I was very happy when the new Monster Manual gave us some higher-CR humanoid stat blocks.
They cap out at CR 12, which technically they already did with the Archmage. But along with the Archmage, there's now the Questing Knight, the Archpriest, and the Pirate Admiral. (The Bandit Crime Lord lags behind slightly at CR 11).
The thing is, in most stories, villains are people. That's largely due to the fact that in most stories, the only really active characters with agency are human beings. But even in fantasy, there are many evil kings, evil sorcerers, or other evil people working at cross-purposes against the heroes.
In D&D, if you want a "person" as your big bad monster, and you want them to be something legendary that a high-level party will be challenged by, your best bets are generally undead like Liches or Death Knights - beings who can act very much like a person even if they aren't technically humanoid anymore.
As I've often talked about, one of the key formative texts that has influenced my tastes in fantasy is Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The ultimate villain of this epic 7-book series (with an eighth "interquel" taking place I believe between books 3 and 4 that isn't really necessary to understand the series) is the Crimson King, a demonic tyrant who is half-human and half-eldritch-abomination. But the villain we spend much more time actually seeing in the story is the Crimson King's duplicitous servant (who wishes to usurp CK's role at the last second if he can pull it off,) the Man in Black.
The Man in Black, known also as Walter O'Dim, is King's most common recurring villain, appearing under different names in different stories, but explicitly the same guy. His most famous appearance is in The Stand, in which he is known primarily as Randall Flagg, though he also goes by all sorts of other names with the initials "R. F." Given his prominence in that book in particular, Randall Flagg is probably his default name, even though we eventually discover in the final book of the Dark Tower (also called The Dark Tower) that his birth name was Walter Padick, before he learned how to use magic and basically turn it against a world that had wronged him.
Flagg's characterization in The Stand is pretty interesting: he seems to be something of a shapeshifter, and can blend in with groups that are ideologically opposed to one another, always trying to stir up violence and hatred wherever he goes. In that novel, I think King probably intended him to be some inhuman, otherworldly, demonic being, even giving one of his names as Nyarlathotep (a figure from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, the only Great Old One that cares enough about humanity to actively hate us).
But I think that the idea here is that Flagg probably isn't human anymore, wandering so long and so far and changing himself with magic to the point that he might still look like his human self (or at least like a human) but he's almost certainly not one anymore.
His defining traits, I'd say, are that he never stays put for very long (even if he does take up residence in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas for most of The Stand) and he's a cruel bastard that sows chaos and ruin everywhere he goes.
So, how might we approach a character like this in D&D?
First off, I think it might be wisest not to make this character your big bad. While it might be exciting to try to track them down, to hunt them and then have a good confrontation, they're basically antithetical to the idea of a lair or dungeon. The worn heels of their boots are the result of endless wandering.
Instead, I'd say that they work as a great kind of MacGuffin - a character that the players might need to chase and thus give them the impetus to travel from one location to the next. Most D&D games I've played in (well, at least the two long campaigns I've played in) haven't stuck around in the same location all that much, and are more Lord of the Rings-like travel experiences. As the opening line of the Dark Tower series says: The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed. There you go: a great way to keep the party pushing forward.
Adventures involving our Dark Wanderer would likely not really directly feature them. As another Dark Tower example, the beginning of the story (actually technically taking place prior to the opening lines, as it begins with some nested flashbacks) sees the hero, Roland (the aforementioned Gunslinger) come across a town that Flagg has corrupted by indoctrinating the town's priestess, who has then whipped the populace into a murderous fervor. Roland is forced to fight every last man, woman, and child in the town (it's a fairly dark series, as one might expect from King, especially early King). Roland doesn't even get a chance to meet the Man in Black face-to-face until the end of the first book, and their meeting is cryptic and vague. But Flagg's presence is felt there, in the hostility that greets him in the village of Tull.
One of King's favorite themes is that evil crumples when confronted - that the bad guys use fear to keep normal people complacent and compliant. Thus, I actually think it wouldn't be that crazy to simply use something like an Archmage stat block for a character like this.
The key, though, is that they're going to focus on evading the heroes as much as possible, rather than trying to kill them in a direct confrontation. Archmages have both Misty Step and Teleport, which could help them escape from a party that seeks to take them down. This is pretty consistent with Flagg as he's depicted in the Dark Tower series - he uses magic to turn Roland's bullets into duds, but he doesn't stand and fight because he'd almost certainly lose. An Archmage is actually somewhat tough (among their powers is a one-a-day 9th level Cone of Cold, which I believe does an average of 54 damage on a failed save, which ain't nothing).
But the Dark Wanderer is also a lonesome figure - they're probably not going to have a bunch of minions to protect them. Thus, they'll really prefer to lure the party into hostile situations. With their own spells, like Fly, they can go through dangerous areas with relative safety.
They're also going to likely be casting Scrying on the party frequently, which might help reinforce the idea that they remain a presence even if they're more than a day's journey away. I'd actually go out of my way as a DM to ensure that the Scrying feels like some kind of visitation. The spell itself describes the person making the saving throw as feeling that they don't know what they're saving against, only that they are made to feel uneasy, so I think having a vision of being stalked by a shadowy figure would fit the bill. Maybe the party doesn't really know what their Dark Wanderer looks like, but when saving against the Scrying spell, they see some defining feature of them - in Flagg's case, he often has glowing red eyes and cowboy boots with worn-down heels. In the Stand, in particular, he has custom buttons, like one with a smiley face with a bleeding bullet hole in the forehead.
Now, again, I think that Archmage actually works the best for something hewing quite close to the way Flagg is portrayed in the Dark Tower series. And I do think that this stat block is pretty well-suited to this kind of elusive foe.
But maybe you want to lean further into the inhuman side of things.
A Lich could perform this role, but they have far less reason to fear the party catching up with them, given they can just recover wherever their phylactery/spirit jar is hidden. I actually think a Rakshasa is an awesome recurring adversary (though arguably too powerful if they're truly intent on hunting the party, as they can planeshift right back to the same place after they die, on top of their insane magic immunity and their insane cursed touch.
An Arcanoloth can play some similarly evasive games with a party as an Archmage, and they're the same CR.
In terms of thematics, a Star Spawn Emissary could work (starting off as Lesser and only transforming if they beat that form) but I don't know that that's really what we're looking for.
Yeah, I'm actually thinking sticking to Archmage is your best bet. You can always reskin it to a different creature type if your Dark Wanderer is of a different vibe.
As always, though, I'd strongly encourage you to think outside the stat block. The kind of prophetic visions and ominous signs of the influence of a true fantasy villain aren't always covered by the game's rules. As long as these are primarily flavor and foreshadowing, there's no worry about upsetting the game balance. But I also think you can create dangerous scenarios and affliction that work on-theme.
Remember that if you make the Wanderer's primary objective when confronted by the heroes escape rather than killing the party, you can be a little nastier with those bespoke afflictions. Maybe you, like Flagg does in the 4th book, neutralize one of the heroes' primary weapons, for example. Maybe the environment shifts in some unexpected way that forces the party to focus on surviving the change (like the floor becoming quicksand) rather than pursuing.
I think it's fair game to give an Archmage any Wizard spell, and even toss in some Sorcerer or Warlock ones that Wizards don't get (which isn't a lot). For higher-level spells, be sure to match the kind of limited use that the stat block has (maybe swapping them out with spells of the same level). Archmages are assumed to have Mind Blank on them at all times, but I do feel like Maze is a fantastic one to really mess with a party.
Now, how do you ultimately deal with your Dark Wanderer?
Certainly, part of the fun of D&D is to let the players' actions dictate how things go. If they come up with the perfect plan to trap this foe and deal with them once and for all, that's probably the best scenario. But if you want to build to a set-piece encounter with them, you should figure out what their ultimate goal is. In the Dark Tower, Flagg's demise is an anticlimax meant to introduce a new, deadlier villain (though as much as I love this series, the last couple books were pretty clearly written in a rush as King was worried he would die before he finished the saga. 22 years later, he's still kicking and I kind of wish he had taken more time on it. That villain who destroys Randall Flagg is, himself, slain almost instantaneously in his own anticlimax. Actually, all the villains have pretty anticlimactic ends, which might be a point King was making but doesn't work very well, dramatically).
I'd say that, especially given that the party's going to be spending a lot of time pursuing this foe, if they can't figure out a way to ensnare them cleverly (and do try to allow for that, within reason) you should try to have this foe reach a goal and begin enacting their evil plan, to give the encounter urgency and stakes. This kind of transforms them into a stationary "dungeon boss" foe, but it's a reasonable way to end their story.
But until that final confrontation, feel free to use any trick in the book - just play fair. They already have Misty Step and Teleport, but consider spells like Project Image, Mislead, Dimension Door, Programmed Illusion, and Freedom of Movement to make them extremely hard to pin down so that they can get away from the party alive.
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