It can be hard to make villains interesting when a character can just meteor swarm them off the board. Here are d4 tier 4 villains to make your high level game a bit more epic.
- Acrillo. This Ancient Black Dragon is suffering. In his youth he gave the race of elves an artifact in exchange for immortality and regeneration. This benefited him for centuries until his bile grew so potent that it ate away at his flesh exposing bone and leaving holes in his flesh. The acid destroys EVERYTHING it touches. It has dissolved adamantium, stripped the magic away from artifacts, and even destroyed a sphere of annihilation. When he flies, acid drips from the wounds causing it to rain acid wherever he goes. He attempted to end his own life to end the pain countless times with no success. He lived in a wet moor far away from the noises of civilization. The wet peat of the moor has restorative powers that can’t heal his wounds but alleviates the great pain he suffers from. He now has a plot to go back in time and kill his younger form, but if he succeeds then the elves will never get the artifact, and the race of elves will have ended centuries ago.
- The Waking Dream. This Beholder is a nightmare for others of its kind. It learned to remove the eyes of other beholders while still retaining its power. It can have the eyes float remotely up to 10 miles away, see through it, and use its eye ray. It has collected hundreds of unique beholder eyes over the years, but concentrating on so many eyes is exhausting. It is in a perpetual dream-like state which inhibits its mobility, but allows it to have near omniscience and omnipotence in its domain. In its dreamlike state he learned that it’s not just the material world it can influence, but the world of dreams as well. The magic it uses to hijack and control the eyes of other beholders can be used on dreaming creatures as well. It now seeks to hijack the bodies of dreaming mortals to make them behave in a way that appeals to it.
- Kokatha. This bugbear (whose name means predator in goblin) was the most favored of Essul (the feral god). He was a beast who mastered the hunt. Essul blessed his savagery with beastial gifts. He can transform into giant beasts or a mist to hunt and prowl, compel others to join him on his hunt or get out of the way, and supernatural vitality. Essul also provided a worthy prey for him to hunt; the Tarrasque. Kokatha used to hunt the beast every decade when the beast woke, but it was imprisoned in a jar by some perturbed devils. He went into a deep sleep out of boredom until the Tarrasque returned, but his priest woke him early with a challenge that he believed may interest the ancient hunter. The priest suggested hunting the characters.
- Llamashta. This goddess of death was once a mortal adventurer. She made shady deals to grow strong enough to save those she loved, but she grew to realize that every action she took made the lives of those around her worse. After a great tragedy that resulted in the death of thousands of innocents and her being bequeathed the ‘honor’ of being a death goddess, she secluded herself far beneath the earth. In her self-imposed prison she used her new powers as a goddess of death to observe the past lives of the dead. She not only learned what she could have done to prevent the horrors she created, but also discovered a way to restore life to those she killed. She is planning to siphon the life energy of a neighboring plane through herself toward the souls of those she killed in error. This may bring them back to life, or create a nation of undead. Either way this will definitely incinerate the goddess of death who sorts the dead based on their actions AND end the lives of every living creature from the plane she’s stealing from.