It’s been over a year since my last post in the Villain’s Schemes series, but since it’s gotten a lot harder in the last week to write D&D content with confidence, I’m just writing about stories and antagonists now – even if it’s using the 5e DMG for its backbone. (This isn’t a post about the trash fire of the 1.1 OGL or the greatest self-inflicted wound in the history of gaming.) As a reminder, what I do in these articles is examine each scheme across all four tiers of play.

Immortality | Influence | Magic

Magic

Gathering power in the form of magic, either as an end unto itself or as a means to some further end, should be pretty understandable to your PCs – in the sense that they’re probably doing the same thing themselves. The shape of their antagonism might be as simple as wanting the same piece of magic the PCs want, but for a contrasting end, and the magic will be consumed on use. At the other end, this scheme could chain into basically any other scheme, and villains usually can’t challenge PCs without at least some access to magic.

Unlike the earlier Influence scheme (linked above), some versions of this scheme have the most obvious possible reward loop: the villain wants a widget, the villain gains the widget and causes problems, you confiscate the widget. Congratulations. Other versions – not so much. If you didn’t care about talking to the deity the villain wanted to contact, well, maybe no help. Overall, this is another argument for having villains use and care about the same spells and magic items that PCs engage with.

Obtain an ancient artifact. Or, if I can rephrase that, “what if there were a MacGuffin?” When you’re thinking of story goals other than “stab the main baddie a lot,” this should be the first thing that comes to mind, with reason. The artifact could be anything – a golden ring with a secret that now only fire can tell, maybe. The artifact can also do whatever you need it to do, to set the stakes where you want them.

You don’t necessarily want to use an artifact, in the rules sense, for tier-1 play of 5e, just because its effects are so sweeping – though I’m not your boss, if you’re good at centering player agency through the weirdness of artifacts, go forth boldly. It was interesting in 4e to have heroic-, paragon-, and epic-tier artifacts, so that you coulduse artifacts and their Concordance mechanics right out of the gate – they’d be powerful, but the whole shape of 4e and power in that system limits what that can mean. In 5e, you could accomplish plenty at tier 1 with a story about chasing a Rare or Very Rare item, to say nothing of Legendary+.

Tier 2 is about as early as I would usually be comfortable with an artifact in play and potentially falling into player hands. In Aurikesh, for example, the PCs sought out the Ever-Living Remnant: the still-living head of the Green Man (an Archfey, the King of the Seelie Court), who is otherwise very dead. This has sent shockwaves through the community of cosmic-scale entities – the other Archfey, the Lords of the Nine, and the Nightwalker (who is, appropriately, a nightwalker). Its effect as an artifact is to grant its bearer the spellcasting ability of a 20th-level druid, on top of their own abilities.

For now it’s in the hands of Kainenchen’s 9th-level Archfey warlock. She and the other PCs have received all kinds of offers from the Powers (again, I’m talking about Archfey and so on) to use it in one specific way or another. Attempts to seize it or kidnap her are surely coming soon. Its two artifact drawbacks are that it’s so powerful that cosmic entities can sense its general location, and the PCs have to give it back to complete their larger goal of resurrecting the Green Man, which is on a timeline.

Tier 3+, it’s fine to have an artifact or two in the mix, and even recommended. Artifact drawbacks are perfect for complicating the lives of incredibly powerful characters, because they can be immovable objects in the path of unstoppable force. One Actual Play stream/podcast that does great things with this is Roll Together RPG’s Wreckage of Myth Drannor 12-session arc – but be aware going in that it’s a PvP-conflict-heavy campaign and some episodes are very hard to listen to if you’re not used to that kind of thing. The Wand of Orcus plays a major role, and that’s just the start of the artifacts in this story.

Build a construct or magical device. Rather than making trouble with an old MacGuffin, what if you made a new one? It could even walk around and make further trouble on its own, like some kind of Modern Prometheus? That would be pretty great. Anyway, this is a magical practice by default in D&D, but many D&D settings have enough magitech or steampunk elements that this could be a pure tech thing.

“A construct” in D&D usually means a creature, and there are all kinds of stories to work from here. At tier 1, we might be talking about a homunculus – either the smol weirdo from the Monster Manual, or the stitched-together new friend from Dust to Dust LARP. That’s not inherently all that villainous, unless they’re going to turn around and mistreat their new creation, or have the construct go do evil stuff. My point is that in the absence of other clear motives, it’s hard to get PCs riled up about just building guardians for your tower, unless you’re making them out of something awful.

At tier 2, the Monster Manual’s golems open up as good encounter options. “I want to build this iron golem so it can stomp a barony for me” is pretty reasonable. For that matter, so is “I want to build an apparatus of Kwalish so I can explore the sunken city.” Maybe the villain wants to build a device to trap magical creatures – elementals and fey are especially popular choices for tiers 1 and 2 – and drain the power or control them or bind them into some further new magical creation. Wizards and artificers are great villains for this, though I’ll also point out that 2e FR went deep on rules about clerical magic item creation.

In tier 3, a kaiju-fighting mech, a device that causes or prevents planar travel, and sentient weapons, armors, or the like are all within expectations. Constructing a new avatar for a god – if that makes any kind of sense in your cosmology – sounds like tier 4 to me. It’s just as reasonable for any of these things to be the PCs’ goal that the villain is trying to stop. For something villainous from first principles, maybe the device is a worldwide mind-control or magic-draining device, or maybe Tiamat wants to reconstruct the Ruby Dragon Sardior under her influence.

Carry out a deity’s wishes. In general, this means you either have a big misunderstanding of a good deity’s wishes, or an evil deity commanding a catspaw. The former opens the door to disabusing them of their error, while the latter feeds into tier 3 and 4 play well by putting you in conflict with the deity once their pawn is eliminated. As a result, this works very well as the whole arc of a campaign, as long as you can keep the villain alive or the organization intact enough to cause problems. For example, the old-school Zhentarim were all about carrying out the wishes of Bane, Cyric, or Iyachtu Xvim, and they could field everything from petty mafioso to Manshoon or the Exarch of Bane, Fzoul Chembryl himself.

Most of the times I’ve seen a goal like this, it slots into one or more of conquest, indiscriminate destruction, purging some group that the person or deity see as corrupt, or just summoning the deity to the Material Plane.

The table says “deity,” but that could be any kind of cosmic power. Archfey, archdevil, demon lord, Great Old One, noble genie, vestige – anyone the villain regards as beyond question or worth serving.

Offer sacrifices to a deity. It’s easy to assume this is about sacrificing sentient creatures to an evil deity, in D&D (and fantasy adventure generally), but there’s also plenty of interesting story in just a transaction of an object or a herd of cattle or whatever in exchange for power and favor – favor that they use antagonistically. At tier 1 especially, I think you could run a great story with cattle or sheep rustling where the antagonist wants to cover their tracks by sacrificing the animals as part of a feast – once the animals are served up to the town, the evidence is gone and the divine favor presumably granted.

Tier 2 is an ideal stage for a story about corruption or misinterpretation of divine decree or prophecy within a kingdom-spanning organized religion, not least of which is because stat blocks like Champion, Blackguard, and War Priest are perfect for named enemies in this tier. Tiers 2 and 3 are both about right for when your big reveal and showdown is a devil, demon, or fallen celestial pulling the strings.

A tier 4 villain could well be the deity that is demanding sacrifices – the ones doing the sacrificing are practically nameless mooks by this point, if that’s a direction you want to go. One god trying to sacrifice another to seize control of some or all of their portfolio is the kind of fight the PCs could get in the middle of and do something about at this level, and I can see how that could be the culmination of a long campaign.

As above, the deity could be any cosmic power. Dispater or the Queen of Air and Darkness have things they value and reward people for just as much as a god does. For that matter, an adult or ancient dragon works well here too – and what they have to offer in exchange for sacrifices might be a service (burn down my enemy’s castle) or something from their hoard – maybe even upgrading a hoard item from Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons.

Contact a lost deity or power. This one’s fun because it’s the whole concept of the Binder in 3.5e, which became the Vestige warlock in 4e. If you’re not familiar, the idea is that gods and other powerful entities may die, but echoes of them remain, and invoking them or their legend is enough to grant some kinds of power. I don’t know that we’ve seen canonical references to that in 5e, but I also don’t know why that should slow you down.

At tiers 1 and 2, PCs likely chase the villain into lost libraries (hunting for information and descriptions of cultic mysteries) and ruined temples. As with any time you put a villain on camera, make absolutely sure your longer game doesn’t rely on the NPC surviving – there is no foolproof escape plan at any level of play, not when charm person and Tasha’s hideous laughter are 1st-level spells.

One likely goal within this idea is bringing a banished deity or power back into the world – such as Morgoth returning from the Door of Night to fight in Dagor Dagorath. If your PCs banished the Great Enemy in the thrilling conclusion of the last campaign and you’re picking up with new heroes fifty or a hundred years later, this is a good tier 1 story just to let them nip that plot in the bud while still enjoying a connection to the previous campaign.

Particularly at tiers 3 and 4, Vecna or Tharizdun are both ideal. With Vecna, you’re possibly telling a story about a powerful mage antagonist trying to achieve lichdom and seeking Vecna’s secret knowledge. With the Chained God, the One Who Waits… yeah, this is just Temple of Elemental Evil or Princes of the Apocalypse. Contact probably means “freeing from imprisonment.”

I’ve had an idea in my back pocket for like ten years now, where a lot of the campaign is about contacting and traveling to a city of lost, dead, or forgotten gods way out at the farthest edge of reality. I’d probably file that under this concept or the next one, if a villain were trying to go there for whatever reason.

Open a gate to another world. Individual or party-scale planar travel is mostly about having access to 7th-level spells (plane shift), but if the villain either doesn’t have that or needs to move creatures or materials at scale, a gate to another world is a solid scheme. There are plenty of non-humanoid villains who aren’t primarily spellcasters, such as dragons or giants, who fit the bill for every tier of play.

Spellcasters that don’t yet have access to 7th-level spells mean we’re mostly talking about tiers 1 and 2. (Not talking about you right now, artificers, paladins, rangers, Eldritch Knights, or Arcane Tricksters.) For this to mean anything in the narrative, NPC spellcasters need to follow rules that PCs can grasp in some way, rather than just feeling arbitrary. Yeah, I know, you’ve heard it from me before.

At tier 1, the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the City of Doors feel like the best options. I’d include the Ethereal Plane, but D&D has seldom done a great job of signaling why anyone would go to the Ethereal. (Here’s one of the standouts; then there’s the Radiant Citadel, also amazing, though a gate isn’t how you get there.) Attacking the Feywild from Prime, or Prime from the Feywild/Shadowfell, both seem within expectations. If you’re starting in the Cage, getting a portal key and using it is a normal element of life – so it’s also probably a step in a lot of antagonist plans.

A gate to another Prime world tends to mean your whole campaign is about that now. If your players signed up for the starting campaign setting rather than this second setting, you might find they’re less than thrilled – biases run especially hot for or against official settings, in my experience.

At tier 2 and above (and there’s not a reason it has to wait, it’s just what feels right to me), maybe your villain wants to open a gate to a moon (looking at you, Critical Role Campaign 3) or the Rock of Bral, rather than catching a ride for whatever reason. This happened in my Aurikesh campaign – an NPC got exploded and turned into a portal to the moon.

I mention the City of Brass a lot for tier 3… and this is no exception. This time it might be as simple as wanting a stable portal between Prime and their loft apartment in the City. It only works as a scheme, though, if thwarting it is useful to the PCs’ causes. Maybe this antagonist is a rival rather than a villain, and it’s sheer pettiness.

A stable gate between Prime and any Inner or Outer Plane is probably a huge problem for someone at any tier of play, though it’s tier 3 and 4 that most obviously let you do something about it. Planar energies, demonic invading forces, Far Realm awfulness, whatever ya got. The worst I can say of this is that keeping this idea fresh takes some thought. Your players have absolutely seen this before if they have any familiarity with D&D or fantasy adventure gaming.

Finally, opening a gate to another world and bringing something through is a standard operating procedure in tier 4. There are all kinds of weird, awful things that you might gate in: demon lords, pit fiends, anything worth imprisoning in Carceri…

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