Your Best Villain

[iwatt]

IMC, the best villain I've run was a bugbear thrall to a Frost Giant Clan. I created him mostly as a watcdog for the Frost Giants, but the PCs had so much trouble with his hit and run tactics, he became the main focus of their wrath for a very long time. He wasn't even that powerful, just "Mobile and Lethile" .

In a campaign I played in, the best villain was the Avatar of the God of justice. This campaign was absed on the fact that Divine magic had just returned to the wrold afetr 3,000 years. All the gods were looking for these mystical tablets that would give them ULTIMATE POWER TM, and therefore were trapped in Avatar forms in the Material. Our party was also looking for the tablets, each PC for a differnet reason (love of knowledge, love of power, friendship, etc..). The Avatar of Justice had taken over as the ruler of the bigegst empire, whose capital was also the home of the Arcanist order. He of course banned the use of magic in the realm. That ticked of some of our players. He also was an intransigent LN SOB whose minions weren't as capable as us. So he resortesd to extrorsion (legit, but still extorsion) to get the tablets away from us. He never took direct action against us since we were at that time the agents of about 5 different gods ourselves. But he did make life a living hell for us. We were wanted all over the world, his agents were always gunning for us, etc..

He finally was responsible for killing one PC (my character's half brother). Of course, in that homebrew only the God of justice was able to judge who was worthy of returning to life, and since we'd seriously pi**ed him off, there was no chance of getiing him back. This led to us swearing we would bring him down.

Our DM would laugh because we had focused on the God of Justice as a "villain" totally neglecting the other trully villanous deities. My PC even made a pact with a long forgotten God to become his avatar, in exchange for a vow to finally destroy the God of Justice.

 

[Wombat]

My greatest villain was Sir Tarrabil, Lord of the Groaning Oaks, a Unseelie sidhe-lord of terrible power, coldly polite disposition, and a twisted sense of humour. He has been with me in three different campaigns -- two Ars Magica (the second time brought back by player request!) and one D20-variant.

He is tall, elegant, handsome, with pale skin, silver-white hair, and eyes almost the colour of ice. He always dresses in the height of fashion and is fastidious about all the social niceties, including gift-giving, fin amour (much to the delight of two of my female players), and knowledge of rank and presidence. He is also almost unthinkingly cruel; his lands get their name from the fact that he impales humans and faeries who thwart (or simply annoy) him on the branches of oak trees. These "guests" are then magicked so that they stay alive but in excrutiating pain for years upon years.

Like many successful villains, he is always levelling up (or equivalent thereof) at about the same rate as the heroes, thus he is always at least their equal. When once the players were forced to work with him (much to the chagrin of both sides of the contract) they found out just how powerful of a sorcerer he truly was ... and they never forgot it.

There is something truly horrible about cold elegance...

 

[Stormborn]

For a modern game (Unknown Armies actually) I ran a villan that scared at least one of my players to death, so bad that the mention of his name still gives her chills:

Mr. Lake - it was never entirelly clear if he was or not really the most recent incarnation of the Arthurian Lance d'Lac (Lancelot), but he certainly believed himself to be. He was on an endless quest to recover the holy grail, only to discover that the grail had many many aspects and that finding one was never enough. By modern times he had bascially gone insane and was a violent sociopathic heavy for an organization that also sought the grail. Barely kept in check by his companions, he was unleashed on the PCs to scare them into giving up information. Scare them he did, they just didn't know anything.

Its a good thing none of them pointed out to him that Lancelot is one of the few Arthurian figures whose origins can clearly be shown as fictional. But then it was Unknown Armies, so perception is really all that matters.