DM Forge: Villains (D&D Tips & Tricks) 

Mary Shelley said it best: "No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."

Again, a fantastic video! One thing I find extremely successful in your and Barker's style is the clipping. It keeps the focus of the viewer alive and shows that you thought when to say what and how.

I think another great tip for villains is to make them mirrors to the PCs. now, this isn't to say you should go so far as the mirror universe 'party but with goatees' route. Rather, look at your players, what they want, and try to create someone who wants the same things, but at a greater cost. In my current campaign, my players are part of a defunct knightly order who have resorted to relic hunting and mercenary work. My villain is 'The Thane of Tears' a treasure hunter and former knight himself who was cursed by the same sort of artifact the party seeks for profit. He has overlapping skills and his motivations are of similar flavor to the group, which puts them on a reasonable collision course for future adventures.

Great editing in these videos. The backstories you provide for the two villainous examples have enough detail to make them really interesting, and, I imagine, always give you, as the GM, an excellent basis for deciding how they're going to behave when you're playing them in real time. Thanks for the great tips!

Very good notes. Thanks. I have been playing and running games for nearly thirty five years, but I can learn new stuff all the time.

I'm working on a vampire NPC who used to be the most trusted advisor and mentor of a tyrannical conqueror. He was only passingly interested in his pupil's politics (elven purity, subjugation of other races, stuff like that), he is mostly motivated by platonic love. He genuinely loved his pupil and was distraught when he saw him die on the battlefield, so for the past two hundred years he's been working to bring back this tyrant who was like a son to him. Dude's twisted and evil, but he has a soft spot for the man he taught.

I often fall in to a trope of presenting my villains as harmless, having the PCs happen upon them going about their normal business, so the players are faced with the conflict of killing this person who *might be evil, but at the time poses no threat to them

I like this video and the fact you have magic cards and star wars in the background doesn't hurt either

In my 3.5 campaign I had the chronicler/head librarian of the capitol city tell the party of some impending threat, and had said chronicler follow the party for the entirety of the campaign, only to reveal that he was working with the enemy caliphate to the south and trying to reawaken a legendary dragon. Totally threw them for a loop, as tropesy as it may seem.

A while back, for a steampunk/gaslamp fantasy campaign, I came up with the idea for an inventor driven mad by the death of his wife, and the AI he made to try to replace her as villains. The inventor wants to make the world predictable, functional - a world where no one would ever have to suffer the unexpected loss of a loved one again. He's meant to be redeemable. The AI he made, though, will follow the letter of his original ambition to the exclusion of its spirit, reflecting her artificial nature, even after he's been redeemed. She's beyond redemption, and is the de facto villain of the story. Order versus chaos has always been an intriguing conflict for me, and the inventor and his invention reflect different approaches toward lawful neutral - one that errs toward good, the other that errs toward evil. There's a lot of bickering that happens about alignments, which is why they were all but edited out of 5e (yet like a few other elements they remain for the sake of branding, much to 5e's detriment), but if they're use descriptively rather than prescriptively, they can be a great source of conflicts beyond just good and evil. In a sense, the inventor is lawful neutral trying to suppress evil, whereas his invention is lawful neutral with its neutrality working against good.

Wow, the quality of this video is amazing. Good work! You've been improving a lot.

I like your characters, but this video had very little tips and tricks, and was mostly just you describing your villains.

I'm tempted to used Mutt and the Corrupter with my own spin to them. I already planned on having a somewhat homeless dwarf in my beginning town that ran into the dragon and got severely wounded and burned through out all the chaos of the dragon attack. I feel like Mutt's backstory can really cater that dwarf. I plan on having the trope of someone who is well known fall into corruption.

Just subscribed to your channel and started watching your videos, this one is really awesome! I just agreed to be a DM and I have a general idea for a villain, and I think your advice here will really help me refine him, thanks!

For my main campaign with my friends I use a set of villains that is a reference to the Bible. They are the 4 horseman of the apocalypse (Disease human vampire blackguard, Famine Druid Abeil Queen, War Vampire Minotaur, Death a lich, and a 5th one called the chosen one which is a vampire mindflyer)(side note vampire mindflyer with 10 levels of wizard= over 30 ECL)

Awesome villains ! Really good ideas :)

Hi, I've been watching your videos lately and loving them! I do want to ask though, you mentioned starting a series similar to the Monster Matters series, but with Dungeons, with the first episode being about former mines. I'm a first time DM about to start my first campaign and my second dungeon is lined up to be a mine, and I was wondering when you plan to get to that? Great content, thanks!

Some of the best "villains" I've seen have been good guys. Angels who do not understand a situation or who oppose what the players want make some interesting bad guys. I have two ideas for interesting villains. One is a Elven monk who took a small band of elves and half elves off the main continent in my game because they knew eventually that elves would be treated as less than human. Sounds noble enough right? Well he slaughtered a island residence to set up base for his people and he enslaved any half-elves that where with them, seeing there human side as monstrous and needing to be tamed. This thought was only reinforced when his little sister was murdered by humans. In his case i do have ideas for how he can be redeemed, especially if the players introduce him to a certain half elf in my game. Another thought i have is a Aasimar who is trying to rid the world of sin. However he does not differentiate between minor and major transgressions. A murderer and a liar are equally evil in his eyes and both should be purged with holy fire.

Arcturos guire leader of the infamous red wake

aFistfulofDice Do you have any stats for the "Half-Duergar" race? It sounds really interesting and I might like to play one in the future :) Mutt does sound like a really cool villain/anti-hero. Might consider adding Inquisitors and Holy Archers to that list of Gryphon Riders? It sounds like another really cool concept.

I think you should have called him Erindale the purger.

I prefer anti heroes to just straight out villains. That way the players never know where he or she is at.

My following campaign will be either Call of Cthulhu or some fantasy thing. Would it be okay if I use an antagonist based on your dwarf?

Bro! Mutt sounds so awesome! I might bring him into one of my campaigns, I know the group would love/hate him haha! Subscribed! Keep up the good work broski! d-(^_^)z

(***Spoliers for AFoD players**) Are you adapting these mythologies for 5e? The Corruptor could be a Oath of Vengance Paladin.

Do you have an age of Ultron deluxe hardcover? I feel bad for your regrets of your money lost lol.

You sound exactly like xidnaf