How do I make Satan my setting's hidden BBEG?
I feel like the ol' mischevious singing devil with a top hat troope to be way too obvious.
>>46679152
Satan is a trickster,Anon. Make him work in the shadows, deceive people into thinking they're doing the right thing, tempt them with riches, power, and/or love.
Make Satan a powerful yet invisible force that causes good people to do evil. Make most of the minor antagonists either good or neutral, but all of them have Satan whispering corruption into their ears.
Most of them believe another god, spirit or muse is inspiring them to do good work, but if fact their strings are being pulled by Satan.
For a specific example, have one of the antagonists succeed in their plans, but have the PCs show them the true evil of their machinations.
>>46679152
Make an obviously typical NPC to take the BBEG role and divert attention from Satan.
Then make Satan a totally inconspicuous character, someone the party interacts with daily and never pays much attention. The kindly potion's seller, the wholesale merchant, the village's goat, the whorehouse's mistress, etc.
Make sure the party MUST visit this character frequently. Optionally, make him the main quest giver/trigger. Behind the scenes, set him up as the one manipulating the events that leads to the story. Also make sure to give him a peculiar trait. Make him a fiddle player (legend says Satan likes to challenge people to fiddle duels); or make him be someone fond of contracts or deals; and many other Satan quirks.
You can even play it obvious and make his name be "Stan" or "Seytan".
At one point in your quest, make sure the Party signs his book or a document of his authorship. A deal or a contract. This seals their fate and later on forfeits their soul setting up for the big reveal.
O you can actually never reveal him. Just throw in a bunch of hints and let the party try to figure it out, if they do you get that "WOW THE DEVIL IS TRICKING US ALL ALONG"; if not, well, you just played Satan and got off with their souls.
>>46679937
Make the village or town they are at actually be hell. Every single person there is just another face of Satan. Have little slip ups now and then that the players would attribute to sloppy GMing or something. Travelers in the town are being murdered constantly, and the farmers goat is always being abducted and left at the scene.
Make them have to rest, and at night, they have horrible nightmares.
String them along, and if they need ultimate help, becoming more and more reliant on the NPCs to aid them in the face of problems, eventually one of them will offer an arcane solution. He will need to use their souls for a ritual.
And its satan, and they will agree to it without ever thinking if you play it right.
If you are gonna play that angle though, make sure you have an owl, or little birds or something constantly chirping whenver they are making a bad decision that leads towards damnation. When it starts getting further in, they find the birds dead out in the open, and right before they sell their souls, its just one crow, cawing.
>>46679152
He was influencing the bad guys to do their thing. Each of the major villains has some small thing that implies devil-worship
>One has a wicked tattoo, which is one interpretation of how the mark of the beast might look
>Another wears a pentagram earring or other piece of jewelry in an obscure satanic symbol, such an inverted cross
>A third keeps a book of demonology or witchcraft by his bed
And so on and so forth. Satan was probably helping the bad guys out in exchange for pushing them and their followers to even lower depths of wickedness, blasphemy, and perversion than they would have reached without his influence. Also, our favorite devil was also getting them to do work that (unknowing to the lower baddies) furthered his own evil plan.
>>46680097
Or maybe the bad guys where doing bag guys shit because they were desperately trying to cancel out their own deal with the Devil
>>46679152
Just make him wear a yarlmuke.
>>46680585
That works too
>>46679152
imagine a chicken, but pure evil and with an evil cackle.
Not, you understand, an especially large chicken, or a vast horde of chickens, but rather one otherwise normal chicken possessed of bottomless evil and great cunning.
>>46680097
>an obscure satanic symbol, such an inverted cross
The inverted cross is an obscure Christian symbol, dude.
>>46681350
>obscure
Relative to the regular cross, sure. Considering St. Peter was the first Pope, it might be more familiar to Catholics than your average American protestant
Never mention him.
After all, the Devil's greatest trick was making people believe he didn't exist. Why would it ever be an option to consider?
However, every other evil refers back something else, some source, and this source goes by many names, and the best part is the Devil is every single one of those names all at once.
As for should it be encountered, or some facet or aspect be encountered, I'd play it like I interpret Chaos from 40k - it's an animal, a slavering beast, nothing more, not some sinister all knowing manipulator. Everything it does, all the lies and deceit and promises of power and infernal wrath, are all things it does to survive, and it is very powerful. It's a grand mimic, utterly inhuman and incomprehensible in every way, mimicking intelligence, mimicking sympathy, mimicking authority, it's parroting things it knows people want without knowing why they want it. When you look into the eyes of the devil, sitting there in a black suit with slicked back hair, or at some colossal goatish horror, there's nothing behind them, just the instinct to consume. It just has a lot of tools at its disposal to do so.
>>46679152
You could use a literal goat. Azazel was a goat once, after all.
Look up an old German tale called The Black Spider.
I'd say it has a pretty good example of what you are looking for.
