For me the answer to best bad guys are ones you want to play. That is not a criteria, but it's the one I'm going to start with.
Rifts Coalition. They have the coolest gear and the biggest support structure for a human faction. Same goes for Star Wars Empire.
In practice we only ever ran one "bad guy" campaign as Zentraedi officers vs the Invid aliens. This was pre-Macross, so it was a full military campaign. That got old pretty quick, so it was a short campaign.
Of those three candidates I will say Coalition States circa 101 P.A. calendar.
I guess the best "bad guys" for a RPG must be old World of Darkness (oWoD) organizations. Well, perhaps not Pentex; but in general, the bad guys in Mage: the Ascension (i.e. the Technocrats) were almost more reasonable than the Traditions themselves. The Camarilla and the Sabbat were practically equally evil for different reasons — although that in the long-running Vampire campaign I played with my friends in the '90s with a rotating Storyteller, the PCs generally acted like some kind of political police for the Prince of the city, and the typical adventure had him pointing the party to some group that he wanted eliminated and the party proceeding with that elimination.
Quote from: Wtrmute on February 14, 2023, 12:47:31 PM
I guess the best "bad guys" for a RPG must be old World of Darkness (oWoD) organizations.
I'm going to second this. Every one of those was meant to be playable by truly dark tables. The technocracy eventually even got meaningful support as players, as some of them could be meaningful opposition to some of the truly evil elements of WoD, and they had interesting powers that would be helpful against powerful vampires, etc.
But like, every book they came out with had compelling villains. To me the worst were actually the mages that had inverted their ascension, as there was no evil they could not do at any time, but they would always have some reason for it. I couldn't imagnie a table actually having something that evil, but man as a villain set they were great. The mirrored Garou were also darkly interesting.
I think world of darkness villains generally fell into two camps- those that were somehow in favor of a status quo for a bad reason, and those who were actively trying to end the world. The first camp were always extremely interesting, the second were standard bad guys, but the writers knew that and did their best to provide a unique take, and they almost always succeeded.
Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 14, 2023, 10:25:54 AM
For me the answer to best bad guys are ones you want to play. That is not a criteria, but it's the one I'm going to start with.
Rifts Coalition. They have the coolest gear and the biggest support structure for a human faction. Same goes for Star Wars Empire.
But... are they bad guys?
:)
Now that there's a GI Joe rpg, I'll go with Cobra.
I once heard them described as a cross between the Taliban and Amway, which tickles me no end and provides some interesting possibilities
I vote In Nomine SJG. It takes Word concepts to their realist conclusion & allows enough campaign ambiguity to cast those words into twisted excesses. Further, you got Lucifer, probably THE most alluring and variable culmination of villainy Occidental society has created in the last few millennia. To create a supporting cast of villainy that are literal embodiments of themes, from either heaven or hell, and it simply cannot be topped for me. 8)
I mean FREEDOM is a Demonic Princess, Lilith. :o PURITY went on a genocidal ethereal crusade and got pardoned AND punished by promotion to the higher heavens. JUDGMENT & GAME play as mutually hated Internal Affairs agents. These are things that makes tradition & modernity clutch their pearls. AND it was done with more seriousness and ambiguity IMHO than the French source INS/MV. ;)
So I really like Chaos from warhammer 40k or even fantasy. The reason despite them being cartoonishly evil is actually how insidious and persistent they are. Once exposed to chaos the thought grows like a seed implanted in your mind taking hold and it always starts with small or innocuous things like overindulging, or a bout of satisfying anger foreve pushing you towards more extreme violations of order. It's subversive, co opting and eventually replacing things in your life with its own twisted distortions of the symbols and rituals that are in your day to day.
Once it has fully taken hold it's also near impossible to truly root out and once a planet has fallen to chaos it even adopts new laws of reality making it impossible to excise. The only solution has been to aggressively stamp out all traces of it even condemning entire worlds to oblivion because once chaos reaches a critical tipping point, not even total obliteration can remove the stain from reality.
I'm probably not doing justice but when I look at chaos I see the modern day woke mind virus that mirrors the behavior of those who have fallen to chaos. Right down to the behavior of a society that has fallen. The alphabets degeneracy in the pride parades as heralds of slaanesh, BLM, antifa and rioters hate peddling fucks as mindless khornates, the "gain of function" labs and Pfizer, as well as the living filth that is San Fran firmly under the banner of nurgle. The politicians, race grifters, and mega corps all in the webs of tzeench
And Slanesh throws the best parties.
Too bad I play Vampire Counts, or would if I could stomach GW shenanigans, which I don't. That's why I would prefer to go One Page Rules army of Ossified Dead. No fanged pompadours to be found. Only "real" undead like a Herald of Death skeleton who hates their former vampire masters.
Oh, and I still have a soft spot for Evil Empires with a legit goal like the Rifts Coalition States. They just want to return Earth back to the way it was. And that's done by shooting all the weird stuff.
Any Marvel game has a decent crop with guys like Doctor Doom, Thanos, and The Absorbing Man.
Anything where the "humans are the true monsters, you guys!"
Warm up the gunner seat on the dropship, daddy's home!
"Any Xenos that runs is an enemy combatant. Any Xenos that doesn't run is a well disciplined enemy combatant!"
Had to ponder for a moment.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3d/Cover_of_Horrors_FASA_1995.png)
I like lots of bad guys, The Coalition, Drow pre-Salvatore, the Slave Lords from the A1-4 series, and especially the Dragon of Tyr, but the Horrors from Earthdawn are the kind of baddies where you're happy to just not be noticed by them...
Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy.
Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 14, 2023, 10:25:54 AMRifts Coalition. They have the coolest gear and the biggest support structure for a human faction. Coalition States circa 101 P.A. calendar.
For an original setting, I have to agree that the Coalition States of America are just fun, and yea, I only use the original Coalition mecha & armor. I keep the "Skeleton Warrior" stuff as an actual Alternate Universe Coalition (basically the original idea for
Chaos Earth from
The Rifter instead of being
Rifts Earth's past).
QuoteIn practice we only ever ran one "bad guy" campaign as Zentraedi officers vs the Invid aliens. This was pre-Macross, so it was a full military campaign. That got old pretty quick, so it was a short campaign.
For a licensed product, I have to go with
Robotech as well, but The Masters forces instead. The problem has been no one yet has actually portrayed the Bioroids the way they are seen during The Masters War. The Zentraedi are basically disposable thugs and the Invid are suicide bombers. In comparison, the Bioroid is basically the futuristic equivalent of an Air Assault/Airborne Infantryman. Palladium's take on them was terrible in both editions for the most part (seriously, Bioroids have the best armor of all the enemy mecha in
Robotech) and Strange Machine Games is too weird a system to get into fully. I'm hoping the
Savage Worlds version by Battlefield Press does them justice.
In Soviet Russia, villain is you!
Quote from: David Johansen on February 14, 2023, 09:47:49 PM
Any Marvel game has a decent crop with guys like Doctor Doom, Thanos, and The Absorbing Man.
LOL well that's just cheating.
Quote from: tenbones on February 15, 2023, 03:19:00 PM
Quote from: David Johansen on February 14, 2023, 09:47:49 PM
Any Marvel game has a decent crop with guys like Doctor Doom, Thanos, and The Absorbing Man.
LOL well that's just cheating.
Adapted settings should at least be a separate category. For adapted settings, my node would be to Call of Cthulhu for most interesting opposition, with Alien as an honorable mention.
For original-to-RPG settings, one of my favorites is Torg. The reality-bending invaders were a lot of fun as they came in such varied flavors. I also think the Zhodani from Traveller are an inspired bad guys, with literal thought police in a believable way.
Okay, so if Marvel was cheating would DC be losing deliberately?
Mutant Chronicles has the Brotherhood a church group that tells the world they're the only hope while escalating the conflict.
The Dark Legion is pretty cartoony though Necromutants and Razides are pretty cool. But the real villains are the Brotherhood, whatever the latest edition may have done to redeem them. They will torture you on live TV and make your family watch.
I'm also inordinately fond of Palladium's Mechanoids. Evil cyborgs abused by their human creators they now seek to destroy all humanoid life. They strip mine stars to power their ships. They're all psychic and they're all crazy.
Quote from: David Johansen on February 15, 2023, 10:29:49 PM
Okay, so if Marvel was cheating would DC be losing deliberately?
Mutant Chronicles has the Brotherhood a church group that tells the world they're the only hope while escalating the conflict.
The Dark Legion is pretty cartoony though Necromutants and Razides are pretty cool. But the real villains are the Brotherhood, whatever the latest edition may have done to redeem them. They will torture you on live TV and make your family watch.
Man, I love the Mutant Chronicles setting.
I don't know what the current lore is regarding the Brotherhood, but I always though that not directly, but they were the kind of attitude the Dark Legion were trying to forment among humanity. "You're going to have to become awful in order to defeat us." *Rubs claws together*
The computer in paranoia. Nothing is as evil, malicious, random and paranoid as that computer. It did have one redeeming characteristic, communism was the death penalty.
I've always found Robert W. Chambers' King In Yellow / Carcosa ideas most disturbing, particularly as it has been presented in the Delta Green setting since Pagan Publishing's Delta Green: Countdown in '99. It's subtle and surreal, but always terrible. The most recent followup treatment, "Impossible Landscapes" also did not disappoint.
I suppose it depends on context. If you're talking just about the game with the most interesting antagonistic forces in it, then I feel like Call of Cthulhu is almost objectively the correct answer. As JHKim pointed out, that's almost cheating, since that game gets to use the work of several of the greatest science fiction writers of the 20th century, but it's worth saying that Sandy Peterson is not only a legitimate expert on the Cthulhu Mythos, but also did a ton of his original creative work expounding and expanding on it.
If you're talking about the best "bad guys" for gaming purposes, that's a bit more difficult. As interesting as the Mythos monsters are, they have a couple handicaps for roleplaying games. One is that they're supposed to be a big secret, so the adventures have to bend over backwards to explain how everything can happen without the wider world noticing. The other is that most of them are beyond "boss-monster" in power levels, so they're a little limited in their uses.
For gaming usability, I think you have to go with Dungeons & Dragons just based on pure quantity. Whatever kind of antagonist you want, it's probably in a D&D book somewhere.
A couple people have mentioned Warhammer. Personally, I really like the Chaos Dwarfs from Warhammer Fantasy. Pity GW killed them off as a faction years ago.
My favorite bad guys in RPGs still has to be Warhammer 40k. They're all bad guys.
I'm gonna say Warhammer 40k. Since nobody is a good guy.
Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 11, 2023, 10:13:59 PM
My favorite bad guys in RPGs still has to be Warhammer 40k. They're all bad guys.
Totally beat me to the punch!
Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 04:47:54 PM
Quote from: tenbones on February 15, 2023, 03:19:00 PM
Quote from: David Johansen on February 14, 2023, 09:47:49 PM
Any Marvel game has a decent crop with guys like Doctor Doom, Thanos, and The Absorbing Man.
LOL well that's just cheating.
Adapted settings should at least be a separate category. For adapted settings, my node would be to Call of Cthulhu for most interesting opposition, with Alien as an honorable mention.
Call of Cthulhu for sure: between mad pharaohs and modern megacorps as a front for the cult of Hastur (*), it has
all of them.
BTW, many consider Alien as a honorary lovecraftian entity.
(*) Just look at Tiktok...
Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 16, 2023, 12:18:49 AM
The computer in paranoia. Nothing is as evil, malicious, random and paranoid as that computer. It did have one redeeming characteristic, communism was the death penalty.
What are you talking about? The computer is your friend. The villains are the mutants and the secret societies. Maybe your security clearance isn't high enough to know about the real villains. You should take your happy pills.
Alien/Aliens has the best bad guy faction. Weylan-Yutani is the perfect evil corp in part because it's pursuing it's purpose properly. You could even argue that individual sacrifices are justified. There's plenty of faction fractals too for internal friction. This makes them both the perfect foil and an excellent faction to work for as PCs.
Cyberpunk 2020 does this very well too. Arasaka is just a great organization to put into your game.
Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 14, 2023, 10:25:54 AM
For me the answer to best bad guys are ones you want to play. That is not a criteria, but it's the one I'm going to start with.
Rifts Coalition. They have the coolest gear and the biggest support structure for a human faction. Same goes for Star Wars Empire.
In practice we only ever ran one "bad guy" campaign as Zentraedi officers vs the Invid aliens. This was pre-Macross, so it was a full military campaign. That got old pretty quick, so it was a short campaign.
Of those three candidates I will say Coalition States circa 101 P.A. calendar.
Most bad guys just want power which is dumb because it can be taken from them. STUPIDSTUPIDSTUPID.
Then you have Delta Green's
Black Brotherhood, a splinter cell of the Church of Cthulhu. All they want, is
THE END. Of EVERYTHING.
COMPLETE UNIVERSAL ANNIHILATION. When you absolutely positively gotta kill EVERYBODY in the world --
(https://images.gr-assets.com/hostedimages/1401207291ra/9769809.gif)
Quote from: BadApple on July 12, 2023, 02:20:36 PM
Alien/Aliens has the best bad guy faction. Weylan-Yutani is the perfect evil corp in part because it's pursuing it's purpose properly. You could even argue that individual sacrifices are justified. There's plenty of faction fractals too for internal friction. This makes them both the perfect foil and an excellent faction to work for as PCs.
Cyberpunk 2020 does this very well too. Arasaka is just a great organization to put into your game.
My original premise was bad guys you like to play.
What you're describing is more like bad guys who you don't feel sympathy for.
I agree that having bad guys you feel good about beating is great, but there are games where you can also be those bad guys as player characters. Again, for me this are the Warhammer 40K factions, or the Coalition States from Palladium Rifts.
Double post
Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 12, 2023, 05:20:53 PM
Quote from: BadApple on July 12, 2023, 02:20:36 PM
Alien/Aliens has the best bad guy faction. Weylan-Yutani is the perfect evil corp in part because it's pursuing it's purpose properly. You could even argue that individual sacrifices are justified. There's plenty of faction fractals too for internal friction. This makes them both the perfect foil and an excellent faction to work for as PCs.
Cyberpunk 2020 does this very well too. Arasaka is just a great organization to put into your game.
My original premise was bad guys you like to play.
What you're describing is more like bad guys who you don't feel sympathy for.
I agree that having bad guys you feel good about beating is great, but there are games where you can also be those bad guys as player characters. Again, for me this are the Warhammer 40K factions, or the Coalition States from Palladium Rifts.
For me personally, grimdark fantasy/scifi isn't my usual thing. I think it's overdone. That said, I will dabble in horror and dark RPGs, and have evil PCs.
When I do play "bad guy" PCs, I like the challenge of playing PCs from highly unsympathetic viewpoints rather than edgy-but-cool ones. I don't have experience with the Rifts Coalition or Warhammer 40K, but from what I know, I'd be more interested in playing a Weylan-Yutani executive like Burke in Aliens more than playing those. For example, one of my favorite HarnMaster PCs was a priest of Agrik - who is usually considered an evil god, supporting things like human sacrifice. If I'm going to go dark, I like going deep.
Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 12, 2023, 05:20:53 PM
My original premise was bad guys you like to play.
What you're describing is more like bad guys who you don't feel sympathy for.
I agree that having bad guys you feel good about beating is great, but there are games where you can also be those bad guys as player characters. Again, for me this are the Warhammer 40K factions, or the Coalition States from Palladium Rifts.
I hear you. It's a matter of perspective. Weylan-Yutani is a company that does a lot of things, many that make life for humans better. In the movies, you just hate them because they use the main characters as meat for one of their projects. I love how deep gray they are. They produce important products but they make hard, cold decisions in doing so. It's a lot like the modern day Johnson& Johnson. They do enough to justify their existence and even support but they also rightfully get denounced for some of their inhuman behavior.
At what point is the individual sacrifice justified for the good it produces. What do you make of the people that make those decisions? Where is the line between necessary costs and being malevolent? I love bad guys that decent people could actually defend. It makes for juicy drama.
Fundamentally I think Chaos from Warhammer takes first spot for me, for being this sleazy quasi-transcendent manifestation of human corruption itself, created uconcioussly by billions.
You can just carve almost any possibility from it's twisted miasms to use, from Epic Demon Armies, to slow rancid moral corruption of small village, according to your whim.
All and None.
In the right hands anything can go from zero to supervillain. Or the exact opposite.
Example: WOD's factions. They are all very bland and lacking in imagination overall. Same for the PC factions really. But with a good DM any of them can sing. Or with a bad one come across as lamer than they already are. Same for Rifts, except Rifts has more nuance with some factions and none at all with other factions.
I think Ravenloft Domains of Dread though had hands down some of the best villains. Some unredeemabley evil and others more nuanced, and a few possible not as vile as it seems. TSR just outdid themselves with some of the writing for quite a few villains for Domains of Dread.
I think I missed this one because I don't think of it as a RPG setting. Its a tactical tabletop wargame. BattleTech.
Sticking to the original setting (year 3025) there isn't really a bad guy. The game has 5 major factions with racial and cultural traits from Earth, but none of them are inherently bad or good. They have all done shady stuff that is immoral, but mostly they're OK.
1. Draconis Combine. They're honorable Japanese, with a large Scandinavian population on one border. However, their also very strict, and have committed one of the worst atrocities in that fiction, the Kentares massacre.
2. Federated Suns. Very nationalistic and the largest nation with the largest army. However, they break peace treaties every third weekend. You can't trust them.
3. Capellan Confederation. Half of their hereditary leaders are certifiably insane and need medication, run secret police, but they're survivors and can pull off some wins when they need to, usually because of their excellent spy networks that put everyone else to shame.
4. Free Worlds league. It is argued that the main enemy of the Free Worlds League fights are other members of the Free Worlds League. Civil Wars are just what they do. Until somebody else comes to visit, then watch out for a unified front. They also have Solaris VII, the gladiator planet that everybody loves, and they're good at building things.
5. Lyran Commonwealth. They're the richest and best equipped army of the big five. However, they let rich people buy their military ranks, and you don't get what you paid for. You get amatuers who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Now, I'm not sure this actually qualifies for my own question. I was originally looking at games that had bad guys, but bad guys that looked OK to play as them. This setting doesn't really have a clear badguy, and that is attractive. You can play it anyway you want.
Quote from: tenbones on February 14, 2023, 02:06:04 PM
Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 14, 2023, 10:25:54 AM
For me the answer to best bad guys are ones you want to play. That is not a criteria, but it's the one I'm going to start with.
Rifts Coalition. They have the coolest gear and the biggest support structure for a human faction. Same goes for Star Wars Empire.
But... are they bad guys?
:)
My favorite bad guys are the ones who unquestionably do bad things, but with a virtuous or at least understandable goal. Dr. Doom is deeply devoted to the wellbeing of his nation of Latveria. Dr. Freeze is trying to find a cure for his wife's fatal illness. Magneto lost his wife to the Holocaust and is adamant that mutants will not suffer the same fate. I find these villains a lot more believable and compelling than the caricature-esque ones that fill most literature. And the stories are more interesting when the good guys can on occasion negotiate with or find common cause with the bad guys. And at some points they make you wonder if they're really bad guys.
Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.
This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.
What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.
Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 12, 2023, 05:20:53 PMMy original premise was bad guys you like to play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godlike_(role-playing_game) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godlike_(role-playing_game))
(https://post.bark.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/howdogwhistleswork.jpg)
8)
Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 16, 2023, 12:18:49 AM
The computer in paranoia. Nothing is as evil, malicious, random and paranoid as that computer. It did have one redeeming characteristic, communism was the death penalty.
Big fan of Year of the Phoenix then?
Quote from: tenbones on August 17, 2023, 04:29:14 AM
Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.
This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.
What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.
Magneto barely knows that he wants other than mutants first and everyone else last. Not helped that alot of his followers are nutcases in it for the power.
Doom is, when in the hands of a competent writer who knows the character, not really all that totalitarial. He is very even handed in Latveria and one of the few times he actually win and took over the world he really did try to bring world peace and prosperity. But found managing everything was a chore and let some heroes undo it. On the hands of bad writers hes worse than Hitler and Stalin combined.
Quote from: tenbones on August 17, 2023, 04:29:14 AM
Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.
This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.
What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.
As someone who un-ironically idolizes DOCTOR DOOM, you missed the part where Doom is right and SJWs are wrong. Doom is not self-serving, he just happens to be the best possible choice for prosperity and peace. Who the fuck wrote this, some Reed Richards marketing drone?
Quote from: Brad on August 18, 2023, 11:44:03 PM
Quote from: tenbones on August 17, 2023, 04:29:14 AM
Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.
This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.
What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.
As someone who un-ironically idolizes DOCTOR DOOM, you missed the part where Doom is right and SJWs are wrong. Doom is not self-serving, he just happens to be the best possible choice for prosperity and peace. Who the fuck wrote this, some Reed Richards marketing drone?
(My time has come)
Ahem.
"RRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!"
A big problem with super villains, is because they're paranoid and power hungry, as soon as they took power they'd kill and exile all supers of middling to high power, and work to stop new ones being born.
Then the next Alien Invasion or cosmic event would destroy the Earth.
So any villain 'winning' would be utterly pyric.
Generally, I find D&D's "Blood War" (as with most implementations of the ninefold alignment system) to be kind of dumb. But within that context, I have a bit of a soft spot for the forces of Lawful Evil. I can totally see how someone might decide that siding with Devils is the lesser evil, if it means keeping the multiverse out of the hands of the Demons.
EDIT: I suppose that in general, I find the concept of lawful-evil interesting. It depends on how you choose to interpret the concept of Law, but the paradox of Evil which recognizes the importance of things like honor, justice and truthfulness is one that I think has some interesting potential.
Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 04:47:54 PM
Quote from: tenbones on February 15, 2023, 03:19:00 PM
Quote from: David Johansen on February 14, 2023, 09:47:49 PM
Any Marvel game has a decent crop with guys like Doctor Doom, Thanos, and The Absorbing Man.
LOL well that's just cheating.
Adapted settings should at least be a separate category. For adapted settings, my node would be to Call of Cthulhu for most interesting opposition, with Alien as an honorable mention.
For original-to-RPG settings, one of my favorites is Torg. The reality-bending invaders were a lot of fun as they came in such varied flavors. I also think the Zhodani from Traveller are an inspired bad guys, with literal thought police in a believable way.
Cthulhu I think definitely would be at the top, but I agree stuff based on existing works should be excluded (Doctor Who has some fun bad guys too, Star Wars has Darth Vader, etc)
Also remember the bad guys in TORG being very cool (the Gaunt Man was pretty terrifying actually).
My vote goes to Ravenloft but that is also kind of cheating because it has villains based on classic horror bad guys (a lot of universal and hammer in there as well). It has more hammy villains to be sure but I like my villains hammy and played by people like Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Lon Chaney, Gary Oldman etc.