How to build a Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG)
Step 1: DON’T.
Yeah, you heard me right. Stop right there. If you’re building a villain from the evil on up, then you’re not doing it wrong, but you’re certainly not going to create anything memorable. If your goal is to make some massive, world-ending embodiment of evil, then I’m not going to say you’re doing it wrong, but at this point you’re just making life harder on yourself. Just go steal Vecna or Thordak or the Tarrasque or any other of a dozen bona fide world ending monsters, and plop it down into your game world. I guarantee your players will have an easier time remembering them than McEvilpants, the Dark Wizard who wanted to summon a Neverending Swarm of Demons to achieve Ultimate Power.
There’s a trope of the BBEG being this guy who does Evil stuff toward Evil ends because he’s Evil. We see it all the time in literature: Voldemort, Sauron, Darth Sidious (or worse, Supreme Leader Snoke). While the intimidating appearance of these guys certainly sticks with us, in an RPG, unless you have the mother of all minis or the descriptive talents of Matt Frakkin’ Mercer, your players will not likely remember your BBEG as being all that intimidating. Heck, you might even just be setting up your BBEG to become a joke, especially if your players score a bunch of crits in the final boss fight and he goes down like a chump. If your BBEG is just a carbon cutout for any other Ultimate Evil from literary history, you’re just putting a lot of work into a character whose name your players are gonna forget.
Example (and I’m begging my roommate and fiancée not to murder me together for this): I once played in a campaign run by @jaesrri, who had not one, but two BBEG: a secret master and a frontman (for a good example of this, go watch The Gamers: Dorkness Rising). For the life of me, I could not tell you either of their names today, or what they wanted beyond just Ultimate Power. Contrast that with a minor recurring villain who kept showing up: Melazaria, a succubus with whom my character had a past (my character was actually the world’s defeated/retired BBEG, but that’s a story for another day). She kept showing up to taunt the players, make their day a little more difficult, or even to ask their aid, especially once she found out her tiefling daughter had been captured. She was unpredictable, scheming, infuriating, but best of all, she had a past, complex motivations, and (this is key here) she had good reasons for doing what she did. Not just good reasons, but Good reasons. She was just a human once who got trapped in a deal way over her head, and she’s just trying to work her way out of that. For that reason, even though no one in the party could actually remember the name of the guy we were trying to kill, you could bet that by the second time Melazaria showed her wings, everyone knew her name.
So, here’s where the secret to making a memorable BBEG comes in:
Don’t make a villain; make a flawed world.
If you’re setting out to make a villain at the start of your campaign-building process, then just from where I’m standing, you’re putting the cart before the horse. Villains don’t arise in a vacuum; they build and feed on situations that are already terrible, and which just enable them further. Think of Emperor Palpatine: the Republic, by all accounts, had been going down the tube for a long time before he ever showed up on the scene. If the galaxy had been paradise, then they would never have needed a strongman to crush all threats against it. We know that the Republic was already a place of vast inequality and corruption, with many systems slipping through the cracks and just feeding the discontent. According to Star Wars lore, over 1000 systems joined the Separatists in the Clone Wars; that’s an awfully big number of worlds who lost all faith in the system, and were willing to burn the whole thing down for a chance at a fresh start.
If you’ve determined what is fundamentally wrong with your world, what is so broken about it that it causes people to lose hope in normal ways of solving problems, then you’re well on your way to making a good villain.
Think of a bad solution to the problem.
The best villains, the ones that really stick with you, are the ones who make a point, the ones who believe that the only way to accomplish something good is through evil means. Think of Magneto from the X-Men: he earnestly believes that humans and mutants can never get along, and so the only way to save the world is to a) create a separate country or world for mutants, b) turn everyone into mutants, or c) kill all the humans. Stryker is a dark mirror of him in this way; he believes in the same conceit about human-mutant relations, but his solution is to a) control all of the mutants or b) kill all of the mutants.
In some ways, you could argue Emperor Palpatine as a relatable villain, and I actually think that George Lucas really missed out on a great chance to make a point about how corrupt the Republic had become and how much it needed saving from itself. A more relatable Palpatine might have seen himself as the hero of the story: he was demolishing the corrupt system by causing it to turn in on itself and destroy itself, paving the way for a new, more equalitarian order. No matter what you think of The Last Jedi, full credit to Rian Johnson for taking this path with Kylo Ren and his mission statement: “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”
Now, on their own, the above examples are pretty good villains. They see a glaring problem in the world, but unlike the heroes, they do not see an idealistic way to solve it; they reduce the conflict to a zero-sum game, where someone has to take it all for there to ever be peace. This alone is enough to make the heroes pause and think, “Maybe this guy has a point,” right before they go on and proceed to murderate them. If you want villains that truly stand out, however, that make the heroes really hesitate, they need something more raw and human: they need…
A Personal Touch
As I said before, villains don’t arise in a vacuum. The best ones have motivations that are believably derived from existing problems in the world. However, that alone might not be enough to push them to do truly evil things to achieve a good end; anyone with a conscience might falter at the price they have to pay for world peace, and second guess themselves into oblivion. What really pushes a villain, what gives them the conviction to follow through, is a personal experience of evil.
Let’s go back to Magneto and Stryker for a second. Both of them have, in their own way, experienced suffering and loss at the hands of humans and mutants respectively. Magneto suffered in German concentration camps, witnessing one of the worst examples of human cruelty in history. For him, he knows exactly how bad humans can be, and he doesn’t want to see that repeated against mutants. Stryker’s motives are a little more subdued: his son was born with a mutation that rendered him a paraplegic, costing him, in Stryker’s view, a normal life. For him, it’s about revenge: getting rid of the mutant gene that cost his family so much. It might even be externalized self-hatred; after all, he knows that his son likely got the mutant gene from him, and he’s taking out that self-loathing on the world rather than deal with it productively.
What would a more relatable Emperor Palpatine look like? Perhaps, in some ways, a lot like Anakin Skywalker: grown up in poverty on a planet ignored by the Republic, suffering because of its corruption. An experience like that might have caused him to view the Republic as irredeemable and in need of replacement. (I’ll talk about how George Lucas screwed the pooch on Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader at another time). Such a view is relatable; if it were just an academic view of the Republic as corrupt, based in no personal experience of its defects, it would be self-aggrandizing and off-putting, merely a way to justify his own avarice and lust for power. However, heroes encountering this narrative of personal suffering would be hard pressed to defend the Republic on philosophical grounds. “Are we on the wrong side of this?” they’d have to wonder. “Should we actually be helping to bring the Republic down?” If the heroes have seen numerous examples of the Republic’s failures at this point, it just might be enough to even persuade them to change sides.
This leads us to the last part of the formula:
The Anti-Savior
The tragic thing about grand visionaries throughout history, people who rise up to destroy a corrupt system, is they’ve inevitably never thought through what comes after it. They might have an idealized image of some new world, a new order that will get rid of the inequalities of the current system; but, inevitably, the new system will create new inequalities in its place. It’s simply human nature to have blinders on when it comes to our own philosophy and ideals; if we couldn’t ignore the bad parts, we wouldn’t be able to believe in anything. Your BBEG should be no different.
If your heroes reject the villain’s logic and decide to oppose him, this is where the campaign can get very interesting, as they might feel compelled to save not just the world from the villain, but himself. Attempting to redeem the villain, even while opposing his aims, can make for a great story, and showing the villain in moral conflict as a result of the players’ actions can be a great way to reward them for good role-playing. Whether the players succeed or fail in ultimately redeeming the villain, it’s sure to make for a memorable story, as they go up against the most difficult and dangerous force in the world: human nature.
If, somehow, your villain persuades the heroes to join him on his crusade, this presents a great opportunity to explore how villainy arises with your characters. How far are they willing to go for the sake of this better world? How will they react to the suffering that arises as a direct result of their actions? At what point is the cost too much? This can make for a really good villainous campaign, one in which the players are not just a bunch of amoral murderhoboes, but are trying to accomplish something good through terrible means, and constantly confronting the cost of their actions. At what point do they change course? At what point do they become desensitized to the bloodshed, viewing it as just another casualty among thousands? If you’re looking for a campaign that truly explores the nature of evil and you have the time to put into it, building a truly persuasive and relatable BBEG can be the way to turn heroes into villains.
I hope these tipz give you some new ideas about how to build memorable villains for your campaigns and challenge your players to think differently about your campaign world. If you’d like to hear more tips, or see an example of this process from one of my own campaigns, feel free to let me know.
