How to write a great D&D villain (BBEG)

a great DND villain can take your campaign to the next level whether it's the antagonist for the entire campaign or a boss for a more localized Quest or region developing really interesting nuanced villains makes your experience as a GM more rewarding and gives the players a lot more to bounce off of in this video I'm going to lay out a four stage plan for creating and running a good d d villain we're going to talk about Origins motivations henchmen and the villains master plan but first this video is sponsored by crit cards and the doctor's handbook uh fifth edition d d Kickstarter from a company called feather Mind Tricks feather Mind Tricks wants to put out a pack of cards each one with a different kind of critical injury and effect that can be dealt out during combat that means even if you win the combat encounter as a whole you can still have lasting consequences but they also want to fund a boot called the doctor's handbook which allows players to take on a doctor class practicing medicine healing injuries and balancing the effect effect of the crypt cards the boot and the cards are Illustrated with beautiful pieces of artwork but I can hear you saying already get to the important bit can you be a plague doctor yes there's a plague doctor subclass for the doctor class and in fact there's eight subclasses one of them I find really fascinating in a morbid way it's the death doctor this is the kind of physician who sits in on torture and executions this whole supplement is quite dark quite grisly but I really want to get a hold of it and if you wanted to there is a link down below this video in the description that will take you over to the kickstarter and you can give them some supports a big thank you to feather Mind Tricks and crit cards and the doctor's handbook for supporting this video now let's talk about villains a villain origin story is a great place to start whether you're running an ancient Lich King or a random bug bear bandit Lord knowing where they came from knowing what made them who they are today is going to really help with your motivation development later on it will help you role play this character and it will help you decide how they make choices once they're interacting with the players I think often if you take a villain and just drop them in without putting too much thought into their backstory even if the villain in the present is very cool and dangerous and has their own motivations it can feel a little bit like they just spawned in because the players reached a certain power level and then this villain was suddenly arrived so I like to take a moment and think about kind of three key areas to develop their backstory the first thing is in a very practical sense just what has happened so far a rough timeline of obviously what age they are and what kind of key events have happened to them along the way and specifically what key events they've witnessed along the way did they live through a massive war did they live through a global cataclysm did they see the rise and fall of a particular Empire these kind of elements will inform their motivations and their actions at a later point the second thing I like to think about is at least one real connection that they have to something external to themselves this could be a place or a person so for example if it was a place they might have a real sense of affection for the village that they grew up in no matter how evil they are now they might still have the sentimentality for this little rural community somewhere or they might have a deep hatred for a city where they suffer their first defeat many years before and and they still have this this desire for vengeance against this city maybe they have a Patriots for a particular Monarch or powerful figure or God within your world just some kind of a pre-existing relationship to again something external to themselves and finally the last part I think about in this place is uh what is the Catalyst event that put them on the specific path they're on now presumably there are many things that led them to this point but at some point they got onto a trajectory that is now putting them in a direct collision course with the players and ideally there should be some really instigating event that kicked all this off so for example maybe they witnessed their family being slaughtered by the king's soldiers and they're now this dangerous kind of Rebel leader who's leading a kind of violent Uprising against the King's son out of a desire for vengeance and maybe they encountered an immortal being or a God and that has led them to sick immortality for themselves and they've now become a lich or they're trying to become a lich as a result of that initial encounter if you have these three elements in place the rough backstory of kind of what they've seen in the world what they've seen so far in their time the relationship that they have with something external to themselves like a place or a person and finally uh they are kind of catalyst moment that drove them to become who they are and to set off from the journey that they're now on that will bring them into conflict with the players you have a great backstory you have a great origin set up there and that will bring us into the next section which is motivation developing the backstory and the origins of your villain leads us directly to their motivations in the present day what are they trying to do and why are they trying to do it now before we go further the Golden Rule whatever they're trying to do it must interact or intersect in some way with what the players are doing and it should lead to conflict between them there's a mistake that DMS sometimes make they bring a villain in and the villain's goals maybe are bad for some people in the world maybe bad for the world as a whole but the players don't feel that their goals or motivations are really in conflict with his villain so for example the villain appears and says that they want to slaughter the Council of high magicians that rule this world well the players are maybe really interested in going off and becoming Pirates so they're like we don't care we're not going to try to stop this we'll maybe get involved later on if if it becomes personal for us but in the meantime yeah let him go and Kill The Magicians we'll go off and be Pirates you need to make sure in advance that whatever that villain's goal is the players have some stake in it and it's going to prevent them from living the lives they want to lead or it's going to threaten the things they care about the safest approach here is to wait a while before you bring your villain in and develop any of their motivations I will always have a rough idea at the start of the campaign who the villain might be but I don't bring in anything of the villain for the first maybe up to like 10 sessions because what I'm looking for initially is what do the players care about in my world what are they interacting with if the players come in and start showing me what they care about what they're showing me is here is what we're going to respond to if the villain is threatening this element so for example the players all want to go to be Pirates fantastic my villain I'm going to tweak him a little bit my villain becomes a sort of authoritarian violent Admiral um who has decided to come in and clear up all the Pirates in this area he's hell-bent on eradicating Pirates altogether well okay now he's hell-bent on eradicating both the players and the lifestyle that they want to pursue so inevitably conflict will occur don't get too hung up on your original vision of the the motivation of your villain be ready to play with it a little bit and you know potentially uh sort of kill your darling scrap what you originally planned you see your players really care about something you go well okay I'm gonna I'm gonna respond to that another good example being if the players for example are uh particularly attached to an area you see that they spend a lot of time in the first 10 sessions helping out a valley going Village to Village building a reputation well okay that Valley now needs to feature in the villain's plan the the villain maybe ultimately wants to open a portal to hell and that portal happens to to be in an old temple in that Valley so that Valley is the first place that's going to be destroyed when the demon hordes pour through you watch your players they'll tell you what they care about once you know that information you know what the villain's motivation is going to be kind of tuned towards the other thing I want to mention here is there's a very common piece of writing advice and DND advice which is use gray villains use morally ambiguous villains with sympathetic genuine motivations now that is good advice there is something really fun about having a villain who the players can almost sympathize with maybe they have a strong code of ethics it's just that Port of Ethics clashes with the players or for example the greater good villain the person who says look I know what I'm doing this bad but in the long run I want the same as you I want to save the world and I think I'm going to do that by committing these terrible acts of evil the means that are justified by the ends so that is a decent approach for a villain and most of the time that works well but don't let people discourage you from doing just really evil sadistic dark lord villains I personally think that the reason a lot of dark Lords and kind of Super Evil I want to destroy the world villains don't work that well it's because they don't go far enough they're not evil enough if you create a villain who is genuinely sadistic a psychopath who is completely chaotic and unpredictable and will lean into the worst possible aspects of human nature making the players see this person as a sort of dangerous force of nature sweeping through the land burning pillaging torturing I mean these are horrible ideas but they will make this villain feel genuinely terrifying because the players don't know if they have any ethical red lines they probably don't and that is a genuinely compelling villain I do think that there is a place in some campaigns for a villain who is just here to watch the world burn her to cause suffering to other people and he might have have a decent motivation for example the villain's motivation may be a kind of a revenge against the world they see themselves as having been wronged or hurt by the world around them they say well you know what I'm going to hurt this world back in every possible way that I can that can be a compelling villain even if all they're doing is burning everything inside so um of course for many people the best option will be a slightly more morally ambiguous villain with you know sympathetic motivations but if you think you can pull off a genuinely horrible villain who just wants to kill everyone and end the world prematurely don't don't let common writing advice stop you we've now got an origin story and a motivation that's going to clash with what the players want to do those are the key building blocks of a villain to run them in our game we should also think about their henchmen now I love giving villains a circular hierarchy of underlings and minions who are going to carry out their orders in the world this is good on a couple of different levels so for one thing it gives you a way to have the villains influence felt before the players come face to face with them uh the longer you postpone that moment of first contact with the villain the more that villain can build up in the player's minds and that's a nice sense of kind of a looming dread off in the distance that they know they're gonna have to face this villain but a great way to have that kind of have them active in the game without being present themselves is to have their underlings going out their various monstrous captains going out into the world causing trouble and furthering goals at once again clash with what the players want to do my personal approach is usually to have if I have like a big bad at the top say an evil draculate who wants to uh who wants to do something um the Draco Lich will have a group of maybe kind of Cults worshipers and I would try to give each of them a very diverse skill and attack set so for example one might be a sneaky Rogue Archer type one might be a big brutish hulking uh Warrior and the other might be a mage uh some kind of Druid or Wizard and the players are gonna have to deal with each of these villains one at a time uh ideally with each villain being a little bit more of a challenge than the one faced before this gives the players a sense that over time they're progressing we might not have come close to fighting the main villain yet but they are progressing over time the other reason this is good is because often players are going to be silly and attack the villain as soon as they see them so if you want to have a really high powered ultimate villain of the campaign you don't necessarily want to put that in front of the players too early because the players um are just going to thoughtlessly run in and you're going to get a tpk so having these little incremental fights for the players work their way up through the hierarchy getting closer and closer to the ultimate most powerful boss in the organization the ultimate villain of the campaign that is going to give them a sense of progression without ever putting them in intense danger of a tpk finally develop a master plan for the villain and what they're going to do across the course of the campaign now for much of the campaign the players won't actually be dealing with the villain the villain will be out there causing trouble conquering cities going after strange artifacts they need to complete their ultimate plan the players are going to hear of this from afar the best approach I found to this is to create almost a series of steps the villain is going to take unless the plan is heavily disrupted but the player is prematurely they're going to take these steps at regular intervals throughout the campaign so for example you might say every five sessions or every 10 sessions depending on how long the campaign is going to be the villain moves one step forward in their plan so that might mean if it's a big invading Force led by an orc warlord and that's the ultimate villain then every five or ten sessions a new city is conquered and the player is going to hear a word of that they hear oh yes this far off city that they've just seen as a name on the map that's been conquered and at first they might think well you know that's somewhere else that doesn't really impact us right away gradually they're going to start seeing the impact of that in the world around them because you know even if they don't the the plan is escalating behind the scenes that the villain is moving forward towards whatever their final goal is so if it is an invading Force more and more cities closer and closer to the players are being conquered they might start seeing displaced peoples on the road they might see towns recruiting bigger garrisons and preparing for a perhaps Doom defense maybe even the the battle is getting closer to the capital city and this is all happening kind of behind the scenes this is just you passing on rumors to the players in a Tavern here passing on word from uh uh you know another traveler in the road but you give them the sense that out there somewhere there is a concrete progression taking place the villain isn't just waiting around for them to level up and come find them now that doesn't mean they have to rush out and face the villain but it could mean that they have to start going out and intercepting the villain's henchmen disrupting the plans for example in one of my recent patreon pieces Heroes of the Highlands Shameless plug the villain is an orcish Chieftain of a kind of Highland Clan he wants to assemble various fragments of an old sword for various reasons and so while the players are adventuring around doing their own thing they were just here every now and then that this orcas Chieftain has excavated another Barrow or gone in search of another strange artifact far up in the north and at first they might ignore this but over time they might start putting it together and go oh wait he's looking for something and we know he's up to no good we should probably get involved here and the the the the plan is always in place gradually the players become aware of it but it always gives you a sense of how to escalate the villain over time because you don't want your villain to come in as one level of threat and then just stay at the same level of threat for the whole campaign without really attempting to further their own plans that is the four-step plan I'm gonna go back and just summarize it quickly because I know I've been rambling throughout this video so step one was develop the villain's Origins and specifically the developed three points the overall kind of timeline that they've lived through uh the the relationship they have with a place or a person in the world and the Catalyst event that has set them on the current trajectory that is now barreling them towards the players the second point was to um develop motivations that are going to directly conflict with the players uh don't just pick a motivation and stick to it uh be responsive to what your players are actually going to care about and what's going to make them hate this villain and get invested in this villain uh so be flexible with those motivations maybe give a couple of sessions initially to see what the players care about and then start finalizing what the villain's motivations really are the third point of course was the henchmen bring in a kind of collection of a rose Gallery if you like of of underlings and Minions that the players have to fight through before they can get up to the villain and finally think about that that progression that the villain is going to go on create almost like a step-by-step master plan that the villain will go through and just have that ticking along in the background as the players are wandering around saving a town from the local Goblin problem Somewhere Out There the villain just took another step forward in their plan and just keep that at the back of your head gradually drip feedback to the players I hope the video has been useful tremendous thank you to further Mind Tricks as I said you can find their Kickstarter down the description on this video uh it looks really cool it looks really dark and I love a kind of horror themed Grizzly DND settings so I think that's going to be right at home in my own games but uh yeah if you want to see the crit cards in the doctor's handbook you can find that down below in the meantime thank you very much for watching and I'll see you soon

Channel: Tales Arcane

Views: 15,064

Keywords: dnd, dungeons and dragons, d&d villain, bbeg, dnd villain

Id: Yu62EeG0sMg

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023