A similar question has come up before in Your Favorite Uber Bad Guy, but to me, what makes a villain memorable is their wits. Why fight yourself when you have other people to do it for you? No sense dirtying your hands over it...:)
My response in that thread is about halfway down the page, my reasons for liking that villain are pretty clear. :)
How do you make memorable villains?
First, give them a goal. True villains don't perform random evil acts for the sake of evil, they have specific objectives and a plan of action.
Second, make them nasty. A villain should be someone the players love to hate. When possible, tailor the villain's personality and methods to directly conflict with the players' personalities and methods. If all else fails, theft from or otherwise attacking the characters will often motivate them.
Third, use minions and misdirection. A villain shouldn't fight the party until the party works its way through several layers of the villain's proxies and lies. Also, long-term villains should have contingency plans and an escape route in case the party starts getting the upper hand. "He who fights and runs away..."
Fourth, make them smart AND tough. Use the rules to build a character that maximizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses. Develop tactical plans that enable the villain to fight effectively while inhibiting the party from doing the same.
There is a section on building memorable villains at giantitp.com in the gaming section if you want to take a look.
Be willing to roll with it.
Putting all your eggs in one basket with villain design pays off when you're plotting the final campaign villain, but you need to be willing to build up villains you'd planned to be throw-aways as well, when the players find them memorable. Listen for cues that players are holding a grudge versus intermediate villains and build those guys up. To make this more likely, it helps to have intermediate villains that do the not-stupid things that masterminds do, like making getaways given half a chance.
I had this one necromancer guy. I never even gave him a name or if I did it has been forgotten in time. He is just The Necromancer. One half of the party got hired by the local thieve's guild to sneak into said Necromancer's house and steal a tome he had. They did but, one of the necro's pets saw them and let the necro know. So he came to their little "clubhouse" and threw the gaunlet down. Next time they left town had a fight outside town and he got away. Few weeks later after a party member died in the arena and wasn't brought back the necro animated said party member and used a few illusion spells to put the dead party member's face on other undead. SO the party had to look their fallen comrade in the face all during the fight. PLus anytime I had him show up or any magic mouth he sent always said the party's leader name three times. Was a great away to get everyone attention at the time.
So far, my greates villain was Balabar Smenk from the Age of Worms Adventure Path. He's crooked, he's bad, and he's got money up his $%$.
The pcs managed to capture him and the Ragnolin dwarf, but 1 week later Smenk was nowhere to be seen, while Ragnolin was dead, his throat cut.
It doesn't take a cleric to guess that this won;t be the last time they see Smenk.
How do you make memorable villains?
You could have the villian steal or destroy highly cherished magic items before escaping. my bet is your players will be out for blood.
This is a long post, but it generally follows along with how i work things as far as villains and other folks.
As a Dungeon Master (DM), one of your main problems is the creation of effective Non Player Characters (NPCs). In this article, I will provide a few helpful hints on how I go about designing NPCs to help, hinder, and harm my Player Characters (PCs). I have been DMing for well over 20 years, and a lot of what I will show comes from my direct experience with what has happened at the table over these many years. Having said that, this is just a guide on how I create and use NPCs at my table. Your experience and methods may be different from mine, and if they work for you, great. However, I am under the opinion that everything may help and every DM, even myself, can improve. Hopefully, this article may help even the veteran DMs out there create effective opponents for his or her game.
First, a few facts: In all of the aspects of adventure design, from maps, campaign settings, monsters, plot, and story, NPCs are without a doubt the primary building block of any successful D&D game. They account for well over 90% of the interactions your players are going to have with your campaign world. From the lowly commoner to the Evil Bad Guy (BBEG), these NPCs form the focus for creating an exciting and memorable game experience for your players. Without effective NPCs, your game world falls flat, and leads to a boring experience at the table for your players. We’ve all played in games where the NPCs were just carbon copies of the same person, with dead, flat uninteresting voices who impart information like reading the text of an Encyclopedia. I think we can all agree that these games are not very fun to play in, and usually a group dissolves after a few sessions. It is this writer’s hope that this article helps you avoid this outcome in your own games.
Remember this fact when creating an NPC: Good characterization comes from motivation. This bears repeating. Good characterization comes from motivation. Even as your PCs have motivations to go adventuring, so too do your NPCs have motivations as well. The second factor when creating NPCs is the rule of Cause and Affect. I’ll deal with that later. With these two rules of NPC creation, you are well on your way to create effective opponents that your players will remember for years to come.
First: Motivation. Every person in the world has a motivation for living their life. This is equally true in the game world setting. Every commoner has things to do for their own survival. Every bad guy, monster, and god has something that gives them purpose in life. The primary motivation for any NPC is survival. Obviously. Secondary to that is where the PCs come into play. For example: An NPC blacksmith has to put a roof over his head, has to pay apprentices and workmen, has to buy materials, and make a profit to keep him through the lean months. When adventurers come to call for him to build certain weapons, armor, and affect repairs, he has to keep his motivation in mind at all times. This is far different than the BBEG necromancer king, who wants to rule the world and make a plague that turns people into flesh eating ghouls. Still, the Necromancer King has the motivation to survive, but his secondary motivator is to create the plague. This leads into the Cause and Affect rule.
Cause and Affect: let’s break that phrase down into its component parts: What is the Cause of the NPC, and how does that Affect the PCs? Knowing these two facts and integrating them with Motivation is half of the creation process, and only takes a few minutes. In fact, the steps I use when creating an effective NPC is to first find out the motivation for that character. This leads to the cause, which then answers the question of how this cause affects the characters.
Now I hear you asking, how do I come up with a good motivation? I usually start with the basics and work up from there. Usually the 7 deadly sins is a good beginning. Greed, Lust, Envy, Sloth, Wrath, Vanity, Anger. Now for you common citizens that populate the cities and towns of your world, these are not effective motivators, as they will probably never affect your PCs in any remarkable way. With the exception of greed, most NPCs the characters meet will never need any other motives than that. These are your basic commoners, shop keeps, smiths, tavern masters, innkeepers, etc. and are simple window dressing, flavor text if you will. For your NPCs who are plot hooks, you need to delve a little deeper into their psyche to make them more effective. Here’s how I go about doing this.
I’ll use the example of Lord Fauntleroy Du Chambert. This gentleman was a con man. His primary motivator was greed. His Cause was simple, the garnering of wealth. He came from a noble family in another part of the world, but his father died and left no money in the will for Fauntleroy. The family was disgraced and he had to sell the family estate for a pittance and decided to make his name elsewhere in the world. How could I make him Affect the PCs in my campaign? Easy. They had just cleared out a ruined manor house, and were in the process of reconstruction to use it as a base of operations. Fauntleroy was in town when he heard about the manor from one of the workers at the tavern one night, and decided to set up a scam on the players. He fabricated the will, naming himself sole executor of the manor, and decided to approach the party with the forged document in hopes they would move out and give him access to the manorhouse.
This finished the majority of the NPC creation process. This then leads into the rest of the method of creating effective and memorable Characters, the meat of the matter. Most of your NPCs will be simple as far as stats are concerned. Most of the time I don’t even worry about stats for characters unless they are going to be in combat. Your basic characters such as commoners, smiths, etc. are not going to be melee types so there is no need to go to the extra trouble of creating their abilities and skills. 99% of the time, these will never come into play anyway. That doesn’t mean they don’t have personality. This is what I find to be the most trouble for new or young DMs, giving their NPCs a personality that is memorable to the players. Fortunately, there are several inspirations in the world for personality quirks, turns of phrase, speech patterns, and etc. One of my inspirations for effective characters is the book by Robert Cambell, called “The Heroe’s Journey.” This lists several archetypes to go by when I need an effective NPC. Some of them include the Mentor, the Comic Foil, the Damsel in Distress, and the Shadow. This is a great book for effective story creation as well, which is something I may discuss in a later article.
Another form of inspiration is TV and movies. And I’m not just talking about TV shows like Buffy, Angel, and Battlestar Galactica, or fantasy movies like Hawk the Slayer, Willow, and Beastmaster. While these are good shows and movies, they represent a small window of the available resources I suggest using as inspiration when it comes to effectively portraying NPCs at the table. Watching shows like the Sopranos, Deadwood, M*A*S*H, and Everyone Loves Raymond, has given me more inspiration on character personality than a show like Xena or Hercules. Movies like Howard’s End and Sleepless in Seattle gives me more than watching a movie like Excalibur. This is not to say that the movies and TV shows I have listed are bad, but I would suggest that by broadening our horizons past the typical Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres may give you more insight on creating characters with more “bite” if you will. The second inspiration is books. Now, I’m a big fan of R.A. Salvatore’s works, and I love Dragonlance chronicles. Lord of the Rings, love it or hate it, is an inspiring trilogy. But these are not the only muses I go to for ideas. I have been known to take examples for characters out of the works of Shakespeare, Tom Robbins, Stephen King, and even the Bible.
Another source of ideas is just looking out the window or going to the mall and watching ordinary people. I have spent many hours in restaurants listening and watching other patrons to see how they act, react, and speak. Even the people in your lives, your family members, friends, and co workers have personality traits and quirks that you can use as inspiration. I have used many friends and relatives as NPCs. My father is a Minister, and I use him as inspiration for the main High Priest at the Temple of Io in my campaign. I have used My brother as a valiant knight named Andre’ Monforque who met the players one time, and later turned into a bad guy as a Blackguard they had to bring to the light of reason to defeat.
Yet another way to make your NPCs memorable is through quirks and props. The first is easy. By describing an NPC with a scar across his neck and giving him a raspy voice, you give him something for the characters to remember the next time they meet him. Perhaps this person is just a blacksmith who had an accident a long time ago and speaks in quick sentences to lower the pain in his throat. He speaks in short sentences and can get his message across with a minimum of verbiage. Perhaps this is one of the main minions of your BBEG, one who will be met several times in the campaign. After the first few times, if you speak the same way, the players will remember, giving him a nickname like “Wheezy”, or “Rasper”. But they will remember him, nonetheless. If one of your players is a wizard who needs to see an apothecary, having that man scratch his beard a lot and speak with a lisp will make him more memorable than Apothecary 1A, seller of potions.
Sometimes in game, if I have an NPC that I wish to use over and over, I will use props such as a long black jacket, or a cane with a gem on it, or a particular pirate hat, or feathered cap. Now, I’m not saying to dress up for the game every week. This is something that I do on occasion to make an important NPC. For your average commoners, smiths, etc. I don’t usually dress up or give them anything but an unusal accent or certain phrases. But for the BBEG, I sometimes will don a dark jacket, a cloak, or some other prop that the players will associate with later on. For example, I have a politician in my game, Lord Kassivus Vaille, who rose to power over a city through skullduggery, assassination, and by buying nobles in his rise to power. The players don’t know this yet, but he is a rakshasa. The first time they met him, I was wearing a long black jacket with a lion pin affixed to the lapel. The jacket was a Christmas gift, and I found the pin at a consignment shop for $1.50. However, every time after that, when the players meet him, I put on the jacket and for a few moments, “Become” him if you will. I had a great night once when during the game I left the table and put on the jacket and came back. They all groaned, “Oh man, watch out. Vaille is back. What do we do now?” They started worrying and getting their guard up because they knew he was a bad guy by that point, as Vaille had done a lot of things to hamper the players since they first met him.
These props need not cost you more than 5 or 10 dollars, and you can find a lot of them at places like consignment shops, dollar stores, and second hand stores. A simple 50 cent scarf at a second hand shop makes an effective prop for Princess Janikka, and makes her more memorable than Princess 1A, Damsel In Distress. Just a simple pair of reading glasses and an old bible written in German I found at a used bookstore are a couple of props I use for a man named Daxtoor the Scribe, and every time I put the glasses on, thumb through the book for the appropriate part where my Flavor Text is, the players know they are going to hear a good tale and this brings them that much more into the gaming experience. This also helps to get into the character. Don’t forget, you are role playing too, only you have more roles to play during the game. Using props helps you stay in character.
The next way of creating effective NPCs is through the use of voice. I touched on this earlier in the article with the example of a flat robotic voice for every NPC the players meet. By adding variations, slang, accents, and turns of phrase, you can make your average Joe Smith into Josephus the Blacksmith, who uses the phrase, “...and Bob’s yer uncle,” or “…and that’s how you do it in Ostford.” Like the example above, Lord Fauntleroy Du Chambert, I spoke in a Haughty British voice (which I picked up from a history teacher in college) with my head held high, and used imperious mannerisms to create a character that the players loved to hate. This was a far richer game experience that night than if I had gone with a stale flat monotone voice, or my own normal way of speaking, to portray Fauntleroy. This goes back to the inspirations of movies and television, and real life. By watching and being an observer of people, you can get a better idea of how to use different voices and mannerisms for good NPC portrayal.
Now, all of the above is not going to happen overnight. There’s a question: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and the answer is “Practice, Practice, Practice.” For every NPC I aim to create, I practice their mannerisms, speech patterns, voices, and general look at least a few hours for ever game. I am lucky to have a background in drama, so I know what it takes to act to a certain degree. But anyone can do it. All it takes is a little effort, even without being on stage or taking any acting classes. Just the ability we all have to mimic other people is enough. By practicing a style of language, a quirky mannerism, or the way people talk and act, you are well on your way to create an effective NPC that the players will remember for years to come. Give yourself a little time. Becoming a good DM doesn’t happen overnight. Though some take only a few months to create a great game, others may take years.
So, to sum up the effective NPC creation process, remember the following basic facts and you are well on your way to designing characters that your players will remember for years to come. First, find a primary motivation for said character. Then, ask yourself what Cause this character has, and how it will Affect your PCs. Then, decide what mannerisms, voice pattern, and phrases this NPC uses when dealing with your PCs. Decide if your NPC is worthy of a special prop or two. Then, practice, practice, practice, and when game day comes, you will have someone your characters will talk about for years to come. “Hey, remember that Lord Fru-Fru guy we always had to deal with who tried to take away our Manor house? That guy was a jerk! Who did he think he was, trying to scam us like that?” Perhaps in the next article, I will explain how to give statistics to these NPCs. Hope this helps, folks.
A wonderful subject. I think good villains need to be several things: They need to be endearing and have some kind of charisma about them. Most of all, They need to be beatable and you as the GM have to take the risk of having them killed if you want them to become legendary. How many times have each of you played under a GM that trotted out an unbeatable bad guy who showed your character's up, just so the GM could feel good and impress upon you how cool the villain is, and how inadequate your PC is. This is weak. Villains need to take the risk of loss of life and limb that PC's take, and have courage, step up to the plate, and kill PC's.
Cool and memorable villains do their own killing. Masterminds may direct things from behind the scene, but in our visual and action oriented world & game, the star athlete/player shines. Have your villains personally deal out a can of whoop ass on the PC's, who in turn are capable given some good luck and using their brains of winning also. As I have mentioned before on other threads, one of my players is capable of drawing comic book quality art (for a sample, his website is www.cloudeagle.com) he draws the villain, I get the illustration laminated, and when I kill a Player Character with the villain, I put a star sticker on the back of the laminated bad guy, thus creating my "Star Villains" The players love to hate them, and they still heckle me about villains they've greased years ago.
I feel that a post like this should be better attributed to its source material. While I concede that you don't say this is your stuff you don't exactly make it clear that its not nor have you given proper credit where its due with this post.
A better method would have been to simply link the relevant article. Especially since you don't build on this in any way. Its one thing to start heavily quoting if your going to be inputting comments of your own but otherwise we might as well read the source document as opposed to a cut and pasted version.
jeremy--
if you were talking to me, that is an article i wrote for a webzine about 6 months ago. it never got off the ground so i decided to post it here. sorry if i offended or didn't make it clear where it came from. yes, i wrote it, and no there is no plagiarism going on here.
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Best homebrew villain: Zogmarizon the half-farspawn green dragon
Basically, the PCs' objective was to track down and kill Zogmarizon without the dragon finding out until it was too late. However, I rigged it that the dragon would find out just to make it interesting. The dragon's lair was in a vine-choked rock outcropping on a mountaintop, and the PCs were basically dive-bombed by the dragon until they found cover. I had the dragon lose interest, so the PCs could escape. The PCs wanted to kill this bastard so badly that they tailed Zogmarizon back to his lair, and there was a rather spirited battle, in which the dragon was slain.
The moral of the story: persistant villains make the PCs more focused on the plot, rather than 'cool-I-get-drunk'-type stupidity.
jeremy--
if you were talking to me, that is an article i wrote for a webzine about 6 months ago. it never got off the ground so i decided to post it here. sorry if i offended or didn't make it clear where it came from. yes, i wrote it, and no there is no plagiarism going on here.
OK I apologize - It sure looked like plagiarism but one can't plagiarize their own witting!
Well, my favorite homebrew bad guys are my four horsemen of the choas apocolypse, though I need to covert them for 3.5 from 2nd edition sometime soon. They are two human antipaladins of that demons lord names Kothchitie or something like that, one male drow cleric/mu who serves a group of evil dieties, and a half orc cleric/assassin who serves the Orc diety of fertility and murder. They currently work for a very tuff cambion who the pc's are now finding out about as he has been fairly hidden and unobvious beforehand. So, my four horsemen with hades following behind theme. While these guys are big and thuggy; what you would call epic level and have a couple bigs mobs of monsters that are terrorizing two continents and have opened a steady demon gateway to the abyss; the pcs fear a different villian much more; I think it is a case of the old familiar bad guys vs the new unfamiliar bad guy.
so, the most feared villian by my pc's is a old resurrected arch mage/priest of the Old Ones that is totally insane and is well along the path of awakening the Old Ones and they greatly fear his general who is an epic Paramandyr who of course wants everything everywhere to die.
so the top two bad guy choices are be ruled by CE demon guys who treat humanity as food stuffs and breeding stock; or the guys who want to completely destroy the current order of things and recreate the new world as in the Old Ones image that has no place for anybody.
hehe then there are all the bad guys that the pc's have cut deals with and work with on long term goals; while still being evil and all neither do these bad guys want to bow down or be recreated so things are a mess.
hehe then their is a vote for intra party pc conflict whereas the pcs (8) are split into 3 factions themselves and each consider the others bad guys that will need to be killed once the horsemen and the worshipes of the Old Ones are taken care of, hehe some good guys eh?
well, am not gonna edit for any spelling errors or such as the edit feature almost never works.
For me the memorable villains are always survivable, long term villains that have an organization and far reaching spheres of control. For parties at lower levels they work through various levels of intermediaries until the party has grown strong enough and followed the villains activities well enough to reveal the upper level bad guy involvement and as the pcs put together all the clues the ultimate bad guy plan is revealed which is of course sick and unpleasant and should be stopped for the good of all. Most peeps dont remember the low level thugs or the low level captains or really even the mid level commanders and only barely remember the moderate level movers and shakers. They do remember few of the big nasties that have been sent to kill them. So, to build an effective and memorable bad guy; it needs to have both power and influence over a long span of time and constantly interfere or be the source of pc activity; they themselves - being cowards usually - need to avoid direct confrontation.
I personally go right to the source for good villain inspiration: The Smurfs....Gargamel...the "Gnap!" Episode was probably the seed from which the whole Savage Tide concept sprung if you ask me.
It appears that one of my humorous esteemed collegues has put a rather 'German' slant on my previous post. I don't know exactly who did it, but it's cute and I applaud the clever soul who did so. I assume that Mr. McDonald's post following mine is directed at me, but I don't comprehend it entirely. I am unaware if my post resembles anyone elses, and my posting of my friend and fellow player's website for his internet comic was merely done to allow the reader to see how good he is and thus imagine the wonderful villains he is capable of bringing to life, as opposed to being a mere shameless plug.
Auf Wiedersehen meine herren
Wow. It appears that I have been 'Smurf-whacked' literally as I posted my last post. Someone's very good:)
Cute:)
One of our PC's got seduced by a hot hobgoblin and then that same NPC killed him a few sessions later. He's so pissed about it.
Smurfs are fun.
One of our PC's got seduced by a hot hobgoblin and then that same NPC killed him a few sessions later. He's so pissed about it.
Smurfs are fun.
A 'hot' hobgoblin?!?!
Effect. Cause and effect.
Effect is a noun..."something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence".
Affect is a verb..."to act on; produce an effect or change in:".
To echo what has already been said by others: make the players hate the character, make their antipathy towards them personal in-character, give them depth and history, and make them recurring (if not the center of a campaign metaplot).
Some of my favorite villains in past campaigns have been various fiends I've created as long-term antagonists. The posterchild of those would be a Baernaloth named Harishek ap Thulkesh the 'Blind Clockmaker'. He made my -players- cry. Not their characters. The players. Out of character. This is what got the reaction (written up in story format)
I'd also lump in the 13+ other Baernaloths I created, and a handful of unique yugoloths. Not all of them are alive, one campaign later, but some of them are still in the background either loathed as petty antagonists, or still lurking around as future threats with plots still being spun around them. Fun stuff.