Show Me Your Villains

Reynard · Mar 19, 2019

I am interested to see what sort of unique monsters and NPCs people have developed to vex their players, particularly versus higher level PCs. What nasty suprises did you build into their stat blocks? What sorts of schemes did they get up to? What were their lairs like?

jasper · Mar 19, 2019

Mr. Fred. Mind Flayer with high stats, spell casting, and smart minions.
RID. Aka Ralph ID. AK Ralph the Intellect Devourer. In 1E I double or triple his psionic points.
Murr. Captain Murr. Started a just a random encounter in one of city state books. (Crazy man attacks party member does subdual damage.) Due to players throwing each other in jail became a fixture in the same cell. Then became addition NPC sailor fighter.
Grandmother Starr. Grandmother of one of my Kings. She worn combat boots. 8th level fighter who would sell npcs and pcs into slavery if they got on her bad side.
Green Thumb was he a rumor or not. GT could be a Sculptor of marble and gems. Or was druid medusa mix. Or was she an ancient green dragon with a huge range. The pcs never did find out.
Grr Plop. Red dragon with high stats and vorpal claws.

Reynard · Mar 19, 2019

jasper said:
Mr. Fred. Mind Flayer with high stats, spell casting, and smart minions.
RID. Aka Ralph ID. AK Ralph the Intellect Devourer. In 1E I double or triple his psionic points.
Murr. Captain Murr. Started a just a random encounter in one of city state books. (Crazy man attacks party member does subdual damage.) Due to players throwing each other in jail became a fixture in the same cell. Then became addition NPC sailor fighter.
Grandmother Starr. Grandmother of one of my Kings. She worn combat boots. 8th level fighter who would sell npcs and pcs into slavery if they got on her bad side.
Green Thumb was he a rumor or not. GT could be a Sculptor of marble and gems. Or was druid medusa mix. Or was she an ancient green dragon with a huge range. The pcs never did find out.
Grr Plop. Red dragon with high stats and vorpal claws.

I detect a hint of whimsy!

Immortal Sun · Mar 19, 2019

Rage: a slightly buffed Ancient Red Dragon whose most notable feature was his Aura of Rage:
Each round you were within the effect had to make a Wisdom save, or you gained +1 Str and -1 to your Wisdom saves. If you saved outside his aura the effect ended and you lost all stacks of the effect. When your Wisidom score hit 0 you became dominated by Rage to then attack your friends. This effect could only be ended by knocking the affected target unconcious. Dispel Magic and Remove curse worked, but only outside the aura.
His breath weapon worked similarly, except it was an instant dominate but for a limited duration (1d6 rounds).

PCs never ended up fighting him. They lost to the Giant demigod trying to escape from the extra-dimensional demi-plane these two things (and others) were on. The demigod is less interesting, really just a 20th level cleric with more spell slots and spontaneous access to the the whole cleric spell list, but was simply more clever at planning than the PCs.

The Glen · Mar 19, 2019

Amalie Von Hendricks, 2nd born of Baron Von Hendricks. Players thought she was a well-connected ally that way trying to separate herself from her father's reputation by helping thing with all sorts of useful information and keeping them up to date on the happenings of the Black Eagle Barony. Turns out she was using them to eliminate rivals so her family could take over the various slaving operations as well as remove humanoid hordes that wouldn't cooperate with her father. A pretty face with a flowing coin purse and the party fell for her without asking. When she did her face heel turn they were devastated. Well some of them were, others missed the steady paychecks.

aco175 · Mar 19, 2019

When I raise a stat block from, say a bandit to a leader bandit, I tend to give him crit on 19/20 and maybe a 4e power like 1/rest: make an attack against each enemy w/in 1square (close burst 1). I also bump a few stats and to hit and such, as well as almost maximize HP.

Another thing I tend to try and do with bigger bad guys is to give them a cool item that they use on the PCs before they can claim it. I bugbear leader had a +1ax that dealt +2d12 on a crit instead of the normal +1d8. I made sure that the bugbear was able to crit on a 19/20 for this one. Another enemy had a cloak of Dimension Door that he used a few times before the PCs were able to corner him. It was frustrating to have the bad guy take off and come back with more mooks, but they were able to finally get him and it felt better than average.

ChameleonX · Mar 19, 2019

In the Elder Scrolls campaign I'm running I introduced the party to Three-Fingers-Left, an Argonian skooma-dealer who had swollen to monstrous size by decades of ingesting Hist Sap (so, like an Argonian Behemoth from ESO, but without the insanity). He has legendary actions that let him command his minions, throw out potions and poisons that do different things, and he's also a 5th level Wizard with Regeneration 10. It was the first and only time the party had to actually retreat from an enemy, and I'm planning on bringing him back for a rematch soon.

Retreater · Mar 20, 2019

My last mini-campaign ended around 8th level. The main villain was Harrumah the Long-Beard, an aged dwarf lord who was holed up in his fortress issuing demands to a xenophobic dwarven kingdom. The group eventually found that his fortress had been sealed from within for centuries and that the dwarf lord had actually calcified upon his throne over the generations. So they were hacking at a statue that was possessing the other members of the party and sending out ancestral wraiths to fight them.

I no longer run 5e "by the book," so my stats probably won't be much use for the OP. I do give my villains (even "mini-bosses") special abilities: auras, legendary actions, the ability to push/pull/slide/immobilize characters, etc. Just adjusting the numbers wasn't doing the trick for making them interesting or challenging.

If anyone is interested in the math or more specific tips, I'll provide them. Just don't want to derail the thread to much.

The Crimson Binome · Mar 20, 2019

Reynard said:
I am interested to see what sort of unique monsters and NPCs people have developed to vex their players, particularly versus higher level PCs. What nasty suprises did you build into their stat blocks? What sorts of schemes did they get up to? What were their lairs like?

It was a while ago, so I can't remember her name right now, but she was a fairly standard archmage. She was pretty mean, though, and she had aspirations toward godhood. Through a series of events that was instigated by the PCs, she ended up with access to infinite Wishes, which she used to conquer the world in the distant past and become an invincible super lich.

Her lair was a fairly typical tower, with hallways patrolled by Empyreans, and an ancient dragon on every third floor. (These posed no threat to the PCs, because they were level 16.) The roof had a magic elevator leading up to the cloud level, where she could look down on everything.

Mechanically, she was just an archmage, straight out of the book. The only "surprise" in her stat block was that she had multiple Wish-grade contingencies, and every time she would have been killed, she just polymorphed into something even scarier. So she started out as an archmage, but when they beat that form and she became a lich, and when they beat that she became an ancient dragon, and when they beat that she became a kraken, and when they beat that she healed back up to full, and when they beat that she used a Wish to run away.

Immortal Sun · Mar 20, 2019

Retreater said:
My last mini-campaign ended around 8th level. The main villain was Harrumah the Long-Beard, an aged dwarf lord who was holed up in his fortress issuing demands to a xenophobic dwarven kingdom. The group eventually found that his fortress had been sealed from within for centuries and that the dwarf lord had actually calcified upon his throne over the generations. So they were hacking at a statue that was possessing the other members of the party and sending out ancestral wraiths to fight them.

I no longer run 5e "by the book," so my stats probably won't be much use for the OP. I do give my villains (even "mini-bosses") special abilities: auras, legendary actions, the ability to push/pull/slide/immobilize characters, etc. Just adjusting the numbers wasn't doing the trick for making them interesting or challenging.

If anyone is interested in the math or more specific tips, I'll provide them. Just don't want to derail the thread to much.

Yeah I'm in the same boat, my monsters are a little bit of everything I've liked from a variety of editions, so my creatures "stats" especially my major villains, aren't very helpful.

I mean, I once made a villain based on The Lich from Adventure Time. It didn't have stats, just some absurdly terrifying powers and a couple good quotes.