Compelling Villains

>>50038699
I'm enjoying villain of my current campaign. He is modeled in appearance after Whammu, covered in intricate tattoos that shift and move. He is a religious zealot that claims to be a conduit for fate itself. He has been showing up to harass the players, always a few steps ahead. My players are now stating to realize that his predictions are not as clear as he makes them sound, nor as accurate.

He is arrogant to the extreme, and seems to be able to form a cult of personality around himself easily. In a few months he has grown a sizable amount of followers.

My favorite moment so far was having him show up outside a meeting between the players and a wealthy patron that was going to help then find/kill him. He told the players that he was already in the process of taking their ship, but they could try and stop it if they ran now. He also told them that he has a follower about to "gift your patron a message, at the end of a blade". So they could choose to stop that. Or they could submit to him and join. Become his lieutenants, and save both the ship and the patron. They told him to fuck off and they ran to save the patron. They found him at the bar unmenaced with a note pinned to his side with a dagger shaped broach.

>>50038906
Tell more!

Oh, OP, let me tell you about how we made a deal with a FANTASTIC dragon.

Once upon a time, in sleepy Seattle, some Shadowrunners with slightly too much of a taste for collateral were embroiled in Splintered State (or at least I"m pretty sure it was Spintered State) and managed to fuck it up, triggering the optional "and here's the dragon!" encounter. This lead to us caught being between a deal with a dragon and a lot of dragon fire. Figuring we could weasel our way out of it somehow, we reluctantly agreed to Drexel's demands.

He proceeded to send us on a variety of infuriating jobs before finally setting us up to be murdered trying to fight Red Samurai. Now, for Drexel of course, this is something that started as profit and turned into fun. For us, it started as our only option and turned into a deep seated vendetta. Drexel's catch phrase of "FANTASTIC!" because the cause of twitches and gritted teeth for players to the point that any time it came up from the DM in other conversation we growled at him for it, and he wore his very best shit-eating grin.

After the attempt to merc us, Drexel continued fucking with the team until such time as he made a concerted effort to wipe us off the map. He had us captured, killed a bunch of our contacts and had the daughter of the party heavy sent to France. Once we broke ourselves out of prison (or rather, the Personafix clones of the party decker/BTL manufacturer did, a story for another time) we took a break from playing ourselves, while the DM wrote short fiction pieces about what our party did to that fucking dragon while we were 'out'. Hopefully one day I can convince him to let me share his writing in /srg/, it's really quite good, but I'll give the cliff notes.

We fucked him. We fucked him good. The aforementioned decker walked into one of Seattle's media broadcasting buildings to spread the information that the face had stolen (after playing Drexel's secretary for months) to the world. (1/?)

>>50039094
(2/2)
Every deal, every plot, every business plan, for the world to see.

He was, as you might imagine, a little miffed. The characters had fooled him into initially thinking that a business partner had backstabbed him rather than the ditzy secretary, so he'd left his house. That opened the door for the heavy to take over the place, while his security was hacked and turned against him. One of the party mages, being the manifestation of all that is wrong with the magical world, dealt with Drexel's abundance of spirits, while the other was desperately trying not to panic while being flown around by the rigger and shooting at the dragon on his way back to his house.

A slight aside. We had nicknamed the party Doomwagon after the rigger's Ares Roadmaster, our go-to transport. Part of the name arose from our collateral damage addiction, part because it just kind of stuck even when we tried not to have a high body count.

Either way, when that dragon returned to his sanctum he found one troll standing in the window with a paper sign, and the Doomwagon, packed with a particularly vurilent later generation of FAB, dropping from the sky towards his face.

It wasn't even the biggest explosion we set off in Seattle.

>>50038929
I've been trying to make him as threatening and hateable as possible, but I realized that in all the time they've dealt with him he has never killed anyone. In fact, he hasn't even called for killing anyone directly. He clearly is trying to recruit the players to his side, and seems to need them for something.

It's been interesting, since the world my game is in has slavery. My players have really gotten into character and see it as a necessary evil. They just captured their ship back from one of the villain's lieutenants, and went about shackling the crew and docking their ears with red hot clippers to denote them as slaves. Conversely, the villain frees slaves quite readily. He has even gifted former slaves that prove themselves by getting their ears healed if they had been docked, and giving them a golden ear cap where they were once marked.

Just fun to see the "bad guy" be the one that's anti-slave. (He still totally uses slaves though. He is still power hungry AF)

>>50038699

The most satisfaction I ever had from getting past a villain wasn't the BBEG so much as his big guy.

We had a small adventure arc where the scenario villain was this nobleman. Not personally powerful, but clever and rich and well connected. He had a high level monk/assassin working for him though, who was the muscle behind his plots.

And after a long amount of adventuring, we finally get some evidence to nail the BBEG bastard with. We need to bring it before a magistrate to arraign him. Of course, the magistrate is in the capital, about a week's march away, and we have no transportation magic.

Cue in assassin dude. He tries to stop us from getting there. He wasn't strong enough to take the entire party of 5 by himself, (he could easily beat any of us alone though), so he just races along, using some homebrew item to not need to sleep, and keeps sniping at us at long range. Every. Single. Day. It was a mobile siege, and he came damn close to stopping us, especially when we tried to stop at a substantial sort of inn that we thought we would be safe in for a night's sleep, and he winds up burning it down, with us separated from some of our best gear.

When we finally got within sight of the city walls, and he tried to stop us by main force, and we crushed his stupid skull, that might have been one of the most satisfying moments in any RPG I've ever played.