The Rogues Gallery

I was thinking about my epiphany about D&D combat being best compared to a comic book fight scene earlier, and it occurred to me also that a good D&D campaign can probably benefit from stealing another concept from comic books: the Rogues Gallery.

The Rogues Gallery is a simple concept: it's just the selection of enemies associated with a particular hero - for Batman we have the Joker, the Riddler, Cat-woman, the Condiment King, and so on. Spider-man deals with Doc Ock, Sandman, the Green Goblin, Venom, and so forth. In D&D, then, the Rogues Gallery would be all the villains associated with a particular PC or, more likely, a group of PCs.

A few thoughts:

• The villains are probably another really good place to reflect the theme of the campaign. If the theme is "lost honour", it's probably a good idea if the villains all reflect that - the guy who has lost his honour and is revelling in it, the guy who has lost honour and is seeking to regain it through dubious means, the guy who is willing to trade his honour for power...
• Likewise, the villains are probably at their best if they relate to the PCs in a key way - if a PC is a paladin knight-in-shining-armour, perhaps one villain could be the dark knight. Or there's the classic family connection, or the sins of the father angle, or the inverted-powers villain, or similar.
• Unlike comic books, RPGs probably don't get a lot of play from recurring villains. They're more like comic book movies in that regard - a villain crops up, causes mayhem, and is then dealt with and never really appears again. If an over-arching threat is needed, it may well be best if it's a conspiracy of villains of some sort (basically, SPECTRE), rather than a single villain who then needs to constantly escape to fight another day. This is particularly true in level-based games, where a threat at 1st level isn't going to work at 10th level - compare Ironmonger in the first "Iron Man" film versus Thanos in "Infinity War".
• It's probably no bad thing for the DM to seed hints of upcoming threats earlier in the campaign - introduce Otto Octavious in the first session as a somewhat-overreaching scientist, so that later on he's more relatable as a villain when he becomes Doc Ock.
• The DM really needs robust recycling facilities. A really good Rogues Gallery can only be fully fleshed out once the PCs are themselves defined, and yet there's a really good chance the campaign may fold before the PCs ever meet them. To minimise the waste, the DM shouldn't be afraid to reuse as much of that work as possible for the next (or subsequent) campaign.

I'll now leave it to the reader to point out how trite and obvious all of the above is...