Levistus's_Leviathan
5e Freelancer
The title pretty much says it all, but let me elaborate for a bit. I've been thinking about this a lot recently (with the recent discussions about antagonists and villains in D&D campaigns and how different groups/creatures can fill these roles), and decided to create a thread in a similar style to this one and this one inspired by this topic, but taken to the extreme. Because, let's be honest here, D&D is a heroic fantasy roleplaying game, and a major part of heroic fantasy is killing the villain(s) and saving the world and being rewarded for it. And this style of play is really enhanced when there are truly awful and malevolent villains (you know, "A story is only as strong as its villain", and all), and there's a lot of tables out there that play a heroic fantasy-style of D&D, so sharing examples of your dastardly villains with each other enhances all of our games.
So, that brings us back to the main question of the thread: "Who (or what) is the Single Worst Person or Entity in your World (or Campaign)?" I have my own example, which I'll cover in a spoiler below, but I want to know yours.
There's really only three rules for what people/entities can qualify:
So . . . that's my example. What's yours? Do you have someone in your world/campaign that's worse than the Abomination? I'm really interested to see what people have come up with for their worlds.
So, that brings us back to the main question of the thread: "Who (or what) is the Single Worst Person or Entity in your World (or Campaign)?" I have my own example, which I'll cover in a spoiler below, but I want to know yours.
There's really only three rules for what people/entities can qualify:
- They have to be evil. Like, irredeemably evil. Think Sauron, Emperor Palpatine, and Voldemort (or, in D&D worlds, Vecna, Tharizdun, Orcus, Demogorgon, and Dendar the Night Serpent). Not just antagonists, full-fledged villains whose plots will likely destroy the world (or, at least, the lives of the people in your world, by conquering them or driving them insane or something like that).
- It has to be a single person. Not a group of people/entities (like a cult, empire, faction, or family), one single person/entity. So, not "the Cult of X evil god" or "Fantasy Nazis", but probably the entity that the cult worships or leader of the "fantasy nazis".
- It has to be your own creation. You can't use any existing D&D (or other existing IP's) villain in this thread, even if you significantly changed them. You can obviously use people/entities that you created that are inspired by existing characters (all of us are inspired by something), but it has to be an original character for your world/campaign and not ripped straight from another story.
Okay, I'm going to be simplifying a lot of this, because I have a ton of lore in my world, and it would take way to long to give the whole story.
Basically, in my world, the Raven Queen is in charge of handling the Afterlife system (which takes place in the Shadowfell). She's a goddess of justice, order, and judgement, so she wanted to encourage the mortals whose souls would be sent to her after they died to behave well while alive. So, she created a reward for those that do good, and a punishment for those that do evil. It's actually fairly simple, but the results are a bit more complicated (especially when you take resurrection magic into account).
When a soul dies, the Raven Queen "reads" their soul to discover the circumstances of their life, learn all of their memories, and judge whether or not they were good or bad in life. While reading their soul, she takes everything good they ever did as well as everything good that they experienced, and adds that to a Demiplane that she creates for them, called "Paradise". If they were a good soul, they end up in Paradise, and experience everything good that they have ever experienced, but only the good, for the rest of eternity (they also get to visit their loved ones if they want to, and can even merge their Paradises if they wish to spend the rest of eternity with each other).
However, she also takes everything bad that they've ever done or experienced and puts it into a single Demiplane, which is called "The Punishment". While every good soul gets their own Paradise, all of the bad souls share the same Punishment, and the Raven Queen only sentences each soul to experience the Punishment for a limited amount of time based on how bad they were (then she basically recycles their souls and reincarnates them in a new form). And this Punishment is formed out of all of the bad actions, memories, and experiences of everyone that has ever died ever since the Raven Queen has been in charge of the Afterlife system. Everything bad that anyone has ever done or experienced is experienced by the damned souls that the Raven Queen condemns her.
And the absolute worst actions, memories, experiences get put into the center of the Punishment, becoming a part of an entity that is known solely as "The Abomination". It's a horrific and awful monster, the literal embodiment of the worst things in all of existence (genocide, rape, murder, torture, enslavement, war, abuse, and so on). It's a colossal amalgamation of everything wrong with the world, and it is in charge of torturing the souls that are sent to the Punishment. Whenever someone dies and they've experienced something particularly traumatic, whether or not they were a bad person, the trauma that they experienced gets added to The Abomination, and it grows even stronger. It's trapped inside the Punishment, and if that demiplane stopped existing, so would The Abomination, but the demiplane it resides in is its territory and no one that meets it escapes its torment (it is covered in chained-up souls of the damned that hang from its giant form. A new chain is added for every victim it takes. No one knows precisely how many souls it has captured, but there are probably hundreds of thousands of souls that it has hanging from it at any given moment, and it's always adding more to this number. The few people that have been captured by it and managed to be resurrected have been driven mad by being tormented by it, and ramble about its horrible features and the torture it did to them).
There's also a cult that worships The Abomination and believes that it's destined to escape the Punishment and consume all of reality. They're called "The Cult of Terror" and they do their best to try and make this happen as soon as possible. They mutilate their own bodies to make themselves look as monstrous as humanly possible and capture innocent people, torture them within an inch of their life, abuse and mutilate them, and do their best to make their life as terrible as possible so that when they die (from natural causes, of course, they aren't wasteful. They're not murderers, they merely want to hasten the destruction of the multiverse. They'll torture, mutilate, and abuse people, but they won't kill them, because then they'll have to capture more people. They're efficient, they'll do what they can to the victims they have captured until they die of "old age", and then move onto new victims. This way every victim adds more power to the Abomination than if they just wasted people by murdering them).
The Abomination . . . is bad. Like, really bad. You can technically Plane Shift to the Punishment (not that you'd ever want to), and if you manage to encounter the Abomination while still alive . . . you're not going to have a good time. As the physical embodiment of all of the worst experiences of basically everyone that's ever existed combined into one single malevolent entity . . . it easily takes the place in my world as the single worst person/entity in all of existence. You do not want to run into The Abomination (or the Cult of Terror. In many ways, they're even worse than the Abomination, as they can affect the campaign in a real, tangible way if the party has the misfortune of running into them).
Basically, in my world, the Raven Queen is in charge of handling the Afterlife system (which takes place in the Shadowfell). She's a goddess of justice, order, and judgement, so she wanted to encourage the mortals whose souls would be sent to her after they died to behave well while alive. So, she created a reward for those that do good, and a punishment for those that do evil. It's actually fairly simple, but the results are a bit more complicated (especially when you take resurrection magic into account).
When a soul dies, the Raven Queen "reads" their soul to discover the circumstances of their life, learn all of their memories, and judge whether or not they were good or bad in life. While reading their soul, she takes everything good they ever did as well as everything good that they experienced, and adds that to a Demiplane that she creates for them, called "Paradise". If they were a good soul, they end up in Paradise, and experience everything good that they have ever experienced, but only the good, for the rest of eternity (they also get to visit their loved ones if they want to, and can even merge their Paradises if they wish to spend the rest of eternity with each other).
However, she also takes everything bad that they've ever done or experienced and puts it into a single Demiplane, which is called "The Punishment". While every good soul gets their own Paradise, all of the bad souls share the same Punishment, and the Raven Queen only sentences each soul to experience the Punishment for a limited amount of time based on how bad they were (then she basically recycles their souls and reincarnates them in a new form). And this Punishment is formed out of all of the bad actions, memories, and experiences of everyone that has ever died ever since the Raven Queen has been in charge of the Afterlife system. Everything bad that anyone has ever done or experienced is experienced by the damned souls that the Raven Queen condemns her.
And the absolute worst actions, memories, experiences get put into the center of the Punishment, becoming a part of an entity that is known solely as "The Abomination". It's a horrific and awful monster, the literal embodiment of the worst things in all of existence (genocide, rape, murder, torture, enslavement, war, abuse, and so on). It's a colossal amalgamation of everything wrong with the world, and it is in charge of torturing the souls that are sent to the Punishment. Whenever someone dies and they've experienced something particularly traumatic, whether or not they were a bad person, the trauma that they experienced gets added to The Abomination, and it grows even stronger. It's trapped inside the Punishment, and if that demiplane stopped existing, so would The Abomination, but the demiplane it resides in is its territory and no one that meets it escapes its torment (it is covered in chained-up souls of the damned that hang from its giant form. A new chain is added for every victim it takes. No one knows precisely how many souls it has captured, but there are probably hundreds of thousands of souls that it has hanging from it at any given moment, and it's always adding more to this number. The few people that have been captured by it and managed to be resurrected have been driven mad by being tormented by it, and ramble about its horrible features and the torture it did to them).
There's also a cult that worships The Abomination and believes that it's destined to escape the Punishment and consume all of reality. They're called "The Cult of Terror" and they do their best to try and make this happen as soon as possible. They mutilate their own bodies to make themselves look as monstrous as humanly possible and capture innocent people, torture them within an inch of their life, abuse and mutilate them, and do their best to make their life as terrible as possible so that when they die (from natural causes, of course, they aren't wasteful. They're not murderers, they merely want to hasten the destruction of the multiverse. They'll torture, mutilate, and abuse people, but they won't kill them, because then they'll have to capture more people. They're efficient, they'll do what they can to the victims they have captured until they die of "old age", and then move onto new victims. This way every victim adds more power to the Abomination than if they just wasted people by murdering them).
The Abomination . . . is bad. Like, really bad. You can technically Plane Shift to the Punishment (not that you'd ever want to), and if you manage to encounter the Abomination while still alive . . . you're not going to have a good time. As the physical embodiment of all of the worst experiences of basically everyone that's ever existed combined into one single malevolent entity . . . it easily takes the place in my world as the single worst person/entity in all of existence. You do not want to run into The Abomination (or the Cult of Terror. In many ways, they're even worse than the Abomination, as they can affect the campaign in a real, tangible way if the party has the misfortune of running into them).
So . . . that's my example. What's yours? Do you have someone in your world/campaign that's worse than the Abomination? I'm really interested to see what people have come up with for their worlds.
