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Outsmart Your Players With 3-Step Villain Plans

How do we outsmart our players? It’s all their brains against ours. Surely the odds are against us. However, here’s a neat trick we can perform to make our villains smarter and our adventures more cunning. We look at the possible plots and actions our poor villain might take and group them into three buckets. […]

Weaponize Your Villain’s Secret

RPT GM Dale S asked me for help with his adventure’s bad guy and plot: Hi Johnn, Would you mind wading in with any thoughts on my villain’s objective? The local gnoll clan and their unusual allies are attacking a small walled human frontier settlement. This is a nighttime ‘storming the barricades’ kind of assault […]

Villain Roleplay Tips – A Trio of Detestable Traits

Salaam Johnn, How can we get players to chase our villains like frothing lunatics brandishing cleavers overhead? It’s starts with someone they want to punch. Someone who isn’t normal but has turned their difference into something cringey. A monster on the inside, at the least. We can achieve all these things for our villain in […]

Factions & Villains – 3 Reader GM Tips

Hitting too Close to Home Let’s dive in with this observation from RPT GM Maja who brings up an interesting point about favourite villain types that mirrors my own experience. Let’s call it the Seinfeld Effect. Johnn, If you ask me what villain type gets the most attention, it is the personal type. My players […]

Outsmart Your Players With 3-Step Villain Plans

Evil GM Tactic: Make PCs The Villains

Imagine you have a party of PCs who insult nice people with their insensitivity, who take actions without care for the consequences and effects it has on others, who murder hobo without remorse. I know. It’s a stretch. But just try imagining characters who are like that. Here’s how to turn the tables. And how […]

Quick Plot Design: How To Create A Villain Plan First Draft

Been working on my campaigns and thinking a lot about villain plans. I like to craft a roadmap for how the villain can win their goal. I call this Villain Win-State. And that road map becomes my adventure outline for villain type adventures. So what are the first couple of steps for making an awesome […]

My Top Monster Villains

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0752 The other day I read a blog about the GM’s Top 10 mastermind monster villains. I love this idea! It’s great inspiration. So today for fun I’m sharing my favourite monster villains with you. The requirements for my list are I can only list monsters I have GM’d or made adventures […]

Your Villain’s Missing Ingredient

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0749 I loves me my villains. I believe every great campaign is powered by a strong villain the PCs hate. But something is often missing from the villains I read in adventure modules. Add this missing ingredient, and your campaign instantly improves. Hobos Reboot Before I get into that though, a quick […]

Villain Tip: Do Evil For Good

RPT GM Strider Starslayer gives us this quick tip on how to make bad guys your players will hate.

Run The Villain Sequence

Roleplaying Tips GM Strider Starslayer has a neat villainous idea for us today.

3 Step Villain Plot Seeds

Thanks to the horde who wrote in saying the mini-plot generator from last week was useful.

Writing the Effective Villain

by Ruth D. Kerce A lot has been written about how to develop the hero and heroine in a story. An often overlooked, but equally important character, is the villain. He/She must also be developed properly to make the plot believable. Many of the techniques used to develop other characters will also work in developing […]

How to Handle Pursuit Adventures

I received the following interesting request from a reader about how to handle a campaign where the PCs are the prey. Below is the reader’s request, and then after that I offer some tips. If you have any other tips to add, please add a comment! Hi Johnn, I really enjoy both Roleplaying Tips and […]

From One Tyrant To Another: Villainous Tips Inspired By A Real World Dictator

From John Dunkelberg Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #125 GMs can find great inspiration for tyrants and other leading figures from our own history and current events. Biographies of famous or infamous people can provide wonderful plot ideas as well as gripping personality traits. A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly on Saddam Hussein (“Tales of a […]