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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jesauce" data-source="post: 6408880" data-attributes="member: 6782433">One thing I always do when setting up a BBEG is decide on obvious thing like motivations, goals and command structure (or lack thereof) but also long-term plans. A great question I like to ask myself is "Okay, so when he pulls off these grand schemes what is he going to do?" Because they aren't planning on failing, they are doing these things because they want or need to. If my BBEG's plan is to take over a country, then what are his plans once he does? Is he going to wage war on neighboring countries? Then he's going to be working towards that end. He'll have plans and contingencies in place if things go wrong along the way. There are always ways of salvaging an operation, or abandoning it and playing another card from his hand to continue his plans. So even when the party thwarts one thing, he just drops it and moves onto the next thing. If they players are pressing him hard enough, perhaps he scraps the temple and does something hurried like attempt to use his troops to rush the town, and while they're distracted he uses another avenue to gain the sacrifices he needs? Or perhaps he has something in reserve, waiting to be played 'in case of emergency.' Maybe he abandons the town altogether, moving his army somewhere else to another town. This is a Mind-Flayer, they're some of the most intelligent creatures in the multiverse. He very easily might have several redundancies in place. He might have several other towns in the process of being infiltrated, perhaps even one of them is almost at the point where he can attempt to overtake that one instead. Maybe none of them are quite ready, but he decides to risk it and push up his timetable, thus doing things a bit too openly and leaving himself vulnerable. Perhaps the party might claim victory for the town and the mastermind withdraws, leaving them as heroes. They can go off and do other things and eventually you can reintroduce him later in the campaign after he's had time to rebuild. I had a similar situation in one of my games where the bad guy simply decided to cut his losses and walk away from his operations. A year or so later I started a new game with the players as new characters set a ways in the future where he was attempting to take over the world again, and it was quite awesome to see my player's reaction when they found out who the BBEG was.Who knows? It's all up to you, of course. Sounds like a fun game!</blockquote>

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