Many Game Masters (myself included) would love to have a memorable villain that storms into your TTRPG campaign, delivers a dramatic moment, and leaves the status quo forever changed in their wake. The challenge is that a lot of players (also sometimes myself included) love to flip the script on a villain. Examples from my own GM experience include parties trying to blast the villain mid-monologue to get a surprise round or using Prestidigitation to make fart noises as the villain exits. 

These often opposing goals lead to YouTube videos with titles like “How do I make my DnD villains scary?” Us GMs don’t want our final boss to be clowned on, or become so generic that they get slapped with the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) label. Some experts suggest giving your villains unique game mechanics to set them apart, such as in the book Making Enemies. The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide takes a faster, simpler, and ultimately effective approach to building a baddie. 

The greatest villains all have some sort of iconic visual element to their character. Darth Vader has his red lightsaber and Bowser’s castle is always teeming with lava. Even the Joker, with all his many interpretations, has to have clown makeup. The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide presents this idea upfront in very straightforward terms. It’s a great introduction for beginner GMs who aren’t naturally inclined to think in terms of themes or imagery. 

The rest of the book unfolds in a similarly easy-to-grasp fashion. It dedicates a chapter to five different villain types commonly seen in our favorite movies, video games, books, and TV. These chapters come with Q&A exercises that help you create the type of minions, vices, doubts, vehicles, mentors, outfits, romances, and other eccentricities your villain has. Examples are also given from across the media spectrum and even real life so any GM should find something they understand. 

If you want to give your antagonist deeper layers, The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide has mini-games that you play alone to decide the details of their day-to-day. What is your wealthy villain’s creature comfort? In what unsettling way is your supernatural entity still tethered to the mortal realm? What promise did your crime boss make to a childhood friend? 

The answers to these questions could help the players ambush the villain at their most vulnerable moment. They could also be heavily guarded, creating an opportunity for a whole session dedicated to discovering them. And once the villain finds out the heroes were getting into their secrets? Well that’s a great excuse to up the stakes. The exercises in this book help your villain go from just another BBEG to memory maker. 

If you’re a writer or a storytelling-focused GM, this probably doesn’t sound like groundbreaking stuff to you. It’s villain 101 to give your antagonist a weakness for the heroes to discover. I do think that The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide is more geared towards beginners, or those who are more at home designing stat blocks than narratives. Although seasoned GMs can definitely find gems here. The quiz sections have great questions that force you to finely detail your occult rituals, contracts, and other non-combat interactions with your villains. 

My gaming group really enjoyed the last product in this series, The Ultimate RPG Worldbuilding Deck, for giving us tons of quest hooks in a single-session activity. The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide similarly gives me ways to develop my villains with just a brief skim. If you’re a Pro GM looking to up your game or a newbie writing their first campaign, it’s worth the $16. 

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4 out of 5 Stars

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A copy of The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide was provided by Adams Media for this review.

Sergio Solórzano is the best Dungeon Master in the USA (according to a Wizards of the Coast competition, anyway). He loves minis and terrain but also goes all-in on improv!