When it comes to bad guys, some adventures just fall short.
We've all experienced it. Bad villains might be boring, irrelevant, 2-dimensional, or a variety of other negative buzzwords or anti-patterns.
On the other hand, good villains inspire oppositional heroism.
I've been ... slowly ... working on a new adventure for my Monstrarium game. I wanted to really focus on having a more memorable BBEG, and I started thinking about what makes villains memorable in movies, books, or popular adventures.
I think that good villains have good goals. And by good I mean horrible. And by horrible I mean the kind of thing that practically forces heroes into action.
This doesn't have to be from "depth" of evil - sacrificing children and raping schoolteachers and stuff might be a form of shock-method, but it gets old fast and is little more than a poorly-tasting trick.
Let's take a page from the Holy Book of Business Management and consider the acronym
SMART. Yea, that boring thing that comes up once a year (if we're lucky) during annual employment reviews. When properly used, goals motivate employees by providing confidence in future success.
I recognize that isn't how most employee reviews actually go, but let's fantasize for a minute.
SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Temporal.
Let's start with an amusing idea for a Monstrarium villain - a Weresnake - and see what happens.