In order to figure out which Big Bad is the best for any Roleplaying Game, we must hold them all to the same standard. Otherwise, this very serious discussion lacks credibility.
Having said this, certain villains would be poor for the average fantasy adventure, but excellent for very specific game types or storylines.
The villain of Coco (spoilers incoming) would be a pitiful BBEG in a regular hack and slash. With a game more centred around roleplay, or a game where everyone is a travelling bard, this dastardly individual has some merit.
Seriously, this boss fight barely needs a guide. This fight is easy. And I don’t mean that in the way that a “git gud scrub” kind of gamer would tell you this fight is easy. It really is straightforward.
Even I could beat this first time every time. And not get hit. Not even once. Or ever actually feel in danger. And if I feel like that, it must be very simple.
Not every Disney movie has a Big Bad Evil Guy. I recently skipped Bolt (unless you count the pretend villain… or the lawyer) and I went right past Cars (that one car is a bit mean?). Of the movies that do have villains, not all of them are going to make good inspiration for the Big Bad in your Table Top RPG.
Lady Tremaine is not going to win this imagined contest. She might win last place though. She’s not taking on any adventurers with any amount of success. Even in a game where you play the talking mice…
With Father Gascoigne dispatched, you’ve got a few directions you can head in. You can save up and pay your way into the Cathedral Ward, to take on Vicar Amelia, or go further out to the Witch of Hemwick, but Old Yharnam is definitely my first optional area every playthrough. Good for blood stones and helpful unlocks after beating the boss.
The Blood-Starved Beast at the bottom of Old Yharnam is quite the contrast to the big and bulky Cleric Beast and to the focused fighting force of Father Gascoigne. He’s must more erratic, harder to read at first, comes with very different dangers, and above all else is much, much more gooey.
But like CB and FG, BSB can be beaten, without any major skill. I found this to be a messy fight no matter what I tried, but I could control the fight even with my ineptitude. And without realising the trick that makes the first half very easy.
Not every story makes for a great basis of Role-Playing Game. Some stories are surprisingly good. A Bug’s Life might not have as much combat as your average D&D campaign, but not closer: A plucky hero journeys through unknown lands to gain the aid of a bunch of performers to help save a group of farmers from the Big Bad Evil Guy and his army.
As soon as you imagine the circus troop as a bunch of bards – persuading and performing and sleight-of-handing their way around the villains, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. Hopper, the main villain in question, is superbly suited for the BBEG role.
“Rocks fall, everybody dies” is a common trope in table top games, which the Games Master can use to express joking (or in some cases, very serious) disdain or disapproval of their player’s behaviour. When the game has gone off the rails, the party is threatened with death by sudden squishing.
[Spoilers] In Brave, however, ‘rock fall, villain dies’ is more apt.
In most TTRPGs, ending a story arc with a boss that’s just a big bear might not result in the most thrilling conclusion. But Mor’du is a very big bear. A big, scary, rage-filled, super strong bear. So there’s something we can work with.
If it wasn’t for the ever-present danger, the rooms I’ve been making this week would be rather cosy.
In direct defiance of the idea that every room in an adventure should be a threat, I’ve gone completely the other way and made the first half of layer 3 entirely habitable. Sure, if the adventurers again the residence it could quickly become a bloodbath, but if they play their cards right, the heroes will have a rather nice spot to rest.
We made it. All the way to the end of the book, two years later. 98 Fantastic Beasts turned into D&D monsters.
Some have been unique, weird and wonderful monsters that were a challenge to convert, some were a new version of a pre-existing critter, sometimes less impressive because the description in the book lacks the outlandish abilities in the original’s stats. It’s a slight downer, that the last beast falls into the latter category, but the result is, I think, a different brute of a yeti from what Dungeons & Dragons already has.
I was recently looking at a friends Lego Harry Potter set when I observed the Lego Thestral and thought: “Have I missed a monster? I’m half a dozen Fantastic Beasts from completely D&D-ifying the whole book, but I don’t remember seeing the Thestral in it.”
The reason turned out to be that Thestral are a type of Winged Horse, and are mentioned in a single half-sentence. Which is an odd way round in my opinion; in a world of griffons and hippogriffs and dragons and pixies, choosing to define a creatures by the fact that they can fly and not by its ability to be invisible to anyone who has not had a specific trauma is more than slightly odd.
What this does also mean, as I round on the penultimate entry in Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them,that I actually need to create three different stat Blocks for the Winged Horse.
I’m not a fan of the Harry Potter werewolf. It’s far from the hottest of takes, but I’ve always had a particular expectation of what a werewolf should look like. American Werewolf in London, great look for a more wolf-like monster . Underworld, I didn’t like beefy muscle boys. My personal favourite werewolf movie will always be Dog Soldiers, which in my opinion has the best looking version.
Dog Soldiers (practical effects) Vs. Harry Potter (CGI)
The spindly, fleshy, CGI thing in Prisoner of Azkaban barely registered on my good-bad spectrum of werewolves. It’s definitely a monstrous thing, but it just isn’t lycan enough for my liking.
The lore of the Fantastic Beast werewolf does, however, do something I appreciate: it goes for the old-school ‘transforms only on a full moon’ version of the curse. If D&D, the werewolf has to change on a full moon, but they can also turn ‘shapechange’ whenever they feel like it. As curses go, most players would actually quite like to be bitten by a lycanthrope. The extra strengths and abilities quickly stifle the negative aspects of the curse.
So this monster conversion means that I can actually create a ‘true’ werewolf for your D&D game.
Gamer Peak 