DM Advice: Villains

Which songs do you use for Strahd?

This is what i didn't like about LMoP. the BBEG is just a rando drow wizard with a spooky staff. I changed it by making Glasstaff and the green dragon work together. The damn game is called dungerions and DRAGONS, and the intro campaign has the green dragon in some random ruins just chilling. The player's have no good reason to go there.

omg please please make a full list of songs that go with all the villains!

I can't believe I found a D&D video guy without facial hair.

Fantastic video my good davvy but um some ppl are just evil

I have a question: What if I want my villain to be a mystery for a good chunk of the game? Like a whole "who is the one behind all these evil deeds?"

Iron man the Villain of Civil War

HOLD YOUR TONG Iron mans the Hero Cap is the Traitor

Snoke was excellent for the role he ended up with, but that wasn’t really being the villain.

Jacob sent me

My villain had seen the world blowen up 3 time decided to restart it as he has power to destroying and creating the world

While we're on the subject of villain theme songs, the theme of what every player from two different groups tell me is the best villain I've ever written is "the doctor's wife" by The Clockwork Quartet.
"Nocturne" (as the villain went by at the time) has an entire playlist that suits him, but this song quite literally details the first few entries of his journal. Which I used as the main exposition device to reveal that his motivations were quite simply a broken heart and the frustration that his literal life's work was failing him, and that what lead him to what he has become was simply being a desperate man with nothing left to lose

Jacob sent me here as well. Great video by the way!

Jarlaxl is my favorite

I'm a first time DM and I'm having trouble with figuring out how personal I can get with the PC's backstories... would having the BBEG hurt/kill a family member of a PC be a dick move? Should I ask for the player's permission first? Or would that be too spoilery?? I don't wanna do something the players would hate (I want everyone yo have fun of course) but spoiling it by asking doesn't sound fun either :/

Civil war was just choose a side show the gray area of what hood and evil are

Defeat the plan so you can foil the villian, I like that.

Patron was born from Capitalists. Capitalism isn't perfect but saying its bad is not cool.

I like you already when you said howdy

I am actually using Tiamat, the tyranny of dragons bad guy, and I am going to give HER, it is a girl, a reason to be a bad guy, and why she is going to be summoned.

Just remember, there is a world of difference between WHY someone ends up being a serial killer, and THAT they ended up a serial killer.

Revealing that a villain had a tragic past does NOT mean that villain is actually just a good person who is doing bad things. Dont start making the villain empathize and show remorse. Instead, have the villain double down on their moral choices. Really drive it home that the villain is fully aware of what he or she is doing to people. Have them revel in it, only touching on their past when they want a point of justification. THAT is how you make a Sauron or a Morgoth.

This whole idea that villains need to be "realistic" and morally grey is patently ridiculous in the face of fiction legends like Lewis, Tolkein, Jacques and others. Morality may well have shades of grey, but that doesn't mean its all grey. Killing is not murder and deceiving a nazi jew-hunter does not make you an evil liar. But evil liars do exist and so do evil murderers.

Dang why everybody hating on capitalism I'm not saying its good just stop saying its bad give a reason or make a whole videos about it

Really shocked you mentioned Poor Mans Poison. Not many people know of them but they are amazing. Plus they are all really cool and friendly guys.

Would there be anything different for a villain when they’re opposing an anti-hero? For some reason my mind is thinking that this is hard to do, while my senses are telling me it is trivial.

According to my dm the best way to make a villain is to make him literally(not hyperbole) unkillable, show up at any point in time to ruin whatever your doing without a chance in hell of passing a save of any king, their is no way to harm him, and nothing short of a deus ex machina to get him to fuck off. I hate it so much

Jarlaxyl does everything out of Malice, unless he were rewarded to do thing in Malice. He is a drow mercenary after all, and Malice is a matron mother of house Du'Urdin. Since Jarlaxyl has been on the surface for so long I would think that he rarely has much to do with Malice anymore.

My “main” villain is a lich who created any army of undead to defend his land that he protected from the shadows, the party wipes out most of his defenses and go to defeat him where they find out that he’s just a goldfish in comparison to the next bbeg.

I think a good way to make a villain is to give them a dumb, silly motivation they overreact to. Like a villain that went genocidal because he was mugged or bullied once or something. That way the event itself is relatable but the villain's reaction isn't (hopefully!). Napoleon complex villains work great imho. While actually powerful ones (like count Dooku for example) I find a bit too relatable and bittersweet to defeat. I want my victory in dnd to be sweet, period.
Edit: some examples of good villains imho are Ep.III Anakin, Dio Brando, Freezer... Less satisfying villains would be the likes of Dooku, Wamuu, Cell. Note that a middle ground imho are the purely evil but not as mentally/morally weak villains like Sidious, Kars or Majin Buu. I hope the SW/JoJo/DBZ analogy is enough, probably could have found better ones but lazy.

I always come back to this video when I need some inspiration. My party’s villain rn is a warlock in service to an aboleth. They’ve (very briefly) met on two occasions but as I write the end to this arc I definitely want them to get a sense for who he is before they (ง’̀-‘́)ง. Thank you!

I love that when you talked about the villain's music, you literally talked about the same songs I relate to some of my villains. SPECIALLY Shayfer James. Counterfeit Arcade is amazing.

@XPtto3 recommended this video, and he was right check this one out!

I sort of disagree. A villain doesn’t need to have sympathetic motives. For things that are human or close to human, you at least need it to follow some sort of logic (even if insane, the logic is just broken, and if it isn’t stable or super chaotic, it should show and people around them react to that). But even that gets thrown out the window with utterly inhuman monstrosities. Especially lovecraftian stuff where the entire point is that they are alien and unknowable, often not even following the same basic laws of physics, sometimes including causality as we know it.

Otherwise, good video though.

I made a campaign where the main villain runs a Time cult their motivations are to try to bring back their dead sister no matter how many people he hurts while doing it

Hearing upper middle class white kids say “capitalism is bad” will never not be hilarious.

Strahd: I do not do this blah blah blah 🤣

"-He's evil isn't a personality, that's a hobby." Is such an AMAZING thing to remember when making a villain!

I have this plan for a villain but idk if they would work:

In my campaign there is a rampant disease going around that makes people slowly forget everything. Part of the way through trying to cure it the heroes will discover it was made and isn't natural.

The twist is that the guy making the disease made it unintentionally trying to become god, instead now he is an unwilling tool of the gods. All the gods are eldritch and hate that their very existence fuels the world and are trying to break free, destroying the world in the process.

Should I add some underling that would be more memorable? Is this enough?

My villain was the leading of a terrorist organisation on a remote island country that had no government. This island was filled with vigilantes, criminals and the innocents that were born there.

The terrorist group were made known to the players in the first mission, as a town requested help to take out an outpost they had nearby. After doing so they found helpful information like maps and notebooks filled with code names. A resistance leader offered to pay for the documents and one player made a deception roll to keep some of the papers. The team didn't want to join the resistance group until they trusted them better, so they kept some of the information and would continue to fight the terrorists when they came across they're territory.

During the end of a cargo transport mission where the players were working with the resistance, the main villain came to attempt to highjack the payload and demolished the resistance fighters first while the party continued to go ahead.

This way the players knew there was a main villain but was unsure of their power but knew their goals, until an ambush where the villains capabilities were revealed to their allies. The players loved this reveal and I'm glad it worked so well

I agree with your points, but I would also like to counterpoint and say that sometimes, a lack of villain motivation can work too. My DM created one of the most chilling villain moments I've played through with three simple words;





"Because it's fun."





That being said, an intricate motive works too, just wanted to give you my two copper pieces.

I feel most Zelda villains are effective for the same reasons that Strahd is an effective villain. They are active players in the plot that we often run into throughout the game, allowing for their presence to be felt whenever they appear and for us to know their personality (or what we think is their personality in Zant's case). Much of what Ganondorf does and say is standard BBEG fair, but games where he isn't hijacking the plot or a mindless beast are games where he's at his best because you constantly feel his presence hang over the setting like an unpleasant miasma of evil even when he's only seen on occasion.

Jacob sent me here- errrrm yea

Jacob told me to watch this

I think you sort of unintentionally made two conflicting examples. One of how Darth Siddius is a good villain, and the other about how the players need to understand why villains became villains. Siddius is literally just evil for the sake of being evil. No tragic backstory, just evil space wizard.

I agree highly. I actually ended up doing a bit with this with the villain I just introduced to my Radiant Citadel party too:

The Pale Dragon is one of four Dragonborn leaders of a doomsday cult my party has been dealing with the plans of for some time, and established as the most dangerous one. He has brain damage that renders him incapable of fearing fear and only having restraint when he uses his willpower to do so. The players were aware of this, and realizing he was completely unfettered made them fear him.

Then he was introduced to the party by walking out of a library with his right hand man, a towering guy named Aquarius. What followed was him, mostly stoically, introducing the party FOR THEM, giving a rundown of each of their backstories while refusing to give any information on himself. He did, however, give his motive through his dialog: he views information and knowledge as more valuable the fewer people know it after revealing he knew something about one of the characters they didn't know about themselves, and thus wants to find all the information he possibly can in a place and then summon the Elder Water Elemental he worships to destroy it so he has it exclusively. When someone retorts his worldview with 'knowledge is more valuable shared', his response was to break his stoic personality for a moment, laugh his head off before switching back to stoic and simply saying 'I've seen what mortals do with knowledge, and it's better hoarded than given to them,' implying a reason he feels that way.

Then then proceeds to prove that he was as dangerous as he'd been built up by breaking a well loved NPC's nose and punching her in the gut before forcing the party to look at her terrified, bleeding face, while making it clear her death would be 'intriguing' due to a specific factor about her. With his mindset, that meant he WOULD see her dead so he could learn what he wanted. This made the party both terrified for the NPC they care about, but also furious with the Pale Dragon for harming her.

He's also using a simulacrum so that the party can defeat him in the battle, but know the real Pale Dragon is much, much stronger and they basically only beat an avatar and foiled whatever current plan the cult had in motion, and thus the true battle with him is later on.

Players are having a lot of fun.

Song for a sub villain I'm using is bones by the killers. She's an undead antipaladin and follows the goddess of undead and gluttony. Fits her vibe of wanting to have fun but being dark or evil about it

Wow. Kanon Wakeshima. What a throwback to my edgy teenage years.

My recent villain was once mortal but discovered a blood pool which they build their manor around. After drinking from it they became a Vampire and the blood made them mad and now believes the whole world should be his as well as everyone is out to get them.

it's so funny seeing how other people write the npcs in modules bc in our Tyranny of Dragons game Azbara wasn't associated with the red wizards of Thay or Rath Modar but was running from both, and saw that blending in with the Cult of Tiamat would be helpful to get him to waterdeep and warn some harpers about Rath's plans. and yeah we didn't give a shit about severin, we assumed 4 other characters were in charge of the cult before him