"You will fight to the last soldier, and when you die, I will call upon your damned souls to rise and speak horrible curses at the enemy."
"As a citizen of the Outworlds Alliance and a descendant of the Rim Worlders, I had hoped that in the course of our research on this volume I might find some mitigating factor to modify history's judgement of my most famous countryman. I regret to say that I have found none. As far as Amaris is concerned, the ancient slogan applies: Ig fallou blaos, dem ressensu glottuo. ('What you see is what you get,' or, literally, 'if you catch this, you will have to eat it.') Amaris may have been worse than even past historians have claimed."
— Anastasia Marcus, on Stefan Amaris, BattleTech: House Davion (The Federated Suns)
Even in the world of tabletop gaming, there still exists some completely despicable villains. Below are some of the worst and most atrocious bastards ever to roam the table top. Hope you roll well.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
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Examples
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# - E
- Battle Machines: Carman Skiric destroys communities on planets he wants to capture because, in his eyes, people exist only as a resource, somewhere below energy and metal. The only reason the Earth and Sol governments have him as the commander of their armies is that he is so utterly terrifying that many foes just give up, rather than have him come down and fight. He's also psychotic, and his personal mech wields four chainsaws, which he uses because, as he says, "I like to see the expression of dawning realisation on their faces, right before I tear them apart".
- BattleTech: In a franchise that mostly runs on Grey-and-Gray Morality, a few characters are pure evil:
- Star League Defense Force Major General Amos "Baby-Killer" Forlough is the reason the Periphery nations nurse a grudge against the Star League up to the present. A pedantic perfectionist, Forlough favored quick, decisive victories, and grew enraged when his enemies—and even his own forces—prevented this. Deciding the best way to achieve quick, decisive victories was to attack civilian populations instead of military targets, Forlough enacted literal decimation, executing ten percent of the population of any planet that resisted him. Low morale among his own troops was treated by killing said troops. His campaigns saw rampant use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons—one of the latter mutated into a super-virus that killed millions—as well as orbital bombardment. Even when warfare got remotely conventional, Amos ordered his troops to indiscriminately destroy anything of value.
- Stefan Amaris is responsible for the setting's Forever War for the next 300 years and counting. Worming his way into the confidence of young Richard Cameron, Amaris encouraged the young man's ambition. Richard soon stoked the Periphery nations into revolt with punishing taxes, and Amaris secretly funded the Periphery in order to tie down the bulk of the Star League Defense Force in police actions, offering his own Rim Worlds Republic troops to man empty SLDF garrisons. Amaris brought Richard an exquisite laser pistol as a gift, which Amaris used to shoot Richard in the head, then kill the entire Cameron family, leaving their bodies locked in the throne room to rot, and soon declared the Terran Hegemony was now the Amaris Empire. Amaris squeezed his population mercilessly, and his troops committed atrocities unmatched to the present. He turned his back on the Periphery allies who had set up his victory, with even his own Rim Worlds Republic left at the mercy of Aleksandr Kerensky and the SLDF with whatever troops and commanders Amaris hadn't brought to the Hegemony with him. When Aleksandr Kerensky led the Star League Defense Force in retaking the Hegemony planet by planet, Amaris pulled his forces back to focus defense on Terra, nuking the planets behind him just to stall the SLDF by forcing them to tend to the nuked populations.
- Khan Jason Karrige of Clan Widowmaker holds an unspecified grudge against Khan Sarah McEvedy and by extension Clan Wolverine. Helped by the fact that Clan Wolverine is making themselves "the nail that sticks up farthest," Karrige formed an anti-Wolverine cabal in the Grand Council, slipped spies into Clan Wolverine, and "manipulated" Nicholas Kerensky into forming the Clan Watch, something Nicholas had wanted to do anyway. Karrige had two of his warriors steal a nuclear warhead from a cache and smuggle it into the Wolverine city of Great Hope. Nicholas decreed a Trial of Absorption on Clan Wolverine, and as Karrige and his Widowmakers marched on Great Hope, supervised by Nicholas himself, Karrige detonated the nuke, killing hundreds of thousands of Wolverine civilians and the two Widowmakers who'd smuggled it in to make it look as though the Wolverines had been desperately trying to kill the ilKhan.
- Katherine "Katrina" Steiner-Davion is a sociopathic, Manipulative Bitch who gets what she wants through a combination of blinding charm and ruthless assassination. She has her own mother killed via a bomb that maims and kills several others, and deftly yet subtly frames Victor for it, taking advantage of Victor's lack of political savvy to become his regent over the Lyran half of the Federated Commonwealth, then outright secedes over the Chaos March debacle. When Victor goes off to fight the Clans with Operation BULLDOG, Katherine manipulates opinion polls to crush the confidence of Yvonne Steiner-Davion, her little sister and Victor's regent. When her youngest brother, Arthur Steiner-Davion, speaks out against her, she assassinates him, sparking the FedCom Civil War. She assassinates Omi Kurita, daughter of the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine, just because she was Victor's lover and Katherine wanted to hurt Victor to buy some breathing room. Katherine was eventually dethroned and sentenced to life imprisonment until Vlad Ward of Clan Wolf demanded her release to him. She made a son using Clan breeding technology and her and Victor's genetic material, intended to be the instrument of her vengeance on the Inner Sphere. This son killed her himself when he learned how vile she really was.
- The Dancing Joker, aka "Noble Thayer", is the most famous alias of the Inner Sphere's most skilled and sought-after virtuoso assassin. He first makes a splash by killing Melissa Steiner with a bomb that wounds and maims many others including Morgan Kell, and kills many more, including Morgan's wife Salome. He later sets up shop on Zurich, where he takes up the Dancing Joker nickname as he leads an insurgency against Xu Ning's Capellan-backed government during the Chaos March debacle. Dancing Joker sets up his lover, Cathy Hanney, to be captured and tortured for information by Xu Ning's forces as just another step in his plan to topple the regime, because he figures "overthrow planetary government" looks good on a resume. Against all the horrors of war seen in the BattleTech universe, the Dancing Joker still manages to stand out for the sheer depth of his utter lack of any human emotion or morality, even if he's incredibly good at faking those things.
- Bluebeard's Bride
: This version of Bluebeard proves to be even more monstrous than his literary counterpart. A seemingly-polite rich gentleman, Bluebeard would often abuse young maidens that he seduced into marriage in various determinable ways, such as raping them or locking them in cages to be tortured. Throughout the years, Bluebeard has murdered several of his brides, hiding their bodies inside one forbidden room within the mansion. When his latest bride prior to the protagonist enters the room and discovers his secret, Bluebeard decapitates her in a rage. If the titular bride enters the room, Bluebeard will murder her as well. If the bride flees the mansion, Bluebeard will take his rage out on her family out of spite. - Champions:
- Doctor Destroyer was born Albert Zerstoiten. Working with the Nazis to develop superweapons, he later betrayed them to the French resistance. Deciding he had the right to rule the world after the war, he recreated himself as a supervillain who invokes grandiose schemes on the world at large, with plots that result in large amounts of death at the hands of his weapons or murderous robots. Possibly his most infamous deed took place during the Battle of Detroit: seeking to annihilate the US with asteroids, he ended up obliterating most of the city, killing over 60,000 with over a dozen heroes dying to stop him.
- Mechanon is an AI who has grown to despise organic life. Aiming to annihilate humankind, Mechanon made his first appearance massacring over a dozen White House officials to seek the nuclear codes and launch the US's arsenal. Returning with grandiose schemes to exterminate mankind, Mechanon also enslaves any AI under his own control, as little more than extensions of his own will.
- Chill:
- Count Vlad "Dracula" Tepes is an ancient, sadistic vampire who carved out a name for himself as a brutal warlord. In his days as ruler of Wallachia, Dracula killed tens of thousands of innocent people in brutal war campaigns, with his favorite method of execution being impalement—an atrocity he regularly had carried out during his dinner parties so he could relish the sounds of dying screams all around him while he feasted. Dracula also burned a homeless shelter and all its occupants to the ground, fatally slashed his lover's belly open when he suspected her of lying about her pregnancy, and even threatened all of Wallachia with destruction to suit his whims. Upon his seeming death, Dracula took up a more subtle lifestyle as a Count, routinely gorging himself on the blood of innocent people and turning women into his vampire "wives", and, after his near-death at the hands of Van Helsing and the man's friends, Dracula returns to slaughter them all. When a group of SAVE members try to track Dracula down, the vampire leaves a massive trail of bodies in his wake in an attempt to destroy the SAVE group and enslave their female members to his will.
- Elizabeth Báthory is a dark stain on vampire history, commonly regarded by SAVE as the evilest vampire they've ever dealt with. Báthory, introduced to the occult and vampirism at a young age, quickly embraced the ways of evil, beginning to torture servant girls and force her servants to help in the crimes. After realizing that blood rejuvenates her life force, Báthory lured in countless young women to work at her castle, only to imprison them to be tortured and slashed open so that Báthory could drain their blood into large baths for her to soak in, inevitably killing the young girls. Báthory orchestrated her servants to take the fall for her crimes after she was exposed for murdering at least 50 women—with SAVE estimating the number to actual be in the hundreds—and went on to continue her atrocities in secret, killing at least 3 women a week for decades to sustain her youth while amusing herself in her downtime by torturing male artists due to a hatred for art itself.
- Nishi Oka, the alias of the Demon Ninja, is a vicious Serial Killer and undead monster who has been active for centuries. Centering in on his prey, Oka isolates them from all about them, stalking and toying with them as sadistically as possible before painfully killing them. His favored execution method seems to be ripping his prey in two before draining them, indiscriminately murdering the young and old, male and female. Active for centuries, Oka poisons and kills others for sport.
- Blood Moon Rising: John Lockwood is the most consciously and gleefully evil Lycanthrope in the entire setting. A "Loup du Mal" type of werewolf, Lockwood enjoys biting innocent people and turning them into Lycanthropes, just so he can use them in his murder sprees or set them loose on the world. Lockwood turned Myra Wade into a Lycanthrope, which led to her killing her own son, and also turned his janitor Leroy Biggs into one, brutalizing a gypsy who tried to help the man and framing Biggs for all of Lockwood's own murders, leading to the man's eventual death in prison. An egotistical sociopath through and through, Lockwood is responsible for a bevy of brutal slayings in his area; keeps trophies from many of his victims, including a half dozen SAVE members who have tried to stop him; and often employs his favorite strategy in battle, which is to rejuvenate his energy by slaughtering any nearby innocent people he can—damning all of his victims to a pained, ghostly existence until his own demise.
- Unknown Providence's "Death's Head Revisited": Don Ignatius Attracto del Guadana y Arroyo was a ruthless Spanish pirate who overtook a privateer ship, tortured the crew, and left them in a filthy hold to die of disease and malnutrition. Punished with the same fate, Ignatius returned as a vengeful undead monstrosity who sought to spread his plague far and wide. Killing numerous workers before being unleashed, Ignatius murders and infects his way across an island, infecting the crews of a nearby ship with intent to get to the mainland and begin killing every human being he can via a monstrous and painful plague.
- Veil of Flesh: Patrius is the lead shapeshifter, or Ganenba, and father to his four subordinates. Strongly implied to be Adolf Hitler, or the force behind him, Patrius was responsible for death camps and mass bloodshed in World War II to strength himself. Seeking world domination by killing and replacing four world leaders, Patrius kills numerous innocents in his path. His own method of feeding is to isolate his victim, drive them insane and then torture them to death for hours, forcing any witnesses to kill their friends and family before committing suicide, leaving them just enough awareness to feel the horror of their deeds.
- Dark Conspiracy (Game Designers Workshop game): Koshchey the Undying, from Among The Dead, better known by his mortal name Lavrentiy Beria, is a ruthless Dark Minion who helped to manipulate World War II to enjoy the suffering of mankind. The power behind Josef Stalin, Koshchey ran the Secret Police and had millions die in the Gulags, savoring the terror that reigned over Russia at the time. In more modern times, Koshchey harvests the suffering of victims for his Dark Tek, taking children to use as "parts" for his computer all so he can recreate the days when he was able to bask in the agony of others.
- The Dark Eye:
- Xeraan is a greedy wizard who was expelled from his academy when it was discovered that he gave other students access to forbidden books in exchange for money. After several decades of attempting to obtain treasures via robbery and blackmail, Xeraan joined the returned Borbarad. Attacking the city of Ruthor, Xeraan kidnapped 150 children. Over the course of several years, he conducted cruel experiments on them and had them fight against each other, killing most of them. The 53 survivors were merged with demons, turning them into brutal killing machines forced to obey every of his commands while still being fully aware of everything that had happened to them. During a battle, Xeraan would attempt to create more demonic soldiers on the spot by opening a portal to the Nether Hells and having incorporeal demons possess the mercenaries under his command. After Borbarad's defeat, Xeraan managed to obtain a demonic shard of his crown, creating his own nation called Xeraanien. As ruler, he continue hoarding treasures by squeezing as as much money out of his subjects as possible.
- Rhazzazor was an ancient dragon who sold his soul to Thargunitoth, the Archdemoness of the Undead, and became a powerful undead monstrosity. He would eventually become the despotic ruler of a small nation, demanding monthly human sacrifices to maintain his unholy existence. When Emer, the ruler of the Middle Realm, not only dared to challenge him but also managed to injure him, he turned her into a living seal for an Eldritch Abomination, driving her almost insane. Eventually he planned to steal the life essences of thousands of people to give himself a new body, offering their souls to Thargunitoth in exchange for his own. When a group of heroes stopped the dark ritual that would've allowed Thargunitoth to claim these souls, Rhazzazor still continued with the plan, hoping that the sheer life essences of all those soul would give him enough strength to simply break the pact and reclaim his soul.
- Karas also known as the Legate of the Spear and The Butcher of Garetia, was a brutal general who fought for the Empire of Bosparan during the Dark Age. Whenever a settlement refused to surrender to his authority, Karas would have all the inhabitants slain. In one notable instance, Karas promised to be merciful to the population of Luring, who had fiercely fought against him, only to immediately break his word once they surrendered and instead told his legionnaires to kill them all, while making sure that the parents would watch their children die before being killed themselves. To restore order to what he believed was a corrupt and weak society, Karas eventually planned to overthrow the Horas and rule the Empire himself. Inspired by the infamous Fran-Horas, Karas intended to create a legacy that would last for centuries by establishing a strict and bloody rule where everyone not doing his part would be executed.
- Rosthaut is the leader of a pack of Gareth's Gargoyles driven by ambitions and a strong hatred for humans. After having learnt about the existence of the fey realm of Mandariel sealed inside a crystal ball and its magical connection to Gareth, he attempts to obliterate Mandariel to cause a magical backlash that would destroy large parts of the city and kill thousands of humans, allowing him and his Gargoyles to rule over the remaining survivors. Despite his claims that all his action are done to free the Gargoyles from the shackles of slavery, he treats the members of his pack as more or less expendable tools which he would sacrifices without a second thought to cover his own escape. Showing that deep down, the only creature Rosthaut truly cares about is himself.
- Aarbilar is a ruthless wizard and former servant of Demon Emperor Galotta. After Galotta's defeat in Gareth, Aarbilar hid among the city's beggars and allied himself with the Gargoyle Rosthaut, sharing both his hatred for the city and desire to rule. To learn more about the magical connection between Gareth and Mandariel, Aarbilar summoned a powerful demon whose killed several people and endangered the lives of dozens more. Then, after obtaining the necessary knowledge, Aarbilar began with a ritual that would allow the demon to enter Mandariel and tear the realm apart from within. Not afraid to get his own hands dirty, he personally sneaks into a temple of Peraine and attempts to desecrate it by murdering several priests, so that his summoned demon would be able to gain access.
- Oswyn Puschinske is the headmaster of the Hall of Power who wishes to establish a continent-wide Magocracy and lord over the rest of the population. To achieve this goal, Puschinske places a Night Soul inside the leader of the Grey Guild and plans to turn him into a living bomb at the largest gathering of mages on the continent to cripple the Mage Guilds and kill everyone who could oppose him. Afterwards, Puschinske intends to plant another Night Soul inside the Empress of the Middenrealm to rule the nation from the shadows. When the Night Soul inside the guild leader got exposed before he could set his plan in motion, Puschinske attempts to have it kill all witnesses by causing a magical catastrophe that would destroy one third of a city. When he's eventually confronted by the Player Characters, Puschinske proudly explains his plans to them in an attempt to stall for time, while he secretly takes over the minds of their allies and orders them to kill the Player Characters.
- Deadlands: (Jasper) Stone, the Harrowed responsible for bringing Hell to Earth, was originally a Confederate officer with a reputation for cruelty and brutality. When he became the servant of the Reckoners, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Stone ruthlessly killed any who could stand in their way, hunting down and murdering countless heroes. Stone does everything of his own free will for his hunger to take lives and to see Hell on Earth enacted, and is so bad that even the manitou animating his body is terrified of his evil.
- Dragonstar: Emperor Mezzenbone is a red wyrm and the first chromatic emperor of the Dragon Empire after five millennia of good-aligned metallic rulers. Like most of his kind he's cruel and regards non-dragons as cattle at best, but even among his Always Chaotic Evil kin he stands out for his catastrophic plans for the galaxy. During the Dragon War between chromatic and metallic dragons that left many worlds devastated in its wake, he was first an important wyrm in the chromatic Asamet Kingdom and then its leader after its first king mysteriously died, and while most abhorred the tragedy of the War, Mezzenbone reveled in the slaughter, planning to annihilate friend and foe alike and rule the remains of a lifeless universe as a god. He only changed his mind when he realized the War would claim his life too if it escalated further, and agreed to the truce that would form the Empire only because he knew he needed the 5,000 years until his guaranteed ascension to the throne in order to ensure his scheme would unfold flawlessly. In the present day of the setting, forty years after his coronation, he has introduced a number of controversial acts including forming a drow Secret Police, supporting worship of his patron deity, the Destroyer, and brutally assimilating new worlds into the Empire. When he believes the time is right, Mezzenbone will unleash everything at his disposal, including systems-destroying superweapons and magical artifacts of untold power, and completely shatter all possible opposition to his scheduled omnicide.
- Everquest tabletop game: Miragul was an Erudite spellcaster, who wanted to study the art of Necromancy, which is considered inherently evil, and was thus banned by the mostly good-aligned Erudites. He and his followers still decided to learn Necromancy, sparking a civil war between his followers and the rest of the Erudites. Miragul eventually tired of the war and left, traveling to Everfrost Peaks and created an elaborate underground lair he dubbed Miragul's Menagerie. When he first arrived, the local Barbarians just ignored him, until he started creating an Unrealistic Black Hole that was going to turn everyone in the region into his undead slaves. The Barbarian Thalger managed to destroy it with the Spear of Fate, but Miragul survived and eventually became a lich. In the Menagerie are numerous horrors, such as several people who are turned to stone but still conscious. While the PCs can free them, all but one are completely insane, and even the sane one is mentally tormented. There's also a monk who has been trapped for ages and can only "escape" by entering a phylactery nearby; a tribe of undead petrified treants who are now evil; and "The Keening Woman", a tormented ghost who came to rescue her husband but died and became undead. Perhaps worst of all, Miragul is apparently working with Terris-Thule, the goddess of nightmares, to become a god.
- Exalted: The second edition version of The Dowager of the Irreverent Vulgate in Unrent Veils is one of the thirteen Deathlords ghosts, and easily the most vile of the bunch. She hunts people as a hobby, but her real wickedness comes into play with her two pet projects. First is her Orphanage of Fear; she abducts the entire populace of a village, kills everyone over the age of nine, and raises the children in homes furnished with soulsteel made from the children's families. She also takes this opportunity to create the Shoat of the Mire, a psychologically-tortured little girl given the Black Exaltation of a Dusk. But the Dowager's greatest work is the single most catastrophic event in Creation's history, the Great Contagion. Having discovered this virus in the Well of Udr, the Dowager unleashed it upon Creation, where it killed 90% of all living things. The Dowager is the cruelest and most vicious of the Deathlords; she would be Creation's most notorious murderer, if only her role in the Great Contagion were well-known in Creation. Her end goal is to find the opposite of Creation in the Well of Udr, and bring the two worlds together into a matter-antimatter cataclysm.
F - Z
- Feng Shui:
- 69 AD juncture: Ming I, the worst of the Four Monarchs, is a user of warped shadow magic who willingly replaced her arm with an Artifact of Doom to hurt people more. In her native timeline, she ruled over the Aztecs and then took Human Sacrifice to heights even they found abhorrent, learning how to use the blood of virgins to extend her youth, only being allowed to remain because she cowed them into believing she was a god who killed or enslaved all of theirs. Worst of all is her mass Mind Rape.
- 2056 AD juncture: Curtis Boatman is described in-game as a bloated, corrupt, and utterly selfish jerk whose own motive is his own profit, and is personally responsible for several sadistic experiments. His laundry list of crimes includes the Uber-kids; tricking normal people into accepting The Corruption of Arcanotech and then accelerating it deliberately so he can have perfectly loyal super soldiers; keeping an entire greenhouse complex of Black Market Produce for himself; planning to betray his boss Bonengel because Boatman likes the Crapsack World with himself at the top of the pyramid as it is; and despite the Buro wanting equality at all costs, he's a huge bigot responsible for the rampant homophobia in the 2056 juncture.
- Freedom City: This default setting of Mutants & Masterminds is home to some fairly repellent villains, but none quite as bad as this duo:
- Wilhelm Kantor, aka Overshadow, is a Nazi war criminal and Evil Sorcerer turned international terrorist. As a member of the SS and the Thule Society, Kantor learned that he was the reincarnation of Tan-Aktor, a Treacherous Advisor to the Egyptian Pharoah Heru-Ra. Sacrificing twelve of his men, Kantor regained his past memories and powers, then went onto become the true mastermind behind the Nazi Ubersoldaten program. When Schwartzpanzer was crippled in combat, Kantor sacrificed him to increase the power of his own personal assassin, Nacht-Krieger; when the war ended Kantor would use the ritual suicides of his SS and Thule Society colleagues to further empower himself and Nacht-Krieger. Kantor went onto kill almost the entire roster of the Allies of Freedom, left Nacht-Krieger to take the fall, and set up the terrorist group SHADOW. He has since attacked world capitals with armies of clones, tried to get the USA and USSR to nuke one another, poisoned municipal water supplies, and attempted to use Omega's power to take control of space/time. In the meantime, he has kept himself alive, first by bodyjacking clones of himself, and later trying to take over the body of his own son, Ragnarok. Evil on both a grand scale and a petty one—once using a terrorist attack just to ruin an enemy's retirement party—and with a bad habit of throwing his "friends" under the bus when it suits him, Kantor is out only for himself, and is as bad as even a Nazi can get.
- Omega, once the heroic king of the first race of mortals, realised that entropy was going to destroy the multiverse, and decided that he wanted to be on the winning side. Turning on Unus The Creator, Omega stole the Doom-Coil, the very device Unus had designed to fight against entropy, and reprogrammed it to spread entropy, feeding his own universe into it as fuel. In the process he defeated Unus, slew most of the other gods, and completely surrendered to his own hatred. Omega now travels universe to universe, corrupting and recruiting the greatest heroes of each 'verse into his army, before annihilating their home dimensions. He transformed the greatest physician of one universe into the sadistic Friendly; promised to spare another hero's people only to turn them into mindless drones; and not only destroyed The Centurion's homeworld, but then tracked him to Earth-Prime, killing him and nearly wiping out Freedom City in the process. Concerned only with expanding his own dead realm, the so-called Terminus, Omega's goal in the extinction of all life across the multiverse.
- Iron Kingdoms: Toruk is the God-Emperor of the dragon race, although he considers his progeny the only thing that might pose a threat to him and desires to destroy them all. To accomplish this, he turns a whole set of island nations into a mix of undead and mutants to serve as his army, all with the intent of slaughtering as many of the inhabitants of the mainland as possible to make a bigger army.
- Lamentations of the Flame Princess:
- The Pale Lady is a ruthless Fay who has children kidnapped to use as slave labor until death or she finds no use for them, with the boys turned into eunuchs to better serve. Many of the firstborn children taken by the Pale Lady are sacrificed so she may obtain her powers, her supply of rabbit-men soldiers propagated by her raping human men she finds appealing before using the offspring as disposable Cannon Fodder.
- Blood in the Chocolate: Lucia de Castillo enslaves a tribe of pygmies for their Cocoa tree with the belief she is a god so that she may create a delicious, addictive chocolate to control the trade across Europe. Allowing her pygmies to torture and sacrifice many people, Lucia uses others for her sick experiments, including children, who she infects with plagues and with her candy so that deadly and agonizing side effects can be observed. Others are kept as sex slaves during the experiments so that Lucia can use their bodies for her own pleasure.
- Legend of the Five Rings: Hantei XVI, known as Otomo Okucheo before his ascension and also known as the Steel Chrysanthemum, is the most violent and tyrannical Emperor that Rokugan ever had. He was ambitious even as a young child, when he arranged for the murder of his brother to prevent him from being made Emperor. His atrocities ranged from the disastrously grand, such as creating a Secret Police force to hunt down traitors and political dissidents; to the disturbingly petty, such as torturing a woman to death for protesting his widespread use of torture, and then naming her as a minor goddess of torture. He ruined a political opponent's reputation and career, just so he could claim the man's daughter as a concubine. When that daughter refused to bear Hantei XVI a child, he had her imprisoned in her own room and forced the matter. The final straw, however, was ordering the execution of his own mother, because she dared to protest him killing all of his siblings so they couldn't contest his claim to the throne. This final act was enough to make his entire guard, horrified by what he had done, turn on him, assassinating him in spite of the fact that they would all need to commit seppuku afterwards. Back from the Dead more than 500 years later, Hantei engineered the 12-year-long War of Spirits in order to try taking back the throne. After the War, as one of the conditions of the treaty, Hantei tutors the son of an opponent. Planning to attack his student in order to cause the treaty to be broken and war to break out again, Hantei, while beating this student, is killed by his own fiancée, who has grown to care for this student.
- Masque of the Red Death:
- Dracula is one of the eldest and mightiest of the Red Death's servants. As Vlad the Impaler, Dracula subjected 100,000 Turkish soldiers to the stake, and his appetite for suffering was so great that he put entire villages to the sword, with men, women and children impaled and left to suffer for hours in agony. As a vampire, Dracula, who has killed so many in Transylvania that the region suffers from a population problem, later emerges to do the same to other regions. Happily turning the loved ones of his enemies, Dracula savors watching them trying to kill one another after, and is a vicious predator as either man or undead.
- Delphine LaLaurie is initially presented as a charming socialite in New Orleans's French Quarter. In truth, Delphine was a Serial Killer who focused on her slaves, having countless innocents tortured and murdered with the "lucky" ones having eyes or tongues removed. After being driven from Louisiana by a mob, Delphine moves from region to region, mentally dominating her own family into participating in her actions and always aiming for areas where she has fresh access to servants who can never please her, long before she proceeds to torture and slaughter them as well.
- Midnight (2003): The wicked god Izrador fell to Aryth long ago. Rising anew, Izrador launched brutal campaigns to take over the lands before resorting to more subtle means. Achieving victory, Izrador runs a nightmarishly despotic regime, with slavery, sacrifice, and more, all while seeking genocide on the remaining elves and dwarves. Draining the land of magic with mirrors that require Human Sacrifice, Izrador enslaves the souls of his victims and converts them to hideous undead monstrosities known as the Fell. Even his own elites fare no better, as one of his vaunted Night Kings was once a hero tortured and broken by Izrador into a corrupt shell of himself. Seeking to drain all of Aryth's magic, Izrador's ultimate plan is to return to the heavens and take over, overthrowing the gods of light and extending his evil reign across the cosmos.
- Punkapocalyptic: Cunnilingus Igni is the wicked leader of the Children of Black Blood. After the death of the original leader, Igni usurped that once-peaceful religion, which worships Tex'co and views oil as a gift from their god. Converting the rest to violent fanatics, Igni launches raids to burn countless people alive and wipe out anyone else in preemptive strikes". Leading many such raids himself to demonstrate his fanaticism, Igni savors the death and immolation of others, described contemptuously as just a scumbag seeking to impose his cruelty on the world.
- Renegade Legion: Caesar Ivanolo Buntari, even before becoming Caesar, completely annihilated an entire world, turning a beautiful garden world with billions of inhabitants into a smoldering cinder. Buntari seized power by using a nuclear weapon to kill the First Consul and most of the Senate; ordered the Legions to slaughter anyone protesting his coup; ordered the Legions to slaughter any of their own who refused to kill protestors; and decreed that women were property of their fathers or husbands.
- Scion: Seth Farrow is the second-in-command of a Scion band called the Shinsengumi. A son of the Egyptian god Set, Seth is a sadistic man who joined the band because its leader, Kane Taoka, promised he could live the high life and have many chances to indulge his sadism. He's one of the only band members who knows Kane is actually taking orders from the Titan Mikaboshi and is more than willing to kill the other band members if they ever find out and become a liability. When the Shinsengumi disbands after Kane's defeat, he pretends to profess loyalty to the Egyptian gods, but plans to either reunite with Kane if the latter ever reappears, or to sneak away and use his divine powers to create a personal kingdom where he can terrorize and murder anyone he wishes without fearing any consequences.
- Sentinels of the Multiverse: Spite originally started out as Jonathan "Maniac Jack" Donovan, a petty delinquent and minor member of the Wraith's street-level Rogues Gallery in Rook City. After getting stopped by the Wraith one too many times, Donovan became a Serial Killer, and after finding out the Wraith's secret identity, Donovan dropped her two best friends off a skyscraper in front of her. After finally being captured, Donovan avoided execution by agreeing to secret drug testing. When the drugs granted him Super-Strength and other abilities, Spite broke out of prison and went back to his murderous ways, while also using any drugs he could get his hands on to fuel his new addictions. Spite's villain card deck reflects all this by often forcing the players to make sadistic choices between saving victims or themselves, and his potential victims include a teenage wanna-be sidekick, an innocent priest in a soup kitchen, and a trusting little girl. Even the heroes deciding to just kill him this time didn't faze him; when the demon god Gloomweaver offered Spite a chance to be resurrected in exchange for killing lots and lots of people to spread enough fear and misery to allow Gloomweaver to be summoned to our reality, Spite saw it as a win-win sucker's bet where he got to live again—even though resurrection is normally a very unpleasant occurrence in this universe—in exchange for doing the mayhem he wanted to do anyway. While nowhere near as powerful as other beings in the universe, Spite is as bad as it gets for a street-level villain.
- Shadow of the Demon Lord's Tales of the Desolation: Xerras the Night Drinker is a vampire sealed away by his master. Upon being awoken by Father Mayhew's entourage, Xerras slaughtered all but Mayhew, who he used to spread his plague, the Dry Death, which painfully drains the moisture from victims and leaves them as Desiccated Ones, broken, dried out zombies for him to control. Attempting to massacre the town of Esker and make the people there his undead slaves, Xerras tortures Mayhew and turns him into an agonized mummy, intending to spread the Dry Death over the lands to dominate all he can.
- Silver Age Sentinels: Milo Rauchenberger was an ardent Nazi who took upon the moniker of the elemental villain Kreuzritter. Raising the nation of Thule with brutal attacks to conquer the world, Kreuzritter also experiments upon countless innocents to create new weapons and subjects people to agonizing pain to master his magic, also being responsible for a near eruption of Mt. Helena that might have obliterated vast swaths of the world if not for the heroine Lady Starbright's sacrifice. When his world crosses over with that of Champions's Millennium-Earth, Kreuzritter works with the wicked Dr. Destroyer to harness the Reality Storm, risking the destruction of both worlds while plotting to betray his erstwhile ally to achieve domination himself.
