The Core Worlds

Villains

Time for another WISH:

Describe three of your favorite villains from campaigns you've played in or GMed. What makes them good villains? Why are they your favorites?

I haven't had the opportunity to play in a campaign with a really good villain yet, but a couple have come close, and I've got a few ideas for the Pulp campaign I'm slowly working on.

Lets start with the most recent, a Forgotten Realms campaign set in The Bloodstone Lands. Our chief enemy was a Witch who was trying to take over the region, starting with a magical (and ever lasting winter - and now I start to think 'Narnia'). In some ways she is a good villainess, but everything about her (so far) has been rather impersonal. We've had obstacles cast in our path, but never seen or heard her. A few evil cackles and a "I'll get you next time!" would be a step in the right direction. The campaign isn't over yet though, so there's still hope.

That was the present, now the past. This time the genre is science fiction. A space station based Star Trek PBEM game, which borrowed heavily from DS9. In this case the villain was the shadowy black-ops organisation - Section 31. In this case we actually got to meet the bad guy, who promptly escaped and went on to cause us even more trouble. It all felt so much more personal.

The difference between the two, is that in the latter everything felt much more personal.

And now the future - as I've mentioned before I'm putting together a Pulp campaign and I don't have a villain for the players to put themselves up against yet. Now, right at this stage I have a few ideas, but not much structure.

We shall start with the traditional group of manipulative men, a group of villains who did so well in The X-Files. Then we shall add an agent of evil, our very own CGB Spender. CGB has to be the face of the enemy that the players usually see, so he needs to be memorable and virtually untouchable.

That's the end of my ideas (I haven't spent much time thinking about this at all), so its research time. Hello Mr. Google...

The first useful hit is Designing Encounters by Rich Redman, which is pretty obvious stuff as far as designing the plot is concerned, but has some useful pointers for dealing with the players as they interact with it. Unfortunately it doesn't say much at all about designing the villain.

More helpful is the Hierarchy of Evil story from Role Playing Tips, but still not a lot on designing the villain himself.

PRIMUS Agents isn't a design guide, but it does include a brief descriptions of characters which are ideal for 'borrowing' ideas from. I think perhaps CGB (and I have a nasty suspicion this stolen name is going to stick!) will be an expert fencer, and probably a member of the nobility. He might be German (their evil empire is quite powerful in this game world), or he might be a traitorous British Count (although I think we get enough of those from Hollywood).

Finally we some so real advice for designing villains over at what turns out to be a dodgy scan of Ravenloft Domains of Dread.

The villain must have qualities that the heroes see in themselves. Professor Moriarty, for example, is all the more terrible because he is so much like Sherlock Holmes. At least one of the players should feel as if his character is looking into a dark mirror when he gazes upon the villain.

Its difficult to plan for this before you know what characters will be taking part in the campaign, but with a little luck CGB can be adapted when the submissions come in.

The villain must pose a threat to either the heroes or something that they hold dear. This does not mean that he must be physically powerful, only that his machinations and influence are great enough to endanger them. Few villains are as terrible as Adolf Hitler, yet he was hardly a physically imposing man.

When they first encounter him, the player characters will be in direct physical danger, although not directly (they won't be considered a threat unless they take some action against him). As before, targeting that which the heroes hold dear is difficult until you know what that dear thing is. Eventually CGB will be wrecking havock in the Empire and threatening the liberty of all - and its likely that at least some of the characters will care about that. The middle will have to wait.

The elements of poetic justice discussed elsewhere in this book should be apparent to the players. If this is not the case during the course of the adventure, it should appear by its conclusion. The heroes should always end a game thinking "he got what he deserved".

This is something I disagree with, the heroes must have their victory, but you can't have a recurring villain without him escaping justice until the final showdown.

The villain must become an individual in the eyes of the players. Dracula is not a classic novel merely because it focuses on a vampire; its fame comes from the fact that it features the greatest of all vampires. Though many other vampires appear in the book, there is only one Dracula.

As I said earlier, the villain has to have a personality, and the heroes have to experience that personality.

Lastly, the villain should be larger than life - or death, as the case may be. Just as the heroes stand a little taller than the common folk of the world, so too must their enemy be exceptional.

Oh yes, a little bit insane, a master swordsman, and unbelievably arrogant.

Narsham writes about Believable Villains. The advice can be summed up as "Villains should not be two dimensional, working out their motivations and history helps, even if the players never find out what that motivation is."

Its a good point, and I'll certainly put some thought in to working out why CGB is helping his syndicate (and that name will change!) take over the world. I won't explain it here, at least not right now - that can wait until I get a chance to actually run this game.

Shiladitya Sen also writes about creating effective villains...

Evil laughter, long-winded explanations & last-minute gloating, etc. have been used so often in all kinds of popular media that their appearance invariably leads to humour of some kind. If that's what you want, then use the standard cliches by all means, but if not, try to avoid producing monocled villains who carry white pussycats around with them.

Its a good point, while I do want to inject a certain level of that type of humour in to the game, it would probably get tired before too long. So CGB will have to be scaled back quite a bit, and leave the gloating for those stages when he has the heroes at his mercy.

It is always a good idea to scale your villain's power level to that of the party. This is extremely important in the case of long-term villains, & requires treading a fine line, so that the finished character is one who will neither overwhelm the party (which would raise the question of why he didn't at his first chance), nor be easily beaten & captured by them.

Also a good point (I'm going to have to read more articles from this site), my initial plan was to make CGB as a massively powerful character who the players would have to work hard to approach in power. Giving him narrow escapes would be better.

CGB still needs a lot of work, at the moment I have little more then an outline which needs filling out with background, motivations and objectives, but its a start.

And finally, on a lighter note, the Super Villain Encyclopedia provides some essential advice on being a villain, while it isn't taking itself seriously, some of the personality traits mentioned do fit in to the slightly over-the-top villain that CGB will become. Will he remember the list of things to do?

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