Does Your Campaign Have a BBEG? Does it Need One?

[billd91]

I don't think a campaign needs a single BBEG - but several more localized BBEGs based on antagonists that PCs may take on in the course of the campaign are probably going to crop up. It could be the dragon sitting as the apex predator of a wild region, a guild master of a city thieves guild, a mummy lord serving as the central curse in a haunted tomb, a giant chief directing his forces to raid the local farmsteads, etc. Sooner or later, PCs are going to encounter a situation with a focal motivator that will only be solved by neutralizing that motivator.

 

[Hand of Evil]

A lot of them. NPCs, cults, organizations, governments, ancient evils, BBEGs are everywhere it is the causes that are fun to send against the players. Nobles are normally the most used BBEG.

Examples:

• Noble mother that wants the very best from her son (party member) and dislike the group he is hanging out with, has money and henchmen to arrange things. from starting adventures, to rescue mission for marriage scheme, to paying Bards to create stories.
• Cult that worships an ancient evil that mostly does land grabs (to uncover ruins) and selling weapons to races that don't make them. They are just always causing chaos.
• The Crime League, just a BBEGs that sell knockoff dwarf ales, drugs, slaves, and such. Just troublemakers that seem to have a lot of resources and do a lot of bad things.
• Dungeon Hearts (stolen from the game), Demons that have gained a connection to the campaign world by a rift and is building a "dungeon" to support them and open a breach to for then to come over.

 

[Faolyn]

Noble mother that wants the very best from her son (party member) and dislike the group he is hanging out with, has money and henchmen to arrange things. from starting adventures, to rescue mission for marriage scheme, to paying Bards to create stories.

I may have to steal this.

 

[el-remmen]

No. But there may end up being one based on what happens in the campaign.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

does the campaign you are currently running or playing in have a BBEG? If so, is that a known fact in play? Is it a known fact in the world? Does the end of the BBEG mean the end of the campaign?

Great Pendragon Campaign: Nope, no big bad. In fact, it centers around Arthur Pendragon, who is very much "good". This is a known fact, and the end of Arthur will be the end of the campaign.

Most of my campaigns have events things are leading up to rather than villains. In my previous Mindjammer campaign, it ended with the start of a long ongoing war, which the campaign was not going to run in.

A related discussion is: does a TTRPG campaign need a BBEG? Does the presence of a pinnacle threat add something special to a campaign that you can't get elsewhere? Without a BBEG, what drives the threat(s) in the campaign?

Threats towards the family, religion and culture of the player characters.

 

[GuardianLurker]

If answer to the original post:
Yes, this campaign has a BBEG, and the players know of it, though its exact nature is unknown to them. And since my previous campaign was Horde of Tyranny, the answers for that one would be yes as well.

As for whether they are necessary. {wibble-wobble with the hand} If you want to connect multiple adventures together with a meta-plot, you probably need an entity behind the meta-plot. That can either be an organization, or a single boss. Whether defeating that is the end of the campaign as a whole is a different matter. Since my 5e campaign had covered 0 to Epic (level 23+) we were all done, so that was easy. I'm planning on ending the campaign with this BBEG as well, but again, that will mostly be because of the campaign's length more than anything.

It is, of course, possible for a campaign to have multiple arcs without having an overall BBEG. Even if there is a recurring BBEG, there might not be one overall.

Without any plot arcs at all, you are looking at an Episodic/Obstable-of-the-week Campaign.

Fun can be had (and is had) in all of these styles of campaign.

 

[Aldarc]

The real BBEG was the friend we made along the way.

 

[Mannahnin]

Games I am currently playing in or have concluded (relatively) recently:

Dungeons of Drakkenheim: We are basically at the end, and there is no single BBEG, though there we did just face a climactic villain we didn't know in advance would be the awful terrible thing it was, and having recaptured Castle Drakken we are going for extra credit by planning to take on a faction leader (possibly the most powerful of them?), having killed a less powerful one earlier in the campaign and allied with the other three.

The Great Pendragon Campaign: No BBEG.

Rime of the Frostmaiden: BBEG

My own 5 Torches Deep & B/X hybrid: No BBEG. Final part of the campaign was a much-expanded Castle Amber.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

The real BBEG was the friend we made along the way.

Or occasionally a fellow PC. I've seen several epic campaign endings revolve around a carefully-planned betrayal that had been in the works for months beforehand. Sometimes the traitor(s) won in the end, more often not.

 

[Voadam]

I usually run module campaigns, often adventure path ones so there is usually an ultimate BBEG and individual module climax BBEG.

I am currently running the Iron Gods AP and it has an insane AI as the ultimate campaign BBEG and decent BBEGs throughout most individual modules in the series that tie into that ultimate one. The party learned early on more and more about the ultimate BBEG so he has been a distant but known presence and the known source of their problems throughout the campaign, even if it is through different factions that independently try and profit off of him, or his problem creations, or even his direct horrible foes. It all ties in fairly nicely.

In most campaigns I play in there are BBEGs in the world but no one BBEG for the campaign.