Hypertellurians, Part 3: Chewing the Scenery
OK sure. I get it. You’re a very-talented writerly GM. There’s a three-novel deal in your future. You’ve got a complex, multidimensional villain with a backstory and a sympathetic motivation. All the bells and whistles. No doubt they’ll eventually get a spin-off series. But you know what your players want? They want to thwart evil-doers. They want to be big damn heroes.
Welcome to the third and final part of our partnership with Hypertellurians, a science fantasy RPG set in the future of old. In this episode, we’re all aboard an interplanetary pleasure cruise with Argencia the Silver Sorceress, with the Power to Crush Men. Yes that whole thing is her name. And yes, she’s the kind of villain I want in my games.
Fully realized villains are great and all, but there’s something to be said for the mustache-twirlers and maniacal laughers. The sultry temptresses and the are-we-the-baddies bastards of the multiverse. I’m talking Skeletor. I’m talking Ming the Merciless. The Wicked Witch of the West. Freakin’ Jeremy Irons. These are the very bad dudes that love all that delicious evil. They have no problem chewing the scenery and strutting their black-caped stuff. And if you’ve never tried a full-on bad guy, trust me when I say you’re missing out.
Just last session I found myself faced with a wonderful opportunity. My players had just defeated a medusa cult. The walls of the boss chamber were formed from ~1500 petrified bodies, and they decided it was their duty to rescue all the victims.
“But we aren’t taking any chances,” said the party paladin. “If we’re spending a few weeks to cast break enchantment so we can invite all these people to settle in town, I’m using detect evil on all of them.”
Sometimes you’ve got to take the lead from your players. And if they were expecting evil, they were going to get evil.
Her name was Minerva Grim. Once she was saved from a stony fate, she proved to be something of a moral quandary. Minerva had wide and staring eyes. An unsettling laugh. A long shock of white hair. I may have had a certain inspiration in mind.
“Do you know what year it is?”
“Ooh, let me guess. Are all my friends and loved ones long dead?”
The party collectively blinked. “Probably?”
“Ha! Good riddance. I never liked my loved ones.”
The party found themselves in something of pickle. Minerva detected as evil, but she couldn’t be killed because she’d committed no crime. She couldn’t be banished because that would make her an instant enemy.
“Why don’t you join one of the adventuring parties in town?” suggested the party, thinking that their allies could keep an eye on her.
“Ooh… You mean I’ll have my very own band of strapping heroes to bend to my will?”
It’s hard to deal with a bad egg when you’re a good egg. The party knows Minerva is bad. She knows they know. And I am very much looking forward to cackling like a fiend, feigning innocence, and trying my best to do just-enough-evil to not get executed on the spot. It’s going to be a fun game of cat and mouse, and I like that both Witch and Argencia would be proud.
So what do you say, folks? Have you ever run a full-on villainous villain, complete with bad one liners and imperious sneer? What manner of nefariousness did you get up to? Tell us your tale of over-the-top evil down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
An over-the-top villain I made for a play-by-post (that spawned randomly out of the comments of a comic like this) was Zilean the lich. Mechanically, they were a lich who was imprisoned for a long, LONG time due to nobody being able to find their phylactery (it was inside his skull, but even he didn’t know this). When he was out and free, he was out for revenge. In the past, he was basically the bad guy of Overlord, or your typical Sauron tyrant.
However, being eternally conscious and imprisoned for so long turned them completely insane. Thus the version that the PCs saw were a mixture of the Joker (complete with conning/killing their own cultists) and Skeletor, with a flair for theatrics (the PC wizard would be next to him during a stage play about his defeat, getting the comment that he liked his costume of himself) and absolutely no shits given about anything.
The same game also had the PC Wizard see Death, who was as his Discworld counterpart. And other slapstick nonsense – a random piece of armor that tumbled off a church rooftop during one encounter would later be found around the church grounds, having caved in the skull of a cultist that was lurking around there.
I am highly disappointed you did not link villainous merry-go-round Matt Mercer as one of your villain examples.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr0XnxfUMAAoJ1-.jpg
Ok, I need to know. What on Earth or Exandria is the origin of that picture?!?
a man can only meme so hard
The Power to Crush Men? Be careful, the party bard will take that as a challenge.
Also, I though that was Barbarian’s ‘power’, in either of the handbooks.
Crush as in compress, subdue a rebellion, or intense infatuation? Or all three.
I know of few ‘hammy’ villains that can top Magic Brian of The Adventure Zone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQaZC24kiw
Not an RPG specimen, but a videogame one: Big John. I invite anyone to convert them into a legitimate bossfight for PCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvi31zTYQBw
My Sunday group plays a game themed off of the anime One Piece, and boy is that a world with some deliciously ripe scenery to gnaw on. And our GM, being a huge fan of old Shaw Brothers Kung-Fu films, had an absolute time playing ‘Tze Chai, treacherous 2nd in command to the Red Star gang.’ Think Starscream’s overt and unapologetic ladder-climbing claims crossed with Pai Mei’s (the Kill Bill rendition of the character) smug swagger.
It doesn’t help that when it came time for the big showdown of the arc, our DM rolled INSANELY well for all of this guy’s parries. This jerk waltzed into the middle of four PCs, snatched the mcguffin we were attempting to use on the Arc’s Boss, and basically walked off the battle field with barely a scratch. This ended up with him allying with said boss (betraying his gang in the process, shocker), and leaving to become an eventual returning villain.
…If we hadn’t rebooted the story to bring the campaign in line with the heavily updated rule changes we’d made since our initial run. By this point, Tze Chai is LEGEND at our table. He can T-pose hover across the ocean to steal the last slice of pizza just to spite you. Our DM insists we have no idea what Tze Chai will be like in this new setting, that he could be our staunchest ally, but MAN, that has done NOTHING to stop our wild speculation on the matter. The DM alternates between finding this hilarious and being annoyed that the dastardly villain Tze Chai has, in his own way, become something beyond even his control.
I’m about to play a hammy villain in a one-shot: The Lord of Edges. He’s a Tiefling, Noble, Hexblade who is every edgelord sterotype at once.
“I never lose. I never even lost my virginity because I never lose!”
I just extricated what I would call a full on villain of evil evilness from my body in my current campaign… and I loved it.
Get ready for the backstory dump!
I am playing a warforged in this campaign (not set in Eberron, but that is just semantics). In my backstory I said all the war and battle and years kind of blended together and I couldn’t remember any specifics anymore. Time kind of has no meaning to me.
My DM decided to take that ball and roll into it that I was created originally for a lich to try an inhabit my body like a robot shell that he would no longer need to look like a lich and “blend in” (yes, as a robot) with society. I did not know this for a bit.
Eventually I was starting to feel the lich take me over every other time I entered a fight (roll initiative… and a wisdom save) and I was informed that I was playing two characters now. One my original concept, they other… someone else. A “wizard”, that may have been a former memory coming out on its own. Neat!
As time and a few more levels passed, I was given alternate goals to the group, nothing bad exactly, but there were three specific goals I was given and things were starting to look “odd”.
– get a spell book (because while I was a wizard as this character, I had only my cantrips)
– get access to a teleport or better yet a phase shift (hmmm… )
– find my original spell book and “lair” (lairs are never not where the bad guys go)
Due to my lack of capabilities when I was this wizard character (shooting a couple cantrips instead of being an awesome monk) the party decided they wanted to get me fixed somehow RIGHT NOW (side quest city, here we come!) and along the way, the DM gave me a new goal.
– if you think there is a chance they might be able to fix you… get away. (alarm bells! well, okay, there were already alarm bells going off, but this is not the actions of a hero. Also, I had been actively lying to the group to this point about who/what the wizard part was… and with a deception of 11 I was real good at lying)
So we finally got to a point that we were going to get me fixed, I played my part as both the “wizard” that was trying to get away and the monk that wanted to help my group (depending on who was in control) and in both real and game world, the group did not trust me over time (because of secret whispers with the DM and such).
Finally, we get to know the full story and I am told there is a lich inside me, that built an astral prizon to keep me in, something went wrong and it got trapped inside instead. Now it wants me dead. We fought, I won, the lich is “gone”… but where did it actually go? We all know liches have those phylacteries that they always come back…
on the horizon, we now have a totes evil yo lich baddie that is probably pissed at us and seeking revenge for having been kicked out of a bitchin bod!
And as a group, we all love that! It is fine to understand the villain. Sure, Thanos kind of has a point, but his methods are obviously wrong and he gots to go!
(I just love sharing that tale, cause it was fun to play the secret evil guy too!)
Sometimes a guy or gal is just an evil for evil sake jerk and they gotta be put down.
One of the villains I have cooked up for my post-COVID Pathfinder 2E is an evil Alchemist called the Stitcher-King that I’m planning to run like Dr. Doom. Whenever the PCs think they’ve finally found him, it just turns out to be a doppelgänger he’s hired to pretend to be him or something like that while he laughs manically from the shadows and makes his escape. The voice I have for him sounds kind of like Caustic from Apex Legends and his entire goal is just to figure out how to live forever without turning himself into a lich or something (not that he can anyway because Alchemists in 2E aren’t magic anymore.)
“Minerva detected as evil, but she couldn’t be killed because she’d committed no crime.”
Passive Evil, huh? Interesting. Our games have always vacillated on whether characters could be passively Good or Evil, or if (in Dungeons and Dragons terms) that simply made them some flavor of Neutral with “tendencies.” The final determination was usually up to whoever was running, and so it varied from campaign to campaign.
Editorial note: The Silver Sorceress is “Argencia” with a C in the comic, but “Argentia” with a T in the text.
No crime that they know about.
Also, fixed.
Well this is timely.
LITERALLY LAST NIGHT, I ran a bit of an RP event for a player in which their Superhero attended a Supervillain Social. No intended combat, just basically expanding the setting and the characters.
The modern world is a strange place for Supervillains. There can be a lot of competing perspectives over what the line for ‘evil’ versus ‘crime’ IS. Everyone in that room, including the hero incidentally, had done terrible things. Sometimes for very good reasons… other times not so much. So the only tools I had to leverage were motives and personality. Rather than play to any one particular style, since it was a social mixer, I threw them all in.
The player seemed to really enjoy it-I was practically telling him GO TO BED!
I get that today is about ‘hammy over the top villains’, but I haven’t done that since High School, so instead I’m a gonna gripe about one of my lesser D&D pet peeves: Alignments in a Progressive* campaign.
Either they exist solely as meta-nonsense, your story above, the Party knows she’s Evil, but due to Progressive values can’t just ROFLstomp her her preemptively, so like a bad Batman comic, they have to wait for her to actually cause misery first – which she will, she’s Evil. Or Evil exists in some semi-quandary grey area, I mean C̶r̶u̶e̶l̶l̶a Minerva de’Ville doesn’t ever have to get up to puppy-skinning shenanigans, she will of course, but she doesn’t? At which point, if Evil isn’t acting in an evil manner, do they stop being Evil? And if, by the rules, they have to perform genuinely evil acts to be Evil, and they are Evil, then letting them live unconstrained by enforced behavioral modification (coercion, magical or otherwise, or imprisonment, etc) is worse than the Batman Dilemma. I mean the Joker is evil, but he isn’t Evil.
My preference, when running and playing, is more in line with Detect [Alignment] showing which Gods or Powers they derive their abilities from, which is a more direct measure of behavior if they have to live up to that God or Power’s code, creed, or requirements.
Like if Ba’al requires Witches to eat live babies every new moon to be empowered, then “Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to live” has Good reason behind it…
.* Which isn’t at all a new thing. We were playing progressive games back in the 80’s, by which I mean, Orcs weren’t ‘Chaotic’ by definition, just by general racial tendency. We had ‘monster’ PCs, happily forged alliances with goblins, orcs, trolls, etc. And just as happily fought goblins, orcs, trolls, etc… but that is down to GM/Group preferences rather than ‘system preferences’. I mean you can easily run a ‘back-to-the-dungeon’ game where the PCs can party with Bob the Orc during the week in the tavern, but come Delve Day run Bob through because he’s in the 10×10 room standing between them and pie.
Also, a possible wrinkle: “Minerva detected as evil, but she couldn’t be killed because she’d committed no crime.”
Shouldn’t that be “…because she’d committed no crime “?
Like, no spoilers obviously, but was all her evil committed in areas where those evilS weren’t considered criminal, or was this just a casual statement, or… [CHEESY EXAGGERATED WINK]
Like, she’s Evil (capital ‘E’ evil), so… to be Evil… meta-philosophical wankery follows.
One of my players, a Saladin, had a powerful demon lord in his backstory – a demon lord of vampires, who shared many of their obsessive traits. He was, until his death, pretty much always a side-note, but this bâtard:
– Conspired with the paladin’s goddess to kill his family, forcing him to accept what was essentially an abusive relationship with said goddess in exchange for a revenge forever dangled beyond his grasp.
– Once the paladin went off the deep end and swore vengeance upon his goddess too, resurrected an old enemy of his (a PC necromancer with whom he… disagreed) and manipulated a charismatic criminal mastermind in order to destroy said paladin’s adoptive city and life (including making him kill one of his own friends as a traitor) whilst doing something else entirely.
– Casually walked away from the above rather than fight.
– When finally captured by the paladin, acceded to his terms of a duel in exchange for his power.
– Let the paladin win, absorbing his power and becoming exactly the thing he hated most in the world – in the Lord’s demonic, narcissistic eyes, becoming him.
– As he was absorbed wholly, whispered a last message implying that he had not truly been the one to kill the paladin’s family, and that he should ask his half-sister (a close ally) for the truth, leading the demonized paladin to freeze the aforementioned half-sister in a block of blood when she “refused” to answer.
There was more, but that was the relevant part. A most enjoyable villain. I always prefer to have my humans be more nuanced, but with outsiders one can really go wild.
I don’t normally do over-the-top villains. My baddies tend to fall into one of two categories: Oafish but reasonably underpowered heroes-of-their-own-stories who happen to oppose the party, or delightfully unsettling Lovecraftian godlike entities. There’s not much in between.
Recently, however, my party was in need of a change of pace, so we started a Star Wars 5th Edition campaign. And hoo boy, you were on the ball with this one, because a space opera is the perfect place for over-the-top villainy. Slimy gangsters, mad scientists, and angsty Sith abound, each with a twirlier mustache than the last. It’s been a blast going over my plans and at every step asking myself “Can I add more ham to this? What about… cheese?”
“Krushman” would be a great sir name for an orc
Do player characters count? o_O
If yes i got a lot, if not… i still got a lot 😛
I have something with evilness 😀
Hey Colin in the comic the lady says her name is “ArgenCia” but in your writing you call her “ArgenTia”. So i just wanted to say, you cometed an small error and ruined the whole comic, well done 😛
fixed. 🙁
You may fix the comic, but not my faith and soul 😛
Let me see. For Drama class, both of my monologues were from pure evil, card-carrying villains, and that was a lot of fun. Urizen the Demon King, of Devil May Cry V, utterly outraged that the hero has managed to actually land a blow. And the Kairos Theodosian, the Tyrant of Helike, of A Practical Guide to Evil, having just poisoned half the fantasy UN meeting he was in and now informing the surviving half that they will in fact be joining his side in the coming war.
Sadly, haven’t had as many chances to play a card-carrying-villain in RPGs. The closest was probably Locus, the cheerful sociopath, who was endlessly fun to play but was also generally heroic in deeds (if not in personality or occasionally methods).
The last campaign I ran, one of the party members, a lizardfolk, had joined their quest for the primary purpose of rescuing two of his children, who had escaped being press-ganged into a pirate crew and disappeared into the Isle of Dread. His daughter was rescued early on, but his son had been sent with the (totally evil) lizardfolk priests to fight their enemies in the north.
At long last, they track down said priests; and find the son has been promoted to a priest himself! While pretending to be allies, our lizardman pulls his son aside, informs him that the dragon these priests worship is dead, and that he’s here to get him out of here. And his son responds, “Ok… I can work with this. But we’ll have to act quickly. My men are loyal to me; if we kill the other priests, we can seize control of the lizardfolk here, and conquer the island. We’ll have to kill your party as well, so word of this island’s existence doesn’t get back to the mainland.”
And so began the lizardman’s new quest to steer his son away from the path of evil. 😉
Derrik Darkluster always tried to present a properly heroic face to the public, so he would have had no choice but to let this woman go.
And then follow her until the public wasn’t looking and stab a bitch; he fully believes in nipping obvious problems in the bud. Technicalities don’t mean shit.
In theory, he’d also have a suggestion spell to nudge her into telling them all about her checkered backstory that would justify her execution. He was able to detect thoughts once a day too, so he had options that could make interrogations run a bit more smoothly.