Kim Possible: They all start to look alike after a while.
Every up-and-coming Supervillain aspires to create a particularly cool Supervillain Lair. It may be an Elaborate Underground Base, an old castle (preferably atop a craggy mountain peak in the middle of nowhere surrounded by a perpetual lightning storm), an underwater complex, an Evil Tower of Ominousness, a volcanic isle, a space station, a corporate office building, a BFC at the end of world 8 (in video games anyway) among other possibilities, but if you really want to be a cut above lesser villainous contemporaries you make it a floating fortress or an Airborne Aircraft Carrier.
It will generally be stocked with most or all of the following:
- A war room, equipped with trap doors for disposing of minions who displease the Big Bad.
- A throne room, if the Big Bad has delusions of royalty (or an actual title). Comes complete with throne for the villain to slouch in.
- A Wave-Motion Gun or other Weapon of Mass Destruction with which to bring about The End of the World as We Know It.
- Barracks for an army of Evil Minions.
- A Den of Iniquity for minions to unwind between assignments.
- Lavish quarters for The Dragon and the members of the Quirky Miniboss Squad.
- Roving security robots. For non-robotic ones, they use Angry Guard Dogs.
- Human-sized ventilation ducts that the heroes will eventually crawl around in.
- A vehicle hangar, possibly stocked with Humongous Mecha or a Cool Ship of some sort.
- A dungeon or prison for holding heroes, hostages, or test subjects (in the case of a Mad Scientist villain or minions).
- A beautiful daughter who is impatient at being cooped up in the Supervillain Lair.
- An Insecurity System featuring booby traps and laser hallways strewn about everywhere.
- A creepy design that resembles a skull, because skulls are evil!
- A Shark Pool, and at least one other suitable deathtrap such as a Lava Pit.
- Whatever transmission equipment is required to broadcast directly to the UN or to take over every TV set in the world.
- A Death Course.
- Lots and lots of Applied Phlebotinum.
- No OSHA Compliance.
- A Mad Scientist Laboratory for the Mad Scientist minions (Or the villain, if a Mad Scientist themselves).
- A monorail.
- A healthy dose of Sigil Spam, for the more megalomaniacal supervillains.
- And Mooks. Lots and lots of Mooks.
- A self destruct button just in case anyone breaches the lair, possibly rigged as a deadman switch keyed to the supervillain.
The more elaborate the digs, and the more time spent dwelling on them, the more likely that the heroes will end up paying them a visit and exposing some important architectural flaws. As such, all varieties of lair are extremely likely to be destroyed in spectacular fashion towards the end of the story.
Examples:
- In Black Cat, Creed, being a Classic Villain, has one of these.
- Bleach: Aizen's lair is Las Noches, a massive fortress in the middle of the desert. It is enormous and includes a great number of traps, minions, a war room, and a throne room. It is perfect for the villain who wants to keep "everything going according to plan."
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: The Infinity Castle serves as the base of operations for Kibutsuji Muzan and his Twelve Kizuki. Nakime's Blood Art allows her to shuffle the rooms (used defensively and offensively) and make entrances anywhere outside.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Dio Brando has a preference for mansions.
- Claw from Kimba the White Lion has Dead River.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The Garden of Time, Precia's base in the first season. Take a look
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- Mazinger Z: Dr. Hell had TWO: the island of Bardos, where he found the Mykene Humongous Mecha, and the (properly named) island of Hell, an islet near from Japan where he moved to in the second half of the series. His first base looked like a deserted island, covered with ancient, half-crumbled ruins, but his second fortress seemed less ordinary, featuring a mountain with four gigantic faces carved on the slopes. Nonetheless, both of them included the next features:
- an Elaborate Underground Base
- a throne room for Hell
- a war room to argue strategies
- quarters for his Co-Dragons
- barracks for his Mooks
- several hangars for his Cool Ships, Cool Airships and Humongous Mecha
- Insecurity System was absolutely useless to stop Mazinger Z
- transmision equipment to broadcast to every TV set in the world
- Hell's Mad Scientist Laboratory where he fabricated his weapons, mechas and cyborgs
- several training camps for his Robeasts and Mooks
- And in the original manga, his second fortress could transform into a Humongous Mecha. And in the Gosaku Ota episodes, he could launch it off to the space and blow it up (in case his enemies invaded his island and he could not win).
- Great Mazinger: since the villains were an subterranean empire, their base was Emperor of Darkness' palace, and it counted like an Elaborate Underground Base.
- UFO Robo Grendizer: The lair of the Vegan invaders was a Space Base set in the Moon. When the Emperor began his final offensive against Earth, he ordered blowing it up to show his troops they had only two choices left: conquering Earth or die.
- NERV's facility at Tokyo 3 in Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's debatable whether or not they're really evil, but they certainly enjoy looking the part.
- In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Lord Genome's city of Teppelin should easily qualify; the entire city structure IS the Giant Robot/Weapon of Mass Destruction!
- In All Fall Down, the Order of Despots has one, on the moon. It's seen in a flashback in chapter two and the heroes return there for the climax in chapter six.
- Batman:
- A story featured the debut of a realtor who specialized in finding properties for super-criminals. Abandoned Warehouses, Absurdly Spacious Sewers, rundown theme parks, you name it.
- Throughout his brief self-titled series in the 70s, the Joker worked out of his "Ha-Hacienda". It's not too clear whether it had a fixed location; at least one comic places it beneath Arkham Asylum.
- Judge Dredd:
- The headquarters of the Dark Judges is the Dark Hall of Justice/Hall of Injustice, an Alternate Universe counterpart of Mega-City One's Grand Hall of Justice. It used to be where they organized the omnicidal murges of their planet that left it devoid of life, but they occasionally go back to regroup since entering Dredd's dimension. Features a lot of Bizarchitecture, a nifty throne room, and a bone-littered courtyard marked by a memorial statue of Judge Death carrying out the last execution.
- In fact, the Dark Hall is simply Judge Death's personal lair. The other three Dark Judges are shown to have their own fortresses — Judge Fear for instance has a rather imposing-looking castle covered with Spikes of Villainy on the inside and outside.
- The Marvel Universe has the modestly named Castle Doom (in the city of Doomstadt, in Doctor Doom's home country of Latveria). The Red Skull, Superia, and Hydra seem to prefer elaborate bases hidden on seemingly deserted islands. The Kingpin, being a "legitimate businessman", has a penthouse in a New York skyscraper — with the floor directly below him packed full of lowlife goons. Doctor Demonicus raised an island from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Magneto had his own private asteroid base in orbit.
- Superman:
- Krypton No More, super-villain Radion has a secret base built on the slope of a mountain.
- In Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, Lex Luthor has a submarine mobile base, an abandoned warehouse, an underground lair, a satellite space base (the Injustice Gang's old HQ which he appropriated after their defeat)...
- Strangers at the Heart's Core: An alien criminal group called "The Visitors" have a secret underground base in the Catskill Mountains where they store their weapons and equipment.
- In the Supergirl/Batgirl crossover Escape from the Phantom Zone, Kryptonian mad scientist Xa-Du has a base in the Phantom Zone called Aethyropolis where he houses his troops, locks his prisoners up and performs horrible experiments. Built from ghost carbon, one of the few solid substances in the "twilight dimension", it looks like a pyramid-like bluish-grey castle surrounded by sharp spires.
- Death & the Family: After bursting out of her cocoon, Insect Queen quickly builds a huge, green hive around Metropolis General Hospital. The walls are indestructible, and the interior of the lair is a maze of narrow, dark and waterlogged winding corridors patrolled by giant, aggressive insects. On top of that, the hive is gradually growing and sprouting secondary hives.
- The Super-Revenge of Lex Luthor: When Lex Luthor returns to Earth, he heads towards one of his secret hideouts: an abandoned prison island where he keeps advanced weaponry, guarded by a stand-by crew.
- Wonder Woman:
- Volume 1: After Paula was arrested and handed over to the authorities she somehow managed to construct an entire elaborate lair complete with throne and all the torture devices a girl could want in the basement below her cell, which could be accessed through a hidden hatch in the cell itself.
- Volume 2: Circe had an elaborate home filled with her "pets" on her own island from which she ruled over a nearby island whose populace feared her powers. Her first meeting with Wonder Woman put a major kink in her way of operating.
- Child of the Storm:
- In the first book, it eventually turns out that Hydra's main fortress exists in a Pocket Dimension tied to Battersea power station in central London. Their ally Gravemoss, meanwhile, has his own personal lair hidden in the Catacombs of Paris (which is fitting, given what he is).
- The sequel Ghosts of the Past shows that the Red Room also has its main facility in Another Dimension. Specifically, the Nevernever, which gives them the advantage of time moving faster compared to the mortal world.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami features this repeatedly as the titular heroine uses her knowledge of modern innovation, coupled with magic and a heaping helping of "they will kill me" to design some awesome Magitek versions. These include a submarine base, several elaborate palaces, and an entire island system — that she conquered. She is notable in treating her minions well, however, and so lacks the usual flippancy with their lives. The lairs she constructs reflect this. In fact, she usually uses magical drone-golems in place of conventional troops. Many of the antagonists themselves have bases that they must have constructed in accordance to a villain's decoration guide, including — you guessed it — an island with a cave shaped like a skull.
- Entropy: The Fate of the Hero System: By the time of Kota's Hero Academia, the Fallen Heroes Alliance operates out of Yomi, a large, elaborate base built in the still somewhat radioactive remains of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant and taking advantage of the pre-existing buildings and infrastructure, plus the area being restricted, to hide in plain sight.
- Heroes for Earth: Originally a small mech vehicle in the first episode of the cartoon. This version of the mobile oil platform is equipped with a laboratory, opulent dining quarters, brig, galley and an army.
- Jewel of Darkness: Midnight has apparently inherited Slade's tastes in lairs, since the one she uses in the Jump City Arc is near-identical to the one he used in Season 1 of canon.
- Deconstructed in the Miraculous Ladybug fic Tax Evasion
. Gabriel is able to get acquitted of being Hawk Moth because of the biased nature of Ladybug's testimony. However, the construction of his evil lair off the books gives the prosecution grounds to go after him for tax evasion, leading to him getting fifteen years and a €500,000 fine.
- Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space: Journalist Buster Kincaid is delighted to find that the suspected Big Bad has an Elaborate Underground Base in Antarctica's Mount Terror — a volcano on Ross Island.
- Pony POV Series:
- Discord's castle(s) during his stints as Equestria's Evil Overlord, as seen in the Origins Arc and the Dark World Series.
- The Big Bad of the Shining Armor Arc, General-Admiral Makarov, is a Genre Savvy Large Ham Reality Warper, so as such has these (or at least creates them when necessary). The Final Battle between himself and Shining Armor ends up playing out in a fortress complete with Evil Tower of Ominousness, and filled with every evil gadget that Makarov can come up with.
- Queen of All Oni:
- Jade originally uses the Dark Hand's former penthouse headquarters as her base, but after realizing the captured Valmont will rat her out, abandons it fairly early on. Later, she relocates to Windsor Manor, subjugating the ghouls haunting the place into a security force as part of its conversion into her new lair.
- Lung lives in an ancient Chinese fortress perched on a crumbling seaside cliff, inhabited by a Mook army of terra-cotta soldiers, monsters, and death traps. Tarakudo finds it all very cliched.
- Steven Universe: Alternate Future: The Big Bad Black Rutile and her Legion of Doom make their headquarters on a former Gem colony called Revanche 666 that's also shaped like a skull. After Black Rutile's defeat, the colony is turned into a prison for Gem criminals.
- Worldwar: War of Equals: The 127th Emperor Hetto starship acts as the command hub for the Conquest Fleet and is Atvar's main base of operations.
- Dog Man (2025): Petey's Secret Hideout, which none of the heroes seem to find, despite being an abandoned building in the middle of town with a huge, illuminated sign that reads "Petey's Secret Hideout".
- The Incredibles 1: Syndrome has an absolutely fabulous lair, in a tropical paradise — Nomanisan Island — under a volcano. Complete with monorail, underground rocket launch site, underwater docks for the subplanes, and lava walls.
- The LEGO Movie's Lord Business is more than suitable for his Evil Tower of Ominousness, in which he rules over all the LEGO realms from, alongside where he also devises his plan to glue everything together. Complete with thunder and lightning, and a torturous Think Tank for Master Builders.
- Meet the Robinsons: Subverted. When the comically inept Bowler Hat Guy has captured Lewis and is telling him his motives for doing so, he mentions how he met the robotic hat Doris and how they retreated to "our villainous lair" to make their nefarious plans. Cue camera shot of the ridiculously cute kid-themed restaurant they actually went to.
- Pooh's Grand Adventure: While not belonging to a supervillain per se, the Skull — a Monster-Shaped Mountain roughly shaped like a giant cranium — serves this purpose for the primary antagonist, the Skullasaurus.
- Strange Magic: The Bog King's castle is the trunk of a tree, with a large (to him) skull for a front door.
- Spoofed to death in the Austin Powers series.
- "Welcome to my secret underground lair!"
- "Is it a hollowed-out volcano like I asked for?"
- "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to my submarine lair. It's long and hard and full of seamen!"
- Parodied in D.E.B.S., with Lucy's lair being something vaguely evil-looking. Then, after the film skewers the meetup dialogue (and Lucy's "evil" image), we find out that, despite all her high-tech gadgetry, the lair still has yet to be completed. This, of course, could be ue to Lucy's just having come back from Antarctica or wherever.
- Destro's under water base in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has everything a supervillain lair needs, including a Self-Destruct Mechanism.
- On the whole, Indiana Jones villains don't tend to have these. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, however, Mola Ram has the titular building: an underground temple that serves as the home base of his Thuggee cult. Hidden underneath an apparently innocuous palace, it serves as a place of worship and of ritual sacrifice, a mine to dig out gems to finance the cult, a barracks for his guards and for the slaves that do the digging... and a makeshift excavation site in which he digs for the mystical Sankara stones. And, of course, the temple overlooks a hot pit filled with lava.
- Not every James Bond villain has one, but most do. In chronological order:
- Dr. No: Dr. Julius No has an Island Base called Crab Key off the coasts of Jamaica with a port and a facility to operate his sabotaging of US rocket launches.
- Thunderball: SPECTRE has an underground meeting room in Paris for its "business" reports. Their main operative, Emilio Largo, has a special yacht, the Disco Volante.
- You Only Live Twice: Blofeld operates from a hidden elaborate volcano base in Japan to house and hide their space capsules-swallowing spacecraft. In the next film, he's moved to...
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service: A mountaintop retreat disguised as a clinic in the Swiss Alps. Followed by...
- Diamonds Are Forever: An oil rig in Baja California.
- Live and Let Die: Kananga has an underground lair below his poppy fields on the island of San Monique - though as its prime minister, the entire island is arguably his lair. His chain of restaurants in the United States that serve as a cover for the distribution of drugs also each come equipped with their own underground sections in which he and his henchmen can have meetings, hold prisoners, and store drugs.
- The Man with the Golden Gun: Scaramanga has an island off the coast of China that houses a plant storing and channeling a new form of solar energy. (It technically belongs to his employer, Thai billionaire Hai Fat... or did, until Scaramanga killed him).
- The Spy Who Loved Me: Stromberg has an underwater city where he plans to survive World War III after inciting it, only to then recreate civilization in his image.
- Moonraker: Hugo Drax has a plan similar to Stromberg's, but since his interests tend towards outer space rather than the deep seas, his lair is an orbital space station.
- For Your Eyes Only: Kristatos has a mountaintop monastery in Greece. It's noted that he and his former partner used to use the same location as a hideout from the Germans, when they were in the resistance during World War II.
- Octopussy: Kamal Khan has a mountaintop palace, befitting his status as exiled royalty. Unusually, one of the heroes has their own supervillain lair too: Octopussy's floating palace, from which she runs her sisterhood of smugglers, thieves, and other con artists.
- A View to a Kill: Max Zorin's is mobile: a dirigible.
- The Living Daylights: Brad Whitaker has a mansion in Tangiers. He keeps it full of samples of the modern weaponry he sells, which allow nasty surprises for anyone attempting to break in.
- Licence to Kill: Franz Sanchez doesn't really have one, other than a very nice house. However, his underling, televangelist Joe Butcher, has a large retreat that's the home base of his cult, and doubles as a production center for Sanchez's drugs.
- GoldenEye: Alec Trevalyan's is a heavily armored train built by the Soviets to transport nuclear warheads. Once Bond wrecks it, he moves to a former Soviet base and satellite control station in Cuba.
- Tomorrow Never Dies: Elliot Carver has a stealth ship, built for him by the rogue Chinese general he's in league with.
- The World Is Not Enough: Elektra King uses the Maiden's Tower, an actual island tower in Istanbul, as this.
- Die Another Day: Colonel Moon has a North Korean army bunker in the demilitarized zone, where his troops produce and test hovercraft to travel over the DMZ's minefields. After his "death" and reappearance as a British industrialist, he has a palace of ice in Iceland. After the palace is destroyed, he turns a North Korean airplane into his command and control center.
- Skyfall: Raoul Silva has an island city, which he personally turned into a ghost town by faking evidence of a toxic leak on the island so he could move in.
- Spectre: Franz Oberhauser a.k.a. Ernst Stavro Blofeld has a facility built into a meteor crater in the desert, which collects and processes the information from his global surveillance network.
- No Time to Die: Safin has an island off the coast of Russia, where his nanobot weapons are produced and programmed.
- Emporer Tod on the planet Spengo had about everything above in Mom and Dad Save the World.
- Star Wars:
- The Death Stars from A New Hope and Return of the Jedi contain most of the features on the above list.
- Rogue One shows that Darth Vader has one on Mustafar, complete with an Evil Tower of Ominousness and impressive view of the lava plains. It's an interesting choice of location given that he sustained most of his injuries that forced him to wear an armored suit in the first place on that planet. Presumably, it was his way of showing the planet did not conquer him, and a subtle dominance of Obi-Wan's line "I have the high ground".
- Although never shown onscreen in the films, according to supplementary material, Palpatine's Imperial Palace on Coruscant is... the old Jedi Temple. Makes perfect sense for a Sith, since it was built on top of an ancient site that was used by Force sensitives from both sides for their rituals.
- In the Angels of Music novella "The Mark of Kane", the Angels are tasked with infiltrating Kane's supervillain lair. Their employer (a, relatively speaking, heroic version of The Phantom of the Opera) reveals that he's been able to obtain the blueprints of Kane's lair by asking around the contacts he made in the lair-construction industry back when he built his own elaborate underground base beneath the Paris Opera House.
- The Big Four: The Big Four have Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings finally confront (three of) the Big Four in their massive lair in the Italian Alps. The lair is even blown up in the end, Dr. No style. The novel is, for good reason, considered the Oddball in the Series for Agatha Christie detective novels in general, and Hercule Poirot specifically.
- Dr. No: Unbuilt Trope. Dr. No has one, built on a tropical island for the sole reason of feeding his megalomania. The book makes a great deal of noise about the time and expenses involved, and Bond muses about the strange, surreal quality of the whole thing.
- The Monster Baru Cormorant: The Elided Keep is the low fantasy equivalent, a secret fortress used by the Throne, the Government Conspiracy that secretly rules the Imperial Republic of Falcrest. It features staff who are sworn to secrecy by blackmail, archives designed to self-destruct in case of attack so their enemies can't learn their secrets, a room full of disguises and falsified credentials so the cryptarchs can go anywhere, another room full of maps where the cryptarchs can simulate plans for world domination, and a throne room. It is, however, completely undefended — anyone who knows it exists should be too afraid of the political power wielded by the Throne to attack it.
- Pale Grey Dot has the Tower serve as this for Her and ESS. It even has Her residing deep in the space, trapped in a life support capsule, much like a vampire in her coffin.
- Erik's underground house on the lake in Gaston Leroux's classic The Phantom of the Opera is an example of this trope created before comic books gained popularity in the Western world. Located beneath the Palais Garnier, it features a wide variety of elaborate death traps, and even an entire torture chamber designed to force someone to hang themselves and/or drown any unfortunate victim to end up inside it. It also houses a cellar containing Erik's entire supply of gunpowder.
- Swellhead: The Bond-villain-esque antagonist has an elaborate underground lair on an island off the coast of Scotland. The characters lampshade the fact that he somehow managed to construct it without anyone noticing the vast amounts of time and money and material that should have involved (it turns out he created it out of thin air using magic).
- 12 Monkeys: Season 2 reveals the existence of Titan, a city-sized time travel machine which serves as the headquarters of the Army of the 12 Monkeys and personal lair of the Witness. Season 4 reveals that its true purpose is to serve as a Wave-Motion Gun powerful enough to destroy the world across every day of existence, creating a paradox so big that time totally collapses.
- The offices of Wolfram and Hart in Angel.
- In Babylon 5, the (adopted) Shadow homeworld at Z'ha'dum had most of the features of a Supervillain Lair.
- In The Big Bang Theory episode "The Ornithophobia Diffusion", Sheldon claims that if he had a working superweapon, he would be living in a Supervillain Lair on the proceeds of holding the world hostage.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- Season One: The collapsed church beneath the Hellmouth. Doubles as a Tailor-Made Prison, since the Master's really anxious to get out of there.
- Season Two: The factory for The Anointed One/Spike, and Crawford Street mansion for Angelus.
- Season Three: City Hall.
- Season Four: The Initiative.
- Season Five: Glory's apartment. Tough act to follow, those clandestine underground government labs.
- Season Six: Warren's basement. Erm...
- Season Seven: The vineyard. And eventually the Hellmouth itself.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Mads have cycled through various lairs for their Mad Scientist experiments in weaponizing awful movies, each more elaborate than the last. First there was the fairly mundane Gizmonic Institute, then Deep 13, then Castle Forrester, and finally Moon 13.
- Odd Squad:
- The comic book character Dr. Soup, from the Shmumberman comic series, has one. Once he is defeated, the factory worker, who is named "Hugo" following Soup's defeat, takes over the lair and vows to turn it into "a place of peace and justice".
- Odd Todd's lair, introduced in the Season 1 finale "O is Not For Over", looks more like an office space than anything else, since he rented out half the space to a team of web developers. According to him, his previous lair was much more dark and mysterious, but since it was too hard to read, he re-did it.
- In Season 2's "And Then They Were Puppies", the Puppy Master's lair is introduced. It looks like an observatory with a dog bone on top.
- In "Villains In Need Are Villains Indeed", it's revealed that Jamie Jam, Mr. Lightning and the Noisemaker have two lairs of their own: one on land, and one in the town lake. Of course, since the Noisemaker Cannot Keep a Secret, he manages to reveal both lairs' existences to Odd Squad, much to the chagrin of Jamie Jam and Mr. Lightning.
- The Total Zeroes, a villainous sibling duo debuting in Season 2, are shown to have a lair in "Total Zeroes". However, Sister Zero eventually becomes Drunk with Power enough to destroy it until she and her brother are stuck in a White Void Room with nothing left to zap, and it's unknown if she gets it back following her power upgrade to multiply things by 8 rather than 0.
- In the first part of the Season 2 finale, "Who is Agent Otis?", the villainous duck family that raised the eponymous agent is revealed to have a lair situated in a barn, which also served as their place of residence.
- Odd Squad: Mobile Unit: The Shadow's lair, first seen in "Odd Beginnings: Part 2", is a roomy warehouse that's able to house nearly all the villains in the world.
- In the early seasons of Power Rangers, the villains were frequently based on the moon. Other seasons/series have had the villains based in space stations, other-dimensional locations, submarines, caverns, island fortresses, the list goes on.
- Brilliantly parodied, along with the rest of James Bond, in the episode "Our Man Bashir" from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
- Star Trek: Voyager. The Fortress of Doom, Chaotica's lair in the holodeck program The Adventures of Captain Proton!.
- Pretty much every Super Sentai series has the villains based in an elaborate lair.
- Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman uses a seemingly standard spaceship called Vulgyre as the headquarters for Zone. It ultimately turns into a massive plot point when it turns out to not only be sentient, but the true leader of Zone who has been using their conquests to become the Galactic Super Beast. The members of Zone are quite disturbed by this, with Doldora having a Villainous Breakdown over it..
- In the finale of Choujin Sentai Jetman, Radiguet (in his Raguem form) used his base, the Vylock (a floating, brain-shaped ship) for a unique purpose — to turn it into extra armor for himself (so the Jetmen couldn't get him in his back wound); it worked for a while, but the Jet Garuda punched it off of him and destroyed it, leaving him vulnerable to the Jetmen's desperation attack, which he ultimately falls to.
- Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger features a rare aversion as the villains lack a proper base of operations in the beginning, at least until Wiserue converts an abandoned parking garage into a proper "war room" they can plot in.
- "Skullcrusher Mountain", by Jonathan Coulton, is set at one of these.
- Obviously a BIG part of 7TV from Crooked Dice. They even produce downloadable scenery for you to decorate the 'set' with. The rulebook includes rules for what happens when you lose a hand to hand while standing on an overhead gantry.
- The Dungeons & Dragons supplement Evil contains instructions for playing evil PCs, including details on the construction of an evil lair. These cover finding a remote location, dealing with local creatures and possibly making them your minions, the cost of constructing a lair underwater or inside a volcano, creating magic traps and guardians, building escape routes... pretty much a short handbook for this trope from a Genre Savvy villain's point of view.
- Magic: The Gathering: The plane of Rath, a parasitic plane connected to Dominaria, has as its centerpiece a stronghold that looks like nothing so much as an inverted mountain. From within its vast structure, the evincars of Rath have plotted for their Phyrexian masters to conquer Dominaria in the name of Yawgmoth. While the Stronghold doesn't have one or two of the above list, it notably subverts at least one of them, with giant bugs roaming the air ducts and an apparently bottomless pit despite it having defined dimensions.
- Parodied relentlessly in Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? by Cheapass Games (formerly known as James Ernest's Totally Renamed Spy Game, formerly known as "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond").
- In Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective, every location is a villain lair for a member of V.I.L.E., with the main hub a lair for Carmen herself.
- Chrono Trigger:
- Yakra's lair is hidden deep inside Magnolia Cathedral, and is guarded by fiends disguised as nuns (and later as the people you're there to rescue).
- The Reptites (sentient dinosaurs) have the Reptite Lair and Tyranno Lair. The former is underground, with passage secured by waiting for beetle enemies to dig holes to the next level, while the latter is surrounded by volcanoes but looks more like a medieval castle (65,000,600 years before the Middle Ages, mind you).
- Magus' castle is a classic Evil Overlord's castle on an island accessible only behind a hidden cave in a mountain range, complete with giant dragon statue on top and uses psychological warfare like fake save points, undead minions who beg to be killed, Creepy Children, and monsters disguised as trusted figures in your characters' life (the latter two don't even do anything to you until you find the first boss). It gets taken over by the Quirky Miniboss Squad later, but with far fewer traps and more Boss-Arena Idiocy.
- The Ocean Palace is a monstrosity of a building that reaches from the ocean's surface all the way down to the planet's core. Once Queen Zeal is beaten the first time, it takes to the skies as the Black Omen, a huge flying fortress that... just floats in one place for a few thousand years. You can actually visit it in three different eras, and fight Queen Zeal again up to three times until it disappears for good.
- At the center of the City of Villains, Lord Recluse spins his web of schemes within his futuristic fortress in Grandville, the capital of his island nation. And that's just the main base — each of his lieutenants has their own customized base (Ghost Widow has an Evil Tower of Ominousness, Dr. Aeon has a futuristic city...), and dozens of smaller Arachnos bases are dotted in all the territory they control. Player villains can join a Super Group and construct a base of their own.
- The Island of Claymodo in Clayfighter 63⅓, home of the Mad Scientist Dr. Kiln.
- In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, after assassinating Allied Supreme Commander Bingham Premier Cherdenko decides that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness and launches attacks at you from his Secret Volcano Base.
- Similarly, his opposite President Ackerman has a superweapon hidden in Mount Rushmore, decimating each of the Presidents' as he activates it.
- Don't forget the Temple of Nod/Temple Prime in the Tiberian series. Sure, they typically get blasted by the Ion Cannon, but that was Kane's plan all along. They have two purposes; to be used by his soldiers and sacrificed when the benefit is greater than that use.
- Confidential Mission's third stage is set in the Island Stronghold of the terrorist group Agares. Spotlights and radar dishes give the place a suitably foreboding atmosphere from the outside. Your characters infiltrate the base through an overly elaborate, tube based transport system, before finding the hidden submarine pen where the final encounter takes place.
- The fifteenth and last stage of ESWAT takes the player into one, with the message "WORLD CONQUEST" unsubtly flashing over a map of the world.
- Evil Genius (2004): As the resident supervillain, you get to build a lair — twice — get the money, minions and henchmen you need to defeat the Super Spies, and successfully Take Over the World — all done in a cheesy 1960s-style way.
- Fallout has several:
- Fallout 1 has the Master's lair, a prototype Vault built under a Creepy Cathedral, and Mariposa Military Base much further north.
- Fallout 2 has the Enclave's oil rig.
- Fallout 3 has Raven Rock in the main game, Haven in The Pitt, Adams Air Force Base in Broken Steel, and the Underground Lab in Point Lookout.
- Fallout: New Vegas has the Lucky 38 Casino, Caesar's Fort, and the Legate's Camp (base game), the Think Tank and Forbidden Zone (Old World Blues), and Ulysses' Temple (Lonesome Road).
- Fallout 4: the Institute fills this niche in the main game, with the Nucleus in Far Harbor, the Fizztop Grille in Nuka-World, and the Mechanist's Lair in Automatron.
- Impossible Mission, by Epyx.
- In the Kingdom Hearts series, Organization XIII has had not one, but 2 castles surrounded by perpetual lightning so far.
- It should be noted that their names are "Castle Oblivion" and "The Castle That Never Was". And if a Disney world has a villain, he'll have his lair...
- In Mass Effect 2, Shepard and Liara go to the lair of the Shadow Broker in the DLC... The Lair of the Shadow Broker. The lair is a massive spaceship hiding in a perpetual thunderstorm on a remote planet.
- Mass Effect 3 has Cerberus's hidden space station. After three games of dealing with the group through holograms or separate organization cells, we finally get to see the Illusive Man's own lair — and it is as suave, devilish, and reprehensible as the man himself.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda: Bring Liam along to the first visit to the Collective's secret base in the Kadara Wastelands, which is hidden inside a cave occupied by giant, hungry creatures, and he'll remark "that's some supervillain lair shit right there." Given this is where a secret criminal group is operating out of (and by all indications, not their only base), he's got a point.
- Medal of Honor has the V2 Rocket Base in the first game, Fort Schmerzen in that game and Allied Assault, and the Gotha facility in Frontline.
- Mega Man (Classic): Every game has at least one new evil fortress for Wily, three have separate evil lairs for the Disc-One Final Boss, some of Wily's fortresses are in space, and once he even has a skull-themed Death Star. And, generally speaking, all of them possess at least two robotic defenders designed to try to stop Mega Man from making it to Wily. Also worth noting is that nearly every fortress built by Wily has a single old-fashioned curved pipe on the side as a Running Gag. Once you notice it, you can't unsee it.
- Outer Heaven in Metal Gear is a mercenary facility where the titular Humongous Mecha is being built.
- In the highly acclaimed "Dreamcatcher" custom module for the original Neverwinter Nights, the following exchange dialogue option occurs between the player and a kobold minion, in a secret lair on the ocean floor:
[PC]: Why is it that villains always go for the underwater secret base?
Krunk the Kobold: Krunk doesn't know, but he did have a previous master who had a secret volcano base. The sulfur hurt Krunk's sinuses. - Lampshaded and/or subverted in No One Lives Forever 2. In one sequence you come upon two guards discussing the needlessly elaborate evil lair. One guard explains that while it would be far more convenient and cost-effective to lease office space, then potential clients wouldn't think that the organization is evil enough for high-profile jobs. As proof, he cites a vastly inferior evil organization pulling in many important jobs simply because they had a top-rate design firm redesign their secret base.
- The various mainline Pokémon games have had underground lairs, volcano lairs, underwater lairs, and even lairs in the middle of busy cities. And most or all of them have bizarre security systems, teleporters, and massive banks of computers. Electric eyes are used in the old ninja hideout.
- The White Star in both Super Robot Wars: Original Generation and Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2.
- This trope was explicitly mentioned to be the inspiration behind the maps of Team Fortress 2. Seemingly innocuous buildings (farmhouses, industrial complexes, warehouses, etc.) hide areas full of computers, rocket launchpads or giant lasers.
- Despite being the Trope Namer for Science-Related Memetic Disorder, A Miracle of Science only has one truly straight example. It's a really impressive example, though.
- Bob and George: Bob's
is the purest supervillain lair, but Wiley, Mynd and others do it, too.
- This map
from Casey and Andy pretty much sums it up.
- Girl Genius: Castle Heterodyne, and, for that matter, Mechanicsburg as a whole, it being the town of Igors. An enormous, ancient and sentient castle, with its cavernous halls and wavy passages filled with Death Traps, and more than slightly whacked in what it has as a head, it certainly qualifies. Somewhat subverted in that for at least two generations, including the most recent, Heterodynes were the heroes, but their castle is much, much, much older. Castle Wulfenbach and other Sparks' lairs are on the book too. Pretty much unsurprisingly, the comic being about Mad Scientists.
- In the print-novel version of the story, it's commented at one point that Klaus Wulfenbach actively encourages his fellow Sparks to build these, since every minute they spend on construction is one less they're unleashing Mad Science on the surrounding countryside.
- Narbonic, being a webcomic about Mad Scientists, naturally has several of these... some more impressive than others. When we're first introduced to Helen Narbon she's plotting to Take Over the World from a rented office above a dentist's surgery, and her sometime-rival Lupin Madblood has built one in his mother's basement. But hey, everyone's got to start somewhere, right? They both eventually move into much more impressive digs later on.
- Tony's lairs in Real Life Comics vary quite a bit, but are usually grandiose — from a missile silo to a space station to a giant underground facility which puts Cheyenne Mountain to shame. He'd have had a volcano lair, but his bid was declined for some reason or another.
- Deviant: The Degenerates, a gang of human traffickers, live in a seedy bar-esque hideout in the sewers.
- The Dark Overlords from the serial Dimension Heroes each live in a different type of scary lair, from a fortress to a castle to a palace to a citadel.
- Reddit has r/evilbuildings
, a place for sharing buildings that look sinister enough to be supervillain lairs.
- In Samurai Shodown: Warriors Rage, the Razor Trio (consisting of Oboro, Mikoto, and Tohma Kuki) live and work inside the Tengen Castle in Riten-kyo.
- Veldron of Super Stories has a labyrinth inside a floating island.
- Villain Source
(Your Online Source For Everything Evil) has a number of supervillain lairs for sale, ranging from skull-engraved volcano islands to inflatable castles for the supervillain on a budget (not any supervillain we'd care to hang out with). Naturally each lair comes with its own obvious, accessible Self-Destruct Mechanism.
- While technically not a supervillain, Eva in Void Domain uses an abandoned prison to fulfill a similar function. Several demons infest the place under her supervision.
- In the Whateley Universe, you can order your own Supervillain Lair from a website. There are ones listed for sale or rent, there are Supervillain Lair timeshares on the island of Karedonia (which is run by a supervillain), there is everything you could want, down to 'Evil lair human resources specialists to keep your henchmen happy'.
- In the first chapter of Ayla 8, side team The Vindicators invade an evil lair in a holographic simulation for training, and get their asses kicked. The person playing supervillain turns out to be Ayla herself, as part of her classwork for the same course.
- Later in the same story, Team Kimba does a sim run where they infiltrate a Supervillain Lair based on the lair of Crucible, an actual Whateleyverse supervillain, complete with Crucible himself at the end. Fortunately for TK, Phase had heard about the actual lair the sim was based on from a classmate a couple of weeks before, and was able to provide valuable intel, so they were able to beat the sim pretty handily, even though the difficulty had been jacked up.
- Mephisto the Mystic mentions
that in the 1960s he went into Covert Construction, serving both fellow supervillains and various villainous spy organizationsnote .
- One of the Wilkins clan, Steff, specializes in designing custom lairs, and has a secret showroom where she demonstrates a few of the special features she offers.
- In the first 'Silver Ghost' story, it is explained the local crime bosses have prepared lairs which they rent out to supervillains temporarily when doing jobs in town.
- Actively invoked in Worm, both by Coil's under-city bunker and later Taylor's bug filled lair.
- Spoofed in American Dad!'s James Bond parody episode "Tearjerker", where the titular villain's lair and vehicles all have some sort of major defectnote . Tearjerker (played by Roger) keeps blaming it on the lousy contractor. This even proves to be his undoing, as his Escape Pod craps out while he's over a volcano.
- In Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Dr. Weird has his lair and laboratory somewhere on the South Jersey Shore (in what was apparently once Belle Isle Asylum). In the first Dr. Weird short, his Rabbot escapes by smashing through a wall; this flaw causes him problems later, as his inventions sometimes escape or are stolen from his "IMPENETRABLE FORTRESS!".
- While it rarely dwelt very long on any of them, nearly every supervillain to appear on Birdman (1967) had a snazzy lair of some kind. Mountains and personal islands were the most popular, but the sky was the limit, and more than one bad guy took up residence there.
- In Carmen Sandiego, the Academy of Evil run by V.I.L.E., which also serves as their headquarters, is located somewhere in the Canary Islands. When they're forced to abandon and destroy this base in the Season 2 finale, due to fears of being discovered by ACME, they open Season 3 by relocating to a castle in Scotland.
- Evil Con Carne: Hector Con Carne has the personal island variant of the lair on an island called Bunny Island, so called because Hector's lair is shaped like a bunny.
- Invader Zim plans his conquest of Earth from an Elaborate Underground Base beneath his house, with a backup base in the form of a Space Station he occasionally uses. His one-time rival, Tak, operated out of an Evil Tower of Ominousness disguised as the skyscraper headquarters of a hot dog company.
- Kim Possible has a lot of fun with this one.
- Most notable, in one episode Dr. Drakken builds a lair in the "World's Largest Cheese Wheel"; which, we are reminded several times, is not a cheese-covered building, but is in fact 100 percent Wisconsin swiss.
- Then, of course, there's Señor Senior Sr., who only became a villain after Ron pointed out that his home was already half way to being a lair.
- Other fun includes a timeshare lair that Drakken shares with his rival (on a lot holding a number of them) and an imposing lair built in the middle of a suburb, both in Kim's hometown.
- Phineas and Ferb has the headquarters of "Doofenschmirtz Evil Incorporated!", with its own jingle as well!
- Mojo Jojo's observatory in The Powerpuff Girls is set atop a volcano, which makes it appear as an Evil Tower of Ominousness.
- Megabyte's Silicon Tor, Hexadecimal's Lair and Daemon's Master Clock from ReBoot.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM): Dr. Robotnik's Robotropolis is pretty much a Supervillain Lair the size of an entire city.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! has the Citadel of Bone, Skeleton King's personal fortress and ship.
- All the Big Bads in Teen Titans (2003) have lairs, as do some of the less big baddies. Of note is Brother Blood, who keeps a tally on how many secret lairs Cyborg owes him. And Slade, whose lairs are always underground, always dark, and always have some theme.
- Several examples from The Venture Bros., most of them subverted. None of the other characters can tell what the Monarch's flying cocoon is supposed to be (it's mistaken for a giant pine cone more than once) and prior to Season 3, it was parked in the Grand Canyon where anyone could see it. Phantom Limb had a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired base he called "the lair of the phantom", but it was located in a gated suburban community for supervillains.

