Campaign Building Part 2, The Worst Villain I Ever Made

For my campaign, I wanted to make a villain that the players really wanted to destroy. Yet I wanted him to have qualities that the players could sympathize with at the same time. Not that I was expecting them to have a moral or ideological conflict as they pursued the villain, but I wanted them to at least intuitively understand how and why the bad guy came to be bad. I also wanted him to be the kind of villain where it would be entirely unthinkable to support his cause.

Lets get the history out on the table first. Keep in mind that this story was developed over the course of the campaign. Not all of this was prepared beforehand.

Our villain here is named Khemet. It was a moniker that he adopted when he became a lich to obscure any connection with his past human life since he hid from the public over several centuries. It would also serve as a name that would inspire fear later on. He was a teenage Human wizard prodigy during the Dwarf war against the Humans. An eager boy who was both enthusiastic and dedicated to his developing talents. By fifteen, he was a well rounded wizard apprentice when the Dwarf armies began to attack Human settlements with little warning. (I’m dispensing with a few contrivances and adding my own here. Dwarfs in my campaign are not in an antagonistic relationship with Elves, instead they are responsible for an antagonistic relationship with Humans. Also, they are surface dwelling.) 

He lost his father first in a raid on the settlement in which he lived. He fled with his mother. He was able to protect her with his talents, otherwise they would not have escaped with their lives. Later, he returned to search for his father, but discovered his father’s remains in town, wounded and badly burnt. The then confused, frightened, and upset teen transformed into an angry and resolute youth.

He continued to train over the subsequent months and his power grew. He and his mother stayed alive by constantly moving with the scattered bands of displaced humans. The group would fight back against the Dwarf soldiers whenever they could, but each attempt exposed them to capture. To avoid disaster, the group would never stay in any place more than a week. They would keep this up for nearly eight months. All of their efforts turned out to be in vain however when a band of Dwarf hunters finally tracked this last major band of humans down. Then, only a boy of sixteen, he lost his last anchor to humanity with the death of his mother. A relationship with whom he cherished. With her passing, his priorities changed from survival to reprisal.

With the Human race scattered and thoroughly diminished, the Dwarfs abandoned the genocide shortly thereafter. Khemet was not so content for peace. He spent years in private practice and study to perfect his powers and when he felt ready a decade later, he struck with all the malice that had built inside him. By then, he was past having a sense of justice or even a plain desire to punish. His assaults were levelled at the smaller villages that he knew he could lay waste to, and by the time he left, few remained alive. Those that did remain alive were left disfigured. He would continue this pattern, escalating with each assault, for months. Just when the Dwarfs thought they had him tracked down, Khemet devastated the task force that was assigned to take him down. But afterwards he disappeared, never seen or heard from again.
At the time of the campaign, Khemet is at least 600 years old or more. I devised a set of rules for Khemet to follow when I had to have him interact in the campaign world. These rules helped me keep him consistent and they kept me sane when I had to figure out what his next move would be. The rules didn’t make him come across as robotic however, so big plus there. I think this is a good exercise to go through for a major villain. You don’t need to get as specific as I have here. But having something like this as a guide to fall back on can be helpful if you’re scrambling for whatever reason.

• There is no race he despises more than the Dwarfs. If he doesn’t actively seek the demise of a Dwarf, he is using that Dwarf for the destruction of the Dwarf race (he definitely revels in the irony)
• He has followers, liches, of whom he holds the phylacteries of; at least one is a Dwarf. One of his agents is planted in every major category of Dwarf society.
• He will generally ignore the dealings of non-Dwarf folk unless they are useful, meddlesome, or especially interesting in some way.
• He will have an unexpected amount of patience for humans that get in his way and often leaves them unharmed.
• However anyone who significantly sleights him, he will weaken, torment, capture, torture, and kill. Usually in that order.
• When he weakens his victim he will nullify their power, disease them, give them a parasite, or maim them. Sometimes covertly if it’s possible.
• By torment, he will usually start with his victim’s family. The victim will see the process and/or the results. The family member almost never survives.
• When he captures his victim, he will almost always mess with their sense of time, either through a magical effect or temporal suspension.
• When he kills his victim, the quickest method he employs is drowning. This is dependent on his available time and interest.
• Khemet uses his agents for information. Occasionally he will investigate something himself, but he would normally rather find ways to corrupt others, or turn his enemies’ assets against them to inform himself.
• As a result, he can be inadequately informed at times.
• Khemet’s disposition is usually like a cat toying with a mouse. If his prey escapes, he enjoys provoking and hunting them down again.
• When attacked, he won’t normally take it seriously. He’ll only take a truly formidable force seriously. 
• He is incredibly confident in his powers. He has good reason to be, but it is the source of his hubris. 

Mapping out an NPC’s behavior like this could be done for any significant character in a story. I’d just stick to the significant characters though. It’s more than overkill to do this for the local shopkeeper. Mechanically speaking, Khemet was built as a level 18 wizard with the archmage prestige class in the D&D 3.5 rule set. Most of his spells come directly from the player’s handbook. A small cross section of the spells came from Monte Cook’s Book of Vile Darkness. Those choices were added because they could be quintessential examples of his cruelty.

The rules and mechanics are important to keep the MO of the villain on track, but keep in mind that this is only a mechanical outline, adding the final polish will require fleshing out the villain’s personality. It’s fun to have a stereotypical mustache twirling villain to throw at your players from time to time, but that gets old if that’s all you have for them.

My challenge with Khemet was never on his character sheet or his spell list. Rather, my challenge was describing his methods. He was an unquestionably horrible being who needed a shortcut to Hades. Presenting his actions faithfully as per the personality and rules I had defined for him always made me uncomfortable during their execution. So much so that I initially provided warnings to my players, out of game, to prepare them for Khemet’s next act of malice. My sense of discomfort ended up serving as a queue for when I was hitting the right sour notes with his activities. The rigor paid off though. There were some genuinely gut wrenching moments in the story and Khemet became a villain everyone was committed to destroying.

Happy gaming.