These final four points are probably the most important that I can make about a villain, and I am referring not only to tabletop villains but to all antagonists when I present the three theses listed below. When a GM is creating a bad guy to use in their campaign, these three things are simply not questionable; they make the difference between a random encounter and a foe worth taking down. Should a writer fail in the pursuit of any of these concepts, the result will be a subpar villain, one that will wind up being mocked by the players rather than feared, and one that will likely go down in a cheap way rather than dying slowly and climatically in a grand finale.
Now the theatrics are over with. Let's get down to the big four traits.
10. Be Effectual
The quickest path to world domination is just like the quickest path anywhere else: it is a straight line. When you have big plans in mind that you have already committed a whole lot of time and manpower towards, you should be trimming down the necessities of your plan to what is absolutely essential, keeping everything under control and ensuring that no time is wasted in accomplishing whatever you need accomplished. When faced with a problem, pride shouldn't factor into the methods of war unless you are absolutely assured of victory; if you see an opening, seize it as quickly and as effectively as possible. Getting the job done with minimal hassle should come before any sort of honor code or personal vendetta (these things can work, but it is important that a good villain keeps them in perspective). By the same virtue, don't waste time and money on minions or fortifications that are going to be worthless to you. Invest in blindsense-packing monsters if you are up against a stealthy opponent, or dimensional locks if they like to try and teleport into your private space. Heck, don't give the good guys an opportunity to stop you at all, just cut straight to the chase and put your master plan into effect with minimum possible delay. On the topic of those master plans, any good villain should compose one that is concise, to the point, and has as few variables as possible. While something absurdly byzantine and convoluted can be fun for confusing the PCs for a while, it almost never works, and something that winds up a hair out of line can throw a wrench in the scheme and leave your whole evil endeavor pointless. Any good large-scale bad guy has plenty of resources at his disposal, and if he had the brains to get them in the first place, he should have the brains to utilize them to their full potential. That means not spending gratuitous amounts of money on low-level minions when a few strong ones can do the job better, and not investing tens of thousands of gold pieces into a doomsday machine when some well-placed spells can wreak more destruction and panic at a fraction of the price (I mean, think about the infrastructure you could ruin with a single well-placed stone to mud spell, or the casualties you could cause by poisoning the right water source). Why would you spend years trying to sway thousands of citizens to your side when you could simply puppet an existing leader and obtain whatever you need in the nation? Why build an army when one or two well-placed assassinations will accomplish what you want in a much more subtle manner? Why go to all the trouble of tracking a person down with men when you would far more successful with a simple scrying? Why involve more than the bare necessity of people in a plot that you are gambling your life on? Why put a crazy plot into action at all without spending a few hours thinking "how can I iron out the kinks here?" The point I am trying to make here is that Occam's razor is the deadliest weapon the titanic nasty can have in his arsenal. Every villain is on some level an engineer of sorts, and no self-respecting engineer puts his work out in the field without asking "what can I do to use my resources a little bit better?" If an antagonist is going to have any shot at getting what they want, those 12 words need to be echoing in their head at least once every hour. Elsewise, your dastardly scheme becomes haphazard and unnecessarily complex, and your ambition will be doomed to the dark pit where the most pathetic comic book villains rot away.
11. Be Purposeful
Evil is a hefty undertaking; one doesn't just wake up one morning and decide that he's going to massacre a town or two and open a portal that will bring an ancient dark one into the world. It takes time, resources, and a whole lot of effort to be a good villain, so the important question that you have to ask yourself is "why in the nine hells am I doing this?" What does the villain have to gain from brutality and treachery, and what can he do with it that couldn't get done with a simple kind asking? Before a villain commits to the dark side, they should have something happen to them that gives them some conviction in it. Maybe they saw that Good isn't as good as it sets out to be, or that the only path to providence or survival is paved with butchery and deceit. Maybe they just want something and feel that negotiating for it is below them. Heck, maybe they dedicate themselves to ruining the heroes because of something the heroes did to screw them over (nobody said that the best villains always start the campaign as villains). As alluring as evil may seem, nobody wants to be evil just for the sake of being evil. Cruelty has its purpose and its intent, and those are both things that any villain the PCs interact with should formulate before going to war. Every blackguard has his justification, every tyrant his excuse, and every madman his logic. Remember this or else your campaign will crumple like tissue paper. He who stands for nothing falls for everything, so if you need to hesitate and ask yourself why the man with the spear is okay with skewering the feisty rogue on cold steel, something is in urgent need of fixing. By the same token, there should be no such thing as a random encounter, or a faceless mook who is intended as nothing but padding for the adventure. Nothing exists without an origin, and that holds especially true for villains. If the PCs run up against a bad guy who is there just to slow them down, its worthlessness will be obvious, as will your lack of preparation. Every moment spent in an encounter should be ratcheting up the tension, building up to the intentions and abilities of the big bad or dropping information about the setting and people within it. Random events that lead nowhere are a hallmark of bad storytelling in film and literature, and the same standard should apply for games. Combat encounters are a big investment of time, so make sure that time spent rolling dice is also time spent continuing the story. Where random encounters might bog down the game, either skip over them or turn them into a meeting with some meaningful contemporaries (even stone golems have a reason for being in the dungeon. They aren't exactly natural landmarks). The bottom line is that everyone that is out doing bad things needs a Raison d'etre, a reason for their existence in the campaign and an explanation for why their acts of debauchery and aberration are the right thing for the world.
12. Be Unique
While I'm throwing around french phrases, I should mention that a generic monster is always worse than a villain a la mode. What I mean by that is that each bad guy should have something that sets him or her apart from the pack, a trait, motive, or ability that makes them a unique individual in a world full of wizards, fighters, and bard/oracle mystic theurges (you weren't the first person to think of a combination like that, so stop pretending that it's all you need to make your character one of a kind). The best kinds of villains are the ones that you are afraid of because you have never seen it before, the type of bad guy who you can't really guess how to fight or talk down because you've never seen their motives or tactics before and you are running blind against. On top of this, an original motivation and skillset has the side effect of making your campaign much more interesting, as players will be up against something they have never seen before and will typically want to see what they are up against. The players' engagement will rise as they are forced to question everything, pondering if the doorknob they use could be poisoned or the fruit cart could in fact be a giant obese land-dwelling octopus minion in disguise. As with in the mystery entry, what players don't know is what makes them want to explore. Unfortunately, originality is something that is difficult to pull off, and attempts to force it are usually quite obvious and result in ideas that don't often make too much sense. As a result, I cannot give too much good advice on how to be original, since the very basis of it is that nobody else has come up with what you are about to try. The best information I can bestow upon ye is to take a look at sources that your players wouldn't typically know about, so that your inspirations are so obscure that your players won't know what to think when you start mixing and matching themes from them. Crack open some obscure religious texts and start grabbing monsters and storylines from there, or check out some unusual art, poetry, writing, or movies that your players are not likely familiar with (if any of you try a dadaist campaign, please let me know how it goes. I would love to hear about it). Take on some philosophical ideas and entities that aren't really represented in most mythologies, and see how your players respond to such out-there concepts. Heck, just use some strange monsters from later bestiaries or adventure modules if you want to go nuts with some encounters, or come up with alternative uses of existing abilities that force players to play in a way they had never anticipated (a pyromancer in a munitions factory would get nasty real quick). Templates also deserve special mention, as they can change how a monster functions immensely while keeping the bookkeeping to a relative minimum. Finally, refluffing is a great way for a GM to give a players and experience they've never had before without struggling with the rules. Simply change the word "sword" to "barbed-wire-coated shovel" or "displacer beast" to "spectral cthonian" and the situation ratchets up memorability by a major margin. Uniqueness can come from simple changes, not rewriting the book entirely but punching things up enough to make it your own.
13. BE RATIONAL
I cannot stress this enough, because it is just so essential to making a good antagonist that the plot completely falls apart if this tenant is not met. Whatever your villain is doing, regardless of whether or not it is original or mysterious or lethal, it absolutely must make sense. The path to evil should be an understandable one, with the baddie being able to justify why he is doing things that others will most likely hate him for. If a villain is expected to be a threat, he shouldn't just be someone that the PCs can simply talk or bribe out of his ways. As much as such a solution may break suspension of disbelief, it is one that you must prepare for when cooperatively telling a story with sapient beings. If this evil genius is even close to the intellect that his 20+ mental ability scores indicate, he should be able to defend his position or else not do reckless evil things in the first place. If he is intelligent, he should be able to figure out some sort of tactic that enables him to get what he wants with minimal risk of skin or reputation If he is wise, he should be able to pick up any quandaries or fallacies in his logic and be able to correct them. If he is charismatic, he should be able to convince others that what he is doing is the right thing to do. If he is none of these things, he should at least have the self-preservation instinct not to do something boneheaded and pointless when it results in a whole lot of bad karma. Every creature with at least baseline mental faculties should be able to explain why they do what they do, perhaps convincing others to do they same as they vocalize their concerns. Petty revenge, spite, or "the thrill of it" are not full justifications for mass-killing years-long plots in the real world, so they shouldn't be adequate in a fantasy world either. Nobody sees themself as a villain no matter how radical or vindictive they are, and "villainy for the luls" is the most brutal detractor from immersion that I've ever seen a GM throw out. Every character, good or bad, should have a philosophy that guides their life and makes their actions seem worthwhile, even if it is as alien or absurd as "the rest of humanity is best suited to exploitation in my interest". Not all antagonist logic needs to be in the human scope (just look at Lovecraft), but it should at least be logic that can be followed. Even the most chaotic evil of demons can make sense of why debauchery is the best use of existence for a creature like itself, as easily as an angel is able to explain why it lives to protect others. No creature exists in a setting with no idea of what it should or shouldn't do, and those expectations of good and bad should be raised and challenged every time the players and villains come into conflict, with questions emerging on both sides as to what they are fighting for and why they are fighting for it. Villains exist in stories to create this conflict, the challenge the audiences conceptions of what is good or useful and to make them wonder why two differing aspects are driven into conflict. When the players beat the villain or vice versa, it should be an instance of a virtue trumping a vice, a clash of ideas that engages participants on a level deeper than "is he dead yet?" Designing adventures is an art, after all, and you wouldn't want an art piece you spend dozens of hours creating to dissipate without a thesis, wouldn't you?
Thanks for reading everyone. This has been one heck of a time typing.
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