Monsters and Villains with D&D's Mike Mearls

Monsters and villains are essential to any D&D adventure. Your adversaries can define you, surprise your party, they put a face to an adventure or to what has been holding you back. Mike Mearls has an unusual favorite monster he likes to include in all his campaigns and some of his best aren’t defined by design, but rather what players made of them.

Mike: I get asked this question a lot, and my answer's always, the ogre mage. I love ogre magi, which, I even call them Oni in the fifth edition, because it's a big, brutal monster that can cast spells. So you get the best of both worlds; it can fight well, and it can plot and scheme, and it's a shape changer, and when it doubt it can always cast Cone of Cold and ruin people. So that to me is a fun monster, 'cause it can do a little bit of everything.

Mike: But the thing is, Oni/ogre mages are still ... they're not like a top tier monster that people think of, so it's still a surprise. Like, I have used ogre mages in almost every campaign I've run the past five or 10 years, and it still always surprises people when the halfling turns out to be an ogre mage, right? "Oh, I didn't see that coming." For whatever reason, these guys, even though they've been in the game since the 70's, people always forget about them. So it's fun, right? Like, it's super classic, and people forget about it 'cause they're kind of in the background, and they have a really fun kit to play with as a Dungeon Master, and making them a villain.

Mike: A villain has to have an interesting personality, right? The villain who is just sitting in the back, lobbing fireballs at you, that's really boring. I like villains that have personality and style, or that have an interesting backstory to them that player wanna delve into, that makes them hate them. One of my most enjoyable villains to play was a dwarf assassin that I had in a campaign a few years ago. And what made him fun was, he was outrageously lucky. Now, I say outrageously lucky not in the sense I just decided, "He's lucky," it was more like, no, whenever ... I would roll my dice out in the open, and it was always crit, natural 20 right? Like this guy just had ridiculous luck, and the players hated him.

Mike: My current campaign, there is an evil albino elf the players are dealing with, and he has not said like a single word to them. They have seen him once; he was on this weird crystal swan boat, and they saw him off shore, and he conjured a bunch of sea creatures to eat them. And that was at first level. They have not seen him since, and they hate the guy. They want to kill him so badly, because they keep running into people that he sent after them, or that are connected to him. He has never said a word, they've learned very little about him other than his name, and they know he's plotting to destroy the city they live in, they don't even know why. He's conjuring this massive chaos storm to devour it. And they hate the guy, and it's great. It was like the easiest thing to do in a campaign, and I barely put any work into him, and the players just, oh, they hate this guy. They wanna stick it to him.