3. Crafting Unforgettable Villains: From First Foes to Your Big Bad Evil Guy (Part 1)
Nothing motivates players more than a truly memorable villain. Whether it’s a petty bandit lord or the mastermind orchestrating the entire campaign, villains give your heroes someone to root against and measure their characters to. Let’s dive deep into building antagonists that feel real, challenge your table both mechanically and emotionally, and leave a lasting impression.
Start With Why: Goals, Motives, and Stakes
Define their goals. Do they want to gain power, protect something, avenge a perceived wrong, or simply survive? A goblin chieftain raiding caravans to feed their starving tribe is different from a cult leader summoning an eldritch horror to remake the world.
Understand their motivation. Goals tell you what the villain wants; motives tell you why they want it. Are they desperate, ambitious, vengeful, misguided, bored? Knowing this colors every decision they make, and even makes your job at the Game Master easier.
Tie them to your world and your party. The best villains have personal stakes with the heroes. Perhaps they’re after the same artifact, they hurt someone the party cares about, or their actions threaten the players’ favorite bar. The closer the connection, the more invested your table will be.
Give them flaws and virtues. Even monsters can have loves, fears, and quirks. A necromancer might sponsor orphanages because of his own tragic childhood; a tyrant might genuinely believe order is necessary for peace. Sometimes it’s okay to make a villain who the party ultimately ends up siding with; just be careful that this doesn’t happen too often or the party may get fatigued from never having a clear bad guy to stomp.
Low Level Threats: Small Fish With Big Hooks
Low level villains set the tone for your campaign. They don’t need elaborate schemes; they need hooks that make them feel distinct and personal. Try these techniques:
Keep the scope local but the stakes personal. At early levels (1-5 in a level 20 max system), your villains should threaten something tangible. An innkeeper extorted by a gang, a village elder kidnapped for ransom, or a rival adventuring party that sabotages the player characters. I will often have the party get to know an NPC right before or right after something has befallen them. Pull on your players’ heartstrings.
Emphasize personality over power. These adversaries often survive on cunning, connections, and attitude over raw power. Give the bandit captain a distinct mannerism (chews mint leaves, hums a familiar melody) or give the goblin leader a unique tic where he stomps his left foot every few steps. You can then tie this in later by having a party member smell mint in the mayor’s outhouse, or hear a unique walking pattern in the healer’s attic.
Use minions and environment creatively. A “boss fight” against a monster of appropriate difficulty can feel especially epic when surrounded by thematic elements. The kobold inventor might employ traps and potions; the cult fanatic will lure the party to a desecrated chapel where there are braziers of green flame spawning 1hp flaming skulls.
Show their impact before combat. Let the players witness the villain doing something they consider to be evil. The bandit leader kicks a puppy, the goblin stabs a merchant, or the cultist sacrifices a dwarf to his deity. Or, the bandit leader hesitates before giving bread to an orphan if you want this to be a more compassionate villain; again don’t overdo this though.
Make consequences matter. If the party allows a low level villain to escape, have them come back later stronger or with allies. Conversely, sparing them could earn unexpected allies, resources, or information but at what cost? Does this villain betray the party later, or do the townsfolk find out and get upset?
Crunchy Tips for Low Level Villains
Customize stat blocks lightly. Reskinning an existing creature saves prep time. Add a special attack (e.g. a poisoned dagger that inflicts a status effect), a special reaction (the thief gets to move one square every time he is attacked), or change up resistances (5 cold resistance instead of 5 fire resistance). You could even take something like an owlbear and flavor all of its attacks so that it can be a bandit thug.
Leverage the environment. Give the villain advantage on stealth checks in their own lair, after all they should know their lair better than some adventuring party. If you’re afraid your villain won’t be able to keep up with your party due to action economy, but you’d don’t want to buff them so that it feels like two stat-balls going at it, give them a lever in their office that they can pull to drop a net on the party. Environmental hazards can replace high damage numbers at low levels, causing them to feel impactful without one-shotting a character to do so.
Stage the encounter in phases. Start with minions harrying the party before transitioning the the villain’s grand appearance. Or, have the villain flee part way through the encounter creating a chase scene. If the party “fails” the chase, the villain gets to their health potion in the next room over. Combat can be fluid, and it is okay to break in and out of it as necessary.
Mid Campaign Adversaries: Raising the Stakes
As your party levels up, your villains should evolve. Middle tier villains can and should challenge the party in ways that require strategic thinking and emotional depth.
Complex goals and means. Once you pass into the next tier of levels (5-10 in a level 20 max system), the antagonists will often have multi-step plans. Maybe an ambitious noble is secretly amassing an army and forging alliances; maybe a demonologist is collecting relics to weaken planar boundaries. These should be villains that are capable of complex thinking and aren’t just brute forcing their way through their problems. It doesn’t mean they can’t have access to more brute force methods, or that they can’t do their own dirty work.
Allow for Intrigue. Let the villain operate in the background, sending assassins, spreading rumors, or framing the party. Players should feel that their decisions matter and that if they cut off a resource from the villain it affects them and causes them to lose options and potentially shift strategy.
Faction dynamics. Introduce competing interests. The villain might be part of a secret cabal with internal divisions, or they might clash with other antagonists. Open opportunities for temporary alliances or choices between lesser evils.
Growth and escalation. The cult leader the players thwarted earlier now commands an army of fanatics; the werewolf alpha they spared returns to warn them of a greater threat. Use callbacks to show how actions have consequences.
Crunchy Tips for Mid Level Villains
Add legendary actions or lair actions. Even non-legendary creatures can feel more threatening by taking extra actions. Homebrew a “mini-legendary” mechanic: the villain can command a minion to move or attack outside its turn, the villain can bite an adjacent enemy to do 1d4 damage and heal 1d4 hp. As with all homebrew content, be careful not to make something more powerful than you intended, but this can add a unique and memorable element to your villain.
Mix it up. Give that evil cleric a rogue related ability such as letting them sneak attack. Let a sorcerer have a signature spell that isn’t normally on their list. Mixing features can keep your players guessing and make the game feel fresh (especially if you are a group of veterans!).
Involve skill challenges. Fighting the villain doesn’t always have to be direct combat. Perhaps they’re escaping via airship and the players have to disable engines while avoiding hostile crew or the wizard’s ritual needs to be disrupted via Arcana and Athletics checks while skeletons continue to spawn.
Your villain doesn’t have to be your boss. The noble has no combat ability whatsoever, but they have a powerful mercenary group at their beck and call causing the battle to be a 5 vs. 5 between the party and the mercenaries. The scholar has a stone golem that he climbs inside of like a mech suit. The cultist summons a demon before running deeper into the crypts.
Building Your BBEG: The Campaign’s Ultimate Threat
The Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) is the villain your campaign has been hinting at, the one whose defeat signals a climactic turning point. Designing a BBEG requires foresight, foreshadowing, and flexibility. Not all campaigns need a true BBEG either, sometimes a few mid level villains are all it takes to get the job done. It depends on how big and long of a story you are trying to create before rolling new characters. I love crafting a BBEG but I often think one of the biggest flaws in modern TTRPG is that campaigns are strung on too long. More on this in a future article! With that said, if your campaign deserves a BBEG, it deserves a damn good one so let’s get after it.
Foreshadow early and often. Drop rumors, symbols, books, or minor agents connected to the BBEG in early sessions. A mysterious sigil on a bandit’s shield, a prophecy in an ancient library, or a letter signed by initials can all build mystery.
Make them truly powerful, and fallible. A BBEG should feel beyond the party’s reach at first. Legendary resistances, powerful magic, or armies at their command make confrontation risky. Yet the party should discover weaknesses; an over reliance on a magical phylactery, a hidden fear of betrayal, or a ritual that must be completed under specific conditions.
Give them a worldview. The BBEG should have a coherent philosophy that players can argue with or even empathize with. Maybe their ruthless actions stem from a legitimate fear of an impending catastrophe. This doesn’t justify their actions, but it makes them more than cardboard cutouts. While I think there should be nuance to your BBEG, and they should have a worldview that your players can understand, you need to make sure they view your BBEG as something to be defeated. This is not like the lower tier villains where sometimes the party may side with them, the BBEG has to be the penultimate thing to be defeated. If they are trying to protect the world from some world ending cosmic horror and your party teams up with them to do so, they weren’t your BBEG - the cosmic horror was.
Introduce lieutenants and arcs. Break the BBEG’s plan into several arcs, each with a lieutenant or sub-villain. Defeating these lieutenants reveals more about the BBEG’s plans and slowly erodes their resources. These lieutenants will often work for the BBEG but don’t always have to. They can be partners who don’t realize the BBEG is much more powerful and is just using them. They can even think they are in charge of the BBEG but really aren’t.
Evolve their tactics. As the party thwarts their schemes, the BBEG learns and adapts. If a demon prince loses his cult in one city, he might shift to corrupting a noble house elsewhere. This gives your campaign a sense of an ongoing struggle.
Crunchy Tips for Big Bad Evil Guys
Custom stat block. First off, it is perfectly fine to use an existing stat block of the appropriate difficulty out of your preferred monster rulebook with no modifications. If you want to spice it up a bit though, you can start with a high difficulty monster (e.g. a lich, archdevil, or ancient dragon) and reskin it to fit your villain. Swap spell lists, change damage types, or replace a legendary action with a unique power (e.g. Reality Break forces each PC to make an Intelligence save or be banished to a random plane for a round). Have fun with this, you’re really taking a step beyond what is traditionally considered “reskinning” but without all the hassle of building a statblock out from scratch (which is also fine to do!).
Phases and forms. A climactic fight should feel dynamic; break the battle into stages. Once the BBEG drops to half health, they summon reinforcements, transform (mortal wizard becoming a demilich), or shift terrain (the glacier begins to collapse opening a portal). Each phase should present a new challenge without overwhelming the party or feeling cheap. You can also make the monster “overpowered” and weaken them once they are at half hp (more on that later).
Lair features. Design the environment to reflect the villain’s theme. A necropolis might have waves of undead and necrotic geysers, while a fey queen’s glade might have enchanted trees that grapple intruders. Lair actions tend to happen on initiative 20, the top of the round, or the bottom of the round depending on how you want to structure it. They don’t always have to damage the party, adding conditions, repositioning players, altering spell effects, or healing enemies can help keep things fresh.
Retreat and return. It’s okay if your BBEG lives to fight another day. A well timed teleportation, contingency spell, or structural collapse can allow them to escape a losing battle. This sets up rematches and increases anticipation but be careful not to overuse it or it may fall flat. Do not let it feel cheap either; unless the party is woefully under prepared they should feel like they have the opportunity to stop the BBEG from escaping.
Making Villains Memorable Outside of Combat
Villains come alive when your players interact with them off the battlefield. Don’t be afraid to let them speak, parley, or monologue. In character conversations reveal motivations, deliver exposition, and allow characters to make choices beyond “attack or run.” Your players might surprise you with how they handle villains through non-violent means; they may potentially even solve the villain’s problems causing them to be neutralized before they were an issue.
Send messages and minions. Letters written in flowing script, magical projections, or mouthpieces (a doppelganger posing as a friend) can deliver threats or demands. These interactions build tension and give players glimpses into the villain’s mindset.
Offer deals and dilemmas. The BBEG might bargain, “Give me the relic and I’ll spare the town.” Forcing the group to weigh moral choices deepens the story. Even low level villains can cut deals; perhaps the bandit leader offers information about an even worse threat in exchange for mercy. The party may have the opportunity to sacrifice 1,000 lives to defeat the BBEG here and now, or 2 lives to defeat a minor villain, but is that something they are willing to do?
Show vulnerability. Maybe the vampire lord visits the grave of a mortal lover, the archmage hesitates to attack when their estranged sibling (a party member!) is present. These moments humanize the villain and can lead to unexpected outcomes.
Create recurring moments. A golden ring, a smoke poof entrance, a pet raven. Small details help players instantly recognize the villain’s presence and build anticipation. It can act much in the same way that a leitmotif does in a soundtrack.
Lie. No, really, lie. Your players are so used to you, as the GM, being a point of truth and knowledge, that sometimes they forget your villains are allowed to lie to them. There is this huge payoff when the villain does the opposite of what they said they would and one of your players is absolutely flabbergasted realizing that they were lied to. It feels like a scene from Breaking Bad where Badger truly believes cops aren’t allowed to lie to him.
Bonus
The Angry GM has a post (two actually) about crafting boss encounters in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition (D&D 5e). Part 1 and Part 2. I often manipulate what he has outlined in these posts to work for my campaign, scenario, and party but the premise is sound. In these posts he tries to fix a very real problem for bosses in most TTRPGs, action economy. What happens all too often is that the party just circles up around the boss and wallops them to death, the boss is a massive damage sponge, or the boss one shots party members (or some combination therein). Bosses also often have to use minions to mitigate their action economy issues (even with lair and legendary actions at their disposal). The Angry GM’s solution isn’t always perfect but it has provided me a framework to manage my boss battles within for years and has allowed me to create encounters where a boss feels fun and challenging even if it is a solo boss without minions. I highly recommend you give it a read and see if you can use it or draw some inspiration from it for your own battles.
Final Thoughts
Designing villains is where you get to flex your creative muscles. Start small with low level threats who have clear motivations and distinct personalities. As your campaign unfolds, layer complexity with mid tier adversaries and weave threads that lead to a climactic confrontation with your BBEG. Mix narrative depth with mechanical tweaks to ensure battles feel unique and impactful. Above all, remember that villains exist to challenge, provoke, and inspire your players. Give them someone they love to hate, someone they’re tempted to understand, and someone they’ll remember long after the campaign ends.
The next article will be a continuation of this one using real world examples. I want to discuss some major villains I have already introduced to my party as well as some I have planned for them to meet later on in my current campaign. In part 2 I will show how I brainstormed my villains, how they are connected, what foreshadowing I’ve planted, and how my party has chosen to interact with them. I’ll see you there!
