Evil Will Rise
Methinks the Handbook overstates its case. Evil comes in many varieties! There are ravening, chaotic monsters who just want to watch the world burn. There are honorable lieutenants who feel duty-bound to serve a dark master. Then you’ve got insane cultists, evil-by-nature demons, evil-in-name-only cartoon villains… The list goes on! For the moment, however, let’s forgive the Handbook its generalizations. We’re talking about the Demonweb Throne here, and that mess is all about power grabs.
When you’re dealing with villains like Morgoth, Palpatine, or (appropriately enough for today’s comic) Skeletor, you’re dealing with ambition. As an archetype, the Dark Lord is defined by its position at the top of the heap. But just because they’re in charge, it doesn’t mean they’re satisfied. No matter how many armies of darkness or super weapons or second-in-commands they’ve got, Dark Lords are always looking for the next conquest. If there’s a rebel hero out there, they need to be snuffed out. If there’s rumor of dissension in the ranks, examples must be made. No threat to the pecking order can be tolerated. And therein lies the utility in your campaign.
If you’ve got a BBEG defined by ambition, then you’ve got ready-made conflict. Starscream and Sauron are always hovering behind the throne, dagger in hand, waiting for their opportunity to take the throne for themselves. That means you’ve got corollary tropes to draw upon. Enemy-of-my-enemy alliances, gothy princesses who can be turned against their parents, and put-upon servants who can be bribed. (Judging by the look of Woolantula the Servile in today’s comic, I think BBEG may have one of the latter already.) All of the above represent vectors of attack for your protagonists. They are convenient ways to get in, get close, and place a less-evil butt in the big evil chair.
So while BBEG adjusts his lumbars, what do you say the rest of us talk shop about ambitious villains? When the will to dominate all life is your villain’s MO, how do you work backwards to structure a campaign? Do you prefer the classic nesting-doll setup, where the local boss leads to the regional boss leads to the Dark Throne? Or do you like to kick things off with an Evil Revolution, where your BBEG has just toppled the old guard and is now racing to consolidate power? There are countless variations on the theme, and I have no doubt that you’ve seen at least one Dark Lord in your own gaming experience. So for today’s discussion, let’s hear all about your experiences with “I am a god!” tropesmanship.
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I bet Woolantula is really missing Queen Scratchypaws right now. The new guy on the throne doesn’t look like the type to hand out gold stars…
Look at BBEG, all smug with his new bod! Where’s Gestalt, though? Is she ‘disciplining the troops’? When it comes to looking at people funny, your average goblin’s got nothing on a demon!
You mean to say that Gestalt failed to get the same power-up as her boss? That she’ll be intimidated by her own subordinates? Possibly demoted? Ready to do anything (up to and including stabbing the old boss in the back) to get back to the status quo?
…
I couldn’t imagine such a storyline.
To be able to take down BBEDG I can see Gestalt taking two paths. Either teaming up with Helscion for some of the sweet tension-filled hero villain teamups. Or Gestalt fusing herself with a mummy, flesh golem, and a sahugin to make herself a true monster mashup.
She did what!?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRLML36HnzU
I had not even considered that possibility.
… But I like it.
You lied about us learning of Succubus’s fate this Monday!
As a DM, I had gone all-in for the alliteration, with the good Petrov, Lord Protector of Pesod and the villainous King Ewell and Prince Yeager of Yenin. Eventually the PCs (heroes of Pesod) confronted King Ewell, only to find that they had intruded on the state funeral for Prince Yeager, whose “You have disappointed me for the last time, Starscream” moment happened offscream–er, screen–but whose timely funeral gave the prince the opportunity to finally do something useful to help his father’s plans.
Four or five adventures later, the PCs had made amends for interrupting such a solemn occasion, brokered a peace accord between the feuding two city states, and even run two missions on behalf of the “now friendly” evil king. Everything *seemed* so much better, so why did they feel like they had somehow given the baddest dude in the land everything he’d ever wanted?…
The shadow of Voltron hangs over the palace.
https://voltron.fandom.com/wiki/Lotor_(Legendary_Defender)
One of my favorite BBEGs in my homebrew is the sorcerer who was able to research a spell for immortality without having to become undead. It was his obsession for so long that once he managed to pull it off, he looked around and said, “what’s next”.
Being tired of being cooped up alone in his tower, he looked around and decided that taking over the local barony sounded like fun and hey, minions! This turned into taking over a fairly large area and making a kingdom. After a few decades of that, he got bored and decided to go for the whole peninsula (really big world peninsula was nearly 1 million square miles). Not being anywhere near powerful enough to just bull through it, he started an anti-nonhuman conspiracy.
He and several of the human kingdoms conspired for several years and were in the last stages of kicking off a war of eradication, essentially destroying and taking over all the non-human kingdoms in the area, when the last group to encounter him managed to essentially wipe out the whole upper echelon, totally by accident. I hadn’t even gotten past the point of them finding an old lair of his with a few clues scattered hither and yon.
The work didn’t go to waste though, I’ve still got it tucked away to use at appropriate times 🙂
I once heard that liches are a metaphor for the fear of tyranny. An immortal ruler who perpetuates evil without hope of change. Sounds like skipping the “undead” part was just a technicality for your guy. Nicely done!
In my current campaign, the BBEG is a “power-behind-the-throne” type whose attempt to put a puppet ruler on the throne of the PC’s province had just been stymied by plain bad luck and unforeseen circumstances – the old seneschal retired early to be with his grandkids, the puppet hadn’t quite made herself indispensable enough, and the old ruler was more susceptible to the poison than he should have been. Put together, the plan went off a bit before the puppet was ready for it to, and the wrong person (a good guy) got put in charge and started sniffing too closely around the death of his predecessor. The PCs and the province they hail from have figured him out – not enough to actually rally any allies behind them (although that’s possibly because any would-be allies have mostly been recruited by the BBEG already) but enough to declare war – but this guy’s on the opposite side of the continent and is one sneaky bastard, so getting to him will take a while, especially when they have to conquer everything in their path to get there.
In my recently concluded D&D 4e game, I had several folks that could have functioned as a BBEG that the PCs just… didn’t treat as BBEGs. At least partly my own fault since I never do the “evil for evil’s sake” thing.
There was a super-necromancer that wrote a loophole ritual into reality itself to be exempt from the concept of death, but rather than figuring out what they needed to do to reassert death’s place for the spook, the party became quasi-friends since her only real goal was to un-kill her ancient kingdom. Like, not an undead army sort of thing, but actual real resurrections.
One of the PCs was an exiled elven noble due to having drow heritage revealed, so another possible BBEG was the matriarch of her house. After they kicked the plot-magic’s ass that would have resulted in the drow gaining control of an ancient elven hereditary super-magic, they just… ignored the drow. They kept moving around so much afterward that I felt it would be tacky to quantum-ogre them back into caring about drow via ambushes.
What ended up being the actual-real-BBEG for the campaign was effectively a giant space flea from nowhere since they only even attempted a knowledge check against the heart of the abyss once they were already physically there and Tharizdun’s avatar crept out of the thing to fight them. (and even then, despite being THAT guy’s avatar, his goal was largely just to get destroyed; the god of insanity and entropy does not play favourites by saving the life of his most powerful destroyer)
Do DQ’s new curly cranial horns mean she’s resigned to being stuck in the skull for a while (“this place is a dump, but I might as well set it up the way I like it”), or do horns in her vicinity just always reshape to fit the person inside, almost as if to help easily-distracted otherworldly onlookers keep track of who is who…
Well I mean… We already discovered that the power of the Demonweb Throne alters the user’s appearance to a general template…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/meanwhile-in-the-abyss
…Rather than an exact form:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/devils-night
Who’s to say that a little of that power didn’t spill over into the skull-receptacle during the struggle for possession of all that power between two indomitable wills?
Man… That must have been some contest though! I bet it would look really cool, but be super hard to illustrate. >_>
In no way do I feel this one time we have missed several panels of very interesting, possibly crucial scenes.
No sir, not me, NOT ME AT ALL.
I‘m more of a „get off my lawn!“ BBEG type of DM.
at the core my BBEG is Lawful Lazy Evil.
He got his plot of land
He got his plot to enlarge his plot of land
But most of all he got The Law on his side because he amassed horde though a trade empire.
Any hero calling hid bed of gold „ill gotten gains“ gets countered with „I got receipts for EVERYTHING“ even for his lunch, dinner and tea. (today: George, Carla and Henry)
On a campaign we went like this:
BBEG takes over the throne of a kingdom
BBEG consolidates his power and defeats the rebels
BBEG fights other BBEG that tries to conquer him
BBEG faces demons and shows them who rules
BBEG finally gets to fight the good guys since all this time they were just sitting and letting him get more power
BBEG defeats the heroes when it was supposed to loose and gets the god of fate catatonic
The gods itself unleash the spirit of redemption on the BBEG to stop him but instead he make a deal with the gods to step down in exchange for godgood
BBEG is now a god and leaves his throne to his half-demon son to deal with the resulting civil war for his empire.
Fun for all family 😀
One time, I posited a series of hypothetical “what would you do”-scenarios before a group of roleplayers. They involved a lich who legitimately wanted to be left alone so he could study and craft.
But what with adventurers being a whole Thing in his world, he’d set up a unique series of defenses: he’d cleared out several orphanages’ worth of kids and brought them to a hidden valley. There, he … gave them a wonderful life. The kids received an education, technology, resources; everything they needed to turn that valley into a little slice of paradise all their own.
All they had to do to hang onto their wonderful society was make sure nobody disturbed Grandfather’s Tower, where their magnaminious patron spent his days in study.
The orphans of yesteryear were good, well-adjusted people who were grateful to the one who had delivered them from misery. And they would defend him to the death against all comers.
The lich was as evil as anything, but he was wise and clever. No telling what he would do once he was done studying, and he’d certainly committed his share of wicked deeds. But in order to get at him, you’d need to charge up a hill of bodies – bodies belonging to good and kind people, whose only fault was ignorance of their patron’s true nature. And that was just what was waiting outside the lich’s tower…
Not to be too pedantic, but with this:
“Starscream and Sauron are always hovering behind the throne, dagger in hand …”
Did you mean “Starscream and Saruman”?
No she did not. Sauron started out as a minion to Morgoth, the original Dark Lord in Tolkien’s Legendarium. He only took control after his master was defeated and cast out of Middle Earth.
Through funnily enough despite their goals not really being compatible[1] Sauron was completely loyal to Morgoth and served him faithfully right up until Morgoth was fully defeated[2].
You’d have expected him to try his hand at treachery before then, or at least to have made preparations for it but he didn’t seem to have done any of that back then.
[1] Morgoth ultimately wanted to destroy the world, while Sauron wanted to rule it and put it to “order”.
[2] well, not counting his getting to come back and be briefly relevant at the literal end of the world to get destroyed. He’s off the playing board for good until then is the point.
But, again, as pointed out by vegetalss4, Sauron wasn’t hovering behind the throne with dagger in hand; we was an oddly faithful servant who merely decided to take over when the vacancy was created through someone else’s actions. Saruman, on the other hand, was fully intending on subverting Sauron from the start and was never truly faithful.
Plus, of course, Sauron is the BBEG of the main story, not Morgoth. So, going just by the main story Saruman fits better and, thematically, even across the whole canon, Saruman is still the better fit.
Then again, I missed the original reference to Morgoth. My bad.
As a DM my taste in villains is mostly just ambitious people with few scruples. They’re in it for power and ego, while some suboridnates might be in it for wealth or principles. Mustache-twirling or MCU-style misunderstood extremists are not my bag.
So what’s BBEG’s newfangled, overly complicated title now that he’s inhabiting Demon Queen’s body? Or what’s Demon Queen’s you humiliating title?
Master of the Spider Throne. Oh wait, that’s Vecna. And we don’t want to get this lich who ascended to godhood with a vampiric minion confused with the other.
(BBEG could now stand for Big Bad Evil God instead of Guy, or maybe change one of the Bs to Bedevilled)
None of my games so far really have Big Bads as characters. The Deadlands game has The Reckoners, but they’re so background that the posse doesn’t even know about them yet.
A concept for a game I’ve been kicking around in my head has Ruin, a one-undead apocalypse so far out of the PC’s league it’s not even funny. Partway through the campaign, they’d take on a demon subordinate fully expecting it to Starscream them, but instead end up bonding with and essentially adopting the little guy. Ruin is also frankly closer to being the Big Good of the setting than the Big Bad; just opposed to the empire the (hypothetical) players are a part of.
#freedomforWoolantula
Someone has given Woolantula a sock!
Now now demon queen, you shouldn’t give up when you’re a head..
Now see, if this comic had competent writers, they wouldn’t miss the slam dunk joke.
I hope my beloved demon queen can come back from this one, but I worry this is her final fate. :c
All you can hope for is the author to take notice of your comment. But I hear she barely ever replies / looks at these things.