Don't you people ever die?! A DMing thread

[Terex4]

Originally Posted by Julford Hajime

3. Any thoughts on this premise for a villain? Heroes futz around for the first gaming session or two before meeting the future-villain NPC, who is not at all future-villain seeming. NPC promises to hire adventurer party for money well beyond their normal amount of gold for that level, in exchange for escorting him to an artifact he's been 'researching'. Assuming party doesn't get greedy and runs off with it (This is a very real risk), he would then hire them once or twice more for increasingly more money to get increasingly more powerful items. After the second/third time doing such a quest, the NPC gives them their money, and tells them he no longer requires their services. Reveals true intentions, murders helpless orphans, blah blah blah, evil stuff. He does nothing to spurn the party, keeps true to his word, and when is all said and done has treated them very well and likely offers them a spot in his new world order. Hell, if they take it, campaign ends after a massacre or two, and I have the setting for villains in a future campaign

If you have proactive players, let them create the villain. The best example of this is my DM with his previous group rolled on the random encounter table and got Mage with Golem. The party was just starting out and he knew they couldn't handle such an encounter, so he improvised.

The encounter was a mage lying on the ground after a forced teleport by his associates with an inactive golem next to him. The mage was a red wizard of Thay who had fallen out with his peers as well as a master golem maker.

The party, seeing a red wizard and being the typical cutthroat players that they were, decided to steal all his stuff and throw him off a cliff. He survived the fall and started chasing the party. They found more of his stashes and continued to rob him. The party could have gotten rid of him by simply returning what they had stolen, but instead decided he needed to die.

Needless to say the villain pulled some seriously fucked up things on the party and they ultimately died to a lich they decided to rob to get magic items to kill the wizard.

Highlight of the game:
The party's sponsor was the mother of one of the members. While they were off plane, the wizard murdered her, reanimated her as a flesh golem, and married her becoming the owner of the adventuring company as a result.