D&D General What is the Single Worst Person or Entity in Your World/Campaign?

[Krachek]

Im found of ancient god, banished outside the world, and who’s mere goal is the control and obedience of the entire world or its destruction if the first goal could not be achieve.
The most interesting part is to create Cult, searcher, philosopher who seek this god as a way for power, renewal, bring back old order, and so on. They usually misinterpret the true goal of this wicked god, or hope they can be allied, or control him or use him in some way.
Such being reveal the temptation for power and control.

 

[Umbran]

Hm. Unfortunately, the worst I have isn't from D&D, but the form still works.

The entity doesn't actually have a name - sentient species have various names for it. We can call it... Loki. Loki was a nigh-omnipotent, nigh-omniscient being locked away by its fellow entities for its bad behavior a few thousand years ago, which escapeed its prison (shortly before campaign start), thanks to human meddling, to find its fellow entities have disappeared, and its own powers severely diminished. Indeed, it may even be mortal now.

This is unacceptable. Loki WILL get its powers back, by hook or by crook. The problem is that the technology Loki is pretty darned sure is necessary to fix its little problem does not exist yet, and in Loki's diminished capacity, it cannot create the technology itself. Loki is left manipulating mortals to discover, design, and produce this technology.

And there is no better accelerator of technological advance than war. Especially interstellar war, with the lives of tens of billions of sentient beings on the line.

By the way, getting Loki back its powers will probably bring back the malevolent forces that destroyed the galactic political unity about a decade ago, which might kill off whatever billions survive Loki's war. This is not Loki's problem, as Loki will be unconcernedly omnipotent again anyway., and not vulnerable to mortal rampaging hordes of intergalactic invaders.

 

[Shiroiken]

The worst person in the world/campaign turned out to be the player all along.

My honest thought. I used to play with a guy that'd regularly be worse than whatever villain I'd come up with. In a campaign about dark temptations, he complained that I never put him in that situation, to which I replied "it's not temptation if you'd just take it without question."

 

[aco175]

In 4e I had a drow warlock as part of an encounter for the PCs. She escaped and kept coming back off and on to harass the PCs or set them up with allies. This kept going on for several levels and she kept leveling along with the PCs to stay relevant. The players would get both excited and cringe when that figure came out of the case. I still cannot use that mini to this day.

 

[billd91]

I tend to run a lot of Greyhawk, but one of my friends runs mostly home brew and here are a couple of big bads we encountered in his campaign:

Caedur - he was a terror for players. He would ride up and shoot at us with arrows of slaying. We went through a lot of raise deads in his wake. This was back in 1e days when being hit with an arrow of slaying was it - not extra damage, no save. And he wasn't a pushover in a close-up fight either, but we did everything we could to close and keep him from shooting us with impunity. He was something of a terrestrial agent for another big bad though...

Shadrach M'shek, Lord of the Pit - Shadrach was a demon-god worshipped by one of the nasty empires of the campaign setting. He frequently made bids for domination of the campaign setting (which was suffused with a lot of swords and sorcery based on the DM's interest in Conan). We encountered him directly once or twice and banished him from the plane by destroying his corporeal form. His worshippers were also the cause of a grand, global war segment of the campaign in which we deployed pretty much all of our many PCs in the setting as parts of various mission teams. It was pretty glorious.

 

[TheSword]

I have to admit to enjoying DM-ing Tom Lumpyface!!
The sheer open-mouthed shock and anger of the players when they descended from the Misty Mountains to discover the villagers heralding the exploits of Tom of Bree, who had defeated the orc raids......

As a player aged 18/19, the recurring assassin Mylekek in my friend’s long-running game was a sheer terror, slaying several beloved NPCs from the shadows. He was scarily effective and downright vile.

Damn You Tom Lumpy Face!

 

[Blue]

I run a lot of shades of grey. I have an unbelievably ancient vampire from a "first-ones" type race that has fashioned a whole xenophobic empire driven by blood as cost for any infractions - but they have a large, safe society, only the guilty give blood and rarely to the death, it's collected humanely, and the they have a lawful but otherwise free society that he actively promotes and does his best to lead. Is he the worst evil? He (well, it) doesn't see himself as evil, nor do the forest gnomes protected by were-leopard elite that any can aspire to join.

We have an ancient and failing Imperium that has genocided the dwarves in order to steal their mines of the literal Bones of the Earth (the land is the dead body of a deity), and created the drow to take their place. Oh, and also created halflings as a servitor race, and even mucked with the human nobles to make them better (where v. humans come from). They rewrote histories, pushed the elves to reservations because their memories were too long to gaslight, and commited various atrocities when they were growing and at their peak. But that was long ago and the current Empress is an 11 year old child, continuing her late father's trend of roads, food, justice, and education for her people. Is she evil, because she leads an Imperium has been in the past? On the other hand, when her "uncle" (father's cousin) made noises that she was squandering the Imperium's resources on exploration, she had him exiled before he could appear before the Council of Nobles to make a case for him to be put in as a legally Regent.

We get to one of the PC's uncle. He's rabidly racist against the elves, tried to kill the PC's father (a Duke) when the father took up with an elven woman, captured the baby and had his ears reshaped, raising him as a human and to also hate elves and lead raids against the very elven reserve his mother came from. He's pretty bad. But he's not a big-bad, he's just a middling-evil self-absorbed out-for-himself racist a-hole. We're talking ancient vampires, how could be be the worst?

 

[CleverNickName]

The first one that comes to mind is Illrigger, an NPC villain in my "Sundered World" campaign setting. He's a tiefling pirate, and the warlock of a mysterious underwater patron called The Lord of Countless Fathoms. His favorite thing to do is capture a ship, plunder it, lock the crew in the hold, and then sink it as an offering to his master. He always spares one eyewitness in a lifeboat as his calling-card, so that his infamy (and his master's influence) can grow.

 

[jgsugden]

I'm going to go with Vane Eddy. He is an evil bard that is like a twisted version of Gaston (from Beauty and the Beast). I spend a lot of time crafting his music to sing at the party - and I am not a great singer. Generally, he sweeps into a campaign like a hurricane, causing chaos and destruction, and then leaving with a laugh as the world burns behind him. He was, once, a PC - for three sessions before the player decide they did not want to be a bard and handed the PC off to me to become an NPC. That player has taken a lot of abuse, for 20 years, for that decision.

 

[iserith]

For my swamp hexcrawl campaign, it's Bokrug the Great Water Lizard, soon to be risen from the sunken tower of Ib by the Cult of the Water-Dead God to destroy civilization.

For my D&D/supers mashup campaign, it's the illithilich Doctor Lobotomy who is set on raising an army of evil to enslave humanity.