Nine D&D villain ideas for your campaign

Do you write D&D villains regularly?

Do you find yourself running out of D&D villain ideas?

It can become easy to slip into creating flat, dull, two dimensional bad guys whose motivations are unclear and whose random acts of villainy make little wider sense to the overall narrative of an adventure.

One useful way of creating a one shot or a campaign is to start with the villain and work backwards. In some of the examples below, you might wish to combine the villains and have multiple appear in the same story. If you're fresh out of dnd bbeg ideas, this is the blog post for you.

Some might be more powerful than others, or serve different narrative roles, Some villains might have been protagonists once, but have become antagonists now. Understanding the nature of the villain helps when it comes to plotting the adventure and the challenges that the PCs face.

A villain who is interested to acquiring gold through skullduggery is going to prevent very different challenges to a villain who is interested to eating the souls of others, and both will be motivated to achieve different outcomes.