From Sauron to Vader - These are great villains. Great for different reasons, but nonetheless evil, powerful, and almost (but not quite) unstoppable. What are the great villains in D&D?
So you’ve got Sauron, and you’ve got Saruman.
You’ve got the Emperor, and you’ve got Darth Vader.
There’s Voldemort, and Bellatrix Lestrange (and Lucius, and Quirrel and Snape and…)
These are great villains. Great for different reasons, but nonetheless evil, powerful, and almost (but not quite) unstoppable.
What are the great villains in D&D?
Oh, sure, we’ve got Strahd looking out over the moors. And there’s Acererak squatting in some ruins. And more demon lords and devil princes than you can count. But these villains rarely attain the level of personal and intense wickedness that some of our favorite antagonists gain. How many tables have actually fought Demogorgon, or cared about Strahd’s back-story, or even bothered to ask what was up with that skull that kills people in the tomb? They might be awesome characters, but how do they fall out in play? Are they significant and mighty, driving the action and challenging the characters, or are they just another bag of HP to beat until it stops moving?
It’s hard to cultivate a truly significant villain in a game where part of the assumption is that most anything you meet that you want to kill will probably be dead in a few rounds (or that you will be). There’s little room for exposition, little space for unfolding plots, and we can always count on our movie and book protagonists to be more stupid and helpless than our heroic D&D characters could ever be.
But, it is possible. So let us make it a little easier.
The Metagame Function of Burning an Orphanage
For the moment, we’re going to set aside things like character motivation and history, and instead look at this from a functional standpoint. In a work of fiction, be it movie or book, what is the functional effect of a good villain? What does one do?
You can see that in all the non-D&D villains mentioned above, that they have an active agenda that they pursue over the course of the work. Sauron is going to conquer Middle Earth. Palpatine is going to conquer the galaxy. Voldemort is going to rule the world. These goals are eerily similar (to the point of stereotype), but it already distinguishes them from the likes of Strahd and Demogorgon, who generally just sit around being evil in their lairs.
Sitting around in a lair is, though, a great set up for a dungeon crawl. I mean, what better MacGuffin to cram into the hidden room deep within the trap-strewn layer than one that you can kill and then take the stuff of? “There’s some evil hanging around somewhere over there, go kill it,” is for D&D games what “The princess has been kidnapped!” is to videogames, but almost even MORE of an excuse plot.
But the great villains in our media don’t just sit in their comfy thrones waiting to be deposed. They are active forces for evil and horribleness in the setting. They do things. In fact, they do things that are, as far as the villain is concerned, destined to succeed.
That activity can change the dynamic of a game pretty significantly. If the villain is a bad person who once burned an orphanage and now is just sitting around plotting somewhere, you can go slay her whenever you get around to it – it becomes something your characters can choose to do (or not). Alternately, if the villain is actively burning down orphanages in some sort of crazy plot to use the ashes of forsaken children to make herself immortal (or whatever), reacting to that villain becomes much more imperative for the PC’s. Suddenly, every night not spent hunting down the Orphanage Arsonist is another potential dozen dead orphans on your hands.
It should be noted that this change in tone is one of the big differences between a sandbox-style, character-focused game, and a more narrative-style, event-driven game, and so it isn’t always a welcome change. Some people might see it as a DM takeover! But there are ways to have the best of both worlds: an active villain that the PC’s have some role in defining or opting into.
Goals for Goombas
Good villains take action to accomplish their mission. But what is their mission? Sure, sure, rule/destroy the kingdom/world/universe/reality, we all know that, but what’s their plan for doing that? What do they need to do to pull that great feat off? And WHY? You know, normal people generally give up on nihilism and power fantasies.
So your villains, like your PC’s, can have goals. If you use the system for PC-chosen goals in my previous article, you can actually add some systemic coherence to what your villains do, and help you guide how the party can fight against them.
If a PC’s goal has three supporting parts (the origin, the legacy, and the three steps need to attain the legacy), the villain also has a goal defined by their origin, the legacy they hope to lead, and the steps needed to attain that legacy. What changes about the villain’s goal (in comparison to a heroic goal) is that the legacy they leave is undoubtedly not great news for most other people in the world.
For instance, you can have a villain with the Wealth goal. The origin can be ported wholesale: they started off poor, just as a PC who wanted that goal would start off. Only, the legacy they wish to leave is perhaps one where they held all the wealth in the kingdom, reducing everyone else to the state of poverty they have fled from. This goal doesn’t just involve finding great treasure or dodging some debt-collectors, but instead involves taking others’ wealth (such as by bold robberies or establishing a cruel monopoly). There’s steps on the road to this goal that the villain can undertake, as well.
Generally, the PC’s only get involved at the final stage of the villain’s plans. If our wealth-seeking villain is bent on leaving a legacy of poverty for everyone else in the kingdom, they may be planning on destroying the house of the local lord with their bandit gang. The first step would be for the poor villain to establish a bandit gang, then to weaken then town guard, and finally to strike at the lord’s fortress itself, hoping to kill everyone inside and take the valuables for herself. The PC’s aren’t likely to get involved until this Bandit Queen is already threatening to destroy the local lord, with the town guard in disarray, and the highly organized bandits massing outside the fortress’s walls.
The steps required for the villain to achieve their goals, though, can be the same steps required for the party to truly defeat the villain. Because goals have an effect on the broader world, killing the Bandit Queen alone isn’t going to protect the kingdom – it just creates a power vacuum that the nearest bandit with a Wealth goal can occupy, with three steps already accomplished. Cutting off the hydra’s head like this just creates copycats, because it doesn’t take care of the underlying structure that gave rise to the villain.
So the PC’s are invited to defend the fortress, strengthen the town guard, and finally to break up the bandit gang (by killing the Bandit Queen). Hey presto, you’ve got adventure enough for at least one night.
As a bang-on effect to using villainous goals, your villain can gain some strange similarity with the PC’s. A villain that wants wealth coming up against a PC that wants the same thing can be a compelling adventure, because the PC can understand and sympathize with the villain’s motives and goals, but ends up opposing the villain. In this way, you can even have compelling “Good vs. Good” or “Evil vs. Evil” adventures that can add some shades of gray to the setting. Maybe the lord that the Bandit Queen is intent on overthrowing is a despot who causes the poverty that gave rise to her (and to the PC). The Bandit Queen’s legacy clearly doesn’t allow for the PC’s legacy, but perhaps one or the other could change their goals…perhaps after meeting the PC, the Bandit Queen sees the error of her ways and joins the PC in a drive to accomplish his goals. Perhaps after meeting the Bandit Queen, our fairly amoral PC thinks that killing the lord and ruling alongside the Queen might be fun. Either way (or even if they simply come to a head), the goals of each will help define each other more deeply.
There’s more you can do in this direction, too.
His goal is Moustache-Tiwrling.
Mirror Reflections
In addition to having their own goals, and being active, most good villains exist almost explicitly to oppose the heroes in what they do. It’s easy to see why most people wouldn’t want to be destroyed or live in a world ruled by a tyrant, but more subtly, compelling villains can be the ones standing between the character and their own legacy.
The goals of the PC’s can come into play here more directly: somehow, the villain is linked to the three steps necessary to accomplish the PC’s goal.
So, that Wealth-seeking hero is going to have three steps to accomplish their goal: pay off the debt, get some property, and strike it rich. The villain can come in as a roadblock for each of those. Perhaps if the Bandit Queen above is the villain, the hero owes the bandits money, can save a farm from bandits (the family then rewards them with the deed to the farm), and finally is offered a great reward by the local lord…to slay the Bandit Queen.
This method makes it fairly easy to develop a villain that all characters in the party are interested in fighting against, simply because accomplishing their goals requires it. If the party also consists of a character with the Peace goal, perhaps the three steps are to defend against a bandit raid, to lead an assault against the Bandit Queen, and finally to force the bandits to disband. Now, we’ve got two characters who both want to put an end to the Bandit Queen for their own reasons.
This becomes even more potent if the Bandit Queen is somehow responsible for the character’s origin. Perhaps bandit raids are one of the main reasons the Wealth-seeking party members’ family was so poor (they were humble merchants constantly being shaken down), and one of the main reason the Peace-seeking character was so scarred by violence (he saw his parents slaughtered by bandits).
Sandboxing the Storyline
So, now you have a compelling villain, who is active in the world, and who even reflects the PC’s in some twisted way. How do you avoid making the players feel railroaded into a confrontation, here? The bandits are beating down the gates, how can the players possibly opt to explore the world for the MacGuffin instead?
Well, the truth is, if your villain is compelling, this likely isn’t even much of an issue – the players’ goals will be to achieve the characters’ goals and the characters’ goals will line up with fighting the villain and hey presto, everything works.
But really, the methods needed to achieve the goals aren’t set in stone, and, as noted above, sometimes a villain and a PC may share a goal, or change each others’ legacies. What you can do is basically decide what will happen to the villain’s plot if the PC’s do not intervene.
The guidelines above assume the villain will achieve their ends if the PC’s do not intervene, because that makes for a great story: the PC’s are the only ones who can save the kingdom!
But perhaps there are other forces opposing the villain, other adventurers, other forces for good in the world. Maybe your campaign’s Elminster can handle the Bandit Queen “offscreen” if your PC’s are more interested in exploring the Grim Mountain. For an ongoing world, where the PC’s aren’t “meant” to be the Heroes (but may become them), this can make more sense than having the PC’s be the only ones able to thwart the villain. And you still have the option to turn an individual villain into something that ONLY the PC’s can stop, either by coincidence of proximity or by special relationships (it takes someone who understands the drive for wealth to undermine the Bandit Queen!).
It can also be interesting to roll with the idea that the villain is successful, though this can feel like punishing the PC’s for not jumping at your plot hooks. If the PC’s come back from Grim Mountain and the Bandit Queen has taken over the kingdom, maybe their job just got that much tougher! As long as your players are clear about the consequences of their actions, they can make informed choices about what they want their characters to do – some would love to overthrow a successful bandit queen.
It’s also true that if you use PC goals to inform your villain that, in creating their characters, the PC’s are essentially also creating their antagonists. This can be made explicit up-front: perhaps the origins explicitly reference the villain, or involve the first few stages of the villain’s plot somehow.
Give Me Your Wickedness
So, that’s more time spent on villains than on characters! I hope it sounds interesting. Let me know what you think! Give me some of the effective villains you’ve used in the past have done, how they’ve been more than just dudes sitting in dungeons waiting for death.
So you’ve got Sauron, and you’ve got Saruman.
You’ve got the Emperor, and you’ve got Darth Vader.
There’s Voldemort, and Bellatrix Lestrange (and Lucius, and Quirrel and Snape and…)
These are great villains. Great for different reasons, but nonetheless evil, powerful, and almost (but not quite) unstoppable.
What are the great villains in D&D?
Oh, sure, we’ve got Strahd looking out over the moors. And there’s Acererak squatting in some ruins. And more demon lords and devil princes than you can count. But these villains rarely attain the level of personal and intense wickedness that some of our favorite antagonists gain. How many tables have actually fought Demogorgon, or cared about Strahd’s back-story, or even bothered to ask what was up with that skull that kills people in the tomb? They might be awesome characters, but how do they fall out in play? Are they significant and mighty, driving the action and challenging the characters, or are they just another bag of HP to beat until it stops moving?
It’s hard to cultivate a truly significant villain in a game where part of the assumption is that most anything you meet that you want to kill will probably be dead in a few rounds (or that you will be). There’s little room for exposition, little space for unfolding plots, and we can always count on our movie and book protagonists to be more stupid and helpless than our heroic D&D characters could ever be.
But, it is possible. So let us make it a little easier.
The Metagame Function of Burning an Orphanage
For the moment, we’re going to set aside things like character motivation and history, and instead look at this from a functional standpoint. In a work of fiction, be it movie or book, what is the functional effect of a good villain? What does one do?
You can see that in all the non-D&D villains mentioned above, that they have an active agenda that they pursue over the course of the work. Sauron is going to conquer Middle Earth. Palpatine is going to conquer the galaxy. Voldemort is going to rule the world. These goals are eerily similar (to the point of stereotype), but it already distinguishes them from the likes of Strahd and Demogorgon, who generally just sit around being evil in their lairs.
Sitting around in a lair is, though, a great set up for a dungeon crawl. I mean, what better MacGuffin to cram into the hidden room deep within the trap-strewn layer than one that you can kill and then take the stuff of? “There’s some evil hanging around somewhere over there, go kill it,” is for D&D games what “The princess has been kidnapped!” is to videogames, but almost even MORE of an excuse plot.
But the great villains in our media don’t just sit in their comfy thrones waiting to be deposed. They are active forces for evil and horribleness in the setting. They do things. In fact, they do things that are, as far as the villain is concerned, destined to succeed.
That activity can change the dynamic of a game pretty significantly. If the villain is a bad person who once burned an orphanage and now is just sitting around plotting somewhere, you can go slay her whenever you get around to it – it becomes something your characters can choose to do (or not). Alternately, if the villain is actively burning down orphanages in some sort of crazy plot to use the ashes of forsaken children to make herself immortal (or whatever), reacting to that villain becomes much more imperative for the PC’s. Suddenly, every night not spent hunting down the Orphanage Arsonist is another potential dozen dead orphans on your hands.
It should be noted that this change in tone is one of the big differences between a sandbox-style, character-focused game, and a more narrative-style, event-driven game, and so it isn’t always a welcome change. Some people might see it as a DM takeover! But there are ways to have the best of both worlds: an active villain that the PC’s have some role in defining or opting into.
Goals for Goombas
Good villains take action to accomplish their mission. But what is their mission? Sure, sure, rule/destroy the kingdom/world/universe/reality, we all know that, but what’s their plan for doing that? What do they need to do to pull that great feat off? And WHY? You know, normal people generally give up on nihilism and power fantasies.
So your villains, like your PC’s, can have goals. If you use the system for PC-chosen goals in my previous article, you can actually add some systemic coherence to what your villains do, and help you guide how the party can fight against them.
If a PC’s goal has three supporting parts (the origin, the legacy, and the three steps need to attain the legacy), the villain also has a goal defined by their origin, the legacy they hope to lead, and the steps needed to attain that legacy. What changes about the villain’s goal (in comparison to a heroic goal) is that the legacy they leave is undoubtedly not great news for most other people in the world.
For instance, you can have a villain with the Wealth goal. The origin can be ported wholesale: they started off poor, just as a PC who wanted that goal would start off. Only, the legacy they wish to leave is perhaps one where they held all the wealth in the kingdom, reducing everyone else to the state of poverty they have fled from. This goal doesn’t just involve finding great treasure or dodging some debt-collectors, but instead involves taking others’ wealth (such as by bold robberies or establishing a cruel monopoly). There’s steps on the road to this goal that the villain can undertake, as well.
Generally, the PC’s only get involved at the final stage of the villain’s plans. If our wealth-seeking villain is bent on leaving a legacy of poverty for everyone else in the kingdom, they may be planning on destroying the house of the local lord with their bandit gang. The first step would be for the poor villain to establish a bandit gang, then to weaken then town guard, and finally to strike at the lord’s fortress itself, hoping to kill everyone inside and take the valuables for herself. The PC’s aren’t likely to get involved until this Bandit Queen is already threatening to destroy the local lord, with the town guard in disarray, and the highly organized bandits massing outside the fortress’s walls.
The steps required for the villain to achieve their goals, though, can be the same steps required for the party to truly defeat the villain. Because goals have an effect on the broader world, killing the Bandit Queen alone isn’t going to protect the kingdom – it just creates a power vacuum that the nearest bandit with a Wealth goal can occupy, with three steps already accomplished. Cutting off the hydra’s head like this just creates copycats, because it doesn’t take care of the underlying structure that gave rise to the villain.
So the PC’s are invited to defend the fortress, strengthen the town guard, and finally to break up the bandit gang (by killing the Bandit Queen). Hey presto, you’ve got adventure enough for at least one night.
As a bang-on effect to using villainous goals, your villain can gain some strange similarity with the PC’s. A villain that wants wealth coming up against a PC that wants the same thing can be a compelling adventure, because the PC can understand and sympathize with the villain’s motives and goals, but ends up opposing the villain. In this way, you can even have compelling “Good vs. Good” or “Evil vs. Evil” adventures that can add some shades of gray to the setting. Maybe the lord that the Bandit Queen is intent on overthrowing is a despot who causes the poverty that gave rise to her (and to the PC). The Bandit Queen’s legacy clearly doesn’t allow for the PC’s legacy, but perhaps one or the other could change their goals…perhaps after meeting the PC, the Bandit Queen sees the error of her ways and joins the PC in a drive to accomplish his goals. Perhaps after meeting the Bandit Queen, our fairly amoral PC thinks that killing the lord and ruling alongside the Queen might be fun. Either way (or even if they simply come to a head), the goals of each will help define each other more deeply.
There’s more you can do in this direction, too.
His goal is Moustache-Tiwrling.
Mirror Reflections
In addition to having their own goals, and being active, most good villains exist almost explicitly to oppose the heroes in what they do. It’s easy to see why most people wouldn’t want to be destroyed or live in a world ruled by a tyrant, but more subtly, compelling villains can be the ones standing between the character and their own legacy.
The goals of the PC’s can come into play here more directly: somehow, the villain is linked to the three steps necessary to accomplish the PC’s goal.
So, that Wealth-seeking hero is going to have three steps to accomplish their goal: pay off the debt, get some property, and strike it rich. The villain can come in as a roadblock for each of those. Perhaps if the Bandit Queen above is the villain, the hero owes the bandits money, can save a farm from bandits (the family then rewards them with the deed to the farm), and finally is offered a great reward by the local lord…to slay the Bandit Queen.
This method makes it fairly easy to develop a villain that all characters in the party are interested in fighting against, simply because accomplishing their goals requires it. If the party also consists of a character with the Peace goal, perhaps the three steps are to defend against a bandit raid, to lead an assault against the Bandit Queen, and finally to force the bandits to disband. Now, we’ve got two characters who both want to put an end to the Bandit Queen for their own reasons.
This becomes even more potent if the Bandit Queen is somehow responsible for the character’s origin. Perhaps bandit raids are one of the main reasons the Wealth-seeking party members’ family was so poor (they were humble merchants constantly being shaken down), and one of the main reason the Peace-seeking character was so scarred by violence (he saw his parents slaughtered by bandits).
Sandboxing the Storyline
So, now you have a compelling villain, who is active in the world, and who even reflects the PC’s in some twisted way. How do you avoid making the players feel railroaded into a confrontation, here? The bandits are beating down the gates, how can the players possibly opt to explore the world for the MacGuffin instead?
Well, the truth is, if your villain is compelling, this likely isn’t even much of an issue – the players’ goals will be to achieve the characters’ goals and the characters’ goals will line up with fighting the villain and hey presto, everything works.
But really, the methods needed to achieve the goals aren’t set in stone, and, as noted above, sometimes a villain and a PC may share a goal, or change each others’ legacies. What you can do is basically decide what will happen to the villain’s plot if the PC’s do not intervene.
The guidelines above assume the villain will achieve their ends if the PC’s do not intervene, because that makes for a great story: the PC’s are the only ones who can save the kingdom!
But perhaps there are other forces opposing the villain, other adventurers, other forces for good in the world. Maybe your campaign’s Elminster can handle the Bandit Queen “offscreen” if your PC’s are more interested in exploring the Grim Mountain. For an ongoing world, where the PC’s aren’t “meant” to be the Heroes (but may become them), this can make more sense than having the PC’s be the only ones able to thwart the villain. And you still have the option to turn an individual villain into something that ONLY the PC’s can stop, either by coincidence of proximity or by special relationships (it takes someone who understands the drive for wealth to undermine the Bandit Queen!).
It can also be interesting to roll with the idea that the villain is successful, though this can feel like punishing the PC’s for not jumping at your plot hooks. If the PC’s come back from Grim Mountain and the Bandit Queen has taken over the kingdom, maybe their job just got that much tougher! As long as your players are clear about the consequences of their actions, they can make informed choices about what they want their characters to do – some would love to overthrow a successful bandit queen.
It’s also true that if you use PC goals to inform your villain that, in creating their characters, the PC’s are essentially also creating their antagonists. This can be made explicit up-front: perhaps the origins explicitly reference the villain, or involve the first few stages of the villain’s plot somehow.
Give Me Your Wickedness
So, that’s more time spent on villains than on characters! I hope it sounds interesting. Let me know what you think! Give me some of the effective villains you’ve used in the past have done, how they’ve been more than just dudes sitting in dungeons waiting for death.
