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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tal Rasha" data-source="post: 3895422" data-attributes="member: 46213">A good epic villain has to be at once powerful and mysterious. Some points to consider:+ actions speak louder than words: it is one thing to hear someone talk about wanting to exact bloody revenge for his wife's death. It is quite another to find a village of 200 people all impaled on stakes simply because the wife-killer came from that village. Make your villain do evil things, but at the same time bear in mind the next item:+ moral ambiguity is good. Personally I find out-and-open villains a bit boring. It's like having a flat character in a book - you know that's all there is to him. So even if the necromancer king has some proper motivation for wanting to invade your kingdom, you still know that the end effects will be bad and that you have to stop him. A morally ambiguous villain however (think Magneto in the X-Men comics) adds unpredictability, drama, sows doubt into the players' hearts as to whether they should really be fighting him, etc etc. And on these lines I reach my third point:+ Keep your villain a mystery for as long as possible. Moral ambiguity is the result of not knowing the full intentions of your villain, and we may expand this guideline to not knowing very much at all about the villain, at least in the beginning of the story. Make your characters slowly discover more and more of the villain's plans, until at last they are shocked to find what he was really up to.Of course, the epic villain has to be powerful and a real threat to the PCs. For inspiration, might I refer you to Artemis Entreri by R.A. Salvatore. Now imagine he started to train students to become as talented as he is, and was slowly building a guild for some unknown purpose. Hope this helps get the ball rolling.</blockquote>

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