Keeping the dead... dead.

[Scion]

Make sure that the final blow is dealt with a Keepers Fang weapon from the eberron campaign setting.

Sure, the followers could quest to recover the guys soul from the keepers realm, but that will take time and during that time you will have a chance to do other things to make him stay dead (like hunt down the followers which are now scattered)

 

[Coredump]

When you kill him yell "Blood and souls for Antioch" very loudly.

Then his fiends will have to risk angering Antioch in order to get the soul back.


PS. this tends to work better if you are weilding a demon in the shape of a sword.

 

[Darthjaye]

Get yourself a Animate Dead spell or similar spell and find yourself a Hunter of The Dead of 5th level of higher to finish him off?

 

[Taloras]

Animate dead as a skeleton. Find a vault with permanent antimagic field inside. Then lock said skeleton inside. Hide Vault. Scrying wont work to find him due to anti-magic field. If they cant find him, how can they wish him back?

 

[Storyteller01]

What level are you?

How much cash do you have?

Do you have access to planar travel?

Do you have a rogue in your party?

Epic level hand book has a guild leader with a magic item that guarantees that those who have died stay that way (nothing short of divine intervention will bring them back, I think). IF you can find the person, she may charge a fee to dispose of the body.

Another question: WHat class is your BBEG?

You could reincarnate him. If you can afford it, keep killing him (mechanical loophole, but hey...) until he comes back in a form you deem appropriate.

He loses a portion of his power, and his friends aren't likely to trust some troglodyte claiming to be their friend/your BBEG. True seeing won't help, since the new form IS his real form. If he's a fighter, coming back as a halfling will definitely cause some problems. Let him spend time figuring out how to regain what he lost, if he can at all.

 

[domino]

You could Wish that any other wish or True Ressurection or whatever spell is made ineffective. Effectively counterspelling whatever they try to use to get him back, before it ever happens.

 

[Rkhet]

Reincarnation and any other resurrection magic only works on willing targets. The BBEG gets to choose who resurrects him, essentially.

This is a theoretical scenario, but let's say level is 30. Planar travel and any skills are obviously not problems, but since there is a reasonable limit on the amount of resources that can be poured into this, PrC-specific abilities are out. Similiarly, any solution costing over 1 million gp probably won't be worth it. Even under 1 million, I'd like to keep it cheap, if possible.

The Garotte is not likely to exist in this world, since it requires DM preapproval.

 

[winterwolf]

Lol Dakkareth, that made me chuckle.
If you want something really hard to do, find a completed deadgate (minor artifact with stats in Dungeon magazine 89). This 200 foot tall artifact eats the souls of anything that dies within 100 miles of the artifact. If the artifact is destroyed, the souls are freed. However, if the artifact is active and set over a portal to Orcus, Orcus gets any souls sucked up by the deadgate. Those souls are then destroyed (not even a wish/miracle/ divine intervention can bring them back) and Orcus gets 1000xp for use in item creation/spell casting.
I know this is a tad bit evil, and probably a bit hard to find (both serious understatements) but i suppose that in an infinite multiverse, anything can happen. And it doesn't cost you anything but self respect (and an alignment change...)! And as we all know, a free dinner that costs you your dignity is still free...
Edit: in no way is this post serious...you could do it, but I seriously doubt any DM would allow it.

 

[Sue Bloodbucket]

Nah...

Take his corpse, bath it, lay it down in a coffin and then send it back to hin powerfull allys. It will take ages for them to debate what to do.
And when they finally resurrect him and he is goning to have his terrible revenge with manical laughter and all that, you'll be happy to have an arc-enemy you know so well, you even know how to kill him to begin with. So after he ponders awhile how to become the supreme ruler of the multiverse for some time and you fought of a couple of his uber-breed henchemen, you go for the kill!
And then you take his corpse, bath it, lay it down a coffin....
That will teach his "allys" to waste such an effort on a wanna-be-bad!


Besides:
In a campaign I did last year I handed the players a sword early in their adventuring days. Nothing so much as a +1 Longsword with the ability to erase the victim killed from the "book of the dead". In planescape terms that means he never quite existed.
Them poor Heros sold it for a couple of tousend GPs...
Needless to say that they had to trace it back througout the multiverse before the end to kill some newly rissen demigod
Was realy fun to have the mostly good guys to bargain with an old death tyrant...

To make a long story short: Don't stick to the RAW too much. Your GM will shurely hint a way to get rid of your BBEG once and 4all.

regards
Sue

 

[William_2]

This isn’t a helpful answer in terms of solving the paradox, but just a comment on it. It really IS a huge gap in the whole logic of the D&D killing and magic paradigm, isn’t it? Despite all the magic available, and the fact that much of it is specifically divine in nature in some odd way, the powerful dead are unlikely to ever remain dead. While the sizable mob of gods will permit magic to seize the dead back from them readily enough, they do not provide a method for keeping the dead where they arguably belong. It is all very odd, theologically.

It also suggests that the really evil need to be incarcerated rather than executed (assuming the society in question has not already removed the death penalty). Those characters who are out meting out justice should find themselves actually needing to deliver villains to justice instead – a real blow to the general pattern that PCs are to judge and execute the villains off the cuff.
I like the idea of a campaign that yields a magic-drenched prison full of the villains the PCs have faced, rather than a graveyard of them. It seems like the only really good solution to the problem of undying villains, as well.

The fact that a spell to keep evil souls in the afterlife is not a fundamental one for divine magic is very odd. Even given that the spells in D&D are largely about combat, and don’t represent at all well the magic a society as a whole would try to discover, the lack of this power is a glaring omission, I think.