D&D General Who's your villain?

[Olrox17]

Villains, you love to hate them. A good villain makes every story more interesting, and the best of them can even overshadow the story's main protagonist and become beloved characters in their own right. Just think of the Joker, Darth Vader, Sephiroth, Piccolo, Revolver Ocelot, the list goes on.

In your current campaign, who's your villain?
What are its goals, methods and alignment?
What is needed in order for its goals to succeed?
Do you have multiple villains? If so, what is their relationship to each other?

If you don't have an ongoing game, feel free to tell us about one of your favorite villains of a past campaign.

 

[Imaculata]

My main villain is Hydra, a godlike aquatic Lovecraftian being, who has invaded the Eternal Depths (the realm where dead sailors go), and driven away its original goddess (The Lady of the Waves). It cannot yet reach the mortal realm, but it sends forth its loyal followers to help him do so. Living ships, along with the Cult of Azarah, all help Hydra do its evil bidding. It is supported by two lesser deities, Teehlian'tara (Vermin goddess and lady of the flesh), and Airen (goddess of chaos).

Meanwhile an evil emperor has risen from the dead, and is threatening to conquer all the free nations, blissfully unaware of the greater evil that also threatens the world. So my players have to deal with an emperial fleet on top of a godlike being.

 

[Olrox17]

My current campaign is set in my own home-brewed world. The current villains, as far as my players know, are elemental cults that are trying to visit great destruction upon the world in a manner similar to what happens in the published adventure Princes of the Apocalypse.

What they don't know yet (although they have clues and suspicions), is that there's someone pulling the strings. The demon lord Pazuzu is the one real being behind the "elemental eye" that these cultists seem to follow, and all of this crisis has been manufactured just as a diversion for the "good guys" to take care of.

In secret, Pazuzu is helping his son in law, an incredibly powerful warlord (not gonna mention his name here, my players might accidentally google it) to build an army strong enough to conquer this corner of the planet. All the players (and their patrons) know is that there are disturbing rumors of demons, undead and foreign armies in the wilderness of the far east, but everyone is too busy with the elemental cults to really get invested in that. The day of reckoning is fast approaching.

Ultimately, Pazuzu's plan is for the offspring of his daughter (the succubus Red Shroud) and this human warlord to rule as emperors, creating a dynasty of cambion rulers, loyal to him, in the mortal realm. They will enforce Pazuzu's worship to their subjects, turning him, at the very least, into a demigod.

 

[ccs]

My current game doesn't really have any one villain. Sometimes none at all. And none will really have anything to do with one another - short of maybe fouling each others plans accidentally .

There are two main things going on though.

Storm Kings Thunder - this game is taking place during our previous SKT campaign.
Half of us played through SKT with another DM. So we already know how it ends & who the heroes of that story are. So whatever the current group is doing there's a backdrop of giant raids & their consequences going on in the background. So the PCs hear news/rumors/meet some of our other characters as cameos, etc.
At the moment this groups dealing with the Fire Giant chapter. I saw an opprotunity where that'd slot into things very nicely, thus using yet another chapter of the book.

Curse of Strahd. (and Ravenloft II: House on Gryphon Hill)
This has been heavily seeded into the game since session #1.
1st, the locals thought that a passing gypsy (aka Vistani in my game) troupe had cursed their area & wanted somebody to deal with the gypsies &/or visit the Druids on the other side of the mountains for help. YES, this is the plot of that terribad 1e module The Forest Oracle.
2nd, while at the inn, one of the players came into possession of the hilt of The Sunsword of Ravenloft fame.
And very specific instructions to return it to the Vistani who were camped about a day south.
3rd, Visiting the Vistani resulted in the Tarroka Deck reading setting up CoS. It also saw the PCs recovering a valuable cargo that the Vistani had been robbed of by an ogre & some bandits (yes, those Forest Oracle bandits who are neither strolling nor hurrying along or whatever when met on the road). Only this time, instead of recovering a pegasus, it's part of the Apparatus Strahds using in RL II. And it's addressed to him at Mordentshire.
Really, the clues of where to go can't get much more obvious....
4) So having solved the local problems without seeing the Druids about it, the PCs decide to visit the Druids anyways for personal reasons. Along the way I run them through the Gnome chapter (slightly modified) of Dragon of Ice spire Peak. In the gnome lab they discover a letter written to one of the gnomes concerning how a alchemist colleague, a certain Count Von-Zarovitch, is developing a way of transforming people alchemically/metaphysically. A bunch of high lv DC Arcane gibberish details the proccess. along with a diagram of The Apparatus. This is of particular interest to the party as the reason they're now visiting the druids concerns changing one characters race via reincarnation.....

 

[Tallifer]

Currently it seems that the main villains in my campaign are the players. <laughs> Consequences and all that.

My last campaign supposedly had a deliciously tropey Ghoul King a main villain, but he featured very, very little. The conflict in my campaigns usually just arises out of the usual greed, bloodthirst, misunderstandings and distrust of the other. As well as monsters who just as murderous and hobo-ish as any party of heroes.

 

[Bitbrain]

Current villain of my Eberron campaign is:

Spoiler

LORD OF BLADES
A hive mind AI program that originated from another world, but was drawn to Eberron by the Day of Mourning.

He wants to recreate the magitech kingdom that created him, overtop the bones of Khorvaire’s current nations. At present he’s hunting down specific dragonmarked individuals because dragonmarks are a resource unique to Eberron.

The PCs blame themselves for that because they were the ones who alerted him to the existence of dragonmarks in the first place...

 

[Shiroiken]

My current campaign has no singular main villain. The primary focus is on a horde of shaugin that threaten the region. There are a few other "bad guys" in the campaign, but their relationship with the party depends on their goals vs the PCs goals. One of them is actually an ally of the party (for the moment), while a few they haven't even encountered yet. One of the LG characters is particularly annoyed at how the townsfolk accept a few of these bad guys, which they do because most of them are actually beneficial to the town (plus scary as hell).

 

[RobJN]

Bargle. Con man, swindler, thief, murderer... and those are his better qualities.

He is currently on the run, after having stolen the Black Opal Eye, and Fire Opal Eyes of Traldar for some (no doubt) nefarious purpose.

 

[atanakar]

At first it was a necromancer who attacked the PCs on a road to visit their great-uncle. The PCs are nobles. Sons and daugthers of a baron who was assassinated a few weeks before the campaign started (level3).

Later they discover the great-uncle was a bad guy in league with the necromancer. Who it turns out had a twin brother who is an assassin. The great-uncle never accepted being passed over to rule over the barony. The great-uncle died for his crimes. The evil twin brothers escaped.

Later, at the end of summer, the twin brothers attacked the PCs, with a skeleton army, and the great-uncle raised from the dead as a skeleton lord. They stormed the PCs summer castle in a bucolic valley. They breached the walls but the PCs managed to kills the brothers and destroy the skeleton lord (great-uncle). In the sky, at the end of the battle, they saw a cloaked dark figure on a nightmare watching the battle from afar.

Later, during winter, a village near mountains was attacked by hungry trolls. The PC went out in the cold only to discover after killing the trolls that the hooded figure was behind the attack. It was a lure. The hooded figure on a nightmare fled down a canyon in the mountains.

This led the PCs to a forgotten valley populated by depraved and degenerated humans from an ancient civilization (B4). They chased the hooded figure to her manor and confronted her. It turns out the she was the second wife of the great-uncle and mother of the evil twins and had set up a trap for the PCs in her manor. A major fight erupted and the PCs won by the seat of their pants.

In the manor they discovered a room with a permanent portal. It led of the Octoportal. A location with eight portals leading to major cities in the PCs Kingdom. One of them led the basement of a tavern just outside the walls of their barony's main castle !!! (level 7)

(to be continued)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

For the campaign I'm running myself, the main antagonist is essentially an organisation vaguely inspired by (but vastly exaggerated upon) the East India Company (not going to name it in case my PCs google it and find this thread!). They initially set up just to make lots of money, but have gradually got into the world domination game (albeit preferring to have other nations and kingdoms as their catspaws, rather than directly ruling them with giant banners and all that). There are a lot of conflicting forces. There's no single individual who is "the villain", and the ultimate victory would be breaking up the Company and cutting off the source of a huge amount of it's power (which is Tiamat incarnate and comatose, impaled on a gigantic spear by Bahamut, who himself is dead-ish - Tiamat's blood leaks eternally and is a source of amazing magic and power for the company - not really of corruption, because they're smarter than that - they don't handle it directly or ingest it or anything - they have people for that. Also I find "magical corruption" storylines less interesting than more human motives, like greed and fear).