Three D&D villains that'll ruin your party's day, but in a fun way

Everyone knows the best D&D villain is Count Strahd von Zarovich - even the game's former boss Chris Perkins told us so. But the multiverse needs more than one antagonist for your heroes to scupper, and even undead overlords need a day off. Besides, if you're brewing your own campaign story - perhaps even your own original setting - you'll want to get creative and brew your Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) to match. You totally should! Every great artist needs inspiration to bounce off, though, so here are three nasty concepts from my silly old brainbox to start you going.

Three ground rules. First, to make sure they can jive with the majority of games out there, I've tuned these ideas to fit the Forgotten Realms (more or less) - i.e. medieval European fantasy with a bit of light magi-tech thrown in. It shouldn't take too much jiggery pokery to make them fit other settings, though. All should be tweakable to be minor bad guys, or end-of-campaign BBEGs, as you like it. They're not locked to specific DnD races, either - though one of them can only be one DnD class.

Second, I'm not building out statblocks here. They'd all need so much tweaking to match your table, your party, the desired Challenge Rating, the style of boss battle you want, and so on, that it'd be a waste of both our time. Instead, these are off-the shelf villain concepts you can take and mold to your game: their name, profile, characteristics, and nefarious plots. These are primed to mess up your party's day - but exactly how they do so, dear Dungeon Master, I leave to you.

And third: like all the best creative ideas, the villains that follow are obvious mishmashes of stolen elements from existing characters and stories I like. That's how fiction works, I'm afraid. Any resemblance to copyrighted works or real world people and places are purely coincidental, I think the disclaimer goes? If it's good enough for AAA videogame publishers, it's good enough for me. Please direct all complaints to the supernatural creator of your choice. Right then, here we go!

1. G.K. Farnborough, soul-snaffling ringmaster

G.K. Farnborough (nobody knows what the initials stand for, and he gives a different answer whenever asked) is the owner and proprietor of Farno's Fantastical Flight of Fancy, a travelling circus that tours the realms. He's supremely charismatic and charming, but there's a glint in his eye that, it takes but a DC12 Insight check to discover, is definitely hiding something. This circus is not what it seems.

The clues

No tour itinerary is ever published, but somehow everyone in each local area knows when the circus is coming to town weeks in advance, and tickets sell like wildfire.
Whenever the circus leaves a town, that town's population mysteriously drops by 10-15%, but nobody can explain why. Almost nobody can even remember exactly who is missing, and no-one has any suspicion it has anything to do with the circus.

The facts

In fact, the circus is a well honed operation for kidnapping defenseless people and using their bodies to spawn Illithids and Intellect Devourers.
G.K. Farnborough is working with two Mind Flayers who were cut off from their colony, and are attempting to breed enough of their kind to reconnect with their lost Elder Brain.
The two Mind Flayers use their psionics to hypnotize the crowd and collect their meek, obliging prey for processing. Then they alter the rest of the audience's memories so they leave thinking they've just seen a truly amazing circus show.
Farnborough is not, in fact, mind controlled. Originally he was just the owner of a failing circus, whom the Illithids offered a choice of servitude or death.
He's been helping them for years, and in that time lost much of his sanity, convincing himself he really is the ringmaster of the best circus in the world, and the Illithids are merely his business partners.

2. Tarik Thune, Bone Counter

Tarik Thune is an infamous necromancer who leads a fairly large, wide ranging cult known as the Bone Counters - so called because its adherents ransack cemeteries and burial grounds, leaving no bones behind. It's rumored the cult's secret hideouts feature shrines built of these stolen bones (which is true) and that its senior members learn necromancy from Thune himself, and employ undead servants in their raids (also true). That's already pretty horrid, but it gets weirder.

Every chapter of the cult is under orders to send at least half the bones they steal to Thune's personal lair, which is in a cathedral at the deepest level of a long abandoned, underground Dwarven city.
In that chamber (which he magically keeps a couple degrees above freezing), Thune and his zombie servants are constructing a gigantic mechanical computer out of the bones, following orders Thune hears in his head.
Thune believes this computer will calculate a mathematical formula that'll allow him to manipulate reality to give him and his followers eternal life, without having to accept lichdom or true undeath.

Actually, if completed, it will summon into the material plane Grai-Blannag, a very ancient, powerful, and angry bone construct that has been imprisoned in the personal zoo of a Devil named Bossaq for several centuries.
The voice in Thune's mind was in fact Bossaq, who has spent the last decade manipulating him to summon Grai-Blannag - purely because Bossaq got bored of keeping it in a cage and thought it'd be fun to watch it slaughter some mortals for a change.

3. Smyrna Pletzkoff, magical murder maker

The most morally grey of our three villains, Smyrna was once a respected alchemist and metallurgist at a prestigious magical academy, until their research funding was suddenly withdrawn due to budget cuts. They'd been developing a stable method for capturing, storing, transporting, and reapplying the energy from lightning spells, using it to power light sources and transport.

While preparing to leave, fearing for their future, Smyrna discovered their research was actually being stolen and redirected to create weapons for an upcoming invasion of a neighboring country (which happens to be their birthplace).

So they stole as much of their equipment and notes as possible, went into hiding, and made the weapons themself: magically powered, self-reloading crossbows that fire lightning-wreathed bolts accurately over huge distances.

Initially, Smyrna intended to supply their death-bows to fighters in their homeland.
But once their theft was discovered, city guards went on full alert looking for them, preventing Smyrna from leaving the city and forcing her underground.
For their own protection, Smyrna was forced to use their death-bows to threaten or bribe their way to alliances with criminal gangs who would otherwise have simply killed them and taken the bows.
In doing so, they became an adept and charismatic gang leader themself, commanding a growing faction of former thieves and street thugs to organize terror attacks against the government that ruined their life. They jokingly call themselves the Light Brigade.
But, without the academy's advanced magical batteries, the death bows needed so much magical power to recharge that magic users started dying in the process.
Fearful of their gang turning on them if they could no longer rely on being the best armed force on the streets, Smyrna had her inner circle begin kidnapping and killing magic users to keep the bows charged.
From there, trapped by their own choices and racked by guilt, they quickly descended into delusion and despair, withdrawing from active leadership and allowing others to take over control of the Light Brigade. It has since dropped all pretence of being a resistance movement; it's a criminal empire pure and simple.
In seclusion, Smyrna is working on a machine they believe will finally replicate their original research and generate infinite lightning power, which they would share with the people. The cost to start it would be a thousand lives of captive magic users - whom they are slowly gathering and imprisoning in the Light Brigade headquarters.
In fact, if the machine is triggered, it will cause a magical explosion that obliterates the entire city.

Possible story hooks

Your party is hired by the City Watch to track down Smyrna and bring them to justice.
Your party is hired by the magical academy to find out what happened to three missing students, apparently abducted from their lodgings.
A magic user in your party is almost snatched by members of the Light Brigade, wearing their distinctive badge (a bow and lightning bolt, crossed).

And that, for now, is the last ladleful of homebrew from my pot. I'm sure I'll think up some more nonsense soon enough, though, so make sure you join the free Wargamer Discord community to be the first to know! If you use any of these baddies in your own games, I'd love to hear what you did with them, and how it goes!