Villainous Cookbook: The Eternal Host

Howdy! I've been looking forward to writing this article a lot. My ideas started to take form back in September of 2019, and since then I've been teasing it outside of the blog every now and then. While I don't plan to make a write-up of each tier, this time I'm making an exception—instead of one villain, I'm going to give you multiple. Well, there's technically plenty of each of these, so they're less of a villain, and more of a nation. I'll also include some of the lore derived from the game mechanics used, so that should be fun.

Before I begin the article itself, I should make a warning. This might be broken. Like, very broken. But then again, I like to see where the limits of a villain are, so that's why I'm doing this. There will be people who will dislike this, and say that there's no chance that a group of players could defeat these. I'll say that such person underestimates the players' ingenuity and that this isn't a villain they're meant to take down over the course of one game session, or five. I won't sugarcoat this for you by giving you suggestions on how the players could defeat them. If you want to make up an applied phlebotinum that makes this nation go extinct, go right ahead. Anyway, my point is: Use this villainous group at your own risk.

Another warning—keep in mind that these are supposed to be villains. I don't condone of their practices, they're literally supposed to be the baddies for players and others to fight against.

The Eternal Host

Of Cain awoke all that woful breed, 
Etins and elves and evil-spirits
— Beowulf (modern English translation), translated by Frances B. Grummere

"We are not here to end the world. We are here to end your world, and to begin a new era."
Elven Army, by JasonTN

The Eternal Host is an elven nation that's aggressively taking over the world with great numbers, expertise in fighting, and ability to never truly perish. Let's start it all with some theory regarding elven biology, and metabiology.

According to the Player's Handbook, the elves are considered mature when they reach the age of 100 years. Though, let's see what it actually says:

Although elves reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, the elven understanding of adulthood goes beyond physical growth to encompass worldly experience.

In other words, the elves don't need to be 100 to be considered mature. They are very capable of reproducing at the age of 20.

So here's another question: How many babies could a pair of elves make during their lifetime? This will be hard to judge because there are at least two unknown variables. How long does an elven pregnancy last, and what's the age when an elf is unable to bear children. Since the answers for the first question that I find online are rather unsurprisingly inconsistent, I'll choose a rounded, generous duration of five years to be a default gap between two children being born. As for the age, at which the elves are unable to bear children, I will say that there is no such age for them. Assuming that their physiology is similar to the human one depending on their age, we can use the page 39 quote from Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes for the reference:

Even the oldest elves look similar in age to a human of perhaps 30 years.

Assuming that each elven woman would live up to the ripe old age of 750 years, and start having children every 5 years starting at the age of 20, this means that they'd be able to have about 147 children. And that... is per single elven couple. While the number does ignore twins, triplets, and so on, it also ignores miscarriages, so I'll call that even and move on. What's more, this number can be boosted further by introducing a biological anomaly. If we toy with the ratio of men to women in this elven nation, we could multiply this number enormously. Let's say that for every man in this nation, there are 20 women. Needless to say, they're too numerous.

There's a canonical reply I've received a couple of times to this. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes says supposedly that there is a limited number of elven souls. First of all, I am not doing this for DMs who will try to argue with me that this shouldn't be possible. A nice saying I've heard for this is, that "If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse." But still, I'll fancy the idea, because I figured there could be players who bring this up. Time for the metabiology! Let's begin by addressing the parts this claim is made up of:

1. The elf requires an elven soul. (This fact is not explicit, it's implied.)
2. There's a limited amount of elven souls.
3. The elven soul is distinct from a regular mortal soul.

The biggest flaw within this line of thoughts lies in the spell reincarnate. Suppose that a non-elf is reincarnated into an elven body. Question is: Do they now have an elven soul? There's a couple of possibilities:

• Their soul is unchanged. Which means that the part number 1 is contradicted, their elven body doesn't require a non-elven soul.
• Their soul is transformed into an elven one. This means that elven souls can be created (and possibly destroyed if an elf reincarnating into a non-elven body would have their soul transformed too). And thus, there could be theoretically unlimited number of elven souls created, contradicting the 2nd part.
• Or maybe... there is no such thing as an "elven soul". A contradiction to the third part states that everyone's soul is just the same, and that's what I would personally choose to believe.

Finally, before we get to the subraces, maybe we could figure out what subraces to use. Honestly, it doesn't matter too much, all of them are pretty cool. I would personally go with the wood elves, but anything can work, maybe with exception of the drow because Sunlight Sensitivity would likely suck for a nation that tries to take over the world. Understandably, you could also mix-and-match them as you see fit.

Alright! Now that that's sorted out, let's check out some social roles! Once more, this time I'll just give them to you at level 20 each described briefly, because otherwise this article would take me years to write. And I would prefer to publish this before the 6th edition could be announced. I should also add that these are not a complete list, you can come up with roles of your own as you see fitting.

Resolute Gunner

• Barbarian 14: Path of the Cannoneer (Caim's homebrew)
• Fighter 3: Champion (Player's Handbook)
• Warlock 1: Gray Portrait (Genuine Fantasy Press)

Starting with Fighter, we get Action Surge, letting the Gunner take two actions in one turn once per short rest. We also get Second Wind, an ability that lets us heal a little, and Improved Critical chance of 10% instead of 5%.

Path of the Cannoneer grants us a weapon that can shoot projectiles which deal 4d8 damage, 4d12 if we modify the cannon (which we will, and for free), though you don't add your ability score modifier to either of these. While we can only shoot this cannon once regardless of how many attacks we can make as part of any action, bonus action, or reaction, we also get the unique ability to use it as a weapon for clobbering enemies. In melee range, it's a heavy two-handed weapon that deals 1d12 damage. I would recommend picking up the Sharpshooter feat for a range of 600 feet with no disadvantage on attacks, ignoring half and three quarters covers, and then some stuff.

Finally, the Gray Portrait warlock gives us a painting that can be used to resurrect our fallen soldier for free. Think of this as a way to back them up. Awesome!

But what weapon will they wield? Well...

Eldritch Minigun

• Warlock 2: Banished Gunsmith (Genuine Fantasy Press)
• Sorcerer 18: Seer Bloodline (Caim's homebrew)

Through the Banished Gunsmith, our warlock is transformed into a weapon that can be wielded by others. While they lose plenty of stuff, they also gain some benefits from it. I should note that as part of the sorcerer levels, you should probably pick the Eldritch Adept invocation, and we'll bend a rule here by picking up the Bloody Bayonet invocation, without fulfilling its prerequisites. While we could do well without it, I wanted to merge the Eldritch Minigun build with the Resolute Gunner. If you wish to though, you could in theory also have the Eldritch Minigun serve someone else. The other invocations we should choose are Agonizing Blast, and Eldritch Spear for extra damage and massive range.

The Bloody Bayonet invocation lets us transform the weapon that this warlock is into any other melee weapon. Well... time to bend another rule. How about a ranged weapon that could be used as a melee weapon? Like say, … a cannon? Now it sounds fun.

Sidenote: The Banished Gunsmith is capable of controlling the body of its wielder even after it's reduced to 0 hit points. Which is just awesome. But it only lasts as long as the wielder keeps failing Wisdom saves against the warlock's spell save DC. The wielder's Wisdom score could probably be dumped to allow this, but it doesn't have to be this way.

We invest 18 levels into sorcerer for three big reasons. One: With the metamagics, we can double the range, so we could burn many sorcery points in order to achieve that. Two: Feats. Besides Eldritch Adept, we should get Spell Sniper, which lets us double the range passively to whopping 1200 feet (assuming we're using the Distant Spell metamagic too). Three: The capstone of the Seer Bloodline. While I could describe it with words, I'll just paste it here for you all to see, it's something lovely.

Change the Future
Starting at 18th level, you can grasp the future you wish for, even if you suffer for it. Whenever you finish a long rest, note the location. If you die, your corpse and any memory of you since that long rest vanish as if you were never there. Any illogical outcomes of your actions since that long rest are rationalized. For example, if you damaged a creature before you died, the creature rationalizes that another creature damaged it instead. You then appear at the location where you finished your last long rest, alive and in the state you were when you finished the rest.
Once you use this feature, you can't use it again for 7 days.

This is a psychological warfare on a whole another level. Sure the miniguns will be useless for several days afterwards, but hey it's a sacrifice I am willing to make.

Bonus points if you give each of these Illusionist's Bracers, letting them cast the same cantrip they did with action as a bonus action, doubling the number of blasts they can make.

Alright, you might be thinking that we got the shooters in the back sorted out. What about the front-liners though? I'm glad you've asked!

The Bjornsworn

• Barbarian 18: Totem Warrior (Player's Handbook)
• Warlock 2: Gray Portrait (Genuine Fantasy Press)

I couldn't resist calling it this, and judging by the name you probably already know what's coming. Bear totem at level 3 of the barbarian gives the Bjornsworn resistance to all damage types, with the exception of psychic. It also makes for a pretty good front-liner generally. The only improvement I could come up with for it is giving it some levels of Gray Portrait warlock for yet another soldier unit that's backed up after death as a painting, and also some invocations that you can go hog-wild with. I feel like you could go even deeper into the warlock, but this felt like a good balance to me.

While a lot more boring description-wise, similar role could be accomplished by a 20th level Atavist who chooses the Bloodied Aspect. Their preservation could be achieved by cutting off their pinky finger, keeping it in a jar somewhere, and casting gentle repose on it once every 10 days. Even if the rest of their body would be destroyed, they could regenerate from this pinky finger since it's their body part. The reason I'm making this a side-note instead of its own build is because it doesn't really need any changes. One thing I should point out besides the pinky finger trick is the fact, that this one gets to automatically kill humanoids who have 25 hit points or less, provided you've rended to its damage. Which is just hardcore if you ask me.

Primal Cleanser

• Druid 20: Circle of the Land (Player's Handbook)

While this unit is less of a battlefield soldier, it's a simple enough build to include here if you wish to make the elven army more threatening. A level 20 druid can cast spells even while wildshaped, requiring no components save for the costly ones. In order to make it work though, we'll need to do another little cheat. Here's a custom table of Circle of the Land spells for a new environment, the "eternia". Basically, it's a biome heavily influenced by magic to last forever. Think Hallownest from Hollow Knight. I should maybe write an article on that in the future, sounds like a fun topic.

Druid Level	Circle Spells
2nd	continual flame, Nystul's magic aura
3rd	glyph of warding, major image
4th	fabricate, Mordenkainen's private sanctum
5th	hallow, teleportation circle

Key component for us here being Mordenkainen's private sanctum. This spell can be cast over the course of 10 minutes with no costly components over and over, becoming permanent after being cast in the same place for a year., though it must be cast with the same effects. What effects are possible? Well...

• Sound can't pass through the barrier at the edge of the warded area.
• The barrier of the warded area appears dark and foggy, preventing vision (including darkvision) through it.
• Sensors created by divination spells can't appear inside the protected area or pass through the barrier at its perimeter.
• Creatures in the area can't be targeted by divination spells.
• Nothing can teleport into or out of the warded area.
• Planar travel is blocked within the warded area.

So what does this mean? It means that you could have a plague of wild shaped druids, looking like normal animals just chilling in a place or flying around a spot for 10 minutes at a time, turning the world slowly but surely into a massive private sanctum of sorts. Disabling teleportation, disabling planar travel, possibly divination spells too. Others could be used at your own discretion.

How much land can a single one of these druids cover in a day? A level 20 druid has three 4th level, three 5th level, two 6th level, two 7th level, one 8th level, and one 9th level spell slots for a day. Add to this their ability to recharge two 5th level spell slots, and we have... a lot of spell slots. When cast at 4th level, Mordenkainen's private sanctum encompasses a 100 ft. cube. This cube's side increases by 100 feet with every spell slot level above 4th, which is wild if you ask me, but also fine by me. Instead of figuring out how could one honeycomb a space indefinitely using cubes of these sizes, I'll just abstract it into a big rectangle. This rectangle would be 600 ft. high (since that's the highest of these cubes), and at a base roughly 970 by 970 feet. This is how much area could a single druid sanctum-ify in a year by going over it every day and casting the spell over and over. This process would take them 2 hours and 20 minutes, plus 1 extra hour for a short rest to recharge the 5th level spell slots. For the context, this area is roughly 1.6 times bigger than the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

And that's a single druid. Even if any elf who isn't a Cleanser themselves would have just one sibling who is, there would be 21.6 thousand of them three generations in. This many of them would cover more than half of the area of Rhode Island in a year. Let's also not forget the fact that they age 10 times slower, so assuming they'd reach level 18 at 100 years, they could still live on for 6500 more years. Which also means they'd have more children, but I really don't feel like redoing all the calculations by this point, so I'll leave the implications up to your imagination. And that's just a tip of the iceberg that shows what's possible with them.

Elven Caretaker

• Cleric 18: Arcana domain (Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide)
• Warlock 2: Currency Conspiracy (Genuine Fantasy Press)

With the Arcana domain, the clerics get the best of both worlds—supportive spells for helping out their buddies, but also some super strong wizard spells. Like clone that lets them preserve themselves. Or wish that lets them cast any spell for free once. Or the one we'll focus a bit of our attention on: Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion. Heavens bless Mordenkainen for all his wonderful gifts to the elfkind, as well as the rest of the humanity.

With a single cast of this spell, you can create an extradimensional space that contains, and I have to quote this,

[…] sufficient food to serve a nine course banquet for up to 100 people. […]

Assuming that an average human could survive on three courses a day, this means one mansion could in theory feed 300 people. Even if every average elven couple had only one Caretaker child out of their whole family of 147 (not including parents), this would be more than enough to feed them. Hey, even if one out of 50 elves would be a Caretaker, if you're a pedant thinking that the spell's intent is to feed only 100 people and never more.

With the clone spell, you could have the cleric make a backup of themselves in case of troubles. After they die, assuming the clone had enough time to develop, they come back to life without any issues.

And with the wish, you could cast literally any spell you want as long as it's of 8th level or lower for free! You want simulacrum? How about yet another Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion? Or maybe you want to help one of those few unfortunate ones who don't get to revive for free with a resurrection spell? Or you could possibly make a demiplane in which the time flies twice as fast as outside, letting the elves train there faster. Any of that and so much more is all possible.

You might be skeptical now. You only get one wish a day, and yet here I am talking about spells with costly components. How do we deal with that? Do the Caretakers go to the battlefield and murder tons of people? As you might have guessed if you know me, Currency Conspiracy comes to help us. They use gilt for their expensive spells. If you think that they'll need to breed a ton of rats to murder every day in order to make 1000 gold pieces required for an average resurrection though, you might be missing a more important point of the feature. Let me highlight it for you:

Also, whenever you reduce a Small or larger creature to 0 hit points using a cantrip or a spell cast using a warlock spell slot or when a creature swears a binding oath of loyalty to you, you can choose to capture a fraction of their soul, granting you an amount of Gilt equal to the creature’s hit point maximum.

Guess what do we have here on our hands? Millions of trained warriors, with plenty of hit points, who are free to swear loyalty to the Caretakers. They would literally have more money than they could spend in their lives. Nothing about the oath says that a creature can swear it only to one creature at a time either. If you want to juice even more money out of it, give them the Tough feat for extra hit points to their maximum, and thus extra money.

Why do we have two levels of warlock? For invocations. Invocations are fun, so once again you are free to customize the Caretakers as you see fit.

Queen of Shadows

• Sorcerer 19+: Imperial Birthright (CaelReader homebrew)
• Warlock 1: Currency Conspiracy (Genuine Fantasy Press)
• The allmage spell (MeowMagic)

Yes, this build is so frightening that I will break my own naming conventions for it.

Currency Conspiracy is for the same reason as with the Caretakers, infinite potential money. The 19 levels of sorcerer are there to provide you with metamagic, and plenty of features flavorfully fitting a ruler of the people.

There are two more details though. One of these is usage of the sequester spell to preserve these queens eternally, for the time of dire need. The other one is the spell allmage that's cast upon her. The spell is cast upon an elected Queen by three Caretakers, who could possibly be accompanied by paladins and/or artificers who will assist them in preventing permanent loss of their spell slots. Let's face it though—even if they lost the spell slots, another Caretaker could possibly help them get their spell slots back.

After the ritual, the Queen possesses the ability to cast all spells, ability to cast unlimited amount of spells of 3rd level or lower, and gains an additional spell slot of every level above 5th. Such power however comes at a cost. This ritual creates a dead magic zone within a 1 mile radius.

"Beneath the Eternal Host's own land
Myriad of shadowed queens still stand
Time passes not for them, they await their calls
Their time shall come once the Eternal Host falls."

As far as I can track, the art was made by a former DeviantArt user named Exellero. While their account seems to be removed, I found one named that on ArtStation that seems somewhat similar.

The Society of Host

There are two major castes within the society: Warriors who go out into the wilderness to take over more territories and gather resources, and Guardians who stay in the kingdom in order to take care of the young, train those who haven't reached age of 100, and to defend the homeland. All of the men and the Queen are considered to be Guardians by default, and other roles are all determined on an individual basis, with large majority of the population consisting of Warriors.

When an elf is born, they spend first year of their life being taken care of by their parents, as well as the Guardians. After the first year, they continue to be raised by the Guardians, with the parents possibly visiting them every 5 years if they're Warriors. Once a child reaches the age of 20 and the coming of age ceremony comes, they begin their training as one of the above-listed social roles, or another unmentioned role (at your own discretion). Since a human could in theory achieve the maximum level within their lifetime, it's reasonable to assume that the elves with proper training, which is passed down the generations, would be capable of achieving the same. Understandably, this training would also come with an unhealthy dose of brainwashing, in order to keep the cycle intact.

Once they reach the age of 100, they start to fulfill their social role. The Warrior leaves their homeland in order to conquer the new lands, the Guardian raises the next generations and keeps everyone fed, the Cleanser begins to alter the world, and the Queen determines what should be conquered next. A Warrior is required to come back to the Homeland once every 5 years in order to give birth to and raise another child, safe from their conquering duties for one year.

One of the major buildings within the lands of the Eternal Host is the resurrectionist gallery. Thousands of paintings are stored within these, as the Caretakers look after them, checking regularly to see which soldiers have died so that they could bring them back to life using their Gray Portrait. What means exactly do they use to tell whether an owner of a Gray Portrait is dead is unknown to all but the Caretakers and the Queen, in order to keep it a secret from those that would wish to endanger the Host.

Every 10 years, one newborn girl is chosen to be raised as a Queen of Shadows. The crowning ceremony is performed when such woman reaches the age of 100. As part of this ceremony, the previous Queen of Shadows has her solar and pit fiend hand cut off, only to be regenerated by a Caretaker. She is afterwards sequestered, awakened only when the Queen that's being crowned falls, or when the kingdom of Eternal Host is invaded by an outside force. After being sequestered, the spell allmage is cast upon the next Queen, using the former Queen's hands and weapons as spell components and continuing the cycle. It is said that the kingdom hides thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Queens of Shadow, sequestered in some safe hidden place.

While a niche thing that doesn't have to apply to everyone, if I did something akin to this, I would create a new plane of existence for them that they could conquer over time in order to avoid running out of space too quickly. A personal favorite would be a fourth layer of Arcadia. Since the third layer of Arcadia is gone by now, it would add further mystery to these elves, giving them their very own corner of the multiverse that they have conquered, and work on conquering at all times.

Be thankful that the elves are usually peaceful and keep to their forests. And if they don't… fear them.
Elves, by Veli Nyström

And there we have it! After what felt like forever, my article is finished. I would like to thank Genuine Believer for inspiring me with his works, parts of which were present in almost all installments of the Villainous Cookbook, as well as to all other homebrewers and readers who supported me while working on this project. It was an honor. I really hope you've all enjoyed it, and I wish you all a wonderful day!

Villainous Cookbook: The Psycho Killer

Howdy! I'm afraid this is one of my last articles when it comes to the villainous cookbook series. I can't make promises of more than one article in the future, but if I'll ever get more good ideas, I'm going to make sure to write it out here.

As for some other plans, my work on the foundations of Runehack's worldbuilding is nearly done, and I'm working out some interesting cities to describe. I've also been working on my own RPG for one of the Runehack's cities, and on getting back into DMing (yes, I'm still burned out). Honestly, depending on how much time and energy I'll have these next few weeks and what I'll feel like writing, the next article could be anything: my final planned villain, first of the Runehack's cities, a more finalized first version of the Runehack's RPG, possibly a theoretical article on non-violent RPGs, or an article on something completely unexpected.

But until that's going to happen, I really hope you will enjoy this next villain. Their focus is more towards efficient murder, but their aim is to do so with little to no trace.

Preface

• My goal is to make an interesting villain using the player options found in the official and homebrew rules of D&D 5th edition.
• The goal is not to make a villain who deals the highest amount of damage. This is not the right place for that discussion.
• I will leave some details out to let the DMs adjust the villain to their preferences. Ability scores are one of them.
• To emulate character development, I will only make character builds at levels 4, 10, 16, and 20. Players should be at best equal to the villain's tier, optimally at a lower tier.
• Limitations breed creativity. But I will bend the rules if it makes the villain more interesting.
• If it seems overpowered, it could be because of rulebending (see the point above), or because I'm mixing homebrews that were not balanced with each other in mind.

Let's get to the article itself!

The Psycho Killer

"If you’re gonna be two-faced at least make one of them pretty."

― Marilyn Monroe

"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."

― William Shakespeare

Who would have thought, it's surprisingly difficult to find images of soulknife-wielding betrayers online, so I guess for this article I'm going with general pics about betrayal.
Love and War, by a user named qissus. (No link, because the original deviantart account has been deactivated)

Ingredients List

• Faceless race (Travelers' Homebrew)
• Rogue 17: Soulknife (Tasha's Cauldron of Everything)
  
• Warlock 3: Ashen Choker (Travelers' Homebrew)

Tier 1

Psycho Killer is a rather simple build that relies on killing people without leaving a trace. According to a video published by DnDBeyond, that's possible with the soulknife rogue, and while they're not Wizards of the Coast, I'll take their word for it and roll with it.

We'll begin this build with 3 levels of rogue, and 1 level of warlock for a good start. While the psionic abilities themselves are useful for the build, I don't want to bloat this article, so I'll focus only on the essentials to keep this short. Just know that if the killer needs to use psionic dice, they're a d6, increasing by one step in each Tier (up to d12 in Tier 4), and they have a number of these psionic dice equal to two times their proficiency bonus.

Psychic Blades
(3rd-level Soulknife feature)
You can manifest your psionic power as shimmering blades of psychic energy. Whenever you take the Attack action, you can manifest a psychic blade from your free hand and make the attack with that blade. This magic blade is a simple melee weapon with the finesse and thrown properties. It has a normal range of 60 feet and no long range, and on a hit, it deals psychic damage equal to 1d6 plus the ability modifier you used for the attack roll. The blade vanishes immediately after it hits or misses its target, and it leaves no mark on its target if it deals damage.
After you attack with the blade, you can make a melee or ranged weapon attack with a second psychic blade as a bonus action on the same turn, provided your other hand is free to create it. The damage die of this bonus attack is 1d4, instead of 1d6.

Cursed Gift of the Choker
(1st-level Ashen Choker feature)
At 1st level, fire and ashes are easier to control as you feel slight pressure around your neck. After you deal fire damage to a creature with a warlock spell of 1st level or higher, you can force the target creature to make a Constitution saving throw against your warlock spell save DC. On failure, its throat is burned and it can't speak or use Verbal component to cast spells. On success, it's immune to this effect for 24 hours. The burned throat lasts until the creature regains HP in some way, for example by using healing magic or by resting.

These, along with the shapeshifting and hex spell give us a foundation for our build. Fire-themed cantrips are optional, but not necessary since the Ashen Choker's gift requires a spell slot to work. We don't have everything we need just yet. As usual, right now we assume our villain to be still training, someplace in the background.

Tier 2

In order to make this work, we'll get the elements we need by investing 6 more levels into rogue.

Soul Blades
(9th-level Soulknife feature)
Your Psychic Blades are now an expression of your psi-suffused soul, giving you these powers that use your Psionic Energy dice:

[...] 

Psychic Teleportation. As a bonus action, you manifest one of your Psychic Blades, expend one Psionic Energy die and roll it, and throw the blade at an unoccupied space you can see, up to a number of feet away equal to 10 times the number rolled. You then teleport to that space, and the blade vanishes.

This time I'm making an exception and including the feats in the Tier descriptions since they're vital to making this build work. We should begin with the Metamagic Adept and Mark of the Perfect Chord feats. With the metamagic feat, I would recommend choosing Subtle Spell and Quickened Spell metamagics, but you can swap them for others if you feel like it.

Metamagic Adept
Prerequisites: Spellcasting or Pact Magic feature
You've learned how to exert your will on your spells to alter how they function:

• You learn two Metamagic options of your choice from the sorcerer class. You can use only one Metamagic option on a spell when you cast it, unless the option says otherwise. Whenever you reach a level that grants the Ability Score Improvement feature, you can replace one of these Metamagic options with another one from the sorcerer class.
• You gain 2 sorcery points to spend on Metamagic (these points are added to any sorcery points you have from another source but can be used only on Metamagic). You regain all spent sorcery points when you finish a long rest.

Mark of the Perfect Chord
You are blessed by the eternal song of the Perfect Chord, for it has marked your soul. You gain the following benefits:

• Whenever you cast a spell, you can choose a 5-foot cube within 30 feet of you. Until the start of your next turn, the area within that cube is magically silenced.
• You can cast shatter once without expending a spell slot. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for this spell. You can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

That's about it for Tier 2, at this point we have someone who's quite capable of murdering. But... we can do better than this.

Tier 3

Let's give them 6 more levels of rogue, which puts them at 15 levels of rogue and 1 level of warlock. Besides boosting their Sneak Attack damage, it also gives them space for two more feats. Mark of the Ashen Wolf and Elemental Adept feats will finally get the build right where we wanted it to be. Finally, an extra ability that will prove to be very useful is Psychic Veil.

Psychic Veil
(13th-level Soulknife feature)
You can weave a veil of psychic static to mask yourself. As an action, you can magically become invisible, along with anything you are wearing or carrying, for 1 hour or until you dismiss this effect (no action required). This invisibility ends early immediately after you deal damage to a creature or you force a creature to make a saving throw.
Once you use this feature, you can't do so again until you finish a long rest, unless you expend a Psionic Energy die to use this feature again.

Mark of the Ashen Wolf
You have been scarred by the power of the Ashen Wolf, and its fiery might burns within your soul. You gain the following benefits:

• Whenever you cast a spell that deals damage, you can choose to have it deal fire damage instead of the normal type.
• You can cast hunter's pace* once as a 2nd-level spell without expending a spell slot. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for this spell. You can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

Elemental Adept
Prerequisites: Spellcasting or Pact Magic feature
When you gain this feat, choose one of the following damage types: acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder.
Spells you cast ignore resistance to damage of the chosen type. In addition, when you roll damage for a spell you cast that deals damage of that type, you can treat any 1 on a damage die as a 2.
You can select this feat multiple times. Each time you do so, you must choose a different damage types.

All of this goes right into the strategy this killer follows during their kills. They begin by casting hex on their target subtly, choosing Wisdom as a score that is affected by the hex in order to make them more susceptible to the killer. With the Mark of the Perfect Chord, they can also choose to magically silence the space the target occupies. They approach, shapeshifted into someone who is familiar to the target. Upon striking with their psionic blades (optimally from the back so that the target can't say anything about the murder even if they were asked through a speak with dead spell or similar), the target takes extra damage from hex, damage of which is changed through the Mark of the Ashen Wolf into fire. Due to this, the Gift of the Ashen Choker activates, causing the target to make a Constitution saving throw. If they fail, they won't be able to speak until healed some way. Whether they're alive or unconscious, the assassin makes one extra attack with a bonus action, either to help the target fall unconscious, or to give them some failed death saves (assuming you track those).

If the target is unconscious at the start of the next round, the killer can turn invisible with their action, and with bonus action get a head start by teleporting away in the easiest way possible. If they're not unconscious yet, repeat the first round, maybe replacing the off-hand attack with a teleport.

Tier 4

Now the Killer only gets some extras that will help them out in doing their job. Their final levels are rogue 17 and warlock 3. Recommended spell choice would be earthbind, and possibly suggestion (plus one extra of your choice). Recommended invocations are Devil's Sight for seeing in the dark, and one other invocation of your choice. Final feat is Mark of the Storm Lord, most important bit of that being that after casting a spell as an action, you get the benefits of the Dash action, as well as 1/SR feather fall cast. Finally, there's a treat to top the cake off, the final psionic ability that could make the murder even easier.

Rend Mind
(17th-level Soulknife feature)
You can sweep your Psychic Blades directly through a creature's mind. When you use your Psychic Blades to deal Sneak Attack damage to a creature, you can force that target to make a Wisdom saving throw (DC equal to 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Dexterity modifier). If the save fails, the target is stunned for 1 minute. The stunned target can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success.
Once you use this feature, you can't do so again until you finish a long rest, unless you expend three Psionic Energy dice to use it again.

That's everything we could wish for when it comes to the assassin. They can get in, they can make their way to the target, and disappear just as quickly. No wounds besides some burn marks inside of the throat are visible, and the crime is already pinned on someone else who's now extremely suspicious, even more so once the corpse is interrogated with magic.

Leave No Trace

If you think that's not good enough because they leave behind a corpse and could be revived, I can offer you a brief alternative: Black Flame Zealot. While most of the features of this subclass I don't find quite as appealing, there's one that stands out at 3rd level that I would wholeheartedly swap out for the telepathy: Burnt Offerings. Here's the feature, with some small changes I would personally make to it to make it fit the subclass:

Burnt Offerings
(3rd-level feature)
Starting at 3rd level, any creature killed by your flaming psychic blades turns to black ashes before it hits the ground. A suitable offering to your hungry god.

Consider the motivations of your assassin. Are they taking slow steps towards taking power over the lands, or to tactically get someone to move up in their ranks? Can they be hired, or do they kill only those who they perceive as unjust, or wrong in another way? How would they react when approached by a party of investigators? How are they when off-duty? Do they leave any clues to their identity behind, or is the burnt throat good enough?

Or you could do it the old fashioned way and leave the body behind. Like I said, only a small scorch mark inside of the throat would be a clue. No pools of blood
Gwent - Assassination, by Ala Kapustka

Well, this was difficult to write, but at the very least it's out! It feels so far like the most underwhelming of the villains, which is part of why I plan to end the series soon. Like I've said in the second of these articles, I've set the bar for myself too high and I can't really fulfill it every time. May the Psycho Killer serve you well, and I'm looking forward to writing the final installment of the Villainous Cookbook! In the meantime, whenever you read this or think of it, have a nice day!

Villainous Cookbook: The Truth Bringer

Howdy! I've decided that maybe I should write out the Villainous Cookbook in a bit more professional format, and I might rework some of my previous villains to work in this sort of framework too if possible. Instead of just talking about the features that they will feature, I think it might be better to list them out here for the context so that the DM doesn't need to look through multiple PDFs to know what the villain can actually do.

In this installment, we're going to create a character specialized in following the breadcrumbs of truth that the party leaves behind, putting them together, and presenting them to the public. Nothing should stop the truth, not even the death itself.

Preface

• My goal is to make an interesting villain using the player options found in the official and homebrew rules of D&D 5th edition.
• The goal is not to make a villain who deals the highest amount of damage. This is not the right place for that discussion.
• I will leave some details out to let the DMs adjust the villain to their preferences. Ability scores are one of them.
• To emulate character development, I will only make character builds at levels 4, 10, 16, and 20. Players should be at best equal to the villain's tier, optimally at a lower tier.
• Limitations breed creativity. But I will bend the rules if it makes the villain more interesting.
• If it seems overpowered, it could be because of rulebending (see the point above), or because I'm mixing homebrews that were not balanced with each other in mind.

Let's get to the article itself!

The Truth Bringer

"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

― George Orwell

"Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you."

― Stephanie Klein

When the slander is your job, you could use a mask. And a way of coming back too while at it.
Faeries, by Taras Susak

Ingredients List

• Autumn Sylvicine race (Genuine Fantasy Press)
• Cleric 17: Secrets Domain (Yorviing's Homebrew)
  
• Druid 2: Circle of the Cloud (Manual of the Ancient Internet)
• Warlock 1: Gray Portrait (CoFS:A)

Tier 1

The Truth Bringer is a rather simple one to pull off. In Tier 1, we take 2 levels of druid, 1 level of warlock, and 1 level of cleric. With this, our character is already capable of "back-ups" that let them overcome death with little to no troubles. I'd personally give them an Acolyte background, or a different one that grants them free services.

Bound to the Portrait
(1st-level Gray Portrait feature)
At 1st level, you create and magically bind yourself to your Gray Portrait. The Gray Portrait is a Small or Medium object that weighs at least 15 pounds, has AC 15, hit points equal to four times your warlock level, resistance to all damage, and uses your statistics for saving throws. It can be repaired at a rate of 1 hit point per minute. You can choose to see through the Portrait’s eyes at any time and are always aware of its current state. If your portrait is destroyed, you tirelessly construct another during your next long rest, and you gain no benefit from that long rest.
If a spell has the sole effect of restoring you to life, such as revivify, the caster can cast the spell on the portrait as though it were your whole corpse without using material components, causing you to step forth from your portrait. However, if your portrait is destroyed and you are dead, you can’t be revived without the use of the wish spell.
You can use your action to cure yourself of any effect that is causing you to be poisoned, diseased, cursed, blinded, or deafened, sending the affliction to appear on your portrait. You can’t do this if it is destroyed.

Backed Up
(2nd-level Circle of the Cloud feature)
Also at 2nd level, if you are restored to life (but not undeath) by a spell such as raise dead, all of the equipment that you were wearing, carrying and holding at the moment of your death is teleported onto your person, to the exact same places where they were at the moment of your death.

With this combination of features, the bringer can be revived for free, even being brought back with all of their equipment. With the free services provided by the temple that they serve, say... the temple of your preferred god of truth, this means that they can be revived any number of times, as long as there's a priest capable of reviving who lives there, and they got a spell slot for the revival. Determining whether they're alive or in need of revival could be told possibly by the portrait itself, or some homebrew common magical item.

As a sylvicine, they gain the benefits of Fey Ancestry, which translates to an advantage on saving throws against being charmed, as well as the Candor.

Candor. You can choose to tell the truth even when an effect, spell, or other mental compulsion would cause you to speak a lie.

This curious ability allows them to spread the actual unaltered truth, regardless of the magic and effects that they're affected by. After checking with Genuine though, he said that this doesn't work when the target is affected by modify memory spell, and believes what they're saying is true. That's a shame, so let's hope their memories won't get overwritten in the future.

A small extra worth mentioning is the knowledge of Druidic language, as well as Anonymous feature: a Wild Shape alteration that lets the bringer take on a form of someone they have seen within last month, mostly for investigation purposes but also possibly for benefiting from their racial boons.

Anonymous
(2nd-level Circle of the Cloud feature)
Starting at 2nd level, you can use your action while you're not underground or indoors to expend a use of your Wild Shape feature and take on the appearance of another humanoid that you've seen within the last month as per the alter self spell. You gain a number of temporary hit points equal to two times your druid level, and all of the racial benefits of the target short of the ability score increases.
You can choose to envelop your equipment in illusory magic, altering it to fit your new form. Any such piece of illusory equipment holds up to physical inspection, provides no new mechanical benefits, and disappears if it is more than 5 feet away from you at the end of your turn.
Finally, if the creature you've transformed into is alive, it must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw. On a failure, you know the distance to and direction of this creature while transformed, unless it is on another plane of existence.
These benefits last until you lose all of the temporary hit points, until you use your Wild Shape again, or for a number of hours equal to half your druid level (rounded down).

I'm gonna skip the other details for now because the gist of this build isn't so important that I must mention them. However, do make sure to get Insight and Perception proficiencies one way or another.

As usual, in this phase the bringer is in the background, gathering details and training. No need to even bring them up in the game itself.

Tier 2

Seven levels of cleric get us several spells, as well as the Channel Divinity: Uncover and Clandestine Casting features. Uncover is rather useful for finding out stuff about the people who the bringer is interacting with at the moment, and Clandestine Casting is awesome for 

Channel Divinity: Uncover
(2nd-level Secrets Domain feature)
At 2nd level, you can use your Channel Divinity as an action to uncover one's deepest secrets. One creature of your choice that you can see within 30 feet of you must make a Charisma saving throw. A creature immune to being charmed automatically succeeds on its save. On a failed save, you magically learn one fact or secret about the target, choosing one of the following:

• Something that angers it.
• Something that frightens it.
• The target's greatest desire.
• The GM provides you with one secret about the target, or one that the target knows, related to a recent event that looms large in your mind.

Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, the creature is unaware of your attempt to unveil one of its secrets. Once you learn one of the creature's secrets, or if the creature succeeds in its initial saving throw against this effect, you can't use this feature on that creature again until you finish a long rest.

Clandestine Casting
(6th-level Secrets Domain feature)
By 6th level, your skills in subtlety have advanced such that even your magic can be done in secret. When you cast a spell, you can use your bonus action to attempt to pass the casting off unnoticed. Make a Dexterity (Stealth) check opposed by the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature that can see or hear you. A creature can use its reaction to instead oppose your check with its own Wisdom (Perception) check. Each creature you succeed against doesn't notice you performing the spell's components. If you are hidden from a creature and succeed against it, you remain hidden from it after casting the spell.

Not much else to say here other than spells, and I'd like to skip those for now.

Tier 3

Divine Intervention, and adding Wisdom modifier to cantrips' damage. Both of these are neat, but I won't bother you with details here, let's get to something more exciting.

Tier 4

We reach the capstone by hitting the 17th level of cleric. And let me tell you, this would make the truth bringer quite a foe for a party that would try to seek it or hide from it.

Sub Rosa
(17-th level Secrets Domain feature)
By 17th level, nothing is hidden from you, and you have mastered the art of secrecy. You gain truesight out to a range of 30 feet, and your thoughts can't be read by telepathy or other means, unless you allow it. You also can't be targeted by divination magic, perceived through magical scrying sensors, or detected by abilities that can sense creatures.

So in a nutshell, we get immunity to mind-reading, divination magic, ... and a 30 ft. range truesight. Well then, isn't that lovely! Truesight is actually something that's extremely useful for someone who seeks truths, and the rest is just perks from the job.

Spells, Feats, and the One Weakness

When it comes to the spells, what you're looking for are tools that make you better at finding information, spreading it, and avoiding conflict.

• Information gathering is easily done with detect magic, detect thoughts, zone of truth, suggestion, speak with dead, legend lore, commune, locate object and locate creature, tongues, hex, and possibly more.
• Spreading the information can be done with sending, skywrite, message, enthrall, and more.
• Avoid the conflict using spells like misty step or dimension door for escape, or calm emotions or sanctuary for stopping the attackers.

Some of these spells are not on the cleric's spell list, or level 1 druid/warlock spells, so you could make up other ways of getting them. Most importantly, though, remember that the bringer is here not to fight. They're here to find the truth, and to spread it.

How about the feats? Ritual Caster would be nice since the bringer has plenty of time for research. Observant is amazing for raising your passive Perception/Investigation through the roof, and so is Skill Expert. Some of the eldritch invocations like Eyes of the Rune Keeper or Beast Speech could be useful, so Eldritch Adept is on the table. Keen Mind could be a nice flavorful thing to have, while Linguist could be something that I'd even give out for free (after all, maybe they're learning languages during all that traveling they're doing while tracking their targets and searching for the dirt to dig up). For the last thing on our list, we might want to pick up one of the psionic feats from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, but that depends on whether you want to get rid of their biggest weakness.

The Truth Bringer is rather good at searching for the facts and sharing them. But what if they are manipulated into remaining silent? What if their memories get changed? It might be a good idea to find some way to make them immune against being charmed. While you could make up a homebrew item, there's an official one that could work. Greater Silver Sword (found in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, page 89) requires attunement by a person with psionics. While they hold the sword, they gain immunity against being charmed, as well as advantage on all Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saving throws. A little extra on top is a resistance to psychic damage. Then there's something with cutting silver cords and instakilling others, but let that be a surprise for the player who gains the sword later. For the purposes of just keeping this villain sensible, I'd say that it's fine if they keep the sword in its sheath and just hold its handle to gain the benefits, interrogations while pointing the blade at a person wouldn't come off as exactly friendly. Of course, this whole step is up to you. After all, maybe you do want your players to find out about this one weak spot that the villain has.

To Reveal the Facts

One of the people whom I secretly consider my GM mentors has taught me an important lesson. You see, the world of your game doesn't have to exist only when you're running it. It can develop and evolve on its own, even outside of players' sight. This is exactly what the truth bringer needs in order to function properly.

The truth bringer is someone who's ordered to find a target, and spread truthful rumors of their wrongdoings. Whether it's a measly group of adventurers, a priest of opposing faith, a revolutionary group, an inventor who wants to change the world for the better, an artist who's nasty to others, or even a king himself, this person will search for any clues as to what bad things they could have done, and announce them publicly to everyone, possibly even while pretending to be that person if they wish to go that far.

One of the first things you should consider when involving the truth bringer in your world is: When and where do they start with their search? They'll try their best to follow the players' footsteps, learning about them more information and filtering it to paint the worst picture of them wherever they go. Consider how fast they could be. Surely they could afford a mount of some kind if the players have one. When they lose track of the players, maybe they could use one of their information-gathering spells to seek them. Along the way, they'll seed the nasty facts about the party, thus turning the people there against the players if they ever decide to come back.

Why are they doing this? Is it their faith telling them that truth is the only way and that people should be punished for sins they do not apologize for? Does their religious order pick their targets, their deity, or do they choose one themselves? What would it take for the bringer to stop following the players? Death doesn't stop them, quite contrary—if the players dare to kill the truth bringer while they're surrounded by people, this will only prove them right and paint the players as bad people who kill people they find unpleasant.

Chances are that the truth bringer isn't all that interested in moral justice either. Maybe they just have someone who's an actual enemy of the party who wished to smear their name by a professional.
Gleaming Regalia, by Iain McCaig

I hope you've enjoyed this installment of the Villainous Cookbook, I've had a lot of fun formulating it over the months and it was nice to see the concept evolve over time. I wish you a nice day!

Villainous Cookbook: The Dreamfiend Master

Howdy! Cults are a big part of D&D's lore, which is why I've tried my hand at making an ideal cult leader in the fantasy context for today's article. It's actually one of the earlier concepts for villains, conceived roughly around the same time as the Superb Exemplar. One big thing that I wanted to wait with this one for, though, was Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, an exciting new sourcebook you've surely heard of. I don't really use it too much in this build in particular, but one never knows how much stuff can be found in it. I can tell already that TCE has created at least two of my next builds, and changed up some stuff too. Let's see where this build goes!

Also, while at it, I decided to shorten the Preface section to raise the chances of people reading it.

Preface

• My goal is to make an interesting villain using the player options found in the official rules of D&D 5th edition, oftentimes also using homebrew options.
• The goal is not to make a villain who deals the highest amount of damage. This is not the right place for that discussion.
• I will leave some details out to let the DMs adjust the villain to their preferences. Ability scores are one of them.
• To emulate character development, I will only make character builds at levels 4, 10, 16, and 20. Players should be at best equal to the villain's tier, optimally at a lower tier.
• Limitations breed creativity. But I will bend the rules if it makes the villain more interesting.
• If it seems overpowered, it could be because of rulebending (see the point above), or because I'm mixing homebrews that were not balanced with each other in mind.

Great, let's get into it!

The Dreamfiend Master

“There are many who don't wish to sleep for fear of nightmares. Sadly, there are many who don't wish to wake for the same fear.”

― Richelle Goodrich, Dandelions: The Disappearance of Annabelle Fancher

Fun fact: You can't kill a nightmare.
Nightmare, by nakanoart

Ingredients List

• Scourge Aasimar race (Volo's Guide to Monsters)
• Bard 18: College of Glamour (Xanathar's Guide to Everything)
• Cleric 2: Secrets Domain (Yorviing's Homebrew)
  

Tier 1

The beginning of this one is rather simple since at the moment they can't do things we really want them to do. The aasimar should be flavored as a good one, at least until the transformation happens, which should only happen when they get desperate, or overly confident they can't be found out. One of our levels goes into the cleric, choosing the Secrets domain. With this domain, we get two extra skills to start with, as well as an ability to detect hidden creatures, concealed objects, and secret codes or messages, at least as long as the master is not blinded or deafened. Extra nice is the fact that they get disguise self and illusory script as automatically prepared. Another very useful thing for us is Wisdom and Charisma saving throw proficiencies. Of course, assume that the spellcasting ability for the cleric is Charisma instead of Wisdom within this build to get the maximum usage out of your stats.

The other three levels will go into bard, giving us one extra skill proficiency, ability to boost other people's stats, roll well with all skills the master is not proficient in, and of course spells, as well as the first features of the Glamorous bard. Enthralling Performance could be reflavored as giving an inspiring speech regarding putting a stop to the Dreamfiend, at least once it actually comes into the existence. Mantle of Inspiration is ideal for motivating your followers into action.

Sidenote: While we're on the topic of cleric and Secrets, let's allow them to cast all of their spells, both cleric and bardic ones, with the divine symbol. If you choose to play them as a follower of some deity, the deity should be something neutral that's both about secrets, but also about protecting others, justice, or healing in general. You could also have them worship no deity, and instead flavor them as someone wholeheartedly dedicated to stopping the Dreamfiend. At least, once it shows up. But the point is: casting with a divine symbol instead of a musical instrument will make them look more serious, and also more legitimate to the players. They won't guess that this person is a villain to be made.

As always, assume the Master will stay in the background, for now, gathering information and potential targets to take down, as well as their possible body parts, hairs, and other things that could assist in the spellcasting.

Tier 2

Time to bring in the main subject of this build, but not before another sweet treat. With six levels of bard, the master Mantle of Majesty. With this ability, the master can cast command as a bonus action for 10 turns in a row, once per long rest. This is awesome, especially if they had some roguish follower that they could charm in order to command them to Attack every turn while threatened to effectively double their Sneak Attack.

Now then, time for the Dreamfiend! Some of you might have figured this out already, but I'll begin with a small description just to cue the rest in. Dreamfiend is a monster that visits the poor innocent people, and occasionally even powerful not-so-innocent people, in their nightmares. It terrorizes them for a lengthy time, and can't really be tracked or fought off. Strangely, it will not visit elves, or other creatures that don't dream, such as the kalashtar.

In order to work properly, the Dreamfiend Master needs to choose the spell dream. Every night, while somewhere private (rope trick magical secret maybe?), the master will cast this spell to terrorize their target of choice. Due to the way the Dreamfiend works, they won't gain the benefits of a long rest from this sleep. And if a creature goes too long without gaining these benefits, they'll gain one level of exhaustion. If this doesn't stop, the Dreamfiend will invade their dreams over and over, forcing them to slowly wither until dead, unless... it joins the Dreamfiend Master's cult.

I leave it up to you how this organization presents itself to others. Personally, however, I would try to make it into a positive society. Not one of fear and hopelessness despite the fact Dreamfiend literally can't be killed. Instead, it's a society that seeks justice in its defeat, helps those who need help (possibly with the master using their healing hands too), and learning as much as they can about the Dreamfiend.

This might also be a good time to consider picking up nondetection. The longer you'll do this, the more likely you are to draw attention, so you better be ready to hide.

Tier 3

Alright! Time to get our last level of cleric, and five more levels of bard. Doing this lets us pick up the Unbreakable Majesty, a powerful defensive ability that forces creatures who want to attack you to make a Charisma saving throw. On a failure, it must attack someone else, on a success, it gets to make an attack, but also has disadvantage on the next saving throw against a spell the master casts. It lasts only for one minute though and can be used once per short rest, so understandably it's only for times of emergency.

With the one level of cleric, we get our Channel Divinity. With a failed Charisma saving throw, it lets you learn about one thing that angers or frightens the creature, one thing it wants, or one secret of its that's relevant to you in some way. It doesn't work on creatures immune to being charmed, but luckily the creature won't be aware of it regardless of whether it fails or succeeds on the save.

Tier 4

Four more levels of bard let us pick up further spells and magical secrets, and increases the size of the master's bardic inspiration to its maximum size. Just to quickly list some spells that could be interesting, Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion could provide a hiding place, as well as food for up to one hundred people, letting you have a massive cult (even better considering the fact that since this is multiclass of fullcasters, the master can cast this spell even twice per day), project image keeps a distance between the master and any pesky adventurers, and resurrection means the party might hesitate about suspecting the Dreamfiend Master, even better if they're willing to provide them for a small fee, as long as they also provide the necessary material component. Glibness is an essential spell for anyone who wants to make a cult in the world of D&D, and it's also brutally useful within combat since it lets the master basically automatically succeed on ability checks as part of the counterspell. Mind blank makes them seem less suspicious, demiplane makes an actual secret hideout, and most of the 9th level spells speak for themselves.

Feats

The master gets to pick two feats during Tier 2, one feat during Tier 3, and one feat during Tier 4. One of the key things to consider is how fast can they react in combat. Plenty of their options require the master to start early, so I'd recommend picking up Alert feat. Eldritch and Metamagic Adept are both very nice choices that you might want to consider picking up since they provide plenty of options I don't even feel like describing here. Magic Initiate is free spells, Fey Touched means free escape button, and Inspiring Leader is cool for anyone with followers. Lucky is self-explanatory, and finally, Telekinetic and Telepathic are both neat, but not necessary.

The Power of the Cult

The Dreamfiend Master, unlike any of the previous villains, is explicitly stated to be a type that gathers the following. Managing those is simple enough really, just make them cultists, but I wanted to give one more suggestion. What if those who reach a high enough rank of power could be bestowed a supernatural ability by the Master without even knowing? While this isn't anything a player by default could achieve, I'm including it as a homebrew extra that would add extra juice and danger to the master.

Dreamfiend Proxy (Recharges after a Long Rest). Whenever this creature begins a long rest, it casts the dream spell. When cast this way, the spell targets one creature that doesn't belong to the cult that this creature dislikes the most, the messenger can only appear monstrous, and it can't converse with the target. The spell uses the Dreamfiend Master's spell attack bonus and save DC, and the spell treats the creature who released it as the caster for all other purposes.

Powerful? Absolutely. But bear in mind this is not something to be handed just to anyone who asks for it, this is the kind of power reserved only for the most loyal. Neither is this something that the follower knows about.

The more the following of this organization grows, the more influence it can hold over the world. This boon just makes it easier.

"Every face you can see in your dreams is the face of someone you've seen before. Anyone who shows their face to others puts them to risk. Please, join us if you wish to stop the Dreamfiend and save lives."
Endless Legend provides a couple artworks for a more unsettling depiction of the cultists that I just had to show here. Also, I swear this being a metaphor for the virus is unintentional. This image and an alternative depiction was just an afterthought.
Cultists Quest step1 1, by A-u-R-e-L

Thank you for reading my article about another villain, as well as their cult. I hope you've enjoyed it, that this was inspiring, and I wish you a nice day!

Villainous Dessert: The Imperceptible Monument

Howdy! This article is part of Villainous Cookbook, but as you can notice, it doesn't follow the regular structure of these articles. The reason for that is, that this is something short, sweet, and not exactly interesting or fulfilling. I brought it up in a discussion on discord, and it actually started a heated debate, so it's fair to say that this build will be spicy. Maybe even the most controversial build of the series. Due to the backlash, I'm starting this article with a disclaimer.

I am a DM who is okay with dirty tricks. In fact, one of the GMs who I look up to but won't name is infamous for playing dirty. As long as these dirty tricks are there to make the story better, and to make the players' experience more enjoyable, I'm fine with using them. I'm not sure if either of those would be achieved with this build because this is less of a thing to defeat, and more of a puzzle to solve. When discussing it, I sparked frustration in people because this couldn't be defeated by the conventional means. I don't expect this to be enjoyed by everyone, but someone somewhere might find a use for this, so I'll post it anyway. But please, if you end up using this, use it to make your game better and to challenge your players, not to bully the player characters.

Regardless of how successful the article itself will be, I know I've enjoyed every part of putting this creation together. I've tried to break the sequester and imprisonment spells for a long time, so I am very happy to say that I managed to achieve both, and at the same time. Even if it does use homebrew.

It would probably have more parts to its legs. And arms. And fingers. And maybe a split up torso. But this is a cool gif nonetheless that I wanted to present it with.
Crystal Golem, by Marie Angoulvant

Imperceptible Monument

Ingredients: A pilot who can wear a spare piloting armor, a rich person, a powerful spellcaster with plenty of time (two of these could be the same person), and a couple of critters.

I'll go through the steps of building the Monument here because it doesn't need levels. We begin by gathering several crystals to simulate body. First 8 should be long enough to serve as arms and legs, without elbows and knees. We don't need joints here. It'd be nice to also have crystalline hands, which need two palms and a total of 28 digits. Try to find long gemstones for this so that they would resemble the body in those regards. Feet are unnecessary, they'd only add extra cost to the whole process. Finally, torso made up of two gems, and a gemstone head. Then again, you could definitely make the number of gems here smaller if you wanted to.

Next up, all but one of these gems should be populated by critters using the minimus containment version of the imprisonment spell. These could be animals, undead, anything as long as it's weak. A vile villain could use orphans or something, but we don't need to go that far. Leave one of the gems empty for now.

Now then, it's time for the only homebrew part of this build. We need a level 9 Maxim Master who will use a lot of jade dust to entangle the individual crystals with pieces of piloting armor. The way this works is using Maxims of Consequence that detect movements of the piloting armor, and are hooked up to the Maxims of Movement that copy those movements on the individual crystals.

I've been met with some remarks about how this fact invalidates the whole build. First, I should mention that the entire series of Villainous Cookbooks uses homebrew materials. My goal was to make interesting villains, even if they used some homebrew and some rulebending. But the more important part of the defense is, that the Maxim Master is based on conditional spells that are already in the game. These include magic mouth, programmed illusion, immovable object, and arcane lock. They are spells that, based on some condition, perform illusions or restrict/allow movement. I've been told many times that the spells available to the players are only part of what's possible, so I would say that conditional telekinesis is plausible.

Getting back on the tracks, we need our pilot to be able to see the outside world. So, centered on the inside of the empty gem, we project an illusory replica of the surroundings of that crystallic structure using Maxims of Information and Illusion, shown from the point of view of the head-gem.

Our pilot, wearing the armor, is afterwards imprisoned within the final empty gem, and each gem is targeted by the sequester spell. Thanks to the limitation of imprisonment being that only light can pass through, the user can make gestures and strike bodily poses and get the magic outside activated. Let's assume the condition for the imprisonment is that the structure has been nonfunctional for 3 days. Whether it's because it's been dismantled or because the wearer stopped wearing the armor (or just didn't do anything for 3 days is up to the DM).

Optional step, we can detect the pilot's mouth movements and produce sounds based on those to allow the monument to talk. Heck, if you wanted to, you could do a visual illusion (whether through Maxims or programmed illusion with a healthy dose of DM fiat) that could be triggered by the pilot donning or doffing a hat, which would let other creatures see it, but that's an afterthought.

Outcome

So, what have we achieved? Our Imperceptible Monument is permanently invisible and can't be targeted by divination magic (sequester), and is made up of objects that can't be destroyed by conventional means (imprisonment: minimus containment). Since this is a group of objects that are not connected and copy movements of an unreachable villain, each would have to be disposed of individually. Also, this thing is made up of objects, meaning it's inherently immune to a huge amount of spells. Fun fact: out of all cantrips, only fire bolt and magic stone can target and damage objects.

The biggest limitation of this build is its sight. Due to the way Maxim of Information is written, the pilot within will be at best capable of perceiving the world up to 30 feet away. If the players get out of that range, they're gonna be likely fine. Other limitations include the fact that the pilot can't cast any spells, and that this thing can't repair itself on its own. It's actually... kind of dull? Which is why I've distinguished it from the rest of Villainous Cookbook in both title and article structure.

How to Defeat It

The biggest point of criticism I've received for this was that "there is no interesting way to defeat it". And that much is true. Over the course of discussion, we came up with some ways of fighting it off:

• Dispel magic cast on each crystal (fortunately it can target even unseen objects). Which needs a lot of spell slots (4 limbs with 2 segments, 2 segments of a torso, head, plus however much is hands and digits of fingers). Whenever they dispel a gemstone, it falls off from the structure (leaving the rest of the structure in tact), and the caster might have to make separate checks to dispel 7th level sequester, as well as 9th level imprisonment on the gem.
• Anti-magic field trip. I regularly put into my worlds a null-magic zone that works as a permanent one, so it could provide a nice "aha!" moment to the players if they came up with this.
• Portal to the Astral Plane using bag of holding and portable hole, or different extradimensional magic items.
• Burying it alive inside of a hole through some clever planning. And let's be real here - being buried with a perception range of 30 feet only in a sequestered gemstone that keeps you alive whether you like it or not doesn't sound like a pleasant fate.
• Immobilizing parts of its body using the immovable object spell. Which, admittedly, is part of Dunamancy, which is something not even all wizards get access to. Alternatively, I've received a suggestion that uses one or more immovable rods.
• The wish. Because you know, wishes can solve anything

Sure these are unsatisfying, since not everyone could do them. What can a fighter do in a situation like this?

Perhaps it's me being naive, but I think that it's good to try thinking creatively in situations like this. How could one dispose of an imperceptible immortal structure pursuing the players? It needs some outside of the box thinking because no amount of attacks and damage rolls will resolve this problem. Some people out there think that's too much to expect from players. I have met groups that just didn't want to try thinking about a problem creatively.

If you wish to use the imperceptible monument in your own games, consider foreshadowing it first. Have the locals talk about the invisible being, about how no weapons, not even magical ones, seem to do anything to stop it. Have the players encounter it more than once, with plenty of time between meetings. This way, the players could have a chance to brainstorm solutions for this problem between the games, and cook up something neither I nor anyone I talked about was able to put together within the 24 hours during which the build has existed so far. Above all else, be open towards creative solutions. The ones I listed above are definitely not the only solutions out there. If the players try to net each of the objects, or find some spells that do indeed affect objects, the least you can do is be open towards them. Maybe they won't kill the pilot (who, let's face it, the pilot could be literally anyone—from the most competent warrior in the kingdom to a commoner, including even... other villains from my cookbook?), but they'll find a way to trap it. And that's fine!

Then again, you could also come up with your own weaknesses for it. RAW it doesn't have any extra weaknesses, but maybe you can figure something out. Maybe the imprisonment used is flawed somehow because the gemstones used were a little too cheap. Maybe the sequester can be overcome. Maybe the players could outsmart the villain inside because of his limited range, and limited number of senses. Your and your players' imagination is the limit here.

If they figure out dispel magic works, though, and if they manage to dispel its body piece by piece, the reward awaiting them is massive. Assuming each critter has one hit die, we're talking about 41 gemstones, 40 of which have a cost of at least 500 gp, and the one that holds the pilot has a smallest cost of 500 gp per every hit die the pilot has. This amounts to 20.000 gp worth of gemstones, plus the pilot's gemstone.

… did I just accidentally make a puzzle with an actual monetary reward instead of a combat encounter?

Edit: After I finished the article, I started to look up art. It seems that Adventure Zone had something aesthetically similar enough, so I'll just use their art for this. Despite the fact that the Monument should be invisible.

Behold, my creation! I know you can't see it, that's part of the point.
Lucas and a Crystal Golem, by /u/tough_stough

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day!

Villainous Cookbook: The Prophecy Breaker

Time travel is fun. But, time travel can be frustrating. Doubly so in a tabletop RPG. Ten times more if players can do it as much as they want, unless the GM wants to have a game that revolves around time travel. But tell you what? I figured that maybe having the time travel be restricted only to the villain would be a good thing.

With that being said, here I’ll have to break one more rule in order to make the overall build just a tiny bit better: it’s going to gain one feature from warlock, and the reason for that is that it’s gonna significantly improve this build. While I could make it level 21, I feel like that would be cheating, and setting a terrible precedence for future builds. I’ll just say it’s “0 levels of warlock”, so try to not mind that.

Let’s see where this goes!

Update: The "0 levels of warlock" turned out to be unnecessary, since convergent future's exhaustion can only be removed with a long rest, so I'm removing all of the bits addressing that.

Preface

The purpose of the Villainous Cookbook is to offer cool villain ideas for DMs. It uses homebrew player options sometimes mixed with the official ones, but it bends the rules a little to work better. While sometimes restrictions breed creativity, other times it's nice to push the boundary a little to make the villain more interesting.

The stats are left completely up to the reader. You can make them anything you want, as long as it's within some boundaries, and you don't need to spend any ASIs or consider the stat bonuses provided by the feats unless you want to complicate things for yourself.

Each of the builds is split into 4 Tiers, to show how the villain grows in power over time. At any moment, the villain should be at least on the same tier as your players if not higher, since you want them to be challenging. Unless noteworthy, I won't mention the specific spells, ability scores, backgrounds, or skills. All that I leave up to you so that the villain is more customized.

One last word of caution—while these builds might seem overpowered, making the homebrews seem overpowered, bear in mind two things.

1. We're adjusting the rules a little to make the character builds work better. If this demands an in-world explanation, say that this is an exceptional person who figured out something others don't know, or has a special bloodline/destiny.
2. We're crossing the homebrew streams. And that can oftentimes go wrong. I'm doing my best to use homebrews that I consider balanced and that I would actually allow my players to use in the games.

Now that all of that is sorted out, the time is here. And our villain who can travel through it too!

Prophecy Breaker

"Here's the thing about time: If you can't make the most out of any given moment, then you don't deserve a single extra second."

— Ekko, “Seconds”

Let's go on a journey, a journey through time!
Time Traveler for IFX, by JessiBeans

Ingredients list

• Any race
• Wizard 17: Chronurgy (Explorer's Guide to Wildemount)
• Fighter 3: Echo Knight (Explorer's Guide to Wildemount)

Tier 1

The build begins with 2 levels of fighter, understandably because it provides the most proficiencies, and 2 levels of wizard. As usual, this is a phase when our baddie is in the background, just doing their stuff and improving slowly.

When it comes to the fighting styles, I would recommend Defense, Blind Fighting, or Superior Technique if you really like the maneuvers.

Tier 2

All six of our levels go into wizard, fairly straightforward. An upside is getting haste and slow on this level, but I’ll write about spells in detail later.

Tier 3

Six more levels into wizard. Yeah, this build is turning out to be pretty straightforward, but that's mostly because I removed the previously mentioned "0 levels of warlock" build, and that removed some extra complications that were listed here.

Tier 4

Our final tier is about putting 3 more levels into wizard, and 1 last level into a fighter. With this, our guy gets 9th level spell slots, and an ability to actually travel back in time, to the point where there’s two coexisting copies that can interact with each other. Just say that the future copy is the echo, so that if they die, you could say that it’s actually created an alternative future or something.

Time Travel

So, what are all of the means of time travel the breaker is capable of? Here’s a comprehensive list, first going by tiers and then listing a handful of recommended feats, as well as spells:

Class Features

Second Wind (Tier 1). You rewind a part of your body, reversing some of the injuries you’ve sustained.

Action Surge (Tier 1). Two of you appear when you choose to do it, both perform one action, and one is left behind.

Temporal Awareness (Tier 1). When you feel threat of a combat approaching, your body’s instincts kick in to return your mind back in time a few seconds, giving you edge when starting the unavoidable combat.

Chronal Shift (Tier 1). Short rewind to slightly alter the conditions and see if it changes the outcome.

Momentary Stasis (Tier 2). A time stop localized on one creature.

Arcane Abeyance (Tier 3). A minuscule time portal for magic to go through.

Convergent Future (Tier 3). Multiple rewinds of time, until you reach a satisfying outcome.

Manifest Echo (Tier 4). A copy of you arrives from the future, though its fate is tied to yours. If it dies, the timeline has been changed significantly enough to prevent the existence of the echo in the first place.

Feats

Alert - It's extra training to the Temporal Awareness.

Eldritch Adept - Overall not that important feat here. Thief of Five Fates could be flavored as slight precognition powers and you ruining it for the target, most other invocations without prerequisites isn't too fitting for time magic.

Lucky - The objectively most "time traveler" feat despite being a little bland, it's like 3 more time rewinds.

Mage Slayer - Some benefits for protection against magic users, could be flavored as time magic overpowering the regular magic at times.

Metamagic Adept - Just like Lucky, this is awesome for time traveler. I would personally go with Extended spell could be explained as you elongating the spell's duration. Subtle spell could be you fast-forwarding your spellcasting, and/or a time stop for spell cast. Quickened spell doesn't need to even be explained. Twinned is a blast from another timeline. This is a feat where you can go hog wild and customize the breaker for your own personal use.

Mobile - Permanent speed boost to you.

Mark of the Eternal Citadel (CoFS:A) - Lesser restoration is like second wind, but for anyone and for very specific things. The other part is sort of time-rewindy, like an instinct that kicks in and lets you quicken your step for a moment. It's a stretch, but lesser restoration is nice.

Mark of the Storm Lord (CoFS:A) - Feather fall is great for saving yourself by slowing your falling speed, but the other benefit is the more interesting one here for me. I feel like I recommend it with all of my builds, and it's for a good reason. That feat is just so universally applicable, because most spellcasters (especially those who want to keep their distance) want to keep their distance. Extra movement speed for free, now that's awesome for anyone. Time traveler or not.

Spells

Let’s start with the obvious. You’ll want to pick haste, slow, and depending on your opinions on this spell, time stop. Another huge group of spells to consider are chronurgy spells that are part of Wildemount’s dunamancy spell list.

Now that the glaring ones are resolved, here’s the deal—the rest is all about how you flavor it. Sure, you could choose spells as you wish and use them that way too, but if you want more time travel spells, look for spells that fall into these groups (these are examples, not necessarily wizard spells):

• speed manipulation (longstrider, expeditious retreat, ray of frost, …),
• luck manipulation (bless, hex, bane, …),
• divination magic for seeing into past, future, or present someplace else,
• necromancy magic, flavored as rapid but temporary aging of people,
• regenerative magic of any kind, if possible.

Style

I’ve seen mixed opinions on Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, so here I’ll include one thing from the book that I would definitely consider for the build, but it's completely optional. It won’t make the build more effective, it just looks neat.

Choose the Artificer Initiate feat if you can spare it. Think how could time travel relate to any of the tool sets offered. One obvious option is tinkers’ tools, which would mean this person has literally built a time machine. But what if it’s something else? Maybe the time is like a river, that you can manipulate only with potions. What if you need to shape it with pottery tools?

My two personal favorites are calligrapher’s supplies and cartographer’s tools, explaining it as accessing the source code of the multiverse and rewriting it, either with glyphs temporarily written in the air, or by creating blueprints and folding them right.

The following three parts are tips on how to go beyond what I described with this build. Bear in mind that it could become too wild if done without a caution. They're presented in the order of least to most world-threatening.

Actual Time Travel

Now, you might tell me that this is kind of lame, because they doesn’t actually get to travel back in time. And sure, you could say that. But what if I told you that… there is an actual way to achieve time travel? It’s possible even for players, but it requires a DM’s discretion. And for an interesting villain, I think it’d be fair to say that we can allow this.

Have the breaker learn simulacrum and true polymorph upon finishing Tier 4. After casting the simulacrum (much easier to do through wish, but I usually ban wish at my games), you cast true polymorph on your simulacrum, transforming them into a gynosphinx. Finally, you find them a lair. You could even make it through demiplane if you want it to be someplace safe.

Now, whenever you are in the lair, you can travel forwards and backwards through time. Wait a minute, time travel restrained to a location, where a time traveler and their assistant travel through time and space? Hang on, I accidentally killed my ancestor, so what is all this wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff all around us?

Well, my friend, popular fiction refers to these as time paradoxes. Now now, no need to worry about that. Time travel is a tricky subject, and we can figure some way to resolve the paradoxes that can happen with it. The easiest solution would be different timelines, but that… can be tricky if you’re playing in an RPG, and if your players aren’t the ones doing the time travel.

A simpler solution would be for the player characters to be "anchored in time", possibly through experiencing time travel or through a different excuse you comes up with. Now, even if the breaker would cause a time paradox by killing the players while they were young, the players would be unaffected, as well as anyone who has traveled through time. But the rest of the world would indeed change to accommodate for this. People would be convinced that “you have died years ago, this can’t be right…”, despite the fact player characters are unchanged.

Bootstrap paradox is easy enough to resolve—just don’t have stuff come from the future and disappear into the past.

Finally, some of you may recall my article on Broken Prophecies. Since it was inspired by my original discord nickname, and so is this, I wanted to bring the article up since it has some neat timey-wimey stuff that could inspire you when using this villain. I know I would personally try to do a Groundhog's Day plot for example. Maybe I'll write an article in the future on how I would do it.

The Prophecy Shatterer

There’s one more cool thing that I wanted to mention. I started to write this after finding a curious reddit thread about how chronurgist wizards would be capable of instantly decapitating their enemies, if their attack roll bonus is low enough. So, if you’d make a prophecy breaker and wanted to add a touch of brutality to the experience, give them a heavy vorpal blade of choice, dump their Strength, and replace proficiency with the vorpal blade you chose with some tool set. I mean, Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything allows you to give up proficiencies from a race, maybe we could remove it from a class too if we really wanted to. Maybe instead of using greatswords, this fighter has learned how to make pottery. Finally, to round it all off, choose Great Weapon Master.

Whenever you make a weapon attack, you add your ability score modifier, proficiency bonus if you are proficient with the weapon, and now you subtract 5 from it thanks to the feat.

For example, with a Strength modifier of -3 and no proficiency with the weapon, your "bonus" to attack rolls with this weapon is -8, which means that if you use your Convergent Future on anyone with AC 12 or higher, you'll automatically decapitate them (20 is auto-hit, even if after adding the bonus it's still lower than the AC).

While this makes for a frightening foe, bear in mind that maybe players should have some chance of escaping them. And that if the wizard is smart, they wouldn't bring their vorpal sword absolutely everywhere.

Infinite Wizard

There is a way to create literally infinite clones of yourself, but I'll be honest with you all—I will inform you of this, but recommend against doing it.

The premise is simple, though it requires wish or a ton of patience. After casting simulacrum once through the regular way, make sure you're well rested, and have them cast wish to create a simulacrum of you. From that point on, have the newest simulacrum create a simulacrum of you with a wish. This goes on until you get absolutely bored of it.

"This is awesome! Why would you not want me to do it?" Well, think about it: if the wizard is good and cares about the world, they could literally solve every problem of the world (or timeline, if we also do the gynosphinx trick). If he's evil, nobody will ever stand a chance, because he's gonna be present in all points of time and space. To some it might sound like a nice challenge, but wizards are scary.

Why should a time mage capable of time travel and de-aging themselves be a bearded old man?
Elyin Goldpace, the Timeweaver, by Raphael Massarani

Personality-wise and with motives, you can do anything here. I mean, it's a time traveler. Go wild!

Thank you for reading, I hope you've enjoyed this installment of Villainous Cookbook, and I with you have a nice day!