Cue the evil laugh!

A while ago somebody asked me how come I never do a villain who is truly “villainish“. “Well”, said I, not paying much attention, “aren’t villains supposed to be people just like everybody else? Don’t they have weaknesses and soft spots just like everybody else”? My friend agreed that they did. But he also pointed out that just once in a while, the player characters should run across someone truly evil. Someone without a single pleasant thought in his head.

Why all bad guys aren’t totally bad

I don’t believe that all villains are thoroughly evil. Why? Because they start out being people just like the player characters. Then they turn bad, going off in some strange direction, developing twisted ways of mind and becoming a pestilence and a scourge to the planet. But as they start out as regular folks, they have to be motivated by at least some of the same things as everybody else.

While a cold-hearted, mean villain will not appear to care much for nice thoughts, there have to be a few things he likes. Just for the pleasure of liking them. Even the meanest fellow around may find some strange pleasure in tending his flower garden when not out to kill and maim and destroy. Surely this makes little difference – liking roses does not justify homicide (not even in the War of the Roses). It’s still a pointer to the fact that the villain does have a heart.

When I meet a truly evil seeming NPC in somebody else’s campaign or storyline I always ask myself whether that fellow has nothing at all about himself that my character could like? Isn’t there at least one little thing that somebody could like?

Bad guys usually have a reason to have turned bad. Some may be on the classic quest for world domination. The majority will be pushing towards humbler goals. Okay, so they have to destroy a few nations in order to achieve their goals, but they are probably also protecting somebody or something as they go about it. Maybe they’re not even truly evil — just different, or ignorant. The end justifies the means, doesn’t it?

The misguided villain

Zephardain had no choice. However much he hated to, he had to condemn to the witch and her daughter. As he looked into the bright eyes of the child he found it hard to believe that she should be the spawn of the Red God. So young, so innocent. How would a child of eight have found the years, he asked himself, how would a child influence its companions and lead them to the evil Old Ways? He consoled himself with the fact that the witch showed all the signs of her evil craft at least. The red hair, the green eyes, the beauty mark on her left breast. And she lived alone, with her child.

Next to Zephardain’s golden throne, Ulisdar hovered. A dark shadow within his dark hood. Somehow, the high priest seemed to carry the darkness with him wherever he went. The gods favored Ulisdar. There had been ample proof of that. And the witch had spoken out against the favorite of the Gods, and consequently she had to die. For that crime, and for all the others she might have committed.

Ulisdar glared at him expectantly. “Take them away to the temple,” Zephardain said tiredly. He would have liked to at least have saved the child. But of course Ulisdar was right. The weeds had to be removed and young weeds grew up to be as poisonous as the old ones already were.

Misguided villains are those who think that they are in control when in truth their power has been stolen by somebody smart enough to manipulate them. Misguided villains believe that they are in positions of power while they in truth are the puppets of somebody standing next to the throne.

For most of them go that they are either weak or ignorant or both. A weak person can be bullied into doing whatever his first minister or vizier tells him to do. He will fear the consequences of rebellion. Maybe the gods will not favor him anymore, or his voters will think he’s wimped out. An ignorant ruler may not be observant enough to tell that the trusted minister is sugaring his own cake, so to speak, or maybe he doesn’t care what happens outside his rose garden. The latter may leave government in all but name to the trusted ‘friend’ who is the real villain.

The puppet villain

Silverio glared at the man lying before him, face bloody from the blows the Boys had dealt him already. “Mi casa es su casa,” he said mockingly, your house is mine. “You were a fool, Antonio, to challenge me, and on my own turf. That was stupid, primo. And now you die.”

“You are weak, Silverio,” Antonio spat through bloodied lips. “Your pride will be your undoing.”

Silverio shook with rage and kicked his cousin in the face. His heavy boot left another bruise. “No, you are weak, cousin, weak because you thought you could get to me through Nadine!”

“I wouldn’t want Nadine if she threw herself at me,” Antonio retorted, blood trickling from his mouth. “She rules you, Silverio, and you know it. Everything you do, you do because that loco woman tells you to do it. That witch is getting you into trouble.”

“Shut up,” Silverio raged. “Witch!” Antonio cried. Silverio reached for his knife and slit his cousin’s throat. “Garbage him, pronto!” he told his man. From the back room he could hear Nadine undressing. “Are you coming, baby? Don’t let that dago get to you, honey, you and I know what to do,” she called. “Now me, I have the brains, baby, and you have the brawn.”

Quite like the misguided villain, the weak one thinks he is in control. And just like him, he is in fact being controlled by a power behind the throne. Unlike the misguided villain, however, the weak one knows that he is being used. He just doesn’t want anyone else to find out.

The real power behind the throne is typically someone whom the villain thought he controlled, until realizing that the table had been turned and that he in fact is the person controlled. If he fails to do as he’s told to do, he will be exposed as a wimp. The real person in power has a hold on him that he cannot or dares not break free from — whether it’s sex, drugs, flattery, or an ability to magically keep away the nightmares.

The deceived villain

“Mein Gott,” Dieter whispered to himself, careful so that none of the others might hear. “Lieber Gott.” His black boots were soiled with the blood of the Jews, and his coat was filthy from searching the basement beneath the old bookseller’s store. Praying silently, he whispered, “Lieber Gott, I did not know. They told me they were not human, they told me they were evil. But that old man and his wife, they never hurt anyone.”

“Quiet!” Detlef whispered back. “If you don’t shut up someone’s going to hear you.” Dieter opened his mouth as if to protest, but Detlef cut him off. “What did you think it would be like? A picnic? There are us and there are them. Don’t get squeamish now.”

Dieter obediently kept his mouth shut as he cleaned the blood from his boots. But inside his head he kept on hearing the old man begging them to spare his daughter and his wife, and he could not bring himself to truly believe that they deserved the fate they had had. “If you say a word you will get the same,” Detlef whispered in response to his unspoken thoughts.” Dieter did not manage a reply.

The deceived villain was lead into doing what he does by false promises. He thought he was going to be a hero and then he finds himself in the center of something he cannot get away from. He has to go through with it, because he has nowhere to run to.

This villain is fairly easy for the characters to approach. As soon as they offer him a way out he’ll jump for it like a drowning man grabs for a stick. He may not be very happy about it, perhaps throwing himself at the characters’ blades to escape dishonor or making sure that they will find him and kill him — or he may simply throw himself at their feet, confessing everything.

The nutcase villain

Rickham heard the voices of the crying widows as he strode back and forth before the jail. What does it matter? “They’re people too,” he argued silently. They are evil, the voices in his head responded. Don’t you see how they look at you? You know they’re going to get you if you don’t get them first. They are women without men, don’t you see?

“Last year it was married men,” he snapped, sensing that something was the hell amiss with that logic. The voices laughed. The men wanted you, Rickham, dear, they wanted you dead. Then we killed them, we killed them together, didn’t we? Rickham nodded. He allowed himself to revel in the memory briefly. The blood of the arcology’s married men had kept the voices silent for almost a month. Sated, but never satisfied.

The voices laughed again. But when we killed the men, Rickham, baby, it made the wives angry, don’t you see? That’s the way it is. They will never leave you alone.

“Enough!” he snapped. “I run this place. I’ll have them all shot. Will that do?”

There are things in the water, Rickham, did you know that? They put it there, to poison you. The children, love, don’t you see? We got their parents, and now they want to get even. Don’t you see, Rickham, baby, we have to kill the children too.

The nutcase villain is the most difficult to role play, control and defeat. This guy may not be certain that he’s doing the right thing, but he knows what his voices in the head tell him to do, and that he cannot get away with not doing it. This guy’s mental layout makes a map of the London subway look simple. He’s so messed up he can’t find head or tails of his own sanity, and the only thing that still makes sense to him is obeying the orders the voices give him.

If the nutcase villain is to get a real flavor in the story line, the master needs to figure out what cracked him. What put out his lights? What’s he trying to do, and for what reason? If he’s completely out of it he will do anything to please his demons. But unless the story line is meant to have an occult streak, those demons are purely his own invention, and then you need to know what it is they truly represent.

Are they his mother whom he never could please? Are they his poppa who dressed him in girl’s clothes and called him Jane? Are they his principal who made him the laughing stock of the entire schoolyard?

The ultimately evil villain

Kesh adjusted his earpiece so that he could better hear the screams of the people burning. It made him feel nice, the way they slowly turned into little black cinders. He could do that because he had the power to do it. He didn’t really care what people thought of him. Oh, they called him insane. Maybe he was? Did it matter? A screw loose in the head was good. It made him unpredictable. And unpredictability is hard to defeat.

Today, the country. Tomorrow, the world. And after that, the universe. Kesh was curious. How far can a man go before some cosmic law tries to stop him? He adjusted the targeting device on his plasma rifle. It would be fun, seeing whom they’d finally send to stop him. Well, so maybe he wouldn’t win that final battle. But he was sure as hell going to have a jolly great time until then.

The ultimately evil villain is just that — evil. He likes his job, and he does it well. Life is a game to be won, and every person he can manage to hurt is a point scored. The ultimate villain knows he will probably meet his undoing at some point or other, but he’s already planning ahead for that battle. And meanwhile, he’s having a really great time making everyone miserable.

He is quite often a genius in some twisted way. He is usually difficult to surprise, and usually surrounded by bootlickers and hired men who come close to himself in cruelty. Some of those are probably serving their own goals while others will be offering him blind loyalty. He doesn’t care. When they are no longer useful he discards them. And that too, is quite fun.