Not him!

[Tech]

Who is your most dangerous villain, either past or present? I'll add specifics:

• I'm referring to those nuts/maniacs/assassins/cutthroat villains who can hurt the heroes.
  
• I don't necessarily mean powerful, although that may be the case
  
• If you want, you can list your not-so-dangerous villain but he still has to be a threat.
  

 

My first villain, long since now-in-jail-forever, was Exterminator. Typical mercenary for hire with nothing more than body armor, skill and a hi-tech energy rifle. He fought an entire group of heroes regularly, sometimes for turns. As I looked back on his sheet, I wonder how he ever did it! The heroes averaged 10d6, 6 Spd, 20 PD/ED back then. He had a 27 Dex, 24 Con, 6 Spd, 12d6 attacks, 27 PD/ED, Mental defense, 2 Overall Levels. Not much more powerful when thrown against 4 or 5 heroes.

 

I suppose the weapons with the AE Flash attacks, Entangles w/NND attacks, NND, RKA and Martial Arts he had made all the difference, hm?

 

I later pulled him out once against a different hero group.. and was promptly defeated by phase 5. That's what happens when you design someone for a specific group.

 

On the low point side, one of our GM's has a guy called Blade. He's actually less powerful than the heroes - I'm guessing he costs like 250 pts under 4e rules. The thing is: he has so many knives, seen and unseen, that it's very difficult to disarm him. The small sawblade on his gauntlet top always makes heroes wary of him. Still, he's effective! He remains on our heroes minds whenever a crime with knives is involved.

[lemming]

Plastique seemed to generate the most fear. Probably something to do with the "corridor of death" as it got named.

There was a Moonbase, the heroes go into a long tunnel (50"?) and see Plastique at the other end. With her 4d6RKA AP, No Range Mod laser.

[Hermit]

"Bones" my combo of Kingpin and Silvermane in style. He was an elderly man who was also a masterful crimelord. No legitimate law enforcement could touch him, he was ruthless. Bones was in the shadows during the crime, and in your face a bit when it came to after the crime usually wearing a too wide smile.

 

The players hated him.

 

Occaisionally he worked with a purple skinned mutant with glowing eyes named "Mind Mold". He was a powerful mentalist who could do just what his name implied. He took sadistic delight in using his powers ...creatively.

 

The players feared him.

 

Both are dead now. Shame really.

[Bengal]

I GMed a team of 11 superheroes (played by 11 players.. it was very hectic) one time, so each mega-badguy needed to be really tough to whether their combined assault.

 

The first one I tried was Baron Ames von Orskel, a powersuit genius in the tradition of Doom. He was more of a plot element than anything (escort the Baron, protect him from supervillains, etc), until the Baron made his move, and battled the team.

 

Several rounds later, he was vaporized (or was he?), but everyone on the team required medical attention.

 

 

The second one I tried was Enarch (Electronic Monarch), a far-future's city-state expert system, which decided it didn't need people to govern and took over for itself, creating a 60-foot tall robot into which it projected its machine conciousness. Each time the heroes hit it, it would chip away tiny bits, but it was pretty clear it was too tough for them. It killed six heroes before we called they claled it quits that night, and took their dead and wounded back to the late 20th century and ended up defeating it by writing a back door into its source code sometime in the 28th century. Dead back to life, yadda yadda, happy ending.

 

Enarch had tons of resistant defenses, was immune to most mental powers (being a robot), and 75% DR versus everything. His attacks were simple AoE TK OIF Object of Opportunity and punches, bolstered by a 10 speed. Nothing more than 18 DC though counting advantages.

 

 

 

The lesson I learned from Enarch is, it's no fun for your PCs to fight a foe they can't beat soundly in a reasonable amount of time. I think if they had thought it through though, they would have tried Draining him, or just skipped the direct approach entirely.

[Guardian]

Here's the most dangerous/hated villain for a campaign that I GM'ed for:

 

At the start of a Dark Champions campaign, one of the PCs was incredibly paranoid. He was always going out of his way to get info on the other PCs, and the player himself reveled in keeping important plot information from the other players/PCs. He even had secret microphones and cameras throughout the group's base, so that he could keep track of what the other PCs were doing. The player never wanted a superhero name for his PC, but kept to the pseudonym "Robert Fenton" which his character had adopted years before.

 

After several months, the player stopped gaming with us as he finally decided that his gaming style wasn't really what our group of players wanted. As GM, I had the now-NPC character turn traitor on the group, and sell them out to a known enemy. Later, he continued to harass the PC's behind the scenes, masterminding many plots against them. He knew their powers, secret IDs, and vulnerabilities. It became the greatest plot-carrot I ever saw, because all I had to do was IMPLY that Robert Fenton might be behind their current predicament, and the PCs would froth at the mouth and go charging heedlessly in whatever plot direction I desired.

 

They even came up with a phrase for whenever something bad happened to them unexpectedly...

"I've been Fentoned !"

 

So a wonderful suggestion for any fellow GMs: If there is a similar disliked former member in your gaming group, turn the character into a villain and watch the players explode !!!

[Chromatic]

Originally posted by lemming

Plastique seemed to generate the most fear. Probably something to do with the "corridor of death" as it got named.

There was a Moonbase, the heroes go into a long tunnel (50"?) and see Plastique at the other end. With her 4d6RKA AP, No Range Mod laser.

 

That and the fact that you could put everyting into trying to take her down, miss and then end up swiss cheese as she shot you full of holes. Fortunately, I got better really fast.

[BoneDaddy]

Wraith. Desolid, darkness, and a stun drain (effects solid). He was crazy as the day is long, but well nigh invulnerable.

 

Strangely, my character had an area effect images attack limited to creating the illusion that everything around was on fire. Even more strangely, this coincided with Wraith's psych lim, and away he ran. It was a short lived moment of heroism for the unfortunately named "Flaming Justice."

[lemming]

Originally posted by Guardian

They even came up with a phrase for whenever something bad happened to them unexpectedly...

"I've been Fentoned !"

Hmm, sounds a lot like a campaign I'm in right now. One of the other characters is paranoid and keeping tabs on everything. (Hmm, come to think of it everyone's a bit paranoid...)

[lemming]

Originally posted by Chromatic

That and the fact that you could put everyting into trying to take her down, miss and then end up swiss cheese as she shot you full of holes. Fortunately, I got better really fast.

I blame Allen for the lethality of so many of my villians.

[Agent X]

Superskrull ran a campaign where the archvillain was a guy called Alchemy who answered the question, "What if Firestorm, the Nuclear Man was a deranged Mad Scientist who had no problem using his molecular transform powers on organics?" He had a huge supervillain team and an incredibly flexible strategy to cause problems for the heroes... and he loved to go after DNPCs and change them.

[Ghost who Walks]

My most hated villain was Peter Minuit, the guy who bought Long Island from the Indians for a box of trinkets.

 

Kidnapped by aliens centuries ago, he returned to Earth as a deranged cyborg with plans to conquer Long Island and return it to...The Dutch.

 

As a pseudo-Dutch villain, I was able to indulge in my protestant neo-Fascism fantasies, without using a German Nazi stereotype!

 

He was a bit like Brainiac I guess...had a huge army of robots, his own spaceship, was hunted by the aliens he stold the robots/space ship from.

 

Was as close as I ever came to a villain who wanted to take over "New York City". What made the players hate him (beside by cheesy dutch accent), was his insane ability to profit from any situation, no matter what they did to him. The guy always made money at the end.

[Guest joen00b]

My group feared Viper like no ones business. I took Non Combat Influence in Hunted disadvantages to new and exciting levels.

 

Back in 96, Viper blew up 3com park, killing the Cowboys, 49ers and all in attendance. Like 85,000 estimated dead. The group went after Viper full force, going near vigilante on them (one of the group members bought off his code against killing specifically for revenge purposes). Where ever Viper was, they would show up, and vice versa.

 

People have disadvantages for a reason, right?

 

On the one year anniversary, there was a candle light vigil held at the site of the explosion, and Viper showed up and mowed people down from helicopters, cars, trucks, etc. Mass murder on a city scale, basically.

 

I think a few of the people in the group formed twitches when I would say anything about Viper.

[Agent X]

Originally posted by Ghost who Walks

My most hated villain was Peter Minuit, the guy who bought Long Island from the Indians for a box of trinkets.

 

Kidnapped by aliens centuries ago, he returned to Earth as a deranged cyborg with plans to conquer Long Island and return it to...The Dutch.

 

As a pseudo-Dutch villain, I was able to indulge in my protestant neo-Fascism fantasies, without using a German Nazi stereotype!

 

He was a bit like Brainiac I guess...had a huge army of robots, his own spaceship, was hunted by the aliens he stold the robots/space ship from.

 

Was as close as I ever came to a villain who wanted to take over "New York City". What made the players hate him (beside by cheesy dutch accent), was his insane ability to profit from any situation, no matter what they did to him. The guy always made money at the end.

Your mind takes twists and turns a cat in an overpopulated birdcage couldn't match. (Maybe I'll be quoted in the "Things people say about Ghosts who Walks" now?)

[Blue]

The primary hero of the first campaign I ran had a well-matched opponent; the sterotypical zodiac character Taurus. He was a guy in powered armor with horns and an axe. All movethroughs and swinging blades. Both characters were bricks so there was little more than taunting and slugging going on.

 

My hero never had a primary enemy. It was always someone different, for the short time we played the campaign.

 

My current campaign was centered around The Black Pope, a man excommunicated during the reign of Diocletian, who has spent most of the interim in slumber, while those who knew the secret of his heresy continued to carry out his philosphies. He has since been turned to dust. So you know what that means.... New villain coming!

[Ghost who Walks]

Originally posted by Agent X

Your mind takes twists and turns a cat in an overpopulated birdcage couldn't match. (Maybe I'll be quoted in the "Things people say about Ghosts who Walks" now?)

Sanity is for the weak. (Could happen)

 

The Black Pope sounds interesting.

[TheEmerged]

Annoying Man. Originally designed as an experiment -- to build a character to see how long he could survive in combat without excessive defenses or the ability to take out the PC's.

 

The result is that my PC's have threatened to spike my Dr. Pepper with Nutrasweet (which I am deathly allergic to) if he every appears again, in any campaign under any gaming system. Just a casual mention of the name in a campaign handout had them forming a lynch mob.

 

See, he starts with the ability to go invisible. And form images of himself. And teleport. And go desolid without appearing to. And to create duplicates of himself. Basically the PC's have no way of knowing if that's an image of him, a duplicate of him, or the real him...

[Enforcer84]

Mind, BOdy, and Spirit.

 

 

pretty high point totals but Spirit (my only original member of the Trinity - Mind and Body were created by my friend Ed)

 

Mind - Charles Xavier like mentalist

Body - Juggernaut like Brick in a pretty boy package

Spirit - NND Killing Attack affects real world.

 

the first time my group met them three characters lay near death. Mind left two in a Hallucination so powerful they couldn't escape for a week (game time) and Body pummelled the team's two bricks to paste. Spirit wasted the mentalist and the martial artist.

 

Then it was found that Mind, Body, and Spirit were all "connected". And that Spirit was vulernable to electricity. The team's ep - Bolt was a living generator and Trinity was soundly defeated but the ease in which they dispatched the heroes the first two battles slead to a healthy fear of them forevermore.

[Stormraven]

Not one of my supervillains scares my players. Ever.

 

I've had Dr. Doom knock-offs, two or three times more powerful than the entire group, and they move, very workman-like, to locate and find a weakness they can exploit.

 

I've created a version of Dread Dormammu (or Tyrannon, if you like) and they used the maguffin in a way I hadn't figured on, without the slightest frisson of fear.

 

But if I send in a five-man agent team, written up on 100-150 points each (against 4-5 300-350 point heroes) suddenly they're white-knuckled, and worried about staying conscious throughout the combat.

[proditor]

I'm totally with StormRaven. I rarely get the "Oh no! Not him!!!" for my villains, but if I say the word "VIPER", everyone starts sweating buckets. I guess that using that NCI and making them a psuedo rip off of COBRA (but competant mind you) actually worked all those years ago.

[Outsider]

The guy my players hated most was Slick. He was basically a flying energy projector with a frictionless body surface.

 

High speed, high defence, high movement, and only moderate attacks. But they could never -catch- him, which is what they hated.

[Crusader108]

My most feared villainess is the life draining, Succubus. She has a low powered telepathy which she uses in tandem with her ability to take the form of her target's ideal woman (COM:36). She then employs a mid-level Mind Control (1 command: Kiss Succubus {something they wouldn't mind doing with a COM:36}...only vs males) which allows her to use her most devastating attack, her kiss (6d6 Body Drain).

 

Over the years she's slain 8 PCs leaving nothing but a small pile of powderlike dust.

[Haerandir]

Let's see... I've got a bunch, all from the same GM.

 

The Flying Headsman... Just what he sounds like, a guy with an executioner's hood, a giant axe, and the power to fly. The axe was a multipower with, I believe, a 4d6 HKA and Missile Deflection. Bear in mind that this is one of the first villains we faced in a 250-pt. 4th ed. game where the GM had specifically asked us not to build tweaked-out combat monsters. So, all of our characters were slinging about 10d6 attacks, had moderate CV's and low defenses. 4d6 Killing damage is scary when you've got 10rPD and 10 body. Especially when the guy just loves to do flying move-throughs with it. You can imagine how we felt about a homicidal maniac who could kill us with a single (albeit moderately lucky) shot, deflect all of our ranged attacks and simply keep out of reach of the brick who was the only character with any hand-to-hand ability. And he was a homicidal maniac. His only motivation was to kill the PC he was Hunting and as many other people as he could reach in the process. But at least he was actually a mystical entity that possessed anyone who put on the hood, so we could never be permanently rid of him.

 

Major Opposition... We called this guy Opposite Rhyming Lad. In addition to being extremely difficult to hit, with all the DCV, he had a giant cosmic VPP, which could only be used to produce effects that were metaphorically 'opposite' to whatever he was fighting. And he had to recite incantations in rhyming couplets to activate his powers. And the GM did, in fact, manage to come up with poems for every single thing he did. And they were terrible. About his only virtue was that if you did manage to hit him, he went down hard. He had a number of annoying sidekicks, too, like Wide Load (the 16 Ton Man) and Immaterial Girl (a singer with sonic powers and the ability to go desolid). Mostly hated this guy for the humiliation and frustration factors. We had to fight him 3 times before we could catch him. He was our campaign's Foxbat, I suppose. Only with a giant cosmic VPP. I suppose he doesn't really fit the original request, but we hated and feared him.

 

DOOM - The Dictatorial Organization Over Mankind... The campaign's villainous agent organization. Pretty straightforward AIM/Hydra/Viper/Cobra clones. Only all of their agents had a 'dirty tricks' multipower that allowed them to do things like murder innocent bystanders to blind you with arterial spray. That made us, as heroes, very sad.

 

The 90-Foot Ninja(s)... Pretty ordinary ninja, only they were 90 feet tall and radioactive. Let me tell you, the 5-foot-wide shuriken is not your friend. But at least they came in groups of 6 or more. Plus, you'd think that at 90 feet tall, they'd be fairly easy to spot, but ninja magic is powerful stuff. Different campaign, several years later, but same GM. We'd hoped he'd learned his lesson from the general player insurrection that ended the previous campaign, but apparently not.

[Haerandir]

Originally posted by Stormraven

Not one of my supervillains scares my players. Ever.

(snip)

But if I send in a five-man agent team, written up on 100-150 points each (against 4-5 300-350 point heroes) suddenly they're white-knuckled, and worried about staying conscious throughout the combat.

 

Sounds like what you need is a team of supervillains with basic agent training, blasters & armor.

[Stormraven]

Originally posted by Haerandir

Sounds like what you need is a team of supervillains with basic agent training, blasters & armor.

 

I tried that - well, something similar anyway - with a merc group called the Warmongers.

 

A duplicating Martial Artist (in 4th Ed., got 8 high agent level dupes) named MIRV, a fire projector named Napalm, a brick named Abrams, and a few others (the rest of the cast changed). They used military style tactics almost identical to my agents.

 

The PCs routinely wiped the floor with them. But a small squad of agents could give them the heebie-jeebies. Go figure.

[sethwolffe]

the name Doombringer get the collective knnes of my players knocking. Sort of a Mechassassin on steroids with a variable special effect weapon system so that he can always have a surprise up his well armored sleeve.