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| Pitch-black schemes hatched in pitch-black depths, by ArchAngel73 |
Human Slaves of An Insect Nation, Part 11-Villainin’
A good friend of mine once
said, as I was busy explaining to him my outline of Prototype’s plot in a
manner that made its story appear, at the very least, competent, that…
‘Villains are important, dude.
They like, make up for half the game.’
Needless to say, this was the
sort of casual use of ABSOLUTE NARRATIVE WISDOM that occasionally grips my
friends mid-conversation that just stuck in my brain and gave me the burning
desire to elaborate on.
Of course, my constant
attempts to bring back this spark of cosmic epiphany to my friend, failed; the
bastard, after dispensing his bit, had left me to do the heavy lifting.
That was two years ago.
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Two years full of drinking, failed campiagns and a very short skit where I pretended to be a Buddhist Mummy, but that’s another story altogether. |
During that time, I went through a phase were I began
to look into the role of a villain in a narrative, but something always eluded
me, when it came to RPGs. I would always try to come up with new, interesting,
elaborate characters but they’d either never truly get the chance to show off
their own complexity and nefariousness, or they would be dispatched by the
players in lightining-quick fasion.
To add insult to injury, those villains would also be
quickly forgotten by the players, never once leaving a lasting impression. All
the work I had put toward building this epic antagonist would just get chucked
out the window the moment after the characters had already unraveled his guts.
But did I give up? Did I despair? Did I break down and
cry?
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| No. Yes. A little bit. But I was mostly very, very angry. |
It took me a while before I began to realize exactly
where and how I had been going wrong: I was dealing with my campaign villains
in the same way I would deal with villains in a story, or a videogame or even a
series. Not once, during my attempts at creating a roleplaying narrative, did I
ever stop to think that what I was trying to do was forcefully insert a
videogame end-boss in a scenario where you can pretty much do anything you
please!
Keep in mind, however, that this revelation happened
AFTER one of my previous posts, where I had already stated my opinion on
developing villains for your rpg campaign. I had not admitted it at the time,
but the examples I had used were based off the few successful attempts I had
pulled off, unbeknownst to me. Now armed with my new-found knowledge (via the
tried and true method of trial and error) I give you…
THE SHAPESCAPES GUIDE TO CREATING A
COMPETENT RPG CAMPAIGN VILLAIN (COMPLETE
WITH ACTUAL REFERENCE)
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| Introducing V’Shan Oorok, Usurper of the Venusian Throne. |
Step One:
Decide the Villain’s importance
A villain’s role (beside the obvious one, which is
being antagonistic to the players) is to act as counterbalance to their every
action and victory, as well as to be an actual living, breathing goal for them
to overcome (via copious application of plasma bolts to the face).
While this is pretty much the purpose of a campaign’s
villain, it is nowhere near a proper definition, nor does it encompass every
aspect of his role. So before we move any further, you need to ask yourself
this:
How much of a shit do I give about my villain’s
purpose and function? Is he really the person who’s responsible for all the
events that have taken place thus far? Is he going to be directly involved in
the characters’ every predicament? Hell, is he even going to show up at any
point and if so, how often?
Once upon a time
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| When people had the balls to admit that prestige classes were a horrible idea |
The villain was a cookie-cutter block of stats with an
evil laugh track, serving the purpose of a space shooter game’s end boss. His
function was to show up, stir shit up and then die in an apocalyptic showdown,
without any regard to his personal development or his place within the world.
For the purposes of this article, let’s call this type
of villain a Sauron.
But later, as pop culture and roleplaying games
progressed, people wanted more out of their games. As the settings evolved,
from bare-bones kick-in-the-door dungeons into sprawling worlds, filled with
all sorts of wondrous things. Really, it was only a matter of time when those
villains would just not quite cut it.
Saurons don’t hold water to most campaigns I’ve either
run or played through, mostly because players won’t just go with ‘he’s EVOL’ as
an answer. They will ask questions and they will want to know more about him,
besides the fact that he can breathe fire or that he has 12 levels in Sith
Lord.
Hell, in some of the games I’ve been through,
there wasn’t even any villain! Sure, there was a plot or a few intelligences
pulling the strings but you wanna know who the final boss was?
Some dude.
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| Okay, her name may have been Aziraphael, the Unyielding sword of the Lords Above, but you get my point. |
The point was, there was no villain to serve as an end boss, because the magnitude of the
disaster that was approaching and the plots that were being weaved were so
great, the players ended up locking horns with just one agent of said powers.
Let’s call these kinds of villains Luthors.
Remember: before anything else, the villain is just a
tool in your hands, there to serve the story. But how important is he to you,
actually?
So before you move on, you need to think: what do I
need this villain for?
For the sake of argument, I am going to be using
V’Shan Oorok in context, as both a Sauron as well as a Luthor villain in the
following examples:
Sauron-Version:
V’Shan
is intended as a 50’s space opera style villain. He is the Usurper of the
Venusian throne, an all-around evil dude and the current lord of the planet.
When the characters reach Venus in a manned experimental craft and find
themselves stranded in the Vupar Tholus of Venus (where they proceed to get
into an impromptu spat with a company of his personal guard), he considers them
to be the Earth Aliens of legend, come to overthrow him.
V’Shan’s role in this example is that of a typical
Sauron Villain: his sole purpose is to antagonize the players, to send his
agents to try and murder them every week and to occasionally clash with them,
building up to a final confrontation in his capital city in the Lakshmi Planum.
Luthor-Version:
In this iteration, V’Shan remains the Usurper of the Venusian throne, but his
villainous agenda is far more subtle. In this version, he is not interested in
controlling Venus, or even to maintain his position. Instead, he is merely a
man in charge of greedy, narrow-minded warlords, nobles and mad scientists,
whom he has manipulated into securing himself into a place of power then let
them do with the planet as they please.
In this scenario, V’Shan is a creature of mystery,
barely ever present before the final stages of the campaign. Instead, the
characters get to know him through his actions, the ferocity of his henchmen or
the terror in the common man’s eyes at the very utterance of his name.
Step Two: Define the Villain’s Goals
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| And when I have finally defeated Neo, I will make everyone like me and NEVER BE LONELY AGAIN! |
What does your villain want to do with his life,
exactly? Well yeah, okay, he might want
to become the One True King or as unto a God or (if you’re a lazy fucking slob)
the richest man on Earth but how will he accomplish that? Hell, what is he
going to do afterward?
A good villain has a properly defined goal that’s easy
for the players to understand and want to antagonize. A GREAT villain has a
goal that could be described as reasonable, or even sympathetic.
Were things
somehow different, then maybe the characters and he could have been friends.
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| Right-on, machine-brother! Death to meat-kind! |
The cliché that nobody really sees himself as the bad
guy holds far deeper layers of meaning. A villain, keep in mind, is not just a
dude who twirls his mustache and eats orphans because the Internet went down.
It’s just a person who opposes the players’ goals but also has motivations that
have driven him to pursue these goals in turn.
And besides that, the villain has a life beyond his
constant attempts to become a deity. Maybe he has a wife and kids, or even a
country that needs to be governed. Perhaps he was an adventurer like your
characters, who just couldn’t handle the Kool-Aid of responsibility.
There’s also the chance that he’s just terrible at his
job and has caused the ire of others because of his unwillingness to
compromise. Maybe, like the Nazis in Indiana Jones, he is fighting a lost cause
and only braving these obstacles for the sake of his Regime.
So, back to our example:
Sauron-Version:
V’Shan has
wrested control from the Emperor of Venus by virtue of his cunning and might.
He has earned the Throne of Venus and maintains his control not only thanks to
the might of his armies, but also by controlling the planet’s greatest water
supply, situated beneath the capital. In this iteration, the alternative to
V’Shan’s rule is certain death, Should his armies fail to maintain his power.
But how did he rise to power in the first place? After
countless years of fighting in the plains of Venus, V’Shan (who rose to the rank
of Lord of the Armies with his own two hands), decided that he deserved more
than just a sizeable pension and his very own house in the country. Believing
himself a better-suited ruler than the current Imperial Dynasty, he wants to
make Venus a world that dances to his own tune, building a perfectly orderly
society from the ruins.
Luthor-Version:
V’Shan
was always a man in power. Noble born, thirteenth in succession to the Venusian
Imperial Throne, he always knew that he was destined for greater things, but
not the hoi-polloi of the Courts or even the maddening din of battle.
Turning his attention to the Unspeakable Sciences,
V’Shan chose to give up on his title and become a Techno-Monk of the Amber
Order. His genius and ambition allowed him to soon rise through the ranks and
discover the lost technologies of Venus and the Ancients’ Forbidden Geometries.
Soon enough V’Shan had in his hands the power to control men’s minds, but also
the blueprints to an unstoppable army, created to wage war against the Universe
by his ancestors.
By using his powers, V’Shan coerced the military and
the noblemen to rebel against their masters, using slaves and workers as well
as the planet’s most brilliant minds, to put together an army that will soon
crush the Universe in his name.
Step Three: And he does all this how,
exactly?
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| No, him being a wizard doesn’t count |
He’s born of Djinn and mortal woman. He’s a robot.
He’s rich as fuck. He’s got superpowers. He’s from the future. He was a woman,
all along.
These are wafer-thin explanations for setting up your
villain’s capabilities, abilities and skills. They might hold up for barely two
sessions before the players decide to look into the villain and he collapses
under scrutiny, crushed by the weight of his own bullshit.
While RPG campaigns aren’t exactly perfect
environments for you to establish a narrative, they aren’t really an excuse for
you to sit on your ass and roll dice all day. If you want your villain to have
some actual depth, then you need to get some more mileage out of him.
If he is the current leader of a sect of evil wizards,
then he must have risen to power, which means that he’s a stone cold bastard.
If he’s inherited such power, then maybe he is used to it, but unfitting. If
he’s come from the future, then maybe his high-tech superiority is going to
last until he runs out of Uranium D-Cell batteries.
My point is that sooner or later, your players will
begin asking ‘How does he do this shit?’ and you’re going to have to answer.
Not by providing exposition, but by handing some explanation through his
henchmen.
By doing this, you also provide limitations to him,
which allow you to define his capabilities and make for far more interesting
stories. If your villain is, say, a dark god, then what’s stopping him from
afflicting your characters with the plague and watching them as they waste
away? If he is the Secret Master of the Earth, how come he hasn’t brought down
the combined forces of the planet’s most powerful armies on your ass?
Maybe he can’t, but why? It sure as hell isn’t because
the characters are so damn awesome that every attempt has failed. When you have
iunfinite resources at your disposal, then no band of sad psychopaths with
superpowers is going to be enough to stop you.
There are two ways to work around this problem: one,
is by giving the impression that the villain is stronger than he is (without
him actually being so) and two, by introducing the characters as a threat to
him, instead of the other way around. Example:
Sauron-Version:
V’Shan,
despite being the ruler of Venus, has not yet solidified his control over the
planet. Pockets of resistance still remain in his domain, which constantly
attempt to strike at his centers of power and kill key officials, thus
weakening his grip on the world.
Even his officers have begun to go astray: some of
them, finally relieved of the yoke of the Imperial Dynasty and thinking
themselves free to pursue their own goals, begin formulating their own plans of
conquest. It’s only a matter of time before their ambitions evolve into a
conspiracy, thus threatening his rule.
Lastly, V’Shan himself may not really be the leader he
thought himself to be: his battlefield experience may have made him Venus’ most
brilliant tactician, but the logistics of running a planet-wide empire escape
him. He sees the characters as a viable distraction from his duties, unaware
that even as he builds this week’s new unstoppable death-ray canon, his
treasury has already run dry and mutiny is brewing in the capital.
Luthor-Version:
V’Shan
does not care. The appearance and actions of the players have barely even
registered as a blip on his radar. He is indifferent to their fates or their
role toward ending his rule. His plans, far deeper-running and nefarious,
cannot be allowed to be disturbed by a group of uppity Earth Aliens who clash
with his incompetent officers.
In fact, V’Shan will not even begin to realize the
players’ importance until they stumble into one of his hidden
factory-cathedrals and discover his war-machine prototypes, destroying it in
the process or perhaps even disrupting manufacture. Suddenly, V’shan realizes
that this group of bastards hs found a way to directly deter the realization of
his ambitions and decides to destroy them.
But at this point, Venus is in open rebellion and the
players appear to have the upper hand. V’Shan’s forces are in disarray or
scattered in the mountains fighting the rebels, leaving him with just his wits
and his few remaining mechanoid servitors to destroy the Earth Aliens before
they find a way to thwart his plans.
Step Four: Who is this man
with the laser sword?
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| *sigh* “He’s so dreamy…you said he was single, right?” “Jodie, people say he drove his wife mad” “Mmmm, angsty!” |
With your villains’ nature, goals and capabilities in
mind, you need to consider what he does that
drives him. What is it that makes him want to be who he is? Dead brother?
Girlfriend killed by the mob? Tiny man with a Napoleonic complex?
Either way, your explanation cannot just be ‘he’s an
asshole’. At least, not without some proper context. Even Voldemort (who is pop
culture’s most iconic asshole to date), hailed from a broken home and had an
abusive childhood. Villains may not consider themselves bad guys, but there
must have been something that made them so fucked in the head.
One of the most interesting and memorable villains I
met in a tabletop campaign was Nomok the Iron Lord. While in himself he was not
much of a villain (a horrible bastard who just wanted to destroy every nation
in the continent according to the wishes of his dark gods), the most memorable
bit about him happened almost right after our showdown:
Imagine the scene; a bunch of adventurers, having
stormed the Nomok’s keep and torn it apart in a near-apocalyptic showdown,
finally confront the bastard and our group’s paladin sticks a sword in his gut.
Nomok collapses and as we’re looking around his chambers, we find…
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| His wife, brandishing a sword, coming to her husband’s aid. |
Of course, we reacted immediately and she was cut down
in barely a turn by our group. We hadn’t had time to find out who she was,
until Nomok broke down crying at the sight of his wife, brutally murdered by
the madmen who had come into his castle and killed his men and him.
Wanna know what the son of a bitch did, after that? He
dorve himself into the paladin’s sword and died. And we stood around, looking
like a bunch of assholes.
Nomok may not have been much of a villain, goals-wise,
but I won’t forget the son of a bitch anytime soon.
With that in mind, let’s go back to our example…
Sauron-Version:
V’Shan has
done terrible things in the name of his former masters. For them, he has killed
and pillaged and performed genocide in the name of maintaining order. While he
does his best to hide it, he knows deep down that he is a war criminal of the
lowest sort.
It was his resentment for his former lords and the
state of the world that drove him to take over the planet and attempt to
restore order. But his idea of order is far from what Venus needs now. Where he
sees the necessity of a regime maintained by brute force, the planet needs a
leader to unify its peoples. Where he sees the death of his subjects as the only
alternative to his rule, the people of Venus see the Earth Aliens as their
prophesied messiahs.
V’Shan’s closest associates also see him as a hero and
would gladly die for him. Like him, they have fought in the wars and know that
the world needs change but like him, they cannot see beyond the confines
imposed on them by their military careers.
Some people also love V’Shan. They see him as the sole
beacon of order in a world that has long since slipped into mere anarchy and
want to maintain that order, either for their own political sakes, or simply
for the sake of enforcing peace.
Luthor-Version:
V’Shan’s will is no longer his own. While V’Shan had
never truly been a good man to begin with, his ventures into forbidden science
soon reached a point where even he could not stomach. Coming into contact with
the forgotten machine-intelligences that dwelt in the planet’s core, V’Shan
attempted to seal them off but ended up losing the battle and his mind, as
well.
Now, all that is left of the Usurper is a sliver of
his former self, its actions dictated by the machine-intelligences. His closest
friends and associates, who had realized this change early on, know that he
desperately wants to be freed from his torment and have done everything in
their power to save him, but have failed so far.
Meanwhile, the last slivers of V’Shan’s mind still
linger, fighting the machines. He wishes to go down fighting and he will need
the aid of the Earth Aliens, to save his world and the rest of the Universe
from annihilation.
And lastly…
Step Five: Make it Brief
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| Nobody came here for your character study… |
With all this in mind, you should know that this
article dictates the content of the
villain, but not his presentation. The presentation of a villain is a whole
‘nother beast, but you know what? It’s really simple to pull off:
Keep it brief and make sure that in no way does it
overshadow the players.
‘What?’ I hear you ask ‘so I just went through all
this development shit for nothing?’. Well the short answer is YES. The long
answer is YES, BUT…
You see, an RPG campaign does not work like a usual
narrative. Unlike a movie, a book or even a vidyagame, you do not have the time
or the freedom to expand on your villain or the world and even if you did, you
do not have the inclination. Matter of fact, what you have is just a small
window of opportunity to present and build said villain perhaps once every
gaming session.
Which means that you need to work around this shit and
make the most of it.
Your players will not sit there and take shovelfuls of
exposition to the ear, while some dude (plot-relevant or not) waxes poetic
about the villain’s role, goals or backstory. They won’t even deign to sit
there and take it, while your Villain disgorges exposition, choosing instead to
take their chances at killing him instead of talking it out.
Before you start bitching about it, take a moment and
consider: would you put up with such a scenario, were you in their shoes? Of
course not!
So try and deal with your presentation subtly and
indirectly: provide exposition through notes, stories and gossip. Make sure the
players know the Villain’s name early on and hear of his exploits. Make sure
their enemies call out his name. Get them to hate him one scene at a time.
Be patient, be methodical and pretty soon, they will
be cursing his name in their sleep.
One last thing…
Step Six: Eschew Villains
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| This looks like a Tuesday... |
On the other hand, perhaps a villain is not required
in your narrative. Maybe your players are just naturals at stirring shit up and
getting themselves in trouble and people out of trouble. Maybe, as you think up
your campaign’s premise, you realize that no one person could be held
responsible for the entire mess.
Or maybe, just maybe, you want to try something
different.
Campaigns without villains aren’t exactly unheard of.
Call of Cthulhu deals in monstrous beings that cannot even comprehend the
characters (what with them being so small and insignificant, barely registering
as sentient, never mind threatening in their eyes), Exalted’s setting is just
overall shitty and requires some emergency mending and so do most othern
contemporary RPG worlds. No one person or organizations are set at the
forefront as the ones behind the mess. Things are just plain old shitty and the
world needs people who can make everything better.
This might sound like the rambling of a hipster GM,
hard at work stroking his own cockles while smoking a bong, but in fact it’s
not: it’s just an alternative approach to designing a campaign, switching your
point of interest from the Dark Wizard of the Week to Your Players Against the
World.
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Come at me then, you big blue cunt… |
That’s not to say it’s any easier to pull off, though:
if anything, this is a veritable challenge, that requires you placing your
emphasis on developing the setting’s problems, assigning solutions and then
finding the way to tie them all together in a
big old knot for the players to cut through!
It takes patience, time and above all, a lot of balls
to pull off but goddamn is it worth every second!
Addendum-Alpha:
A big old thank you to fellow nerd Einai Mpelalidiko
for his advice on approaching this matter and turning the original incomprehensible
draft into the article you see today.
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| Your beer is in the mail, dude. |
Addendum-Beta:
Apparently publications are like buses. You wait for
one and then three come along at the same time. I had 3 stories of mine
published in 3 days in a row, so you might excuse my burning desire to tell
everybody!
First, a big ol’ Thank You to the good people at
Fiction Vortex Magazine, for accepting my short story, Nth Chance. Any of you
aspiring writers out there should check them out, since they are just starting
out and are aching for awesome new material (not to mention they’re a pretty
cool bunch altogether):
Second, Aphelion Magazine just had another short story
of mine published. It’s about a boy who discovers he’s no longer real:
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2013/03/TheGearsThatGroundTheHeartsofChildren.html
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2013/03/TheGearsThatGroundTheHeartsofChildren.html
And lastly, to the awesome crew of Dark Fire Magazine,
for accepting my short story about cursed fortune cookies and their pretty
intelligent feedback (and above all, their patience):
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