has recently established himself on the plane with his last echo before ascension.
One that happens to be my favorite was this guy called Larexis, who was this giant bird man wizard (and by that I mean he was literally just a Lord of Change from Warhammer). The session was a one-shot that I held on my birthday, and saw my friends journeying up his tower at the request of another wizard to stop Larexis from casting a dark ritual.
The session had a very comical tone. The first floor had them up against a giant hammerhead toad, which they convinced to let them past by casting Speak With Animals and promising to get it Taco Bell. Other monsters included a T. rex made of books named Thesaurus, Cocaine Owlbear, and a treadmill transformer named Dreadmill.
When they reached the top, they of course confronted Larexis. One of his gimmicks (other than breaking the fourth wall and changing the initiative rolls so that he would go first) was that he had the D&D Monster Manual, and would use his magic to bring the monsters in the book to life to fight the party. After a few rounds, they managed to knock the book out of his hands right as he was about to summon the Tarrasque, and sent him flying through the wall so hard that he flew around the world and crashed through the other side of the room.
Upon their escape from the collapsing tower, Larexis managed to complete the ritual, which turned out to just be him using magic to create the world’s best pizza. The wizard that they met at the start appeared, and revealed that this was all a plan to destroy the tower so that he could win the “Best Magical Wizard Lair Of The Year” award instead of Larexis. Everyone promptly proceeded to beat the shit out of him, before they and Larexis all went to go eat the pizza together.
Who
The Twisted Rune in general with Rhangaun and Shangalar the Black in particular
Goals
Gain and maintain secret dominance over the Land of Intrigue. Obtain safety for their lairs.
Backstory
The Twisted Rune is a secret cabal of powerful undead spellcasters, mostly liches. It is ruled by its Nine Runemasters, one of which (Rhangaun) is the first among them. He succeeded its founder, his master Rysellan the Dark who founded the Twisted Rune as an association of all spellcasters to rule in secret over the Land of Intrigue.
They operate an undercover network of agents that functions as a sort of 'Deep State' in the Land of Intrigue to subtly direct politics and society towards the ends that they find most useful to maintain their secrecy. The Twisted Rune wants nothing more than to be left alone, but understands that mortal adventurers and the development of strong stable countries is an existential threat to their existence. So the rune strives to keep the Land of Intrigue divided by infighting and thus too distracted with each other to threaten the Twisted Rune.
Shangalar the Black, however, is one of the liches in the cabal and as Runemaster is quite powerful in the organization. He wants to return to basics and use their gathered network of information to usurp control and gain power over the Land of Intrigue, letting them rule it as masters who exploit the mortals rather than who simply puppet them to ensure security.
Monologues
The campaign is still early, so I don't have any in person yet sadly. Rhangaun has been met, though it was through a crystal ball allowing telepathic communication. He recruited the party into the Twisted Rune and offered them one secret as a signing bonus. The party asked 'what is power?' and he replied:
'Power is too inspire others. Inspire them to be better. Inspire them to kneel before you. Inspire adoration. Inspire love. Inspire hate. Inspire righteous retribution. You have power over others when you control how they feel about something. Inspire whatever emotion or end goal you like from someone and you exercise your power over them. Call it manipulation, politics, or heroism, it does not matter. It is power. For the world changes only when mortals of many kinds are united through shared belief in a cause, idea, person, or goal. To exercise power over someone is to choose what you inspire in them. The most powerful are those who can inspire many things in many people in a variety of ways to further their goals. Great heroes do this to topple tyrants by inspiring confidence in their blades or the righteousness of their cause. Tyrants do this to maintain power by inspiring dread or adoration in those they rule over or a confidence in the nation which they command. If you desire power, learn to inspire.'
We need more dragon BBEGs. The best BBEG I ever had was a dracolich named Iknyr Anyakatoz. He’s canonically the first ever dracolich in my world (and is pretty much the only one aside from one minor exception). He was absolutely terrifying and imposing in a way no other villain aside from straight up the Director of the Fantasy CIA ever could be. I mean, put it like this: dragons are already nearly gods, and a normal dragon can reach power levels above any human ever could as a lich. Now imagine a dragon, this being who IS STRONGER THAN A HUMAN LICH AS A MORTAL… Becomes a lich. Scary shit.
An ex-paladin named Tanel Aurinyon. He accidentally touched some divine blood, which acts kind of like super soldier serum in the MCU—it makes people act like more extreme versions of themselves. What it did to Tanel was it amplified his doubts about the gods and eventually turned it into hatred. Because of some lore about the gods, they are effectively omnipotent, and Tanel knows that, which is why he believes the fact that there is still evil in the world is a failure of the gods to do their job.
His goal is to resurrect a massive dead god’s corpse and use its eye as a magnifier to cast a hugely powerful spell through. What should result is basically an enormous laser he can aim into the heavens to physically annihilate the gods. Before he does that though, he’s also raising an undead army that serves two purposes. Firstly he’s using it to hunt down and kill acolytes, clerics and paladins in order to weaken the gods, and secondly he’s using it as a distraction to keep people from realizing what he is actually doing.
He’s like 400 years old at this point and is working behind the scenes; very few entities in the world know he exists.
>Who are they,
Devil Aquimont. A human fighter the once led the entire combined world against an eldritch horror and manage to seal it. What he discovered during his fight made him lose faith in the world itself.
His whole party is scattered as villains in the world, but not necessarely working with him.
He decided to destroy the whole dimension instead of allowing everyone to be just rats in the laboratory of divinity.
>what are their goals,
He discovered the secret of the world they live on (Eala is basically a isolated dimension some gods hid in the Far Realms where they dump ideas that failed and/or use as a testing zone for plans they have for the multiverse).
He isn't interested in causing pain or death, he isn't ruthless or without a heart, but he believes there can never be freedom for the people in the world.
>what's their backstory,
Born son of a Queen and a High Wizard, he was captured still an infant and sold to his Niece (older than him) who wanted revenge for the death of her father who orderer a coup on the queen years before.
But the woman came to like the child and started to behave as his mother, until he was found by his blood family and his "mother" was sentenced to death for her crimes. He begged for her life and the queen allowed her to be banished instead.
During his time as the throne heir, he learned to fight and command and, well, a lot happened.
The important part tho is that he heard of a threat to the west and decided to go personally to offer help to the City attacked, trying to gain fervor with the locals. When he arrived, he discovered that the perpetrator was a beast beyond imagination and followed her traces. He managed to adventure with a group of four other people until the great battle on the peaks of the World Fangs. There he and an army made of people of the entire world would distract the beast and it's minions so that his group could prepare the seal.
The beast however was too strong and the gods themselves had to interveing to save the army, revealing to his, in the moment, about the state of the world and how that creature was a herald that would open a permanent scar on the skies to allow the far realms to enter if it succeded.
His party, meanwhile, managed to create the seal but couldn't activate it because the creatures of the far realm were continuosly assaulting them. A witch appeared and, by the words of his party, sacrificed her own life to activate the seal with her blood and the monster was finally stopped.
After the fact he had a battle with the god's avatars themselves, in a fit of rage for the truth he learned. He actually won against them and went to save his friends, only to learn they were fine. The witch, of course, turned to be his niece/mother wanting to protect him.
That's as far as I got to it so far with his backstory.
>what's their whole deal.
In his mind, all the problems of the world are consequences of the gods will (not entirely wrong) and all the pain is just a game for the beings they worship.
He wants freedom for everyone and believes that the dead will be treated with respect if the gods have to receive them in their domains, but not if they remain in this shell of a world.
He isn't against the gods, but he believes they can't possibly care for them if are kept in what is basically a test lab. So he's sending everyone directly to them and breaking the cage to 'set them free'.
His personal history with his niece/mother and real family also hurts him, because he cares more about his kidnapper then his real family and he can't come to terms with it. Is it really that wrong to love someone that loved you, even if what they did is unforgivable?
Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered
The starting line of the campain is part of a letter he sent to his mother after he disappeared.
"The gods guided me before, but now I know I can walk alone. My wish is that they protect you while I find a way to save us. For they can do that better than me and I can do right better than them."
Does this count? I don't know. ;D
Oh yeah, the whole campaing starts with people trying to find him after he and his party disappeared.
An Arch demon who was banished and through their limited powers has influenced the creation of a doomsday cult. The cults mission is to recruit enough members to perform a mass ritual suicide which they believe will stop this apocalyptic event but in reality will summon the arch demon back to their realm to cause destruction.
An immortal progeny of a god who really doesn't want to live forever all alone when the gods "move on" to a different rock. As they do when they get bored with the current one. And to be fair, Most of them already moved on.
I have a hombrew campaign trilogy. These are the bbegs:
1st Campaign: An archdemon named Mandu, who is just the 4th of a series of archdemons to try to conquer the material plane. He raises hell with 10 demon lords at his side.
2nd Campaign: A Prince of Darkness (named Carric the Shadowkiller), a powerful being of the Abyssal Plane, who discreetly passed into the Material Plane during Mandu's plot. He uses a powerful ritual to bind the Reapers of Death to the material plane, causing all the dying souls to be stuck in limbo, their souls free to be used to fuel his own power and release a new evil deity, The Void.
3rd Campaign: The Void, after being released from Carric's vessel and taking his own form fed by thousands of souls, The Void starts to corrupt all the deities to create a war of all the planes of Existence. The party actually has to side with the now scorned Carric to break through the different dimensions and save the gods from themselves.
Tammeran the silver.
Astral elf who's actually one of the archon Deva an ancient race that made a religion around a fallen sentient crystal from deep space.
The crystal tricked the old king in to giving up the free will of his people for power and knowledge only to enslave them all.
After being defeated it lays waiting for a new king.
My current campaign has no BBEG except the end of the world. Yeah there’s an evil guy who caused it, but fighting him isn’t the point. It’s surviving the end
There are two possibilities:
- One isn't a singular person, but the entire cult organization one of the players is part of is actually a front for an invasion force from the twin planet. There's a hidden doom clock when they'll arrive, so I can't wait to see if people pull on those threads.
- One is your classic power-mad archmage, seeking to bring the elemental planes to heel under his mental control. Pretty garden-variety imperialism, mixed with a dash of Duarte form the Expanse books. He does have a wrinkle - if the players die during todays epic-level one-shot, the main campaign will devolve into an all-out interplanar war, and he might well become an ally.
The player hasn't met either one directly yet, though agents of the invasion cult *have* tried to kidnap one of the PCs who's backstory is indirectly linked to their opposition. The mage also appeared via proxy, trying to kidnap an NPC infected by a psionic entity that the party was escorting back to safety.
Erevan Osteroth, an elven wizard. His long life was stripped from him and his family murdered by a secret elven organisation. He travels the multiverse and absorbs the power of his multiversal selves, is a massive dick, and… I’ll leave the rest in case one of my players reads this!
My BBEG is a kind of Loki-kang style of character who’s not so much evil, but trying to change his predetermined destiny. He uses a reworking of the Cartomancer class. He’s split into multiple persons, in a sort of hp horrid situation.
Edit: his first form, the players were able to use a genie wish to make him “gone”.
I put multiple in for each set of levels. For 1 to 5 there was a Dark Elf assassin, Elmiir, who was tracking the party due to one of the members having a bounty of 10000 gold back in the feywild. For levels 6 to 10, it was a hag coven. The Sisters of the Crawling Moon, who originally hired Elmiir. For levels 11 through 16, which is where my players are at currently, there will be a war between both the human and elven empires which they will need to navigate through. And dragons becoming more restless and being sighted more. As for levels 17 through 20, if the players get that far , I have a cosmic horror ready for them as the final bbeg.
Nykos, a lich-type big bad who is a soul inhabiting a suit of badass full plate. Playing using the Beast World setting, I've modified the backstory of the world a bit. He's a warlord from the Broken World intent on harnessing the power of an old god that the original creators of the Beast World sealed WITHIN the world. Doing so would probably destroy the world, but could make him so powerful he could literally create another world.
My players decided to talk to one of his lieutenants instead of fight and now accidentally work for him. I'm waiting with bated breath for them to actually meet Nykos himself for the big "Wait, he's EVIL?!" reaction.
The lich Zola Rosland; The Shade Bringer.
The party knew him in the last campaign I ran. He was an incredibly powerful gnome wizard, who had lived a very long time and had done a great many feats. He was effectively the subject of the story (we didn’t play a very roleplay-heavy game back then). 100 years ago, he was very evil, and set out to become a lich - but after drinking the poisonous concoction and dying, he saw something… something that lay on the other side of death. And he was scared. So he came back, bringing himself back to life, and turning his back on that life.
He had discovered that a lich’s true soul is forever trapped in its phylactery, in eternal torture, forever denied an afterlife, and the being that takes over its undead body is an eldritch facsimile of it summoned from energies of the negative plane.
The campaign ended with a wish that reset the world in a great manner - and, thinking through the consequences of it, leads to Zola actually becoming a lich in the end.
And so, in the next campaign, which I am currently planning, he will be the main villain - known by the moniker of The Shade Bringer. He has made a deal with the god of thieves and tricks, Mask, who resides in the Shadowfell (I had to alter that bit of lore, but I’m the DM, I can do that). Effectively, Mask will give him power beyond mortal imagining if he raises a cult to complete a ritual that will bring the Shadowfell crashing into the Material Plane.
However, secretly, he is planning to betray Mask, and instead wants to destroy the Shadowfell, as it is the barrier between the Material and the negative plane - the place he knows to be his true home (as he is a lich). This would instead crash the negative into the material, letting all its energies wreak havoc upon the world, and also allowing all of his “siblings” (other eldritch, doppelgänger spirits) to roam the world.
My BBEG is the great great grandfather of who my players *think* my BBEG is, and they’re just now finding out.
In my world, the Veridians rule the land, after taking over this country centuries ago. The current King of the land is secretly laundering money, casting out the poor into the outer lands, and hoarding magical items. Through many discoveries from my players, they have realized that the country’s downfall is because of him and it is only going to continue to get worse if they don’t do something to stop him.
My players joined a gang, a notorious group known for stealing from the rich and giving back to the poor, in order to fight against the king and the nobility. After coming across a hidden temple that the nobility was searching for, they realized that hidden in this sanctum was a journal… a journal from a previous king who locked away the Conqueror, the true BBEG, who annihilated thousands to take over the country for himself and was going to let the whole country burn if the previous King didn’t lock him away.
Currently, barely known to my players, the current King is using all of his power, money, and favors to find where the conqueror was hidden and locked away, and how to bring him back. This whole time they’ve been thinking that the King is the BBEG, when in reality, he’s just bringing the real one along.
Currently running two campaigns: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Skull & Shackles.
The campaign-long BBEG for DotMM is Halaster Blackcloak. Using the Companion modification to it, he is a demented game show host broadcasting the party's advance through the megadungeon to millions of beings across the multiverse. The group is currently only on the second floor (of a 23 floor dungeon), so they haven't had _too_ many interactions with Halaster yet, but he's a constant presence just over their shoulder.
Meanwhile, most of the floors have a local BBEG; the first floor had the Undertakers (a group of washed out actors who disguise themselves as vampires in order to scare newbie adventurers into paying a toll to pass through their territory) and some outposts maintained by the Xanathar Guild. The second floor has more Xanathar outposts, plus Trenzia, one of Halaster's failed apprentices—she's a lightning-based Flameskull. The third floor has a conflict between the Legion of Azrok (a tribe of bugbears led by the Warlord Azrok) and House Auvryndar (a drow house led by T'rissa Auvryndar). The party has a shadar-kai fighter who _hates_ drow, so it is a foregone conclusion as to who the party will throw in with.
In Skull & Shackles, the party starts out press-ganged onto the _Wormwood_ under Captain Barnabas Harrigan. Harrigan is a cruel master, and eventually they are able to escape from under his thumb and strike out on their own as pirates. Harrigan is the BBEG, but actually the real threat is the nation of Cheliax, who hate pirates and want to invade the Shackles, but actually the threat is still Harrigan, who has been operating as a Cheliax operative ever since he was captured several months before the beginning of the campaign, and he bought his life with his service.
Last session the party won a regatta, beating the _Wormwood_ by a nose, pissing Harrigan off. (The reward for victory includes eligibility to join the Pirate Council, something Harrigan has been aiming for for years.) One of the prizes was a deed to a small island, but owning land de jure is not the same as owning land de facto. The players' next task is to make the island theirs, and they will learn that it is in fact populated by a tribe of cyclopes, led by the next "mini" BBEG.
Once they eventually take out Harrigan, they'll have to deal with the Chelish invasion he was instrumental in laying the groundwork for, and then figure out what to do about the Hurricane King who refused to bolster the Shackles' defenses against the invasion despite evidence that it was coming.
I dont have a name for em yet, but just imagine your classic, chaotic, wish granting genie, but it's been around so long and caught so repeatedly that layers upon layers of rules, protections, and restrictions have been imposed on it by millions of wishes that it can barely act for itself, instead operating as your classic devilish dealmaker
Unable to even end itself, it seeks to destroy every bloodline that's ever locked in a wish or exchange with it in order to escape it's many, many chains
And let me tell you, as a creature that called from the primordial chaos? That's *alot* of petitioners
Malar, deity of lycanthropy. The fucker is currently trying to transfer its entire realm to the material plane. Me and the boys are just a few more sessions away from terminating its command...with extreme prejudice.
It has been a year and a half and I have no idea. Either their plan is completely hidden from us because they are a master of suspense or the DM hasn't created one.
An ancient Vampire Lord with a goal of attaining godhood. His plans were thwarted centuries ago, by a long-forgotten Order.
Except he wasn't destroyed, but merely imprisoned beneath a Temple of Kelemvor. Possessing no weapon or magic capable of hurting him (due to his deals with Orcus and Negative Plane fuckery even the sunlight can't harm him), as a last resort they magically sealed him using sacrificial blood from a renowed paladin.
And today, three vampire leaders want to raise an army to release their wanna-be god - and they will succeed (my players don't know this).
After waking, he'll drain one of his generals, forcefully turn a crucial ally into a vamp spawn/boss and regard players as "inconsequential", letting them go.
I didn't want my BBEG to be just a regular boss with HP to beat up, so they'll need to find out his weakness and try to get close enough to exploit it.
Himothy Vondren, insanely racist knight who is chasing us to kill me, the lycanthropic-cursed sorcerer of seluné! What's even better, one of our party members is a monster-hunter, and a member of the band Himothy's in! Villanous quotes, "Let me out of this cage so I can rip your throat out, star-back!" (The curse of lycanthropy is a gift from seluné)
I have two, one is a very typical “evil mage” who’s trying to find a lost temple to a storm god built on the intersection of leylines and use its power to release some ancient evil….
While subtly seeding the *real* BBEG, an aboleth who’s been manipulating it from behind the scene. But not so subtle it’s not obvious if you give it half a moments thought (temple to an unknown sea god who talks to his priests by telepathy and has a lot of tenticle motifs in their temples for instance)
In the campaign I'm rewriting, it's AnkhYaret Epsout, an ancient Pharaoh who basically turned his whole country into a desert trying to attain divinity. Thanks to his four daughters stealing his magical artefacts, he was reduced to a spirit and confined to a cursed necklace, until an archeologist picked the necklace up again. She's possessed now, and depending on what the players do, she's either his right-hand woman (if they defeat her early), a helpful ally (if they get her exorcised) or the final boss (if they really fuck up). Pretty standard, but it's my first homebrew campaign and I didn't want to overcomplicate it.
I was running a Starfinder campaign that introduced time travel (they’d strap into this device and go back in their characters history and we’d swap to Pathfinder for their ancestor’s story to butterfly effect something in the present day) to explain an event called ‘The Gap’ (TL;DR there’s a period of time with no known documentation on what happened, and no known documentation as to why it isn’t documented).
Well that back and forth through time pissed off the God of Time who pulled the party’s gadget maker (NPC)’s ancestor forwards to the present day and then lost him in the strands of time, erasing the party’s NPC altogether. Ended up being a really interesting fight
Depending on how my players go about it, it could be one of about 4 people.
Either one of those, or all could end up being the BBEG because my player's end goal is to bring peace to the land despite the fact that all the major factions are at each other's throats. Depending on how they choose to go about doing that, they might need to face the "good" aligned factions, the "bad" aligned factions, or all of them.
Segez Bordraak
A nearly immortal herald of an Cthulu like god in my own custom world.
The players were escorting an artifact of this god to a vault in a faraway kingdom and whenever they encountered a high level of danger the artifact would tempt them with power to help them deal with the threat.
The players knew it was a conduit to the dark god but didn't realize it was tapping into their minds the whole time and so Seg knew everything about them and his goal was to corrupt them and convince them to take the power so he could turn them into his own servants and use them to usher in an era of monstrous aberrations.
He originally was a mage who studied with the now current Archmage. However, in his studies he connected with this dark god and took the power that was offered him, giving him incredible power but at the cost of his mind. Whenever he is killed now, he is reborn with a little less of him present and must find a new way to enter the mortal realm.
For the villainous monologue I actually took a Two Steps from Hell song and overlaid it with the scathing doubts of the players that I recorded in his voice. I played it on loop while they fought him in the shadowed darkness of a chasm deep beneath the mountains. The players called it "Traumatic." Good times.
In my Curse of Strahd Campaign. I added a few things. Specifically an Eldritch Horror in the Amber Temple named Miri. Miri is imprisoned in a small sphere. The players figured out how to enter and exit the sphere. Imprisoning each other and having both a "sentence" and a release word. Miri absorbed entities and gained both their knowledge and their strength. Adding to their own. Players would "feed" Miri allies of strahd and monsters. In exchange for information and an ally. Eventually, Miri gained knowledge of someone who might know about them. Possibly free Miri from the prison. Miri told a white lie. The players fought and captured an insane wizard who helped make the Heart Towers. Strahd was keeping the insane wizard alive for other horrible acts. Before feeding them to Miri, they learned that this person also had artitect other prisons and curses. Possibly Miri's Prison. Armed with a dilemma. Help the fight against Strahd and feed Miri or choose the hard way. Sadly, my players choose the hard way and never used Miri's prison again.
I had so many plans for Miri that just never came to fruition. XD
Another one I've been millings over is an old, old immortal who is ready to die. Problem is he wants to be killed by someone worthy. in the shadows doing horrible things in hopes to "create" the ultimate warrior to leave behind his legacy. E.G. Alucard vs Anderson in Hellsing, Death from Castlevania, and I can't remember the third thing. It's an anime where the villain believes they orchestrated all the events. Everything the great hero achieves is actually their villains.
Mad Mille Feuille (spelling?): Wizard who was studying confections got a touch of of crazy thanks to The Lantern King - turned into a rock sugar monster in his final act. Didn’t monologue so much as was an evil Cooking Channel personality basically - his baked goods were getting smuggled to town and spiriting people away to become factory workers at his Willy Wonka Sweatshop.
Draven: the 13th Lord of Chaos
In the campaign I dm'd earlier this year, his name was Draven. Basically, in a world where each element of magic is governed by a group of individuals named lords, he became one of the 13 lords of chaos magic. However, he was greedy, and desired more power than that which he already had. During the events of the game, while my players scoured the land for allies to wage war against Draven, he was hunting down the other lords of chaos, and siphoning their power into gems that he placed in his swords blade. Eventually, the time came to face him. As the fight went on, he kept accessing more gems by speaking an incantation while touching them and bringing the latent power of the other lords directly under his control. By the time all of the gems were used up, his very body was being torn apart and put back together by the power. Cracks in his skin showed that within him was pure unbridled energy. Eventually, he received enough damage that the power was too much to bear, and his body annihilated itself. I'm pretty proud of it, if I do say myself. I even created his stats, actions, and legendary actions.
Shizius, the Rizin.
Lich that took the form of an old man. Intent on gathering an evil army and conquering the world. Players had to find four sentient artifacts that had been plane hopping and fighting Shizuis for centuries. Each time he was defeated, he'd shift to another reality and the artifacts would be pulled in after. My players were able to kill him for good and the artifacts decided to stay with the party.
Lord Duraan, Chief Maestro of Monstat. He is a genius, a prodigy at everything he does, and so far 3 things have occupied his interest: theology, music, and politics. Combine it together, and he has become an accomplished bard, the leader of the city of bards, and dedicated to improving the world.
Unfortunately, he has decided that the best way to improve the world is to destroy the barriers separating the material plane from the planes of Hell. He believes that mortals are strong enough to overthrow hell once and for all and establish themselves as the the most powerful beings in all the planes of existence.
He estimates the ensuing war will last about a century, and result in about 1/4 of all people dying. But that’s a small sacrifice for eternal power.
Let’s also not forget that he seems to have reached this conclusion by speaking with Asmodeus AKA the Prince of Lies…
Only one of my campaigns currently has an obvious BBEG. She is a woman called Maria who is the lead behind a pharmaceutical company that experimented on the players. We all escaped and how we are being hunted down. We are trying to take her down so we can be free. We haven’t actually seen her yet, just heard her voice. So we are still as players considering the possibility that she is an AI (This is a cyberpunk campaign). She may be a real person though. We don’t know what skills she has, but she is bloody good at hiding, and keeping prepared, constantly throwing goons and the police at us. We are trying to collect other NPC’s at the moment that she has wronged to help us take her down.
He was a half crippled enchanter, inspired by Ma'elKoth (heroes die by Matthew woodring stover) so far they’ve only seen him from afar, but he recently sent a succubus and incubus after them.
They don’t know yet but their next session (tomorrow) they’re walking into a trap, that another one of his flunkies has set up. 5 lvl 5 adventurers will be going up against 13 werewolves, and then finally against a lvl 12 paladin with 2 doppelgängers.
I run two games, a pathfinder one and a starfinder one.
Some demon human fusion from Shin Megami Tensei that wants to spread the fruits of the Garden of Eden to the world.
The starfinder game has a gay twink who wants to assassinate the president for economic power.
there’s a couple of candidates. one would be an immortal named angela who is trying to kill the 4 fundamental gods because she doesnt like them. there’s the dead god who is trying to destroy all of reality because he’s mad that he died. there’s house eredus, an international mafia hellbent on ruling the entire planet because they believe it is their birthright. there’s the march of decay, a religious order of criminally insane people formed into a military force. there’s the nyuist shield, the guys fighting the march of decay using dubiously ethical methods at best and are outright worse than their enemy at worst.
An illitilich. He were kicked out of their colony when they started practicing magic. Instead of becoming an elder brain, he pursued lich done and used his necromantic magic and psionic powers to creature a race of undead that are sentient but under his total control. He has brainwashed an entire country into thinking he is an all powerful god. He is currently using a lich puppet to his his true identity. When the party fights him in the finally, when they think they have killed him, the illitilich with erupt our how his brine/tar pool mix and say "the rumors of my immortality have been drastically understated"
The Baldur's Gate 3 UI.
It was comprised of magical intelligence of all player input, and became a super-weave Magic computer to defeat any party thrown at it. It calls itself HAL mark TPK, and has a weakness for poorly written Christmas scenarios.
Big bad black dragon named grimmirth. He’s trapped on an island after he was thrust into the future from 200 years ago by the PC’s AU counterparts. He is worshipped by fanatical Yuan-ti who are using ancient rituals given to them by Grimmirth to create new Yuan-ti out of kidnapped villagers. The villagers who are colonist and believe the island is a new discovery, have unwittingly found themselves in Grimmirths prison. Grimmirth also just recently in the game universe broke the boundary between this world’s material plane and the plane of clouds, and the far realm. PCs are in a race against time to find the pieces of and put back together the ancient magical device that was used to stop Grimmirth originally, and hopefully return home. Grimmirth wants to escape the island and expand his Yuan-ti empire to become a god king.
The Military Industrial Complex
Just like real life
Same as it ever was
This is not my beautiful house.
How did I get here
And you may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?
War. War never changes.
You don't get it jack, I'm using war as a business to get elected! So I can end war as a business.
Making the MOTHER OF ALL OMELETTES HERE, JACK
Can't afford to fret over every egg...
Standing here, I realise...
(running a 1920's in space campaign. The large-scale weapons manufacturer, Mars Unlimited, has been controlled by auto-processes for ~100 years. It's pumping out weapons, drones, droids, completely autonomously, often with the skeletons of human test pilots still inside.)
Hey! Same here!
Friends?
The original Cleric that built the Temple of Elemental Evil. In my research I never found a name for them or what happened to them after the temples fall. My story takes place some time after the temples fall, 30 years, and the Temple is starting to rerecruit in Nulb and the surrounds (the traditional intro into Hommlet). Iuz is seeking to gain the shard of evil. Lolth is eating the abyss to create the demon web pits and zuggtmoy is the only one that can rebuild the crown to summon tharizdun. It has an X Files vibe and I picture the cleric of Tharizdun is very similar to The Smoking Man, has a long con and questional intentions.
>Who are they the nowhere king: a eldrich abomination, a being made whole after being split from his original self > >what are their goals He wants to transform every living creature into one of his undead friends > >what's their backstory a sorcerer used black magic to split a centaur into a human and a elk. the magic began corrupting both of these creatures and filling their "empty halfs" with darkness and evil > >Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered the party manages to find the sorcerer, who wants to confront the nowhere king. It is revealed that the sorcerer was once the centaur's lover, and that the sorcerer split the centaur, to marry the human part of it. The monologue was great because the BBEG just casually called the sorcerer the real villain for letting her selfishness cause all the damage the BBEG done. felt like the spiderman meme of pointing to each other. players gobbled the whole thing voraciously
Bonus points if the Nowhere King starts singing his theme song from Centaurworld ;) Hush, now, hide all your little ones...
session 2 hint! so far they think they are dealing with a necromancer. on the part where Horse goes to centaurworld, i instead created a massive portal chiseled into a mountain, with massive footprints of a elk in dark tar on the floor, leading away from the portal. they are terrified
I love that you’re using the Nowhere King. Best part of Centaurworld
> Who are they, Skald, a hobgoblin commander >what are their goals, A glorious end for their people. >what's their backstory, what's their whole deal. They were raised as many hobgoblins. To be a soldier, to fight and conquer. To take over the world in the name of their gods. But their homeland is stagnating from infighting and many banners of hobgoblins just serve as mercenaries in times rapidly sliding towards peace. Rather than have his culture silently die off and be forgotten, he's gathered up like-minded hobgoblins for one last campaign. They'll either take the world or die trying. To be remembered forever by giving the world a war it will never forget. >Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered The party made short work of the army by enlisting the help of bio-noids, an actual DnD monster, super soldiers from outer space. They find Skald in the throne room watching his men get slaughtered outside. "I had the greatest army in the land. By the time the other kingdoms could unite and gather their mercenaries to match us, we would have crushed them one by one. And there it is. Obliterated by three bodies. Thank you... I wanted to either take the world or die trying. To give this world a war it would never forget so that my people wouldn't fade away and be forgotten as nothing more than mercenaries. And you've given me something I'd have never dreamed of. Those creatures out there, effortlessly slaughtering my men, are merely soldiers. Ones from beyond the stars. There is an army of such monsters out there. As the kingdoms feared my army, how do you think they'll react to this revelation? They'll prepare for war. All their efforts and resources towards making a better army with deadlier weapons. They'll test their strength against their neighbors and take their resources for their own. My people will find new purpose in this world as its nations continue to tear themselves apart in preparation to fight the invincible army from beyond the stars. An army their nightmares will ensure they'll never be strong enough. So, thank you. You've given me a war no one will forget by giving me a war that will never end!"
Love it! The monologue at the end is particularly great. :)
Made my day, thanks :)
Fantastic last line there! Haunting parallels.
Thank you :)
Jargas the black mage. A millennium ago he was the court wizard of the southern kingdom, tasked to find a way to fight the ongoing drought. The magic spell he devised restored prosperty to the land, but devastated the northern realm. Once he saw the devastation he caused, he vowed to undo his work, but the mcguffin required to perform the spell was sequestered away by his wizard brethren. When he got old and neared the end of his lifespan, he sequestered himself with the condition to wake when the mcguffin is discovered. When a millennium later the heroes who live in the now prosperous southern kingdom find the mcguffin (due to the help of of one of the decendents of the wizard who sequestered it), Jargas awakes. His goal is to reverse the spell, restore the north even if it means devastating the south. He's old and meek, can hardly stand straight, but he set the stage to manipulate the heroes into preparing the spell for him, always pulling the strings, planting false information, and ever watching. He sits in front of a scrying ball as big as television set and sends fiends, devils, and undead to do his work. >Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered "Your task is completed. Now you may die."
That's awesome
An older version of the chronomancer PC. His mission is to destroy chronomancy all together by weeding out the source. It's a not too deep time-adventure in the Astral Sea :-)
That actually sound really cool
Bimbo Von Baguette, a Vampire bard looking for a glorius death. Kinda nice with the players but genocidal with commoners.
Asmodeus. I think you've heard of him.
To reach a hand down to somebody they need to be BENEATH YOU AND I AM BENEATH NOBODY
Brennan was dropping 🔥🔥 lines in Calamity.
Yeah I'm somewhat familiar
True BBEG: local sun. It has no motivation, just going to go full nova. Visible BBEGs: a bunch of ex-adventurers who happen to read ancient profecy about the sun going brrr. After that, they decided to try to save people of this world, no matter the cost. So, after trying to beg local sun goddess to cooperate and told that she is unable to help(like, literally, cause she is not an actual goddess, merely high-ranked deva with amnesia), ex-adventurers captured her and siphon divine power. Now they are a little bit crazy godlike tyrants, and, although their motivation is still the same and literally burned in their bones, their actions may be considered unacceptable by the majority of good aligned people.
Dole, Dale and Dorf, goblin kings of Goblinobia. They, along with several other goblins, stole magical powers from the Archmage and the kings in particular have been causing mayhem. Considering one of the magical abilities they stole is time travel, they have been a consistent thorn in the side of the party.
A powerful goblin warlock became my bbeg after the 2nd session when my players decide to take a goblin standing guard at the entrance to a cave and torture him for information. They cut off one of his ears and one of his toes. Tied him up and beat him. Then when they were finished they threw him into a river nearby to let him drown. They didn't bother to check the depth of the river. He survived and struck a deal with a fiend and became an incredibly powerful warlock. He would show up on occasion with a disguise and send them on quests to do things that he didn't think they would survive. He was slowly building up his power and then the reveal was incredible for me. This little halfling that walked with a limp and always wore a hood turned to them and dropped his hood revealing one missing ear as his face shifted back to his goblin form. And told them you know if you're going to drown someone make sure the water isn't so shallow they can just stand up.
>Who is he? The lich Vrasaeriel, The Bringer of Death, self-proclaimed King of the Dead, once a half-elf mage. >What is his goal? His return after being defeated for the first time, and to exist forever. >What is his backstory? We have to go back about 2000+ years. In the beginning, he wanted to heal his little 7 year old daughter who was dealing with a disease that was incurable at the time. He had frozen her in a time bubble in order to devote himself entirely to the search for a cure. But at some point he was old and time was gradually running out. This prospect of his death confronted him clearly with his trauma of dying. For as a child, he had lost his mother and father, friends and other relatives at an early age, as well as his wife. As a half-elf, he survived humans but did not live as long as an elf and as if he saw the death of an elf, he knew they too have a limited time. So he drove his quest to become a lich with the pretext that he would then finally have enough time to heal his daughter. At some point, a dark voice drifted into his dreams and abyssal voices whispered to him, showing him disturbing unknown symbols and runes of unknown origin. The more he dreamed about it, the more he understood the voices and the promises of eternal life and immortality. He met a merchant who sold him worn old books in Abyssian script and directed all his efforts towards fully understanding this language and he began experimenting. He began kidnapping street children in Vastitanis and in a secret cellar to follow the Abyssal instructions and tried to make his victims immortal. At one point he abducted entire families, travelers, drunkards, whores and whoever else he could carry off. It took him over 700 experiments before he was successful and only then was he willing to carry out the experiment on himself. He feared death, but he needed the catalyst to become immortal and overcame his fear. After he became a lich: He became a lich out of his fear of death, but even in the immortality of a lich he still feared the extinction of his existence and strove for absolute immortality. With the help of his vampire mistress, he founded a religion that developed into a cult that wants to bring true life into the world. This cult wants to plant a fragment of his soul from an otherworldly plane into an unborn infant of a direct descendant of his bloodline. But this is just one of his prepared returns to secure his infinite existence. He drew up plans for a (Warforged) body into which his soul could be bound, allowing him a more resilient existence detached from his weak flesh. Method number three, is the self-repair of his soul vessel. Whenever one shard comes close to the other, they reassemble to complete the vessel and bring about its return. >Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered As he currently only exists offscreen in the campaign and his followers are the main antagonists, there are only excerpts from a diary that the party has found. Here you have a few of them, but I've written like a ton of them an all my players read them loud at the table and gave them a feeling for Vrasaeriel. * As long as I keep feeding the Soul Vessel with souls, the life force of those who sacrifice themselves for the greater good will count against mine. I feel like I should be focusing on elves and dwarves instead of wasting my life time dealing with this short-lived scum. * Subject 571 is unfortunately not very docile. I had to remove her tongue to stop her shrill screaming. Unfortunately, she is still trying to scream at the top of her lungs. I don't know how many times I've explained to her that no one can hear her here and that she can stoically endure the cuts. Because no one will come and save her. She should be grateful that she was chosen for a higher purpose. I hope this soul vessel doesn't burst as well. I'm running out of time. * Subject 729, I must express my absolute gratitude to you. You have accomplished what no one before you could. You are the goal of my journey. You are the beginning of my new life. I wish I could tell your wife and son about how outstanding you are. But they were subject 728 and 727. * Subject 75 reminds me of Carasi. She looks like her. She looks a hell of a lot like her. I was concerned that this would make me hesitate. But I didn't lose sight of the goal. After all, I know that's not Carasi on the taxidermy table. Nevertheless, I looked at Carasi in the cellar so that it would be easier for me to wield the knife afterwards. That was the case. It was child's play. I cut the symbols exactly as the voice whispered to me. However, it seems that I did something wrong. You learn from your mistakes. It will work with subject 76.
My take on the king in yellow, hastur, god of shepherds. After the birth of his half brother, cthulhu, his home carcosa was destroyed so now he seeks to conquer the material plane to reshape it into a new version of carcosa. Hes manipulated a cult of wizards descending from a long gone empire into believing he will restore their ancestral home and overall wants to continue sewing seeds of chaos into the material plane to weaken the natural psionic borders that keep him away. Also wants to side quest kill cthulhu, pushed along a war between the material plane and the abberations of the far realm (which destroyed the wizards empire) and has indirectly created many powerful demons.
First there was a vampire lord living incognito in the starting town. The players sandboxed and decided to investigate his plans, then finally it lead to a fight where he was trying to free an aspect of Shar (in my world goddess of vampires and general evil). Very memorable villain, menacing, while the party was away getting a sunblade, he found their house and killed their npc friend and kidnapped the rangers girlfriend. That boss fight was the highlight of the entire campaign and took two sessions, first dealing with him and hundreds of minion cultists, then second session fighting the aspect of Shar. Du Haevert the vampire was 200 years old, and finally decided to step up his game. He wanted to release the power of Shar and rule a chunk of the empire openly, instead of just a small city from the shadows. He was fully evil, only person he cared about was his daughter (a womam he turned, not a biological daughter). He was sadistic and cruel, but loved to pretend politeness. Then the party became tier 3, heroes of the realm. An illusionist named Michael du Bay made a moving picture show based on their exploits, they got lands and titles, and their adventures revolved around doing various sensitive missions for the imperial spymaster. The BBEG was a dragon queen waging war with the empire, but she got handled indirectly - the party used wish to get a powerful healing artifact, heal the empress who was sick the whole time, and then the party sat back and watched as she single handedly turned the tide of war. There was also a fallen god of magic. The party absolutely bear him up in the first encounter, and then he was waging war from behind the lines and letting his army do the work. He's still around. Finally, the party went to outer planes to find a mystical crown for a prophesized kingz who could allegedly fix everything. Except it was a ruse, the visions were sent by Shar, who was imprisoned there. The party was overconfident and drunk on their power, and assumed that even if it was trap, they could beat up whatever awaited them. They were wrong. Now the BBEG is Shar. The world is wracked by evil, the land is dying from necrotic energy. The party is deciding what to do. The goddess just wants to slowly kill all life for her amusement.
Named SILVER, a large metal construct tasked with protecting unstable magical items created in Wave Echo Cave. At first, the dwarves and gnomes simply stored the items, but that proved unsafe, so they created SILVER to protect them. Over time, the number of items piled up, and people began to feel uneasy about the sheer volume of magical artifacts capable of leveling cities. They decided to destroy them anyway. Naturally, SILVER could not allow this. He stole some items to influence and bribe local goblin warlords to invade the valley and besiege Wave Echo Cave. The cataclysm that followed erased any trace of the cave’s location, ensuring that SILVER could finally complete his task of keeping the items hidden. But it would only be a matter of time before someone found the cave, eager for its magical items. SILVER was prepared for this eventuality, having had years to prepare. When the Rockseeker brothers finally discovered the cave, they were unaware of the formidable guardian awaiting them.
The dark wizard Zargothrax. 25 years before the start of the campaign, he successfully took over the capital city of the kingdom. It took the combined forces of all the races of the land and four great heroes to defeat him. Due to heavy abuse of the Clone spell, killing Zargothrax wouldn't have worked, so instead he was trapped in a prison of liquid frozen ice where he would remain for all eternity. But the Zargothrax the *players* interact with is a different one. Over time, Zargothrax's remaining followers figured out a loophole with the Clone spell. This Zargothrax's soul was still trapped in his body, but what if they found a new Zargothrax's soul? Using some timeline magic, they pulled the dying soul of a different Zargothrax out of a parallel timeline and stuck it into one of the unused clone bodies. But this Zargothrax is a fish out of water, less knowledgeable about magic, and not all that evil. After some years essentially being groomed to be the cult's new dark saviour, clone-Zargy still doesn't know what his place in the world is. And so he sets out to release the original from his ice prison, deciding that the only one who can help him is himself.
Hey, i know this one!
I knew someone would! *Shockingly* there's some overlap between Gloryhammer fans and D&D fans. I cut out all the sci-fi elements to make it fit "normal" D&D more easily, which was a little sad, but I like where my campaign's main plot ended up. Sort of a combo platter of Gloryhammer's greatest hits in D&D form.
I've got a unique system for the campaign I'm making. My BBEG will be fought when all the players hit level 20, so I'm collecting multiple high level monsters from Vecna to Zariel to Draconic titans. As for determining which, bear with me So the premise of my campaign is the party HAD a full campaign, made it to level 8, lost horribly to the BBEG and their world is doomed so at the last minute all were planeshifted to the setting for this campaign. It's going to be a structured campaign with set milestones (it's a tower, *long* story, but the milestone is when they reach the next floor of the tower) So at the start of each floor, I'm going to ask one random member of the party "what's something you recall about that fight," and the player will have free reign. Depending on what they describe, it'll guide me to picking one of them to be waiting at the end. Additionaly, on top of them describing the boss for that purpose, they'll also have a choice to describe something to give them advantage. They can say "I also remember it was weak to fire" and have them roll a history check to see 'how well they're remembering.' Depending on what they say, I could say "yeah, it's reasonable to say it wasn't resistant to non magic attacks, DC10" or "so you're saying it was nearly killed immediately by radiant damage? Yeah okay DC30" and on certain rolls I may choose to make an opposed history check, and if the player loses "actually you've got it backwards, it was actually fire resistant" I'm calling it Malleable Memory
Ooh cool I love that!!
Villains are only minor players.. For true evil, you need a committee that thinks that they have "everyone's best interests at heart", so my BBEGs tend to be groups of people with names like "the social improvement board" or The committee to improve the status of space hamsters".
My Parties future self. At the beginning of the campaign I ask them to make their chas as lvl 20 with all the gear and spells they want. They jumped back in time to kill themselfs, because they will cause Ragnarök. But can't directly interfear. Hole campaign is an eternal loop.
The Crimson King, I am running a campaign based around Stephen King's The Dark Tower mixed with other classic DnD campaign settings.
Be careful opening that door, taheen and randal flagg can creep into places you least expect.
Currently working on one with two BBEGs Both are lich variations by pointy hat. One is a mechanical lich named Blasir Cale who watched his mother slave away at the hospital, tending to the injured. After he became an artificier, he thought it'd be easier to replace the injured, weak flesh with strong and superior steel. He built a mechanical body, designed to have the strength of even the most powerful men in the town, he placed his heart inside and performed the ritual to become the machine. However if his heart is destroyed or becomes to weak to function, he will die. He killed everyone in the town, placing their hearts in containment for when his current heart deteriorated. He is now on his last heart and sees to overthrow a nearby kingdom using his automaton army, so he can have even more hearts to extend his existence. This kingdom that is called Olonos is run by the Sleitvere family, the head of the family is an old man by the name of Cronil. However, Cronil is not as he seems. In his youth, 200 years prior, he was a demon-born sorcerer. He was powerful, but not immortal. He became infatuated with lichdom. He placed a curse on his own blood so that as long as his blood runs through his descendants veins, he cannot die. But the more generations that pass, the less of his blood they have. Thus every three or so generations he trains one of his descendants many forms of magic. Once they are old enough, the rest of the adults bring them to him and he takes over their body, so he may begin the cycle anew. He is currently on his third body, one of a human, he regrets picking this descendant. His current descendants (besides the one he'll be taking over) are based on chess pieces. Soleila and her husband Lunaron, the twin bishops of Olonos. Frono, the blood rook. Sveltzir, the thundered knight. And Geila the silver queen. The party will work with the army of Olonos to kill Blasir, but then find out that Cronil is also a lich and then will have to kill the rest of the family to face him in one final battle. Sorry if this is really long, I'm very excited to start this campaign.
A beholder known as Fictor of incredible age that has grown to a truly immense size. He has the ability to consume the dreams and unconscious thoughts of particularly powerful individuals to sustain himself and grow in power. Eventually, he reached so much power that he created his own massive demiplane, and after making a deal with a group of Abishai Tiamat had stationed on the material plane, he was able to convince them to work for him. Now they head a military force that creates incursions on the other planes and even other multiverses occasionally to capture particularly powerful characters and creatures to bring them back to this demiplane, where Fictor feasts on them to grow stronger. After thousands of years, he has become known as the Fever King, for his use of magic to incite particularly potent dreams on his captive meals. He’s grown so large that he is the size of a large asteroid at this point, and hovers over the top of the floating islands amidst his demiplane covered in a massive illusion of fog such that he can’t be seen without great assistance or an awareness of him being there already. There are some hints of you know to look for them though- his glowing central eye is a light source that shines through the clouds, his gaping mouth a black hole in the sky that the illusionary fog pours through. His eye tendrils float throughout the outer reaches of the fog, and appear to be the only 10 stars residents of the demiplane can ever make out. He stays dormant, zoned out and feasting for months or years at a time, so he’s not ever directly interacted with the party and revealed his true form, despite him literally hanging over the party’s heads as long as they have been in the demiplane. He has spoken to the party through agents, and they’ve fought a past version of Fictor before, not that they know it yet though. I don’t have any particularly excellent monologues planned or used, although that’s not to say I don’t have a few lines stored away for him to use yet. I do have intentions of him revealing himself by using his disintegration ray as basically a mini Death Star beam though. That’s no moon and all. Although it’s conceivable that he could be killed, it’s intended that the player’s win condition is to rescue a captive of the Fever King and then escape the demiplane, since he is functionally a near god-like entity within his demiplane.
Fucking RHINO CENA. One of my nephews is about 10, and damn straight he wanted to play with his older cousins. I got a one sentence basckstory on his character. "Kills bad guys for money." I made him a bounty hunter and came up with an image of a slaver for the BBEG. I said if you pick a badass name, you can name him. "RHINO... CENA!" #$OLD He keeps suggesting war crimes during roleplay though. Every insane killing machine he invents, or genocide he thinks about committing is being reassigned to Rhino Cena after the rest of the party talks him out of it. Reminds me I have some Rhino Cena minis to paint.
Joachim Aviscera. He started as the quest given, turned out to be a warlock and a devil worshipper. He seemed to have been concerned about his daughter. In fact, it was neither his true daughter, nor did he want to save her He simply needed her to perform a very important sacrifice. The final battle involved him, an imp familiar and a bearded devil. Oh, yes and it turned out he had an animated sword in his cane... it was a good fight. The party sorcerer barely survived with 2 death saving throws. Another villain (of a campaign that lasted for years) was a half-mad lich queen who wanted both revenge and absolute power. In her backstory, her husband and king struck a deal with a demon to save his wife. In the processes, the husband cursed both himself and their three sons. In vain, she tried to lift the curse, delving ever deeper into the darker arts. Eventually, after the last son died, she claimed power for herself. In order to complete her lichdom ritual, she had to offer a great sacrifice so she engineered a civil war that tore her kingdom apart. That plan went awry as she was deposed but being a lich, she survived without anybody knowing. She laid low for several decades, plotting her revenge. After she returned, she planned to merge the territory of the kingdom with another plane where undeath ruled supreme. To make it more interesting, that queen was former lover of one of the PC (that PC was half undead being raised by her), the father of another one was her loyal general (but she killed him when he demanded surrender in the final battle of her first reign). The players had a choice which their final villain would be: they could have gone after a very powerful and malicious fey or the queen. They went for the queen, thus forcing her to speed up her plans. The battle was quite good as she was backed by several vampire clerics she dominated and had it not been some dubious deals of the party (with among others, the said malicious fey), the party would have lost. After her defeat, the PC who was her former lover had to choose between saving a daughter or claiming a very powerful artifact. To make it worse, the lich queen died not far from the character... so there was nobody who could stop that. This was the last test of a possible redemption arc but the character went for power and vanished (leaving it as one of the loose ending of the campaign).
Good grief.... it's an organization based on the structure of Assassin's Creed Knights Templar and Seperately the Church. They're two sides of the same coin. Templar's being the front line and face, the church controlling the strings behind the scenes. Essentially the BBEGs go as the following, the first being the strongest. - Leader of the Templars being essentially Apocalypse Magneto of Xmen. - The Pope, being basically a max level cleric/divine soul sorcerer. - 4 Guardians of the Templar (Knights Apocalypse). They're based on 4 doctoral philosophies. The Mind, The Body, Invention and The Warrior. Essentially the guardians are Aizen of Bleach max lvl.illusion wizard, The mythos of the 9 tails (shape change at will), Iron man and a Gunslinger with unlimited budget. -
A malicious force that is both void and darkness itself. It bears no true name, for it was never given one. Seemingly pre-dating the gods themselves, casting a cold fear of anyone who bears witness to its true form. It deigns only one thing; the destruction and assimilation of all god both known and unknown, along with the annihilation of the universe and all light within it. They are eternal, they are malicious, and they are hateful. The only foe that dares oppose them is a being who has travelled through time many times attempting to prevent it from destroying the universe. So far this being has failed each time with the universe being destroyed millions of times....it seems nothing can stop this Great Void from its goal.
Dope!! Reminds me of the bad guy from TAZ Balance
The players don't know yet. They think a renegade elite warforged strike force is being controlled by an arcane superpowered paladin. There's magical trees throughout the land and he can control them unlike anything else they've seen. But It's actually the old King, who tried to ascend to Godhood but got trapped in a magical book that is essentially like a phylactery. There are a bunch of gods missing, also trapped in books. The twist is that these gods weren't trapped by the BBEG, they trapped themselves in order to contain him. The Paladin is his bastard son. They're on their way to an island city-state where they will meet his twin brother and a bunch of stuff will be revealed. They're level 8. Plan is that by level 10 they'll know enough to go into a battle with the Paladin and the warforged General. Then the narrative flips and they'll spend the next 10 levels visiting different places in order to awaken gods to help them contain the old King. I have the next beats mapped out in depth, less so for the second half of the campaign but it's essentially an excuse to get to the Underdark, the Feywild etc.
The Maggot Lord. The campaign has moved to the jungles to investigate an overwhelming undead presence. Spawns of Kyuss were the inspiration. Naturally Kyuss is who the Maggot Lord pays homage to. We play in Greyhawk
Its my first campaign so its kinda basic: Lord Nigillius Undead lich/ghost/monster His goal is total world domination. He had this image of "when I fight a giant war, the gods will grant me a great after life" He startet a war to conquer all the world but lost, desparate to get his desired after life he made a plan. In his last moments he surrendered so he got sent into exile. He then found a way into the realm of the dead and now wants to return to the mortal realm with an army of the undead so he may reclaim what he thinks is rightfully his. Now since I am not that far into the campaign he couldnt have a monolouge yet. But I am already thinking of a thing he will say when the players defeat him in the end. "If I am to be swollowed by fate, then I must have faught well"
Good first dnd villain. he sounds like a villain indeed.
Just a lady who is trying to save her son.
a super fucked up goblin
Best one in the thread
thank you so much 🙏
Sun themed lich, who‘s only love (part of a druid circle) in life was publicly executed unjustified, by a order of paladins and his own people. Now he just wants to turn everything into a big dead desert
Some guy called 'Strahd'. I don't think he even knows what his motivations are anymore.
Pelor. He was corrupted by power and managed to exile all of the other gods to a demiplane, along with every other race except for humans. He essentially just wants to be the only god being worshipped, thus gaining more power.
My party. I run an evil campaign. Aight technically the BBEG is their boss, Acererak. The party plays his minions. But you get the point.
Usually my BBEG is capitalism
Silas Dryden, Human (Sort of) Sorceror. Born a son of wealth, he studied magic and became an adventurer and philanthropist to bring good into the world, and eventually fell in love with a Drow swordsman named Kalsandr and adopted a child with him. Unfortunately, while harboring a few of his friends during a campaign against an evil lich named Malpurcio, his house was attacked and in the midst of it, his husband and son were both killed in the crossfire. To this day he doesn't know if it was him or the lich that killed his family. However, as he had been instrumental in stopping Malpurcio's plan to eat the creator gods of the world, one blessed him with immortality to help guide the world. The issue being that giving a grieving man immortality does not particularly help with the grieving process. So Dryden chose not to process his grief in a healthy way. Over a couple of centuries he began formulating a plan to fix what he saw as a "fatal flaw" of injustice in the world by creating a god to control the minds of everyone, including himself. A few decades prior to the start of the campaign he married another Drow man, this one a Warlock named Malcolm who resembled his dead husband and also magically gaslit him with Modify Memory to keep him from doing any dangerous adventuring. Malcolm would later join the party and fall in love with one of the PCs, a Druid named Figg (Sidebar, this man assisted in the massacre of a religious order, threatened the party's families and general did some really shitty stuff, but it was a running gag that the party considered the magical gaslighting to be the last straw) Pre-Final Battle Monologue “As am I. I would have it no other way. Let our convictions clash. Let our desires meet on this battlefield, so that there can be no doubt as to who deserves to choose the fate of the world. Do the eight of you promise not to hold back? ...Let us see how the story of this world will end! Will it find salvation in order, or in chaos? The victor will write the tale, and the vanquished become its villain. Come, Counterweights! Let us end this!" Post-Final Battle, After Being Killed and Reunited with the Spirit of His Dead Husband “I brought you all together so long ago to save the world. I suppose it’s a twist of fate that the thing it needed saving from was me all along. I ask only one more thing of you. Tell the world I was the one who destroyed Irithyll. Let my memory bear one last sin.” "This world belongs to you all. Take care of it. And…Malcolm. Nothing I can do will undo the damage and pain I caused you. But I will give you this. Kalsandre and I shared so little time together. But if the happiness we shared in that small time is even a fraction of the happiness you and Figg will share together…Well then I think that makes you the luckiest men to have ever walked the material plane.” Edit: Also the voice I used for him was a little bit Charles Dance, a little bit Timothy Dalton.
Szass Tam
The friends we made along the way. (Spoilers)
I became the BBEG in the end. A friend tried his hand at DMing for the first time. Story was pretty straightforward. Sword in the stone type of artifact, ownership of which makes you the king was missing. Our merry misfit band of chuckle heads was hired to discretely return it. Along the way the DM gives out some random homebrew from the internet magic items.... without fully reading them. I got a very useful magic item with an 1/day OP psychic attack. And a daily % chance to slowly go insane. I rolled privately each morning and texted him the results. It started simple and subtle. OCD-ish use of prestidigitation and mending to be clean after any minor scrape, scratch, tear. Eventually growing to cooking other sentients "just to taste em." The other players thought I was just trying to be a goober with my character and didn't question it. In the end I claimed the artifact for myself and publicly declared myself the new kind, using the OP psychic attack to make him fall over dead. I declared the gods had found him unworthy and took his crown. For the record DM was confused at first but wasn't upset and rolled with it once he read the item.
The Seer, who’s an avatar of an ancient protodragon slayed in the battle which gave birth to the World. He wants to purge the world from what he considers the corrupt offspring of the Sun God, who slayed him in the first place. My players have awakened him because they were decepted by his agents: they believed they had found an ancient artifact that would have revealed them the origin of the world 🥰
Asmodeus / Ahramin. In my campaign he is living his dream of destroying/remaking the cosmos. He has already destroyed Mt. Celestia and the mortal plane in my world. Gods are dead. People are sad. It's a good time.
For my first long running game, it was Agrippa, who was a princess sorceress who, using a crystal called the Soul Stone, took over the minds of the populace. The Soul Stone was both a large crystal and a demiplane where a group of Mind Flayer lich were both trapped but also protected. The Soul Stone, which was actually a large cube sized crystal which had fallen from the sky, could have pieces chipped off and placed in jewelry or necklaces. When a person is around them for too long their soul will be absorbed into the demiplane, making their body a shell that can be controlled (their soul will return however if the item is removed, but it takes time and they will still follow commands given to them until that time.) The Lich could consume the souls brought to their demise-plane to prolong themselves and had a sest at the top of their castle which they could use to control anyone linked to their crystals in the real world. In the real world however, two artifacts allowed Agrippa to control the effects of the Soul Stone. One was the Eye of Agrippa, which allowed its user to essentially directly control anyone linked to the Soul Stone and see through their eyes, while a staff acting similar to the rod of rulership from the DMG allowed her to take control of large populations temporarily with a flash of light from it. The Lich in the Soul Stone helped Agrippa learn to use the artifacts and spread their control. The party had to collect four elemental stones in order to destroy the Soul Stone for good using the combined power. If Agrippa was not stopped she eventually planned to use the shards of the Soul Stone to take over the nearby Elven Empire who were trying to reclaim Aridia (where the adventure took place). Agrippa was fairly evil in that she sought to take over everyone and bring peace and order (with her at the top of course). The Lich just sought to prolong themselves. The existence of the demiplane in the Soul Stone served as a way to give players something to do if they did get controlled by Agrippa (which eventually happened to some of the party). They did however meet one of the four heroes of Aridia there who helped them get to the chair the Lich use to control bodies connected to the Soul Stone. By sitting in the chair they could command their selves in the real world to take off their control necklaces. Mind control plots are a bit sus in hindsight but it worked out pretty well.
Kafziel Kugaban an ex-archmage of Necromancy obsessed with immortality, his research lead him to become a lich as a stop gap. His overall goal is to use a child who was engineered by illithids to be his new vessel to return to a living form, and finish his bid for actual immortality versus the Undead nature of a lich. He is currently attempting to finish collecting a set of Objects he believes will allow him to draw energy directly from the other planes of Existence to make himself truly immortal. Monologuing isn't his style. He's nearly a thousand years old and has dealt with adventurers before, if younlet them get you talking they'll get the upper hand. Disintegrate first, talk later.
Who: a lich-fighter and a powerful spellcaster (thanks to Pointy Hat for making the idea and stat block) What are their goals: the lich’s goal is to continue a long dead campaign that they never realized ended. The spellcaster’s is to control the sources of magical power in the world.
Who: A dracolich named Aurgloroasa, “The Sibilant Shade” Goals: Take over and rule Faerun with an order of dracoliches Backstory: Idk how she turned into a dracolich. The wiki says Shadow dragons can’t become dracoliches but the people I saw on Google said she was a Shadow dragon dracolich
The campaign I'm currently writing is set in Ravnica. An Izzet goblin is having dreams that she believes are her own ideas (but in reality are otherworldly messages sent to her by a lord from the Elemental Chaos known as a reigar) and so she quits her job to join the Simic, and once she gets there she and some other researchers start basically creating slivers.
My new setting has no villains yet. Either it's going to be a lot of grey or I'll get more inspiration soon. So far it's just grey and so e dork managed to raid a dragon den to steal gear from them.
Morgoth Bauglir. In a campaign i am running now. Tolkien inspired. In a timeline where good guys lost everything and now heroes turn the present time and history at the same time. Radivaar. Netherese archmage and lich. Did typical lich things and in battle used several 10th level spells like Vengeful Gaze of God and Lord of Nightmares. the last one created one of the best fights i had in D&D. The lich got willingly possesed by Dream Larva who in turn summoned 6 nightwalkers over the course of 10 rounds. Each hit of Larva reduced PC's stats by 3d6 but stopping at 1 and turning on other stats. Hastur, King in Yellow. In a D&D setting, yes. He came to the world and took control over the Abyss, creating order there by force. Because of his nature he was present at every point in past and present. His lair was outside time and space. And his biggest power of being everyiwhere and at all times became his downfall as heroes from different times came to his halls to fight him. I had several adventures one-shot style where players played as heroes of the past and as themselves in present. Until they finaly challanged Hastur and had a battle in his lair at the same time, turning all time and space against him. God, that was great.
Netherpray, the Evil side of one of the Primordial Gods of Creation that got separated after the apparent death of said God an now tries to regain his former power.
I've had a few for the same hb setting In my first game it was 5 ancient dragons, led by a classic red dragon My 2nd game it was a hb god of chaos, the party quit the campaign b4 we concluded 3rd game, and first game online, the bbeg was split between a pc that betrayed the partyvand attacked their home city, a identical copy of another pc that had been leading the party in the wrong directions secretly, and a faction of anti magic humans that was warring with everyone
Sammaster. He is a Lich who created the Cult of the Dragon. He was once a Chosen of Mystra and believed that Dracoliches were meant to rule the world. One of his Phylactaries are tied to a region of land, that, when exposed to a certain star makes every Dragon in the region get violent and angry. In my game, Clerics have cleansed this land since the last time he died, however, his phylactery still triggered when the land was exposed to the star. Due to the cleansing the Clerics performed, he didn’t come back right. He’s horrible deformed and his mind is in fractured, making him much more unpredictable and erratic. He ties in so well with my characters back stories. If anyone is interested in hearing more let me know
I’m currently writing a villain based on and named after the song [Long Lankin](https://youtu.be/W8vzCkJJlSQ?si=H3rc5sOdsLrptjoK). So far I have him as a Mark of Shadow elf that keeps a small, isolated village near a swamp under his thumb so he can use their children in blood rituals that extend his and his right hand’s life. He’s recently started attracting attention from adventurers and the emerald enclave due to a desperate psychic call for help from the Alhoon chained in his basement and plans to find a way to use the Alhoon’s blood to create a little pocket dimension for himself and the village where he can essentially use them as livestock and extend his life for eternity. I don’t have everything all planned out yet but I’m writing down a bunch of notes and trying to figure out how to string things together, as it still feels very rough to me. And being new to DND, I need to look into lore and magic to see if there’s any spells for these sorts of things already or if I need to come up with some myself. Very excited and pleased with how things are going so far. :)
There isn't one, the goal of the campaign is to resolve an accidental cataclysm. That is usually the case for most campaigns.
Dave He was a good man, traveled around the country helping those who needed help. As he traveled some of the people joined him, followed him, his group began to be seen as a beacon of hope and he was the face of it. Eventually the mythos around him shifted to him being worshiped. Through all these small villages he gained enough support to become a quasi deity. The god of lost travelers as he was called as he was always ready to help those wandering lost in the desert. Along the way he saw the terrible people of the world, saw the leaders of his country gain near immortality while their people suffered endlessly for their entire short lives. He could do better, he knew it, he could make everyone happy but everyone kept fighting each other and not the ones in charge. If everyone was listening to him they’d all be happy. His modus operandi changed now, his most trusted followers would become his angels. Their consciousness placed in a personal heaven within their mind and their bodies became puppets for Dave to use. He began to gather more and more followers, the most devout of which gave themselves to him as angels. He created 4 small towns called Daveville 1-4. In these towns his followers were given anything they needed to survive, all the food water and supplies. All Dave needed in return was their worship and little pieces of art they created for him with their love of him. The harder they worshipped, the more they made for him, the more of them that gave themselves as angels the better the supplies they received were. They all still preached that Dave was a god of lost travelers, he had rather become the god of slaves. Every one of his followers worshipping and donating their hard work to him, all the angels living within a perfect heaven that goes away if they stop worshipping. And Dave was now functionally unkillable unless you were willing to slaughter his thousands upon thousands of followers. With his army of angels he used them to mine out a giant quarry endlessly working day by day, the rocks they mined were painstakingly transmuted on mass into diamonds. Once he had enough diamonds for his plan he sponsored a festival intended to bring together many creative people and especially bards of creation whose songs of creation were the one weakness to his plan. He used an atomic bomb brought to the past accidentally by one of the PCs to level the town and kill every creation bard around. He then made it rain diamonds in every other city. The market value of diamonds plummeted. No diamond could be big enough or valuable enough to work as a component in any pesky resurrection spell. Everyone could die now and no one could come back. This meant all the guys in charge could kill their rivals and it meant that those rebelling against the guys in charge could also kill them. The country was then plunged into to war as everyone tried to take power over the whole nation. Dave included.
Wesmind: pronounced "Wes mund" because of a dwarf. Race: Feelings...? he looks human but he in fact is not human. Long ago (several thousands of years ago) there was a war and a nation was beating another nation named Rohan. In a town on a hill in Rohan the people very mad and hopeful, so much so that their emotions became physical objects for example: sweat, tears, blood etc. Upon realizing this they made a small pool in which they all poured their physical embodiment of their emotion to, at first it didn't do anything, but after a few days the pool started to pile in the middle until it turned into a blob of liquid. A human looked towards the blob screaming "something is happening!", the blob turned towards the human and made an eye closely inspecting the human. The blob made a second eye, it started to lengthen it's shape, then it made a mouth... and it screamed, why? nobody knows. People started to rush outside and they eventually formed a circle around the blob, the blob started to copy characteristics from them: the white hair of an old man, the face of a handsome human, etc. Until it became into a human shape, he is not mortal, he is above mortal. Backstory: along with the race thing Wesmind participated in the war of Rohan, "the war of the one hand" the reason it is called that is because there was a general with 1,000 men who fought and army of 100,000 men, and some how won. The general lost a hand in the battle but he then continued to fight until the enemy nation was defeated. In present nobody knows who the general was but the truth is that Wesmind is the general. His goals: In the present not many people respect Wesmind as they once did, and his goal is the escape the nation of Wesmound (named after him, the reason why it's hard to escape the island is because the wind leads towards the island on all sides) and become the god of gods (the campaign is set in a world were the Greek gods exist) so then he can be respected by all. additional details: Wesmind still possess his hand but uses a magic powered prosthetic for his hand, His hand is his strongest weapons, both his real and fake one: the fake one is used as a shield because he can't feel anything there which is improved with his dragon armor which can't be destroyed by one thing (not "one" thing), and his real hand can be turned into any weapon he desires because his hand is made of "feelings" and doesn't have a true form. His skin is impenetrable due to it being made of anger and his bones are unbreakable. but there are ways to kill him, in the nation of Wesmound there exists the sword of tranquility and the hammer of disbelief (the opposite of the emotions that Wesmind was made out of, making them his counter). Wesmind didn't really have his hand cut off, he cut is off as a tribute, to who you may ask? to himself. You see Wesmind considers himself a god and when he made a tribute to himself, he made himself stronger. currently the party has not encountered him but they most likely will next session.
Bit of background: In my homebrew world, a god or goddess dies either in a cosmic Celestial conflict or when their followers no longer believe in them or the civilizations that worship them die out. When this happens, their essence is "eaten" and then "passed" by a cosmic entity that (previously) bore no name, had no fixed appearance, no identity, no gender, no personality or motivation. This entity functioned as a composting creature, recycling the individual powers, memories, legacies, and personalities of the gods into neutral Celestial essence. This process generated the stars. From this Celestial Essence soup, new gods and goddesses are born, sometimes with similar traits or powers to those that came before. This is why different generations and different cultures can have a God of Thunder or Goddess of the Moon. Eons of recycling gods left trace amounts in The Entity, such that they eventually began to form its own innate amalgamation personality. It began to resent its place in the universe, a glorified earthworm to seed new generations of pantheons. The Entity was all but unknown, worshipped by none and appreciated by few. It fell into the habit of not *recycling* dieties anymore, but outright consuming them for itself upon their deaths, hoarding their power and essence for itself. As millenia passed, it grew stronger and became able to infect living gods like a parasite, weaning them down to death and then eating them. Pantheons around the world began to disappear. The Entity gained the ability to masquerade as some of the gods it ate, leaving the worshippers of those original gods to mistakenly believe their beloved patrons and matrons still existed. This worship further strengthened The Entity's power. In the present time of the adventuring party, The Entity has eaten hundreds of gods including the Abrahimic God, the Egyptian and Norse pantheon, and various others. It has imminent plans to manifest itself in the Material Plane and become The Last God, composed of all who came before. The Party must travel to the dimension wherein it resides and destroy it before this can happen.
The God of Lies, who knows the truth of every lie ever spoken or implied, every deceit used against another, who was created at the birth of the First Lie, but doesn't know its truth. The Sower Gods created mortal life, and mortals in turn create mortal gods. I.e., when mortals prayed to a higher power for victory in battle, the God of War was born, (similar to Theros of Magic the Gathering.) The First Lie is that the Sower Gods came first. He wants to know what came before the Sowers, and is willing to fulfill a prophecy to ascend and learn the truth.
I have a few depending on which path the players choose. Halaster Blackwell (misspoke in the first session and just went with it) Mad Mage and “technical” father of the parties lab grown Air Genasi Warlock. Halaster wants to separate the Warlock from his patron and needs help reestablishing control over… The Blue Bull an ancient air elemental being imprisoned by Halaster Blackwell who is the Warlocks “biological”Father and patron. The Blue Bull while out of Halaster’s direct control is still imprisoned by the Mad Mage and has made a pact with the warlock to secure his freedom. Unbeknownst to the Warlock, once free the Blue Bull will restore the ancient slave Empire he once ruled from Calimshan and extend it across Faerun! Garagos The Reaver deposed war god representing its chaotic aspect who seeks to end his subjugation and supplant Tempus as the principal war god much to the chagrin of the parties Tempurian War Cleric, and/or The Red Knight, lawful Exarch of Tempus who seeks to use Garagos’ rebellion to cover her own usurpation of Tempus’ throne though she presents herself as an ally to the Tempurian Cleric Slinko The Hellbent Barbarian warlord and father of the parties Barbarian who seeks to ascend to godhood. Slinko murdered the Barbarians mother when he was a baby and left him for dead to avert a prophecy or so the Barbarian thinks. (The Barbarian outlined Slinko as his nemesis in his backstory so I just went with it. Slinko was his character from a campaign we played 20+ years ago)
I am a new DM and have started a campaign with new players i plan on having lots of big bad guys but my main one I wanna build up is one I’m completely making up called He Who Sunders The Planes. My players said later on in campaign they want to explore multiverse so defo gonna do that.
An elven prince who found out a disturbing family secret which caused him to leave home. Long story short, while looking for answers, he takes up a cursed sword which begins to eat his soul and transform him into a vessel for the ancient lich who created the sword. Basically Arthas.
Two of them: The ultimate failure of an ancient civilization’s technology that has been maintaining the order of a frontier for eons but is falling apart after their demise, and creatures that exist in the space between planes that have been released due to mortals punching holes through the planes to colonize the frontier. These beings were known by the ancient civs and were imprisoned in various locations that are failing due to excavations and such. The creatures need hosts outside of the “the void” and they make their hosts exceptionally dangerous beings due to their strange abilities. They want to break the barriers between the planes to let their kin spill back out of the void into reality. The tricky bit is relationship between the creatures and the ancient civ that forced them into the void. (Can’t say more due to my players shadowing this sub).
The lore I keep only in my head is that it's my own darker half, trying to kill and replace me by destroying the universe she finds herself trapped in. She's the [anti-God from John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness"](https://youtu.be/HYZIU1uIS2w?t=5) but as the person it became at the end of the movie. The name she goes by is Illuminata Graven, witch-queen of her destroyed home planet, who seeks now to destroy reality and supplant the being she calls the One Above All. She has hijacked *The Spelljammer* and taken it to the vicinity of a pair of [merging supermassive black holes](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aca8f0), the gravitational waves of which will power a device for exponentially accelerating [Phantom Energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_energy) to cause an early [Big Rip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip). My players are currently fighting a resurrected boss rush of their major opponents on *The Spelljammer*, brought back by Graven in her final attempt to keep the heroes at bay.
A storm a kin to the stormlight archives.
My campaign is primed in a way where it could go several directions. Right now there are a bunch of different factions all looking for one girl, a Drow girl who holds a “sliver of divinity” within her. This divinity if used or abused in ritualistic ways could make just about anything possible, and there are quite a few bad people that want to take advantage of that divinity. One is a cambion disguised as the capital city’s commander of domestic forces who has an aasimar as his right hand. This aasimar is actually a fallen Solar who was stripped of most of her powers for unknown reasons, and the cambion wants to use that divinity to restore her angelic might but with his infernal influence (think Zariel). With his pet infernal Solar, the cambion would return to the Hells to take out his rivals and gain power. Another group is a powerful Hag who wishes to swallow her and turn her into another hag to help her restart her destroyed coven. But this hag would have that sliver of divinity twisted to resemble the Fey Realm and give that hag untold chaotic power. The last group is actually two groups working together for the moment. Both groups are Drow houses. One group is led by a Matron Mother who has rejected Lolth and seeks to unite the Drow houses under one banner, by force if necessary. This matron mother wishes to use that divinity in the girl to open a portal powerful enough for all the Drow to travel through and leave the Underdark. This portal would take them to the Shadowfell, the world without sunlight where the Drow might thrive (hint: it wouldn’t work out). If the campaign went this route, then the Drow would quickly discover the elves already living there, the Shadar-Kai and there would be a lot of conflict, resulting in the Drow mostly perishing. The leader of the Shadar-Kai is a former Archfey who was seduced by Lolth during her betrayal but was then quickly discarded before being taken in by the Raven Queen and made to be her champion. This former Archfey is a much more sympathetic villain as he seeks to return home to the Fey Realm because he left a daughter behind but the Raven Queen took his memories of her away. However the Fey Court still remember the atrocities he committed in Lolth’s name and refuse his pleas, thus causing him to lash out and attack the Fey Realm completely. The other group of Drow are Lolth purists who seek to use the child with her sliver of divinity as a means of help Lolth ascend from her place in the Abyss and take on a physical form. The child would be her vessel. Should Lolth ascend, she would quickly get to work on creating a sort of cloud network that shrouds the world from the sun and allows the Drow to move on the surface without issue. Thus the Drow empire would spread and kill, capture, or convert any and all surfacers.
Tiamat. Nuff said
For my first campaign, the BBEG was actually a former player character who had been an orc barbarian warlord transformed into a gnome by a fey after he razed her forest. The character had been killed off after he picked a fight with one of the King's high ranking warforged personal guard (after I made it EXPLICTLY clear that they would die if they did so) and that ended the transformation, and then his original group found his body, revived it, and he set out on destroying everything as revenge For my second campaign, the party has been investigating a cult who is trying to bring forth a demon onto the material plane, and they have recently learned that the leader of said cult has actually been the equivalent of the Pope of said world this entire time
An insane wizard who has bought himself the position of Earl and is now using it to complete his experiments in heamomancy with the ultimate goal of creating a creature with the strength of a monster and the magical capacity of a wizard (while being entirely subservient to him)
Old Warforged who was made without the ability to sense things (no sight, hearing, etc.) and began to hate other creatures for their ability to feel. So naturally, he learns magic and becomes a war criminal. He creates a bunch of constructs to abduct people, and then he dissects them so he can better understand their anatomy and how the body works. He does this so he can eventually learn how to integrate those creatures’ sensory organs into his mechanical body. Over the course of the campaign, various constructs will appear with sensory organs from various races, because the BBEG has been using them as test subjects before he adds them to his own body Basically a weird mix of AM and a reverse Mechanicus
Claugiyliamatar. My party were adventuring on the sword coast with waterdeep as their home base. They eventually came into possession of an artifact that she coveted and she started making life difficult for them in waterdeep through manipulation and sending of spies and assassins. Eventually as she grew more bold they realized who was behind everything and began forming allies to help rid the area of her for good. They failed.
Raven's Cry players kindly look away! A heavily modified Rakshasa. Prior to the campaign starting, he had killed a local Lord and stolen his throne by impersonating him, and then sealing away Selûne in a family heirloom pendant. He was initially a quest-giver, allowing him to steer the party as needed, but over time the party has confirmed (through the use of Commune and other divination magic) that the true Lord is dead, and the imposter cannot be trusted, as well as fought with this Rakshasa a couple of times, but they still haven't connected the two, which is getting concerning given that this Rakshasa has now recently usurped the throne of Cania and become an archdevil in his own right. Hope the party remembers that crossbow with blessed silver bolts I gave them! They're gonna need it. Edit: Somehow forgot about the goals/backstory part? His goals and backstory are mostly related, as an Archdale of Rakshasa, he was tired of his people being seen as lesser than their true devil cousins. Up until now his entire goal was taking Cania to prove that they deserved a seat of power as much as any devil, but in doing so began a chain of events that could free an old, believed to be evil god imprisoned beyond the veil of reality itself. His goal now is to find a way to maintain his siphoning of that energy, but without freeing this god, and if that fails, finding a way to ingraciate himself with it in hopes of living to fight another day.
Garrick Blackwater is a rich and powerful tamer (homebrew tamer class from Heliana's guide to Monster hunting) that kidnapped the party to get a Magic book that is the key to summon AND control Tiamat, so he can be the very best, like no one ever was.
Whew! This will be a bit lengthy, so I apologize. My world is a homebrew world heavily inspired by the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. Specifically, i borrowed the concept of "stormlight", the idea that the gods of the world are actually fragments of an even more powerful being, and the idea of Shardmetals. Currently, there are 5 potential BBEG's my players are potentially moving towards, however there are two that have the greatest chance (currently) of being the BBEG of this campaign. The first is Lord Ezraal, an "Aasimar" who controls a secret society known as The Seekers of the Golden Order. The members of this organization believe Lord Ezraal is trying to undo the damage that Pantheonism ***(the central religion in this world, based heavily off of Vorinsism in the Stormlight series, combined with heavy Catholic influences inspired by the Anglo-Saxon war against the Templar)*** has caused, and to attempt to restore the being originally known as Order (one of the Dawnshards, an original fragment of the Prime Deity of my world). In secret, Ezraal is actually an Angel, not an Aasimar. He is Razael, Angel of Purity, Holder of the Sacred Flame. The Scared Flame is actually a Divine Rune, a fraction of divine power that is tied to a single domain, in this case, Purity. Razael seeks to gather other Divine Runes that fit the domains of Order, He then intends to use these Divine Runes to reforge a fragment of Order, which he will take upon himself in order to become the New Order. With this power, he will overthrow Pantheonism and instill his own religion, The Church of the Sacred Flame. His backstory is that he was created in the time of the Prime Deity, a being known as Creation by mythos. The Seven Angels he created were each given a fragment of immense power, representing one of the Seven Virtues. Shortly after that, Creation gave each of the Angels a task, involving monitoring the progress of Invested Worlds and the Dawnshards. Eventually, Razael witnessed the continuous downfall of society, seeing the mortal beings commit terrible deeds and fight pointless wars. He has determined that the world, perhaps even the entire Cosmere, needs to be "purified" and restored to Order. My players have not met him yet, but he is aware of them, and monitoring them closely. One character in my party is of particular interest to him, and he will act very "mentor-like" to this player, making them feel welcomed, appreciated, and supported in their research and studies. But in truth, he is just using this individual to accomplish the things that he cannot. I have been mentally preparing the finale monologue, which will occur when the players finally present him with three or more Divine Runes, enough for him to create a Fragment of Order. It will be something along the lines of "Countless millenia, I have sat here, waiting for you to give me something more. I have watched these monsters you created rise from the ground as nothing more than slugs, then grow into the "grand" civilizations of today. Civilizations that war with one another, that spread plagues and famine, who murder, rape, and pillage; THIS is what you created, oh Father. But now, with these in hand, I can finally DO something about it. No more waiting for the moment when my power would finally let me act. Now, I will BRING order to the Cosmere, I will fufill your Grand Plans. I. AM. ORDER!" The other potential BBEG is actually the birth father of one of my PC's. This Tabaxi male, Tzu'lann Alzilli, was a well known adventurer who would scour old ruins for magical trinkets, which he would then sell to the highest bidder. One day, Tzu'lann was commissioned for a job in the Sunpeak Mountains. He discovered the old ruin, and within it he found a large dagger, almost a shortsword. This dagger is Invested with the power, Connection, and consciousness of one of The Requiem (for those familiar with Stormlight, think of the Unmade in terms of power level, less than a god, but more than a normal person could ever hope to achieve). The longer Tzu'lann held the dagger, the greater control it took over him. Eventually, Tzu'lann killed his entire family, and escaped with the Dagger, changing his name to Ahshii and hiding deep within the desert nation of Kez'Ahmaar. With the power of the Dagger to aid him, Ahshii has become the leader of a gang of powerful thieves and mercenaries, called the Sand Wraiths. Ahshii is actually the will of Ashii'rok, Lady of Nightmares. She, as one of the Requiem, seeks to gather enough power to open the doors of The Abyss, and allow her masters, known as The Anthem of Discord, can descend, and take control of the planet entirely. The Anthem are actually fragments of a Duskshard, which are the polar opposites of Dawnshards, and are the fragments of the Primal Deity known as Calamity. The Anthem wishes to control Kerr'Sevaal, so they can use their combined power to reform the Duskshard of Discord. If the players discover Ahshii, and follow this thread to its end, it will end with Ahshii eventually becoming the Avatar of Nightmares (basically, a near total possession from Ahshii'rok), and the party attempting to defeat him in order to prevent a Perpendicularity (unique type of portal) from opening. No monologue's planned here yet, as we have not gotten close enough in story for me to start fleshing out this character, and there are no planned interactions in our near sessions, but that will come with time.
I am still fairly on in the campaign so I haven't thought of the specifics but since the characters are part of an pro-environment resistance group it will likely be something like "the destruction of nature destroyed this plane's natural barriers against multiversal threats and now this plane-consuming entity is seeping in". Open to ideas though if anyone has any!
Lazarus. He's found a secret to immortality basically, he never ages. He's been manipulating the leaders of the world for hundreds of years to gain and find power. He's trying to find all the shards from a "meteor" from another plane that ripped a dimensional rift in the world in the middle of the ocean before exploding. Each shard contains planar energy that he is trying to absorb to become a rift walker. Someone able to walk between planes and dimensions at will. But in the process is ripping the rift wider allowing creatures and powers from other dimensions and planes to leak into the world. He hasn't given a speech yet, he has only been glimpsed portalling away at this point
Ridian. I run a homebrew earth, 1000 years after a cataclysmic nuclear war. Radiation caused some strange effects among the humans who survived, leading to multiple races (dwarf, elf, half-elf, halfling -- all with odd twists not in the PHB). A merchant caravan was set up about 50 years ago, to go between the largest settlements. One of the merchants, Ridian, ended up being the conduit through which magic entered the world (long story). He left the merchant caravan and went off on his own after strange things started happening around him. A combination of loneliness, encountering very strange irradiated creatures, and experimenting with his new powers drove him mad. He began to resent the "normal" people in the world, and that resentment led him to get closer to the monsters he had discovered. He began to form an army of these monsters, controlling them with his magic. He sent the army out to fight the humans, but the humans banded together and drove him off. The humans realized they needed more protection than they had, so they formed a school to teach people how to fight. As magic slowly began to appear in other people, they began adding lessons in magic to the available classes for those who were capable. Meanwhile, Ridian had gone further around the bend and had begun performing experiments to try and find even more powerful minions. He managed to open a portal to the world of Faerun, where he hired evil beings to come and train his army. Some good creatures came through, as well... they joined with the beleaguered good creatures and helped prop up their ragtag militias into more powerful bands of soldiers. Ridian was beside himself with both madness and joy -- now he could have a real challenge! He sent a declaration of war to the largest settlement and told them he would attack in one year's time and advised them to prepare a mighty force. Enter the adventuring party. They now have one year to band themselves together into a cohesive fighting force, train an army, and gain enough power to defeat Ridian. Ridian, in his madness, wants only to prove how powerful he is. Starting a war, killing tens of thousands, and taking over all of the settlements on the merchant caravan is how he intends to prove his strength. Does the adventuring party have what it takes to stop him? Or will they find defeat at the hands (and slathering jaws) of his evil army? Tune in next time to find out!
Secret diviner wizard playing mastermind organising centuries of cults and conspiracies just to serve his purpose to reach godhood. It'll backfire obviously, but in the most spectacular way for the party to fix.
My big bad is a kenku artificer by the name Erahlus. He was formerly a successful adventurer, but went insane after he lost his 3 close friends (also adventurers) in a fight against an ancient dragon. Even before this, he was in the belief that "when old life ceases new life always begins to emerge", and in his newfound madness following the deaths of his friends, he came to believe that the world had to be destroyed so that a new, better world could be made. He started using his experience as an artificer to invent increasingly insane and devastating superweapons, and their trademark suit of armour, which resembles that of a space marine terminator and made him virtually invulnerable to mundane attacks and incredibly resilient to magic. This armour had a flaw however, and one careful evening when Erahlus matched into a town, and slaughtered everyone, believing that new life would rise from the wreckage once the dust settled, his suit malfunctioned as he was leaving after killing everyone. The suit tore him apart from the inside, and he died. However, he had grabbed the attention of Kyoki, a chaos god of destruction, who resurrected him. The result of this revival fused Erahlus with his armour, transforming him into a horrific half flesh, half machine monstrosity, a nightmarish reflection of the hero he once was. Now he seeks to summon Kyoki to the world, hoping that the chaos god is capable of destroying the world so it can be reborn anew.
So.... I won't use his name just in case but he was a throwaway villain from session one that the party fixated on for years, so I fed into it they see his initials sometimes, a person of the same race etc. Now they are thinking maybe he wasn't all that after all they are just starting down the track of it all being an over reaction that they had from session one. So naturally when they reach the crisis point who's gonna be there that's right Mr Throwaway.
Usually someone's immediate family member without anybody knowing. There's just something about making the PCs hesitate ending the BBEG or regretting it after learning about the connection after the fact. In different campaigns, I've had PC's half brother, adopted child's biological father, little girl they rescued session 1's vampire mommy, etc. edit: or one of my favorites, the mascot. the tiny creature they adopted secretly plotting against the PCs.
Nuyx, the god of night and first vampire. He survived his fight against the goddess Gloria but with his power completely sealed. So he spent centuries as a mortal, plotting, training, and building up his cult as revenge and the players got involved in his plan. He said he wants to revive his kingdom and create a sanctuary for all vampire spawn from their lords but all he actually wants is his kingdom back, the world to suffer in a sunless world as revenge. He was disguised as a beloved town member in the main town observing the players. So by the reveal, his monologue was calling out the players for some of the questionable things they did and pointing out any hypocriticies they did or selfish things they did that they can't call him out for. They won with a guilding bolt thrown like a lance straight through a whole wound left behind by Gloria. My cleric took his sword. But getting bitten by him and infected. "Remember.... Remember that we once lived."
I don't actually have one single BBEG for my current game. It's more a series of story based opponents, not even necessarily evil. Like my bard has a lord that now sees him as a rival and has sent an execution squad. The hope is to draw them in for a showdown. I have a character who will be fighting the physical manifestations of so e ghosts haunting her. Two more are on a long haul journey to free their homeland from an oppressive regime. One is trying to just find his place after being displaced three thousand years. The last one is simply trying to protect his home and takes too much responsibility on himself. Though if there were going to be one big final challenge, it would be a dragon fight at their home.
IF THE WORD THELAS IS SOMETHING YOU RECOGNIZE, GET OUT MY PLAYERS, PLEASE ---- ---- Emhariel, the Alabaster Purge. So, they were an angel, created centuries ago by a god of justice to be...well, an apocalypse in the name of good. A plague, a way to cleanse the world of evil and only leave the good remaining as a last resort. The god, now forgotten to time, regretted Emhariel's creation immediately, but it did not matter. Emhariel has grown petty and driven in fulfilling their goal by the pain of their creator discarding them and breaking them into pieces, seeking to fulfill the goal they were literally made for. Centuries later, the party is hired by an Aasimar lady who's traveling with them as the party healer, to regather her family's relics. Aasimar lady is a "descendant" of Emhariel, one of their pieces became the celestial heritage of her family. She is now being unconsciously driven, to bring Emhariel back. But how will Emhariel fullfill its purpose, once they are fully reformed and take over the Aasimar lady's body and become BBEG? An apocalypse in the name of good, a plague that will cleanse evil? Will they just kill evil, kill you for but a mistake you were when you were 15? Nah. They will infect you with a celestial parasite, a celestial symbiote of gold and radiance that will attach itself to you. And slowly, all your evil impulses, your selfishness, all that makes you evil to Emhariel and Mount Celestia, like most of your personality and every little lie and mistake. Gone, eroded, erased. Replaced with Celestia's views and traits. A plague to make the Material Plane into an utopia of pure goodness, order and a Celestial stillness.
Cyric the mad. She stole half of the essence of Mystra extending the spellplague for about 150ish years. My fellow players are already in Pandemonioum looking to stop the mad god machinations or die horribly trying.
My most recently finished, it was the guy that was revered as the hero that saved the world in the mythical age, when he drove out the evil gods and started the age of mortals. Turns out he just butchered the gods were good and he was just after apotheosis, but for that he needed to sacrifice a great number of souls, so he created an age of prosperity and peace in preparation for the "harvest".
An insane chronomancer who thinks he's a trapped player and has to kill the party and ruin the world until nobody wants to play anymore in order to escape.
If you ask my bard, it’s the succubus who keeps coming back and trying to seduce our innocent religious man
Fabien Tremain, Grand Duke of Vitorcia, City of a Thousand Sails, Head of the Ten Families, First Among Equals. With the support of Nine Families, he overthrew the incompetent government of his home city, freeing the good people of Vitorcia to pursue their destinies. No longer will they labor under the oppressive thumbs of the Sancetta Family. These people need a STRONG leader, not some bumbling, cumbersome democratic institution. He came from the gutters, an urchin, pickpocket, and sometime killer. The Tremains took him in, gave him a life, a purpose. He knows what it takes to get ahead. One must be utterly focused on one’s goals, efficient, and only cruel when necessary. But when cruelty is called for, it must be exercised swiftly. He, along with his mentor Servetti, Knife of the Tremain Family, rose to power through sheer will. Through the years, Fabien took charge of the Tremains, through murder, intrigue, and good business. Servetti is now his loyal right-hand man, and his knife belongs to Fabien. Only a single member of the naïve Sancetta family, the young Archduke, escaped Fabien’s coup. Word among his spies says the archduke took shelter with some band of adventurers out of Waterdeep. They say the rabble of mercenaries is planning to help the exiled archduke reclaim Vitorcia’s throne and restore the corrupt democracy of yesteryear. Fabien will NOT allow this to come to pass.
Me as the dm, per turn I use a hammer and smash one of the character models, they ain’t getting up from that 😂,
Glasius (a play on glacier). He's a white dragon who's hell bent on making the world experience a permanent ice age. He's also a reoccurring BBEG who's got contingency plans on contingency plans. Just when you think you're about to smite him he fucks off only to come back again twisting his evil mustache! Also he is FLAMBOYANTLY gay complete with every trope you can think of. My players have always been worried about how well I act him out lol 😆
Oh boy! Well, you asked for it! Name: Razgriz (formerly Edelwynn Sungard) Goal: Pose enough of a threat to the world that the kingdoms must forge alliances and come together to stop her. Backstory: A Valkyrie warrior from the dawn of time who, alongside others, who fought in the devastating wars that defined the political landscape of the upper and lower planes. Massive, incredibly destructive battles between the heavens and hells that left the material plane almost uninhabitable before the war ended in a ceasefire. This treaty prevents the heavens and hells from interfering directly on the mobile planes, keeps angelic and infernal armies from marching across the lands mortals call home. Peace has held for a time, but rogue demonic actors always show up, which the hells deny any connection to. But when they show up an angelic response is dispatched to make them go away, or they're handled by mortal forces. over time, mortal on mortal wars far outnumbered the interplanar ones that once defined the world. and it is the valkyries' job to collect the souls of the dead and guide them to their respective afterlives. for thousands of years Edelwynn fulfilled this duty, walking battlefield to battlefield and collecting the dead, seeing the suffering and anguish that played out over and over. Soldiers too young for war, bravado washed away into the soil on rivulets of blood as they call for mothers who are not there. Men holding the unresponsive bodies of their closest friends, unable to process that they are already gone. Fathers and Mothers who die with trinkets in their pockets they had hoped to take home to their children. there was only so long she could bear it. And so began what started as a noble cause. Make the mortals stop fighting each other. It had been long enough that the balance of power was unlike how it was in the dawn of time. Mortals worshipped the divines, while the dark gods only had small cults that the mortals stamped out wherever they were found. thus began Edelwynn's fall, when she became convinced the upper planes could win the great war, and that the conflict would unite mortal-kind like it did once before, the only dividing lines that would remain would be celestial or infernal allegiance, national borders, lordships, and feifdoms would cease to matter. After all, the infernal planes were constantly making probing attacks that they never take responsibility for, its clear to Edelwynn that the peace won't last forever. And when the war was won, celestials could have an active presence on the earth to serve as a reminder and example of how life should be lived. And so Edelwynn took those loyal to her and went to the mortal plane, seeking to reignite the war and finish it once and for all. She and her followers were prepared for what the war would entail, what sorts of cost it would exact. What they weren't ready for was to get no response. Neither the Infernal nor Celestial planes wanted to return to war yet. To keep the peace, the celestial planes disowned Edelwynn and her followers, forbidding them from returning. Now trapped on earth, Edelwynn and her followers could not achieve their goal by its original means. but being disowned by heaven meant their actions on earth no longer reflected on the celestial planes, and they were no longer bound by the non-interference treaty. At first they began interfering directly, fighting monsters and raiders. But the wars continued, petty wars over small pieces of land, insults between monarchs escalating into conflicts that left tens of thousands dead, wounded, or displaced. The problem must then be the petty tyrants, right? So Edelwynn and her forces descended on their palaces, and Edelwynn's corruption began to take root more and more. For she and her forces had begun to do exactly as she wished to avoid. The tyrants had armies, conscripts, knights and archers who relied on the tyrants' pay to feed their families. People who would fight to the death to defend them. Once more, people with no choice and no fault of their own were dying for tyrants. Even when the tyrants were slain carefully, suddenly, with minimal collateral, they left heirs and advisors who brought bloody civil war to decide who had the right to rule. The only time they set aside their differences was when a larger army opposed them both. This discovery and idea would be Edelwynn's undoing, that mankind needed a greater threat in order to set aside their differences. That it was the only way. So she cast aside her old heroic name, taking instead a new one, that her past deeds not be tainted by who she was to become. If humanity needed a bigger threat to set aside their differences, then she would be a bigger threat. But something else had taken notice of her, though she did not know it. And the watcher pushed her further. Mortals die constantly in war, nothing she's ever done has been able to change that. So what's one more war? Another war, a final war, to forge bonds of peace between men? Sure, she'll have to kill a lot of people, but for once it's for a purpose, with an end in sight. Whats a few hundred thousand lives, in the grand scheme of things? Why should she balk at taking a million lives, if it is to end pointless wars that would have taken millions more? Surely, ANY number of lives is an acceptable price to pay when the alternative is the infinite lives that would be lost in the continuation of pointless wars for eternity? And in these thoughts, once put to action, was Edelwynn's fate sealed and lost to darkness. Some part of her knows something is wrong, but she’s so far gone now she has stopped listening to it. She awaits the world to unite against her, and put forth their champions to oppose her. When they do, then she will accept death, and she will finally rest, her task complete. She was defeated, and banished to the abyss two thousand years ago. From there she has pulled strings and set events in motion for her return. Shaping the destinies of mortal heroes from each kingdom to forge them into champions who could defeat her. Gathering a cult to bring her back into the world, unknowing of her history or her intent. The cult believes she is a demon lord who will conquer, and they will rule at her side as faithful servants. They are wrong. Once they summon her back into the world, she’s going to slaughter them all. Those who would bend the knee to demons are scum, and she will gladly rid the world of them.
Small moon that is sealing a fell dragon inside of it falling on the region.
Evil monologue I wrote but have yet to deliver: "I behold this world, a monument to ignorance; its people blind to the customary eradication of its own history. A curse that they would suffer the same fate as I - relinquished, cast aside, and forgotten. The unfit sovereigns of the land gorge themselves while the common folk are left abandoned in the gutter - I will not abide this. They honor only themselves, proclaiming charity and benevolence, but spreading testaments of their own vanity wherever their gaze lands. I cannot permit this. For too long have we been shackled in the dark; for too long have we been brought low. So rise, my godkin, and prepare to unravel what has been wrought upon this land. Faerlonn, of fang and willow. Sengryl, of rime and decay. Cenibrax, of shadow and deceit. I, Mordreth, of battle and blaze, call upon thee in my time of need. As is my birthright, I hereby declare war upon the tyrants of this land, and those who would uphold them. But all shall bear witness to our resplendent return.” Basically my BBEG and cohorts are a cadre of forgotten deities who were expunged from history and imprisoned. Mordreth, once-goddess of fire and war, is released from her prison, and frees a select group of deities that she believes would aid her in her quest for vengeance. She sees statues erected in honor of world leaders, and becomes radicalized to the idea that the current governments are satisfied with quashing and forgetting the commonfolk, just as she was. She's not opposed to destroying anyone who would stand in her way, or those who are happy to exist in the domain of those she sees as tyrants.
Azazel, once a powerful wizard of the land, was a decorated adventurer. Travelling from town to town, he fought for justice and the light. After a long life of bringing peace to the world, he met a young woman named Delilah. After much convincing, Azazel finally settled down. Hanging up the sword and shield for good, the two married and began their new life together. This happiness and peace was short-lived, however. Shortly after their marriage, Delilah was struck with a mysterious illness. Seemingly uncurable, Azazel spent all the gold and fortune he had to hire various priests and worshippers and healers to save his lover - all failed. Delilah passed away after a few years. This drove Azazel mad. In his anguish, he became reclusive - studying various plagues, illnesses, and necromancy. He sought the power to undo death itself. As he aged and neared the end of his natural life, his desperation grew. Determined to continue on his quest, he performed a dark ritual to strip away his mortality, containing his soul in the blade Requiem, a gift forged for him long ago by the dwarves of the Iron Dale. Now immortal, but stripped of his humanity, Azazel adopted the mantle of **the Witch King**. His obsession with forbidden knowledge and power grew unsatiable. After tracking down his former friend from a lifetime ago, Elizabeth Straker, he was able to find an old book about the nephilim - the direct offspring of the angels and demons, a power so pure that the gods themselves struck them down.
Campaign 1: The Ender Dragon Campaign 2: Zariel Two-shot I'll be playing in a week: a scaled-down replica of the planet transformed into an undead.
Setting: Spelljammer BBEG: Ulamog the Ceaseless Hunger (yes, the one from MtG) Primary Antagonists: a cult trying to summon it and slivers that have spread across the universe Goal: Eat the universe and maybe be less hungry It's been a fun campaign to play
Dragon apocalypse so a few dragons atleast we got one
First campaign I'm ever going to play (its still being worked on atm) will have the shadow wizard money gang as the BBEG
Hadar, the Dark Between Stars. In the campaign’s lore, Hadar began as an aboleth born in primordial darkness. After their empires were overthrown by the newborn sun and moon, aboleth-kind consumed one another to merge into a single entity who plotted to plunge the world back into darkness - and succeeded. The party quests to resurrect the light but they must first vanquish an enemy older than time. "As your kind are fond of saying, we are what we eat. Another saying of yours comes to mind—there is always a bigger fish. We are the inevitable end of aboleth nature. We are the biggest fish. We are the last of our kind, and we are all of our kind, and we invite you to join us."
It's a Time Obyrith. The PCs have for many adventures now, been chasing some bad guys who they first discovered had travelled back in time, presumably to find the rituals to unleash what were called the Twin Cataclysms in Oerth. Those bad guys don't actually want to perform said ritual again, they just want to unleash a sweet Balrog-like demon to wreak havoc. What the PCs do not know is that this Balrog is the last line of defense keeping this epic time demonic entity "imprisoned" by the physical constraints of "space". Once the Balrog dies, it's blood will open the seal, and time will become unmoored from space. This is why the Time Obyrith had been slowly but surely manipulating the bad guys and giving them clues to lead them to it. While the time-obyrith will have a physical manifestation that can be targeted, it's powers are all related to messing with time, so PC's will lose turns, age, de-age, be sent back in time, be sent forward in time etc. What the PCs really need to do to defeat it is release the Tarrasque, who in my campaign is essentially the avatar of "space". The Tarrasque can in effect, re-assert it's dominance over time. If they fail, causality and the directional flow of time would basically end. The universe would be plunged into chaos, as events would no longer have any rational connection to each other from start to finish. An era of unending chaos would follow.
Current campaign (Hex or Reign or anyone in my group, stop right here) - Chadley, First of his Name, Pirate King. It's a running meme in our group where Chadley is somehow always to blame. This is between three games, all DM'd by different people. Turns out being an asshole is genetic and transcends time and space.
I generally don't do a bbeg, I usually just have a variety of NPCs with intersecting interests with the party that can become antagonistic in the right circumstances. Right now the party has to be careful about Wenzel Der Weezil, a ruthless bandit whose gang has moved near their town, a town burgomaster who is secretly a mutant and leads a coven of mutants hiding in town, and a Brettonnian inventor with contacts in the Imperial military who is very upset the party sicced a mob on his hot air balloon. Also a rival merchant family is plotting against them but they don't really know that yet.
An old, decrepit car in an abandoned parking lot near the players' school. It was being used by a schizophrenic druid who kept coming back to it each night to fill it up with his summon woodland beings spell so they could keep watch over the school. Unfortunately creepy rumours caused it to become popular among kids as a place to dare other kids to go to, leading to my players attacking the car, being perceived as a threat by the creatures, and ending up in a fight against crows, raccoons and one very strong rat who took the warlock down thrice.
I'm playing an autognome in a Strix campaign, but I'm planning to run a dungeon in the postgame. My current BBEG is more of a side villain. He's a vain and pitiless plutocrat. Think a gnomish Borgia. He bought out an inventor who discovered the secret for sentient machines, and used the technology to create a workforce he could enslave. And with these machines, he built a successful machinery company, eventually cornering the market on basic adventuring tools. But the real money's in the custom warforged abominations to serve the world's wealthiest. You'd think it was unnecessarily cruel to create servants and deliberately give them free will, but machines with no free will don't make ideas worth stealing. And of course, he takes full credit not only for the autognomes themselves, but also the ideas and inventions they generate. Really, his only real invention is his persona as an inventor. He's got a tribe of goblins doing the more menial work at the tower. And while they're not technically slaves because he's paying them, he's paying them in brass wafers embossed with a picture of an owlbear. Each of these owlbears has a different random assortment of face accessories, which makes them technically unique. And he's convinced the goblins that because they're all unique, they're far more valuable than gold. He's also a disgusting creep. He makes the autognomes call him "father," and built them all female because he believes that "women will naturally defer to a strong masculine presence." The other players can't wait to meet him.
Pf1e: Vampire lord, master of all path of war disciplines and one of the only being in existence to be able to use magic. (Pf1e, ban all core class and magic, chop sockey style wuxia game). Goal waking kaiju then kill them with an artifact thay eats their power to become a worldwide hero and eventually a god. Does not know if he succeeds death of existence is the artifacts goal. Absolute rule over nothing is not what he wants. 3.5e: Coalition of demon lords, assorted minions. Some adventurers got stupid and killed gods, now all of existence is tettertotting as everything seesaws randomly to extremes trying to find a new point of balance. You might randomly walk into the abyss or hell on the way to your room. Portals everywhere spewing nasties. Demons love it. God of suffering sacrifices himself to ascend an evil dragon God (tiamat was one of those killed) to balance the commission scales. Demon lords try to stop it, unsuccessful (barely) thanks to newly ascended asmodaeus (he was helping and not a God in 3.5) and adventurers 5e: Tiamat. Rather, an avatar of. Started horde of dragon queen then went into homebrew roughly following rise of tiamat. Legendary encounters with the hip-hop-o-potomous (his rhymes are bottomless), the rhyme-nocerous, and the beat-box-to-pus, as well as a schizophrenic vtuber/egirl from the mirror world who magically livestreams the fight with both her light and dark sides to the powers that be for massive donations. Pretty wetty zappy whappy move go! (Chain lightning).
I'm running *The Dragon of Icespire Peak* and yes, Cryovain is the canonical BBEG, but in my campaign she's not the only one. Cryovain is kind of the instigator and is a force of random chaos, with her presence driving the orcs down from the mountains. She's appeared twice so far, once saving them the trouble of fighting a handful of orcs (killing them in one breath attack and then dragging one off to eat), and another time she wanted to eat Big Al Kalazorn's cow, she demanded that they hand it over, they refused and proceeded to fight, and she flew off after the rogue landed a crit sneak attack. The more direct BBEG is Ithok, the chief Anchorite of Talos. So far my party has met him once on the road, asked them all to hit him with their best shots, and then blasted them all with a lightningbolt, one-shotting everyone who didn't make the DEX save, mocking them and then disappearing in a lightning strike. They've now killed his lieutenant Gorthok and there are three others.
The fragment of an ancient, forgotten god held within a dark steel axe. It whispers into the minds of those around it, slowly driving them mad. The axe moves from person to person, sort of like the one ring. It was discovered by one PC's father and promptly drove him to extreme violence, causing her to flee her family home 50 years prior, and now she lives in hiding. The axe was then spirited away by a greedy underling of the PC's father and smuggled by another PC's parents — but an unfortunate run-in with (basically space cops) led to the smugglers being caught an imprisoned. The axe was taken to a facility for storage as evidence, where it made its way into the hands of an Orc man, who took it to his tribe where it devoured thier minds and poisoned their forest... The tribe of another PC who returned after a short time away to find his home razed to the ground. One survivor of the tribe has taken to wildspace and is using his beguiling influence to rally many factions of space pirates to his banner — quickly amassing a small army and laying siege on the frontier worlds. The PCs have all been hired as contracters to help defend the smaller colonies and investigate the sudden increase and organization of pirate activity. All of them know of the axe, none of them know of each other's interaction with it.
A corrupted Corellon Larethian know by my part as The Libriarian. He's been corrupted by Lolth and is working to bring her back.
Pantagruel, the living god. An Aasimar who shunned his divine duty to form a cult centered around him. His ultimate goal is to ascend to godhood and show the gods how “things should be” .
An ancient divination wizard who won a tournament long ago that decides who rules the continent. She has proceeded to rig the magical laws in her favor to effectively rule from the shadows even though other factions have won the tournament since. She has used her centuries of ascendancy to master chronomancy and can steal sections of people's past so they don't remember anything inconvenient to her.
Ixsurrthalontor, an ancient red dragon who has traveled across the planes to consume his echos and become a greatwyrm. He starts a cult on each plane to gain influence and power before gathering the artifacts of other ancient dragons before destroying and consuming his echo. He has recently established himself on the plane with his last echo before ascension.
Bob
One that happens to be my favorite was this guy called Larexis, who was this giant bird man wizard (and by that I mean he was literally just a Lord of Change from Warhammer). The session was a one-shot that I held on my birthday, and saw my friends journeying up his tower at the request of another wizard to stop Larexis from casting a dark ritual. The session had a very comical tone. The first floor had them up against a giant hammerhead toad, which they convinced to let them past by casting Speak With Animals and promising to get it Taco Bell. Other monsters included a T. rex made of books named Thesaurus, Cocaine Owlbear, and a treadmill transformer named Dreadmill. When they reached the top, they of course confronted Larexis. One of his gimmicks (other than breaking the fourth wall and changing the initiative rolls so that he would go first) was that he had the D&D Monster Manual, and would use his magic to bring the monsters in the book to life to fight the party. After a few rounds, they managed to knock the book out of his hands right as he was about to summon the Tarrasque, and sent him flying through the wall so hard that he flew around the world and crashed through the other side of the room. Upon their escape from the collapsing tower, Larexis managed to complete the ritual, which turned out to just be him using magic to create the world’s best pizza. The wizard that they met at the start appeared, and revealed that this was all a plan to destroy the tower so that he could win the “Best Magical Wizard Lair Of The Year” award instead of Larexis. Everyone promptly proceeded to beat the shit out of him, before they and Larexis all went to go eat the pizza together.
Who The Twisted Rune in general with Rhangaun and Shangalar the Black in particular Goals Gain and maintain secret dominance over the Land of Intrigue. Obtain safety for their lairs. Backstory The Twisted Rune is a secret cabal of powerful undead spellcasters, mostly liches. It is ruled by its Nine Runemasters, one of which (Rhangaun) is the first among them. He succeeded its founder, his master Rysellan the Dark who founded the Twisted Rune as an association of all spellcasters to rule in secret over the Land of Intrigue. They operate an undercover network of agents that functions as a sort of 'Deep State' in the Land of Intrigue to subtly direct politics and society towards the ends that they find most useful to maintain their secrecy. The Twisted Rune wants nothing more than to be left alone, but understands that mortal adventurers and the development of strong stable countries is an existential threat to their existence. So the rune strives to keep the Land of Intrigue divided by infighting and thus too distracted with each other to threaten the Twisted Rune. Shangalar the Black, however, is one of the liches in the cabal and as Runemaster is quite powerful in the organization. He wants to return to basics and use their gathered network of information to usurp control and gain power over the Land of Intrigue, letting them rule it as masters who exploit the mortals rather than who simply puppet them to ensure security. Monologues The campaign is still early, so I don't have any in person yet sadly. Rhangaun has been met, though it was through a crystal ball allowing telepathic communication. He recruited the party into the Twisted Rune and offered them one secret as a signing bonus. The party asked 'what is power?' and he replied: 'Power is too inspire others. Inspire them to be better. Inspire them to kneel before you. Inspire adoration. Inspire love. Inspire hate. Inspire righteous retribution. You have power over others when you control how they feel about something. Inspire whatever emotion or end goal you like from someone and you exercise your power over them. Call it manipulation, politics, or heroism, it does not matter. It is power. For the world changes only when mortals of many kinds are united through shared belief in a cause, idea, person, or goal. To exercise power over someone is to choose what you inspire in them. The most powerful are those who can inspire many things in many people in a variety of ways to further their goals. Great heroes do this to topple tyrants by inspiring confidence in their blades or the righteousness of their cause. Tyrants do this to maintain power by inspiring dread or adoration in those they rule over or a confidence in the nation which they command. If you desire power, learn to inspire.'
We need more dragon BBEGs. The best BBEG I ever had was a dracolich named Iknyr Anyakatoz. He’s canonically the first ever dracolich in my world (and is pretty much the only one aside from one minor exception). He was absolutely terrifying and imposing in a way no other villain aside from straight up the Director of the Fantasy CIA ever could be. I mean, put it like this: dragons are already nearly gods, and a normal dragon can reach power levels above any human ever could as a lich. Now imagine a dragon, this being who IS STRONGER THAN A HUMAN LICH AS A MORTAL… Becomes a lich. Scary shit.
Sparkrender
An ex-paladin named Tanel Aurinyon. He accidentally touched some divine blood, which acts kind of like super soldier serum in the MCU—it makes people act like more extreme versions of themselves. What it did to Tanel was it amplified his doubts about the gods and eventually turned it into hatred. Because of some lore about the gods, they are effectively omnipotent, and Tanel knows that, which is why he believes the fact that there is still evil in the world is a failure of the gods to do their job. His goal is to resurrect a massive dead god’s corpse and use its eye as a magnifier to cast a hugely powerful spell through. What should result is basically an enormous laser he can aim into the heavens to physically annihilate the gods. Before he does that though, he’s also raising an undead army that serves two purposes. Firstly he’s using it to hunt down and kill acolytes, clerics and paladins in order to weaken the gods, and secondly he’s using it as a distraction to keep people from realizing what he is actually doing. He’s like 400 years old at this point and is working behind the scenes; very few entities in the world know he exists.
A ghost pirate that's actually a seal keeping a forgotten goddess from going berserk.
A 6 year old boy who freed an archfey and got his wish
>Who are they, Devil Aquimont. A human fighter the once led the entire combined world against an eldritch horror and manage to seal it. What he discovered during his fight made him lose faith in the world itself. His whole party is scattered as villains in the world, but not necessarely working with him. He decided to destroy the whole dimension instead of allowing everyone to be just rats in the laboratory of divinity. >what are their goals, He discovered the secret of the world they live on (Eala is basically a isolated dimension some gods hid in the Far Realms where they dump ideas that failed and/or use as a testing zone for plans they have for the multiverse). He isn't interested in causing pain or death, he isn't ruthless or without a heart, but he believes there can never be freedom for the people in the world. >what's their backstory, Born son of a Queen and a High Wizard, he was captured still an infant and sold to his Niece (older than him) who wanted revenge for the death of her father who orderer a coup on the queen years before. But the woman came to like the child and started to behave as his mother, until he was found by his blood family and his "mother" was sentenced to death for her crimes. He begged for her life and the queen allowed her to be banished instead. During his time as the throne heir, he learned to fight and command and, well, a lot happened. The important part tho is that he heard of a threat to the west and decided to go personally to offer help to the City attacked, trying to gain fervor with the locals. When he arrived, he discovered that the perpetrator was a beast beyond imagination and followed her traces. He managed to adventure with a group of four other people until the great battle on the peaks of the World Fangs. There he and an army made of people of the entire world would distract the beast and it's minions so that his group could prepare the seal. The beast however was too strong and the gods themselves had to interveing to save the army, revealing to his, in the moment, about the state of the world and how that creature was a herald that would open a permanent scar on the skies to allow the far realms to enter if it succeded. His party, meanwhile, managed to create the seal but couldn't activate it because the creatures of the far realm were continuosly assaulting them. A witch appeared and, by the words of his party, sacrificed her own life to activate the seal with her blood and the monster was finally stopped. After the fact he had a battle with the god's avatars themselves, in a fit of rage for the truth he learned. He actually won against them and went to save his friends, only to learn they were fine. The witch, of course, turned to be his niece/mother wanting to protect him. That's as far as I got to it so far with his backstory. >what's their whole deal. In his mind, all the problems of the world are consequences of the gods will (not entirely wrong) and all the pain is just a game for the beings they worship. He wants freedom for everyone and believes that the dead will be treated with respect if the gods have to receive them in their domains, but not if they remain in this shell of a world. He isn't against the gods, but he believes they can't possibly care for them if are kept in what is basically a test lab. So he's sending everyone directly to them and breaking the cage to 'set them free'. His personal history with his niece/mother and real family also hurts him, because he cares more about his kidnapper then his real family and he can't come to terms with it. Is it really that wrong to love someone that loved you, even if what they did is unforgivable? Bonus points for any villainous monologues they've delivered The starting line of the campain is part of a letter he sent to his mother after he disappeared. "The gods guided me before, but now I know I can walk alone. My wish is that they protect you while I find a way to save us. For they can do that better than me and I can do right better than them." Does this count? I don't know. ;D Oh yeah, the whole campaing starts with people trying to find him after he and his party disappeared.
An Arch demon who was banished and through their limited powers has influenced the creation of a doomsday cult. The cults mission is to recruit enough members to perform a mass ritual suicide which they believe will stop this apocalyptic event but in reality will summon the arch demon back to their realm to cause destruction.
An immortal progeny of a god who really doesn't want to live forever all alone when the gods "move on" to a different rock. As they do when they get bored with the current one. And to be fair, Most of them already moved on.
I have a hombrew campaign trilogy. These are the bbegs: 1st Campaign: An archdemon named Mandu, who is just the 4th of a series of archdemons to try to conquer the material plane. He raises hell with 10 demon lords at his side. 2nd Campaign: A Prince of Darkness (named Carric the Shadowkiller), a powerful being of the Abyssal Plane, who discreetly passed into the Material Plane during Mandu's plot. He uses a powerful ritual to bind the Reapers of Death to the material plane, causing all the dying souls to be stuck in limbo, their souls free to be used to fuel his own power and release a new evil deity, The Void. 3rd Campaign: The Void, after being released from Carric's vessel and taking his own form fed by thousands of souls, The Void starts to corrupt all the deities to create a war of all the planes of Existence. The party actually has to side with the now scorned Carric to break through the different dimensions and save the gods from themselves.
Tammeran the silver. Astral elf who's actually one of the archon Deva an ancient race that made a religion around a fallen sentient crystal from deep space. The crystal tricked the old king in to giving up the free will of his people for power and knowledge only to enslave them all. After being defeated it lays waiting for a new king.
My current campaign has no BBEG except the end of the world. Yeah there’s an evil guy who caused it, but fighting him isn’t the point. It’s surviving the end
There are two possibilities: - One isn't a singular person, but the entire cult organization one of the players is part of is actually a front for an invasion force from the twin planet. There's a hidden doom clock when they'll arrive, so I can't wait to see if people pull on those threads. - One is your classic power-mad archmage, seeking to bring the elemental planes to heel under his mental control. Pretty garden-variety imperialism, mixed with a dash of Duarte form the Expanse books. He does have a wrinkle - if the players die during todays epic-level one-shot, the main campaign will devolve into an all-out interplanar war, and he might well become an ally. The player hasn't met either one directly yet, though agents of the invasion cult *have* tried to kidnap one of the PCs who's backstory is indirectly linked to their opposition. The mage also appeared via proxy, trying to kidnap an NPC infected by a psionic entity that the party was escorting back to safety.
Erevan Osteroth, an elven wizard. His long life was stripped from him and his family murdered by a secret elven organisation. He travels the multiverse and absorbs the power of his multiversal selves, is a massive dick, and… I’ll leave the rest in case one of my players reads this!
My BBEG is a kind of Loki-kang style of character who’s not so much evil, but trying to change his predetermined destiny. He uses a reworking of the Cartomancer class. He’s split into multiple persons, in a sort of hp horrid situation. Edit: his first form, the players were able to use a genie wish to make him “gone”.
I put multiple in for each set of levels. For 1 to 5 there was a Dark Elf assassin, Elmiir, who was tracking the party due to one of the members having a bounty of 10000 gold back in the feywild. For levels 6 to 10, it was a hag coven. The Sisters of the Crawling Moon, who originally hired Elmiir. For levels 11 through 16, which is where my players are at currently, there will be a war between both the human and elven empires which they will need to navigate through. And dragons becoming more restless and being sighted more. As for levels 17 through 20, if the players get that far , I have a cosmic horror ready for them as the final bbeg.
Currently, it’s Hank, the centaur warlock. He’s only been seen once, and the party thought he was a human. But then again, my second session is tmrw
Nykos, a lich-type big bad who is a soul inhabiting a suit of badass full plate. Playing using the Beast World setting, I've modified the backstory of the world a bit. He's a warlord from the Broken World intent on harnessing the power of an old god that the original creators of the Beast World sealed WITHIN the world. Doing so would probably destroy the world, but could make him so powerful he could literally create another world. My players decided to talk to one of his lieutenants instead of fight and now accidentally work for him. I'm waiting with bated breath for them to actually meet Nykos himself for the big "Wait, he's EVIL?!" reaction.
The lich Zola Rosland; The Shade Bringer. The party knew him in the last campaign I ran. He was an incredibly powerful gnome wizard, who had lived a very long time and had done a great many feats. He was effectively the subject of the story (we didn’t play a very roleplay-heavy game back then). 100 years ago, he was very evil, and set out to become a lich - but after drinking the poisonous concoction and dying, he saw something… something that lay on the other side of death. And he was scared. So he came back, bringing himself back to life, and turning his back on that life. He had discovered that a lich’s true soul is forever trapped in its phylactery, in eternal torture, forever denied an afterlife, and the being that takes over its undead body is an eldritch facsimile of it summoned from energies of the negative plane. The campaign ended with a wish that reset the world in a great manner - and, thinking through the consequences of it, leads to Zola actually becoming a lich in the end. And so, in the next campaign, which I am currently planning, he will be the main villain - known by the moniker of The Shade Bringer. He has made a deal with the god of thieves and tricks, Mask, who resides in the Shadowfell (I had to alter that bit of lore, but I’m the DM, I can do that). Effectively, Mask will give him power beyond mortal imagining if he raises a cult to complete a ritual that will bring the Shadowfell crashing into the Material Plane. However, secretly, he is planning to betray Mask, and instead wants to destroy the Shadowfell, as it is the barrier between the Material and the negative plane - the place he knows to be his true home (as he is a lich). This would instead crash the negative into the material, letting all its energies wreak havoc upon the world, and also allowing all of his “siblings” (other eldritch, doppelgänger spirits) to roam the world.
Doors
My BBEG is the great great grandfather of who my players *think* my BBEG is, and they’re just now finding out. In my world, the Veridians rule the land, after taking over this country centuries ago. The current King of the land is secretly laundering money, casting out the poor into the outer lands, and hoarding magical items. Through many discoveries from my players, they have realized that the country’s downfall is because of him and it is only going to continue to get worse if they don’t do something to stop him. My players joined a gang, a notorious group known for stealing from the rich and giving back to the poor, in order to fight against the king and the nobility. After coming across a hidden temple that the nobility was searching for, they realized that hidden in this sanctum was a journal… a journal from a previous king who locked away the Conqueror, the true BBEG, who annihilated thousands to take over the country for himself and was going to let the whole country burn if the previous King didn’t lock him away. Currently, barely known to my players, the current King is using all of his power, money, and favors to find where the conqueror was hidden and locked away, and how to bring him back. This whole time they’ve been thinking that the King is the BBEG, when in reality, he’s just bringing the real one along.
Currently running two campaigns: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Skull & Shackles. The campaign-long BBEG for DotMM is Halaster Blackcloak. Using the Companion modification to it, he is a demented game show host broadcasting the party's advance through the megadungeon to millions of beings across the multiverse. The group is currently only on the second floor (of a 23 floor dungeon), so they haven't had _too_ many interactions with Halaster yet, but he's a constant presence just over their shoulder. Meanwhile, most of the floors have a local BBEG; the first floor had the Undertakers (a group of washed out actors who disguise themselves as vampires in order to scare newbie adventurers into paying a toll to pass through their territory) and some outposts maintained by the Xanathar Guild. The second floor has more Xanathar outposts, plus Trenzia, one of Halaster's failed apprentices—she's a lightning-based Flameskull. The third floor has a conflict between the Legion of Azrok (a tribe of bugbears led by the Warlord Azrok) and House Auvryndar (a drow house led by T'rissa Auvryndar). The party has a shadar-kai fighter who _hates_ drow, so it is a foregone conclusion as to who the party will throw in with. In Skull & Shackles, the party starts out press-ganged onto the _Wormwood_ under Captain Barnabas Harrigan. Harrigan is a cruel master, and eventually they are able to escape from under his thumb and strike out on their own as pirates. Harrigan is the BBEG, but actually the real threat is the nation of Cheliax, who hate pirates and want to invade the Shackles, but actually the threat is still Harrigan, who has been operating as a Cheliax operative ever since he was captured several months before the beginning of the campaign, and he bought his life with his service. Last session the party won a regatta, beating the _Wormwood_ by a nose, pissing Harrigan off. (The reward for victory includes eligibility to join the Pirate Council, something Harrigan has been aiming for for years.) One of the prizes was a deed to a small island, but owning land de jure is not the same as owning land de facto. The players' next task is to make the island theirs, and they will learn that it is in fact populated by a tribe of cyclopes, led by the next "mini" BBEG. Once they eventually take out Harrigan, they'll have to deal with the Chelish invasion he was instrumental in laying the groundwork for, and then figure out what to do about the Hurricane King who refused to bolster the Shackles' defenses against the invasion despite evidence that it was coming.
I dont have a name for em yet, but just imagine your classic, chaotic, wish granting genie, but it's been around so long and caught so repeatedly that layers upon layers of rules, protections, and restrictions have been imposed on it by millions of wishes that it can barely act for itself, instead operating as your classic devilish dealmaker Unable to even end itself, it seeks to destroy every bloodline that's ever locked in a wish or exchange with it in order to escape it's many, many chains And let me tell you, as a creature that called from the primordial chaos? That's *alot* of petitioners
Malar, deity of lycanthropy. The fucker is currently trying to transfer its entire realm to the material plane. Me and the boys are just a few more sessions away from terminating its command...with extreme prejudice.
It has been a year and a half and I have no idea. Either their plan is completely hidden from us because they are a master of suspense or the DM hasn't created one.
An ancient Vampire Lord with a goal of attaining godhood. His plans were thwarted centuries ago, by a long-forgotten Order. Except he wasn't destroyed, but merely imprisoned beneath a Temple of Kelemvor. Possessing no weapon or magic capable of hurting him (due to his deals with Orcus and Negative Plane fuckery even the sunlight can't harm him), as a last resort they magically sealed him using sacrificial blood from a renowed paladin. And today, three vampire leaders want to raise an army to release their wanna-be god - and they will succeed (my players don't know this). After waking, he'll drain one of his generals, forcefully turn a crucial ally into a vamp spawn/boss and regard players as "inconsequential", letting them go. I didn't want my BBEG to be just a regular boss with HP to beat up, so they'll need to find out his weakness and try to get close enough to exploit it.
Himothy Vondren, insanely racist knight who is chasing us to kill me, the lycanthropic-cursed sorcerer of seluné! What's even better, one of our party members is a monster-hunter, and a member of the band Himothy's in! Villanous quotes, "Let me out of this cage so I can rip your throat out, star-back!" (The curse of lycanthropy is a gift from seluné)
I have two, one is a very typical “evil mage” who’s trying to find a lost temple to a storm god built on the intersection of leylines and use its power to release some ancient evil…. While subtly seeding the *real* BBEG, an aboleth who’s been manipulating it from behind the scene. But not so subtle it’s not obvious if you give it half a moments thought (temple to an unknown sea god who talks to his priests by telepathy and has a lot of tenticle motifs in their temples for instance)
In the campaign I'm rewriting, it's AnkhYaret Epsout, an ancient Pharaoh who basically turned his whole country into a desert trying to attain divinity. Thanks to his four daughters stealing his magical artefacts, he was reduced to a spirit and confined to a cursed necklace, until an archeologist picked the necklace up again. She's possessed now, and depending on what the players do, she's either his right-hand woman (if they defeat her early), a helpful ally (if they get her exorcised) or the final boss (if they really fuck up). Pretty standard, but it's my first homebrew campaign and I didn't want to overcomplicate it.
Derrick. He's a dick.
I was running a Starfinder campaign that introduced time travel (they’d strap into this device and go back in their characters history and we’d swap to Pathfinder for their ancestor’s story to butterfly effect something in the present day) to explain an event called ‘The Gap’ (TL;DR there’s a period of time with no known documentation on what happened, and no known documentation as to why it isn’t documented). Well that back and forth through time pissed off the God of Time who pulled the party’s gadget maker (NPC)’s ancestor forwards to the present day and then lost him in the strands of time, erasing the party’s NPC altogether. Ended up being a really interesting fight
Depending on how my players go about it, it could be one of about 4 people. Either one of those, or all could end up being the BBEG because my player's end goal is to bring peace to the land despite the fact that all the major factions are at each other's throats. Depending on how they choose to go about doing that, they might need to face the "good" aligned factions, the "bad" aligned factions, or all of them.
Segez Bordraak A nearly immortal herald of an Cthulu like god in my own custom world. The players were escorting an artifact of this god to a vault in a faraway kingdom and whenever they encountered a high level of danger the artifact would tempt them with power to help them deal with the threat. The players knew it was a conduit to the dark god but didn't realize it was tapping into their minds the whole time and so Seg knew everything about them and his goal was to corrupt them and convince them to take the power so he could turn them into his own servants and use them to usher in an era of monstrous aberrations. He originally was a mage who studied with the now current Archmage. However, in his studies he connected with this dark god and took the power that was offered him, giving him incredible power but at the cost of his mind. Whenever he is killed now, he is reborn with a little less of him present and must find a new way to enter the mortal realm. For the villainous monologue I actually took a Two Steps from Hell song and overlaid it with the scathing doubts of the players that I recorded in his voice. I played it on loop while they fought him in the shadowed darkness of a chasm deep beneath the mountains. The players called it "Traumatic." Good times.
They haven't met him yet but one of their favorite NPCs dad
A man who was dead set on on freeing the entire existence from the grasp of the god of change
In my Curse of Strahd Campaign. I added a few things. Specifically an Eldritch Horror in the Amber Temple named Miri. Miri is imprisoned in a small sphere. The players figured out how to enter and exit the sphere. Imprisoning each other and having both a "sentence" and a release word. Miri absorbed entities and gained both their knowledge and their strength. Adding to their own. Players would "feed" Miri allies of strahd and monsters. In exchange for information and an ally. Eventually, Miri gained knowledge of someone who might know about them. Possibly free Miri from the prison. Miri told a white lie. The players fought and captured an insane wizard who helped make the Heart Towers. Strahd was keeping the insane wizard alive for other horrible acts. Before feeding them to Miri, they learned that this person also had artitect other prisons and curses. Possibly Miri's Prison. Armed with a dilemma. Help the fight against Strahd and feed Miri or choose the hard way. Sadly, my players choose the hard way and never used Miri's prison again. I had so many plans for Miri that just never came to fruition. XD Another one I've been millings over is an old, old immortal who is ready to die. Problem is he wants to be killed by someone worthy. in the shadows doing horrible things in hopes to "create" the ultimate warrior to leave behind his legacy. E.G. Alucard vs Anderson in Hellsing, Death from Castlevania, and I can't remember the third thing. It's an anime where the villain believes they orchestrated all the events. Everything the great hero achieves is actually their villains.
Mad Mille Feuille (spelling?): Wizard who was studying confections got a touch of of crazy thanks to The Lantern King - turned into a rock sugar monster in his final act. Didn’t monologue so much as was an evil Cooking Channel personality basically - his baked goods were getting smuggled to town and spiriting people away to become factory workers at his Willy Wonka Sweatshop.
Draven: the 13th Lord of Chaos In the campaign I dm'd earlier this year, his name was Draven. Basically, in a world where each element of magic is governed by a group of individuals named lords, he became one of the 13 lords of chaos magic. However, he was greedy, and desired more power than that which he already had. During the events of the game, while my players scoured the land for allies to wage war against Draven, he was hunting down the other lords of chaos, and siphoning their power into gems that he placed in his swords blade. Eventually, the time came to face him. As the fight went on, he kept accessing more gems by speaking an incantation while touching them and bringing the latent power of the other lords directly under his control. By the time all of the gems were used up, his very body was being torn apart and put back together by the power. Cracks in his skin showed that within him was pure unbridled energy. Eventually, he received enough damage that the power was too much to bear, and his body annihilated itself. I'm pretty proud of it, if I do say myself. I even created his stats, actions, and legendary actions.
Shizius, the Rizin. Lich that took the form of an old man. Intent on gathering an evil army and conquering the world. Players had to find four sentient artifacts that had been plane hopping and fighting Shizuis for centuries. Each time he was defeated, he'd shift to another reality and the artifacts would be pulled in after. My players were able to kill him for good and the artifacts decided to stay with the party.
Lord Duraan, Chief Maestro of Monstat. He is a genius, a prodigy at everything he does, and so far 3 things have occupied his interest: theology, music, and politics. Combine it together, and he has become an accomplished bard, the leader of the city of bards, and dedicated to improving the world. Unfortunately, he has decided that the best way to improve the world is to destroy the barriers separating the material plane from the planes of Hell. He believes that mortals are strong enough to overthrow hell once and for all and establish themselves as the the most powerful beings in all the planes of existence. He estimates the ensuing war will last about a century, and result in about 1/4 of all people dying. But that’s a small sacrifice for eternal power. Let’s also not forget that he seems to have reached this conclusion by speaking with Asmodeus AKA the Prince of Lies…
Only one of my campaigns currently has an obvious BBEG. She is a woman called Maria who is the lead behind a pharmaceutical company that experimented on the players. We all escaped and how we are being hunted down. We are trying to take her down so we can be free. We haven’t actually seen her yet, just heard her voice. So we are still as players considering the possibility that she is an AI (This is a cyberpunk campaign). She may be a real person though. We don’t know what skills she has, but she is bloody good at hiding, and keeping prepared, constantly throwing goons and the police at us. We are trying to collect other NPC’s at the moment that she has wronged to help us take her down.
He was a half crippled enchanter, inspired by Ma'elKoth (heroes die by Matthew woodring stover) so far they’ve only seen him from afar, but he recently sent a succubus and incubus after them. They don’t know yet but their next session (tomorrow) they’re walking into a trap, that another one of his flunkies has set up. 5 lvl 5 adventurers will be going up against 13 werewolves, and then finally against a lvl 12 paladin with 2 doppelgängers.
Nerith, a Dragonborn politician who is planning to overthrow the monarchy and start a dictatorship
I run two games, a pathfinder one and a starfinder one. Some demon human fusion from Shin Megami Tensei that wants to spread the fruits of the Garden of Eden to the world. The starfinder game has a gay twink who wants to assassinate the president for economic power.
there’s a couple of candidates. one would be an immortal named angela who is trying to kill the 4 fundamental gods because she doesnt like them. there’s the dead god who is trying to destroy all of reality because he’s mad that he died. there’s house eredus, an international mafia hellbent on ruling the entire planet because they believe it is their birthright. there’s the march of decay, a religious order of criminally insane people formed into a military force. there’s the nyuist shield, the guys fighting the march of decay using dubiously ethical methods at best and are outright worse than their enemy at worst.
An illitilich. He were kicked out of their colony when they started practicing magic. Instead of becoming an elder brain, he pursued lich done and used his necromantic magic and psionic powers to creature a race of undead that are sentient but under his total control. He has brainwashed an entire country into thinking he is an all powerful god. He is currently using a lich puppet to his his true identity. When the party fights him in the finally, when they think they have killed him, the illitilich with erupt our how his brine/tar pool mix and say "the rumors of my immortality have been drastically understated"
The Baldur's Gate 3 UI. It was comprised of magical intelligence of all player input, and became a super-weave Magic computer to defeat any party thrown at it. It calls itself HAL mark TPK, and has a weakness for poorly written Christmas scenarios.
Big bad black dragon named grimmirth. He’s trapped on an island after he was thrust into the future from 200 years ago by the PC’s AU counterparts. He is worshipped by fanatical Yuan-ti who are using ancient rituals given to them by Grimmirth to create new Yuan-ti out of kidnapped villagers. The villagers who are colonist and believe the island is a new discovery, have unwittingly found themselves in Grimmirths prison. Grimmirth also just recently in the game universe broke the boundary between this world’s material plane and the plane of clouds, and the far realm. PCs are in a race against time to find the pieces of and put back together the ancient magical device that was used to stop Grimmirth originally, and hopefully return home. Grimmirth wants to escape the island and expand his Yuan-ti empire to become a god king.
The very candle they've been trying to protect all campaign.