Last night, some friends dragged me to see the Tale of Desperaux. The movie turned out to be all right, but while I was watching the movie, an idea for a villian for my campaign occured to me. The villian could be a former priest of the Imperial Cult who turned to the worship of chaos. He doesn't worship any of the four chaos gods in particular, but he enjoys spreading heresy among different Imperial worlds as a form of revenge. His methods start subtle but ussually lead to a great deal of civil unrest on any world he visits. However, any stat builds I've made for this villian so far haven't felt quite right.

My other idea for a villian is a Metallican Gunslinger who has it in the for the moritat assassin who works for the campaign's inquisitor. The player asked for an archenemy he can't kill in one game session. If fights between the assassin and the gunslinger become one of the memorable parts of this campaign, that's what I'm going for. Of course, the gun slinger wouldn't fight fair if he finds he can't beat the Moritat Assassin in a straight fight the first time they meet.

ANyone have any suggestions on how to better flesh out these two villian concepts?

If your Moritat-Player wants something he is not able to kill in the first fight... do not use the gunslinger. In fact, my advise would to not use anything the pc could possibly kill in a fight at all .

Why so? Well... fights between enemies are normally a "till death"-thing. No matter how smart the GM is planing an "escape", there is always one player coming up with the ultimate way of spoiling this. Right out of the blue. "Resurrect him later" isn´t working most of the time, either. The players I know have a tendency to destroy the corpse as completely as possible. "Two in the head... just to be sure he will not come back".

So, if I want a "nemesis" they really meet face-to-face, I try to come up with something the pc cannot beat. Something that forces them to escape. By running away. By blocking the way behind them. Whatever.

Otherwise, good luck with coming up with a good escape strategy. Flash granates do the trick once. If at all. A lot of pc are into firing wild while being blinded. Smoke grenades aren´t fast enough, by the way. Teleportation might be good, if reasonable. Otherwise, your players will simply FLAME you for it. Clone-copies are my favorite in a SciFi. The villian keeps a brain tap of itself. One that is updated every month. And a personel servant whose sole purpose is to stay out of trouble and to inform the "copy" about anything that occured between the the last tap and the moment of death. Tried this trick once in a fantasy setting. My players where REALLY startled ^^.

If you really want to scare your players with something that they can't kill I have done this to my players and they dropped bricks.....They where hunting for a cult leader in an underhive .....long story short they find him and a big fire fight breaks out between cult members and the PCs. They get to the leader snd of course smash my best laid plan to the ground and kill this villian that I had taken many an hour creating and coming up with his persoonality. What they didn't know is that he had a demon pact......so as they celebrated and high fived...yay we killed the villan...I was still rolling dice and had the vvillian rise to his feet hover in the air and then morph into a demon host.......they all dropped their **** and ran....and he is still out there

A really good unbeatable foe is a reputation. What I mean is discuss with your player the potential for some sort of action which won't create a single nemesis, but rather mark them for future troubles from a wide variety of potential foes.

Better yet, why not play the "keep your enemies close" card and have the nemesis become a member of the Inquisitor's retinue? All of a sudden it's not in the Inquisition's best interest for either acolyte to kill the other. Some great opportunities for RP and a good reason that the character would occassionally come face to face with their mortal yet unkillable rival.

After looking through Disciples of the Dark Gods, I noticed a way for the BIG BAD to survive through the use of fate points. Combined with the daemonic pact my big bad already has, killing him should take an extraordinary effort on the part of my PCs. The fact the players already believe someone else is the main villian helps, and I learned along time ago not to place any villian you don't want to die right away in direct contact with the player characters.

Since starting the game I'm running, I've struggled to come up with an idea for a 'big bad'. I've been trying to make one that's unique whilst they've been doing some of the prewritten missions to give me time to think. But recently, a combination of DotDG and a Stargate SG-1 episode gave me an idea and I'm going to see how it plays out...

I've managed to create a nasty, but killable (if they know what to do) hybrid based on Anubis from SG-1. The idea being that a Tzeenchian Daemon managed to possess a Cryptos, but can't 'unpossess' it. It retains the abilities of the Cryptos, combined with it's own Psychic power and can possess hosts in the same way a Cryptos and Anubis can, leaving the symptoms that Anubis does on his hosts after a while (lesions caused by the energy possessing the body).

I've managed to do a balaced statline which uses a lot of averages between the Unbound Daemon host and the Cryptos statlines (ie DH's Per + Crptos' Per /2, etc) and Strength and Fel based on the host, which if anyone wants to see, I can post up later

I'm starting the group on a mission in which this hybrid will be the main antagonist leading a cult of sorcerers and if it goes well, he'll be a recurring villain that'll come back and haunt them.

You could always go with the Halo-Device owning Villian. Unless your PCs know he has a Halo-device, and know what one is, they arnt likly to do an autopsy to find the device. Plus no matter how he dies, theres a way a faithful servant (wormtail from harry potter comes to mind), can do the nessisary rituals and rites to ressurect him. That makes for a scary villian, one the PCs think that they've already killed. But when he pops up again expect the "wait, didnt we kill you."

Especually if when they killed the villian, he was in the secondary phase of bonding to the device. When he comes back, he will be in the tridary phase, and thus, much harder to kill.

-Ira-

The "Villian" could also be a rival cult. Perhaps the Moritat and this other cult haver some very basic difference in their view of how and why you shall (or shall not) kill for Him on Terra.

If your Moritat manages to dispose one of the Assasines, the rival cult will send another. But never sending two or more, strictly keeping it a "one on one affair".

Something like the Vorta from Star Trek DS9 comes to mind. An alien antagonist who has a set number of clones and constently updates memories (Psykers, anyone?) who pulls strings from the shadows and does everything in his or her power to stay out of the line of fire. Or something like the Cylons from the current Battlestar Galactica, every time they die their mind is downloaded to a fresh body ready to go. Which if the transfer were more painful each time then that would make the villian even more driven to kill the acolytes.

You could also have you villian be a sorceror that worships a minor chaos god, like Rasputin from Hellboy. Everytime the characters kill him he comes back stronger, but each time a litte more of his god comes back with him.

Salcor