D&D General evil plan ideias - why would the villain require 100 souls?

[Benjamin Olson]

There is a long perished archlich he needs to converse with and learn the secrets of, whose long unfed phylactery needs to be fed centuries worth of souls all at once to revive him.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

100 days of spare life.
He sign up at 1 life a year, but soul value just get down since.

Damned soul inflation. But what can you do, everytime there is a major war or natural disaster the freshly killed soul market just crashes.

 

[Bird Of Play]

i need to get rid of 100 mercenaries and i out of brain juice
let's say the villain in question is a evil wizard or something like that

Souls used as an energy source?
My lich pretty much uses souls as batteries. Granted, slowly consuming one soul was enough to get his phylactery going for weeks, but hey, you can change stuff so 100 souls are required to fuel whatever your evil wizard (perhaps a necromancer) wants to fuel?

 

[Imaculata]

The villain is actually targeting members of a specific family that are hiding a terrible secret.

 

[jayoungr]

100 days of spare life.

Extra twist: the villain knows (or thinks he knows) the exact date of his death, and he needs the extra days of life to accomplish something very specific.

 

[Krachek]

Extra twist: the villain knows (or thinks he knows) the exact date of his death, and he needs the extra days of life to accomplish something very specific.

That can be an interesting twist, he need extra life, to a greater cause.

 

[Dioltach]

IMC souls are the currency of Hell. Literally: each Hellish coin contains a screaming, torturer soul.

 

[steeldragons]

How powerful is this wizard guy? He could be looking for a batch to fuel a new -very high level- spell he's developing. Or to have a "bank" to experiment with..."What happens/how does this spell function if I use 5 souls? Hm. Nothing. Ok, cast it again using 10. Not bad. <scribbles notes. adjusts calculations> What if I pour 42 into the casting? Oooo. I like that!"

It could offer the heroes the opportunity (or time sensitive motivation) to stop/get the big bad to FREE/release/save the accumulated souls before they are all "burned up." Drop some tip that the souls are for them to "use up"...and maybe there's a couple of friends/family members/loved ones soaked up in the soul harvest. So they need to get to the evil stronghold. Stop the uber-wizard. You can't bring them all back to life. BUT you can make sure they are freed to their just afterlives/peaceful rest/what have you.

Clearly, this needs to be a very high level (8th or 9th) spell. Almost certainly it should be in the Necromantic area. Maybe some kind of "mass enervation?" Or create a "Necrotic eruption" of the Negative Energy plane (or the setting's underworld) into the Material plane (because the evil wizard is looking for his Ophelia or whatever). Or a "mass-scale vampiric take-others'-lives-to-add-to-my-own" [or immortality/entering lichdom?]. Which, as suggested, could just be the point of taking the souls in the first place (extra year per soul sounds about right to me). Living an extra century -for a human wizard, in particular- would be a massive boon, making the indisputably evil dealing in soul-sucking "worth it."

 

[jasper]

i need to get rid of 100 mercenaries and i out of brain juice
let's say the villain in question is a evil wizard or something like that

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[Umbran]

He has a plan to cast a large number of Wish spells, and he needs the souls to absorb the damage and the chance of never being able to cast Wish again.