Genre Police: Developing A Complex

I don’t remember a time before monsters. I’ve always wanted to be surrounded by the idea of them.

Be it an early, battered copy of Out Of The Pit or guidebooks to movie creatures and villains; I’ve always had an attraction to the dark and horrid. I read and watch a lot of horror, particularly if it’s transgressive in its formation of who is a hero. This is just who I am as a person – I like my media to challenge me, especially in my understanding of morality.

As established in my last article, that means I’ve gone through periods of going very hard and very dark in some games, not always to the games favour. So I’d like to take a moment just look at how and where we can look at villains in our games and where we can find the right sort of darkness for the game you want to provide. Because every game deserves good bad guys. It just needs different ones.

Complexity

Let’s start by looking at complexity when building villains. Here are three villains I’ve either created or borrowed, in three different campaigns I have running at the moment. Once we know who they are and the game they are in, we can maybe see how and why we can look at how they all serve the narratives they are in. Try and think as you read them about how which might be the most straightforward and complex in your games and then we’ll discuss how I’ve thought about them.

Lord Judgement: One of core architects of my group’s woes in the very 80’s cartoon world Laser Valkyries Of The Fallen World D&D game, Lord Judgement is a clever and manipulative warlord of the Redbelt, a mesa wasteland of raiders and clans. He rules the area and undertakes alliances in order to send schemes and minions to ruin nations. His schemes have so far threatened the homes and friends of the PCs and brought war to their doorstep. So far he hasn’t actually featured beyond flashbacks and visions, but his hand is felt in almost everything.

Atropus: The World Born Dead is a planet that hangs in realmspace, sleeping and slumbering but acting through the whims of his minions, the Eldritch Liches, creatures who were once mortal and joined with symbiotes in order to becomes something else and serve his whims. At least one PC has been removed from the game by becoming one of these creatures. He’s featured in my Blending Of Shadows D&D game. This game is a morally complex and dark game about people who are able to affect change at a high level and often features difficult choices for the players.

Hester: a minor character in my Sabbat-focused Vampire game, Out Of Control. Hester is just another member of the New York Sabbat and nominally on the same side as the PCs. But she’s toxic. In the few interactions players have had with her, she’s shown herself to be debauched on duty and has turned on the dime at a chance to bully and socially trap a character she was getting on with moments before. She’s clearly petty and dangerous.

These three represent a wide level of varied actual threats, motivations and capabilities. They’ll also have a very different role in each game. But what we are looking at for now is complexity and where you want your game to sit on that scale.

How It Actually Plays Out

In this trinity, Atropus appears to be the least complex villain – he’s a goddamed death planet that turns people into organ-liches and eats worlds. But what if I told you he’s currently working with the heroes? Because in Blending, Atropus is infested with something far worse. He’s got interdimensional surgical horrors mining his surface. They have the technology to corrupt his servants, and he needs the PCs to help in return for an artifact they need.

Here, the complexity of the campaign has informed the presentation of a pretty clear ‘bad guy’ from D&D lore. Atropus isn’t just an evil planet here. He’s a moral decision to make. Are the players actually going to help this thing that erased one of their friends? The players were expecting Atropus to be at least one of the big bads of the campaign. Now he’s asking for their help against something that might be way worse and he has something they need to prevent another tragedy. His role in the game is way more complex because the players have come to expect this game to present them with difficult moral choices and twisting plots. If I’d have featured him in a game that was more straightforward in its understanding of evil, this wouldn’t be the right way to present him.

By contrast, there’s no doubt about Lord Judgement. He’s set up as a fairly big confrontation at some point in the players’ future. Maybe he’s the big bad, maybe he’s not. But he’s a villainous warlord who experiments on Owlbears, uses brainwashing and technology to try to spread chaos and anarchy. His motivation is a little unclear and oddly oversimple and maybe that’s because this is an 80’s cartoon game and maybe it’s because the players are still trying to pin down exactly what his agenda is beyond: destroy anything that looks like civilisation.

This is about the right level of complexity for Laser Valkyries. We don’t need him to present them with a moral choice: he needs to be unambiguously evil. This doesn’t mean he isn’t challenging or devious – his schemes are Machiavellian and overcomplex, in fact. Like he’s enjoying the theatre of it all. But he doesn’t need to present the players with a moral challenge or have a relatable motivation – he’s the bad guy.

Hester is another level of complexity. She’s petty, cruel and downright horrible to anyone who isn’t a vampire. She’s a classic sadistic villain. But she’s on the side of the players, and she outranks them. She serves to illustrate how poisoned the society the players live in is. On a moral level, she represents a place the players themselves might already be. Are they going to make their unlives mean something new and inhuman, or like Hester, are they going to repeat the petty patterns of their lives in order to gain control and influence? Are those two things in conflict within themselves and the faction they are part of?

In this way Hester is more complex, even though she’s not featured that much – she’s not a bad guy to be defeated or a moral choice to be made and then worried about. She represents a question that in fact is divorced from her fate. If she dies or lives, triumphs or fails the question she posed is still in the air now. Because the Out Of Control campaign is as much about the impact individuals have on each other and where we place the lines between drive and cruelty than any active defeating of the bad guy.

We can see that one of the first things we have to ask when making a villain or threat for out game is how complex we want to go. Are we interested in creating something that challenges our players to think outside of the box, or even question their choices so far? Or are we more interested in giving them something to investigate about? Or even just something to swing a weapon at? This gives us a good starting place to begin to design our threats.

Creative Common credits: Evil Wizard by Edriss and Evil Sci-fi General by borjen-art.