RPT Newsletter #026 | A Quick & Dirty Guide To Creating Great Villains

[Stephan Hornick]

A Quick & Dirty Guide To Creating Great Villains
From JohnnFour | Published first week of June, 2000, updated February 3, 2022

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #026


A Brief Word From Johnn
A hearty welcome to all new subscribers, and a big thanks to all current subscribers for sending in your villain tips. I’m designating June “Villain Month” and will be using and posting your tips on the web site or in this newsletter throughout the next few weeks.

Cheers,
Johnn

P.S. Please forward this issue to any gamer friends who would enjoy it and find the information useful. The more readers and tips the merrier! Thanks.

Overview:

STEP 1. Assign Your Villain a General Power & Success Level
STEP 2. Give Your Villain Some Strengths & Weaknesses
STEP 3. Give Your Villain an Objective & a Point Form Plan


STEP 1. Assign Your Villain a General Power & Success Level
Don’t go through your character creation process and try to roll-up your villain. That takes up precious planning time. Instead, give your villains an overall power/success level to use during play.

For example, I am giving Mordius The Black an 80% success level in my campaign. Any time he tries something I roll the dice and give him a base score of 80 on d100.

Keep track of what skills & abilities your villain uses during play (I use index cards) and you’ll have your villain fully created in a few sessions without sacrificing your precious planning time.

(Thanks for the tip Delos!)


STEP 2. Give Your Villain Some Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths and weaknesses are important because they make all your villains realistic and different from each other.

Here are some example categories for strengths & weaknesses:

• Behavioral (intimidating stare, flinches easily)
• Physical (incredible strength, poor vision)
• Mental (always cool, genius, fear of snakes)
• Political (Emperor is ally, merchants are openly enemies)
• Economic (healthy bank account, poor credit)
• Social (people never suspect him, nervous around ladies)
• Military (large, well-trained army, poor general)
• Family (mother is Queen, must protect his sons)
• Special (spells, the force, intuition)

STEP 3. Give Your Villain an Objective & a Point Form Plan
IMHO, this is the most important thing when creating your villain. With a goal and plan on paper you suddenly have direction for your campaign, ways the characters can get involved and a great tool for GMing on-the-fly.

You can plot out a villain’s plan at any time. But I do mine after determining strengths & weaknesses. I find it easier to create unique plans when I know more about what a particular villain can and cannot do. Otherwise, every plan I make starts to sound the same: capture and kill the PCs then conquer the world!!

Start with the villain’s objective in mind, then work backwards to the present campaign day. Try to have 3-10 steps in your plan. Fewer steps make it hard for you to act on, more steps can create too much work for you to do.

For example:

• Build a powerful army
• Find a general
• Establish a base of operations
• Raise 100,000 gold pieces
• Steal the money, find magic items and sell them, loot tombs and graves
• Trick a group of mercenaries/adventurers into doing the stealing/finding/looting.

Hmmm, seems like I’ve got a good campaign in the works there just by quickly creating a villain and his evil plan.

Here’s a special challenge for you now: quickly create three villains using these three steps, then mesh all their individual plans together into a timeline for one grand, multi-threaded campaign!

Have more fun at every game!

 

[ExileInParadise]

So, the closest in the fantasy poll would be "a strong commander of an army"

Given that I tend to build and run strictly science-fiction campaigns - the only logical villain is humankind itself.
My preferred "big bad" is the _consequence_ of humanity's headlong progress into technology.

The classic science-fiction story is Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus.
In it - the doctor creates his own undoing.

Translating that into today - a game can easily adopt robotics or artificial intelligence as the big bad, ala "Skynet" from the Terminator stories.
RPGs like Eclipse Phase are built around the premise that humans create their own villains.

Of course, Gojira / Godzilla was a giant monster created as a consequence of human atomic bomb testing - and he qualifies as the big monster answer.

But, for real scary campaign fun... how much craziness would you commit if you had *all of the above* poll answers are big bads - all at once - in competition?
Then you end up with something much like the Living Greyhawk campaign run by the RPGA where the world is broken into competing domains where each has big bads driving the local story and coming into conflict with other big bads at the borders between regions.

 

[Stephan Hornick]

@Morvar : This could be a way to do this in your campaign.

 

[JohnnFour]

I'm a lich guy.

I need a villain that's smart so they can be a puzzle for me.

That's what I enjoy a lot about being GM. It's a bunch of puzzles to me.

So after a session I like to spend time on my villain Loops, trying to come up with encounter-level stuff that'll help me trick my players.

 

[JohnnFour]

the world is broken into competing domains where each has big bads driving the local story and coming into conflict with other big bads at the borders between regions.

I didn't know this was an RPGA thing. Cool beans!

It's how I've structured Duskfall, except with the addition of monster-led factions so I can matrix against political powers and operate inside any border.

 

[Stephan Hornick]

I'm a lich guy.

Hehe... I thought so. I like each of those in turn.