Malice

[Adamaro]

I DMd this campaign awhile ago, which was supposed to be horror campaign, but with wizards popping in and out of dungeons with teleports and spamming maximised disintegrate, the "horror" quickly fell out of "horror adventure" thing. Not to mention players were more or less uninterested in pursuing the plot. No matter how "horrid" the encounters were, players were more of a mehdisintegratedisintegratedisintegrate-prone.

So.

I was thinking of movie villains and the only guy who really scares me, is the guy from Saw movies. I mean the perversion of ideas in those movies is ... The idea of anyone playing a god, imposing his own mortal rules to other people in a totally brutal way is for me ... seriously disturbing. Not even Freddy Krueger, Hannibal lecter or that babe from the Ring match this.
I am also sure such malice is essence of evil.

So: What traits should an evil villain have in order to repulse/make PCs want to hunt him? Eating live skinned stillborns does not seem enough. Or I have some players on my hand with really tough carapace, regarding horror and evil deeds. I would like a villain, who even NE or LE character would want to hunt down. Any (evil) ideas?

[Human Paragon 3]

If your players don't seem to empathize with any of the NPCs this guy murders, I guess you just have to make it personal. Have him humiliate your PCs, take advantage of their weaknesses, laugh in their faces.

Maybe invent some custom traps that maim instead of kill, and use them on the PCs.

And have the guy one step ahead of the PCs all the time. They want to OMGDISSINTIGRATE. He knows this, and puts spell reflection on the targets. They want to teleport all the time... so he puts a huge divert teleport on the dungeon that sends them to the worst possible place whenever they try to use any sort of teleportation effect. And so on.

See also ShneekyTheLost's Joker Bard.