‘Howl’ by freeimages.com / michael lorenzo

I’m listing this as an entry in the Blog Carnival because it builds on several past articles about villains and villainy. See:

• The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain?
• Shadows In The Darkness – The nature of True Evil
• Making a Great Villain Part 1 of 3 – The Mastermind
• Making a Great Villain Part 2 of 3 – The Combat Monster
• Making a Great Villain Part 3 of 3 – the Character Villain
• The Scariest Villain
• A Proliferation Of Lesser Masterminds
• Dark Shadows – Focussing On Alignment, Part 5 of 5
• ….and, to a lesser extent, the entire Focussing On Alignment series.

Not to mention the 117 articles on cultures and societies that have appeared at Campaign Mastery, or the articles on Organizations in RPGs, or the recent guest article by G F Pace on The Psychological Dynamics of RPG Groups! This article can be considered a sequel to any or all of them.

For a very long time I have recommended leavening and rounding villain personalities by incorporating some aspect of their personas that renders them “not all bad”. Incorporating a little hint of carefully-selected gray vastly increases their plot potential and makes them vastly more interesting characters.

More thought needs to be exercised when dealing with villainous organizations and governments. This article will show you why, and how.

The Nazi Menace

The prototypical organization used to at least some extent as the basis for all villainous organizations is the 3rd Reich of 1920s, 30s, and early 40s Germany. I thought for a while that Al Quida might represent a new model, but ultimately they presented as too similar to the Nazis, a twig from the same tree – you’ll see why, shortly. In the century since, the only organization to have come close to the depiction of outright evil represented by the Nazis is Islamic State, but even there, sufficient parallels exist that you can still regard the Nazis as a Template.

The Nazis first attempted to gain power through a putsch. At the time, there were somewhere between 100 and 1000 of them, most of no significance whatsoever. This attempted coup failed and Hitler was imprisoned. During this incarceration, he dictated Mein Kampf, formalizing (and in many cases, formulating for the first time) his beliefs and general policies.

When he emerged from his rather lenient imprisonment, five years later, Hitler began seeking power through legitimate channels and rehabilitating his image into a messianic figure. At the first election they entered, they received 2% of the vote, having expected to be swept into power, deluded by the fanaticism of their most loyal supporters. That represented about 10,000 votes.

On their second attempt, they had about 100,000, and were becoming a party to be reckoned with. Further work on cleaning up public image of Hitler and the party had been quite effective, enabling the future Fuhrer to survive several catastrophic dysfunctions in his personal life and the lives of his closest followers that would have been toxically fatal to most political figures.

Then the Great Depression hit home, and Germans turned to the political extremes, having lost confidence in the established order. On his third attempt, the Nazis swept into elected power with 1,000,000 votes, though President and Field Marshall Hindenburg initially resisted making Hitler Chancellor, instead offering him the position of Vice Chancellor. Somehow, over the next six months, Hindenburg was persuaded that giving Hitler the power he craved would force a further moderation of his most extreme views, unaware that what moderation had already taken place was for public consumption only.

The burning of the Reichstadt persuaded Hindenburg to decree a state of emergency, giving Hitler broad powers without oversight. Hitler began by rounding up 4,000 Communists, on the basis that it had been a Communist who had set fire to the seat of German Democracy, but followed up by smashing the power of Unions and rival political parties and, in fact, any organization that could provide organized resistance, and any leader around whom opposition could rally, including rivals for power internal to the Nazi Party.

And then, Hitler bided his time. No-one dared criticize him – the Night Of Long Knives had shown what opposition forces could expect – but he remained careful not to overreach, a lesson learned from previous failures. Little by little, and piece by piece, he constructed legal frameworks to legitimize his policies while never overtly acting himself; instead, he simply gave permission for others to act, maintaining a state of civil unrest and justifying the continuing state of emergency.

With the death from Cancer of Hindenburg, Hitler stood supreme, taking the positions of both President and Chancellor, and declaring himself Fuhrer. After an intense period of social and military revolution and development, the German economy and national pride began to pick up, recruiting still more moderates to the Nazi agenda. The stunning successes of his first military forays brought Hitler to the height of his authority and power.

If you were to break down the true attitudes of the German population at this time, perhaps 1/3 had been sold on Hitler’s entire message, another 1/3 bought part of that message and considered it worth tolerating the rest for the sake of that part, and those who remained were either too politically passive or too intimidated to oppose the regime.

This is the point from which those templates derive, and hence the point which speaks the most strongly to how similar organizations, of any nature, should be modeled in an RPG.

Uniformly Evil?

Does this mean that there were no “good” Germans? Absolutely not. There were perhaps 100,000 fanatical supporters, and – as I indicated above – about 1/3 of the German Population who had been indoctrinated by success. Another 1/3 were loyal but had various redeeming qualities.

Does it mean that there were no “good” members of the Nazi Party? Absolutely not, even before the membership was made mandatory on a national scale. There were members of good standing who quietly opposed Hitler while superficially supporting the regime – most famously (thanks to the movie), Schindler. In fact, any industrialist of the era was potentially compromised in their loyalty to the party, more pragmatic than obsessed; and that is how many of them retained their positions after the war. They had been sucked into the Nazi machine by the promises of prosperity, and cemented in place by the apparent delivery of that prosperity.

Even amongst the rank and file of groups like the Gestapo and SS, there were people who were motivated by national pride, not malice. Numbers varied, of course, depending on the nature of the group.

There were even a few who dared to take personal advantage of the political situation to advance their own agendas, like Wehrner Von Braun. For him, the V1 and V2 were never about death and destruction; he simply wanted to build a rocket that could reach Space, and the weapons applications were a means to that end.

Many such received military ranks and honors purely to put them under the thumbs of more senior members of the authorities, again preserving a legalistic form that was no longer strictly necessary given the absolute power of the Regime over its citizens.

Death By A Thousand Cuts

And yet, as a roleplaying template, the Nazis must be portrayed as universally evil. Permitting them any form of humanity as a general principle saps the vitality of the entire group as a foe. Individuals may present redeeming qualities, but each such occurrence needs to be counterbalanced by true fanatics

Any realistic depiction of a group of Nazis in which the individuals comprising that group are so afflicted with humanizing elements dies – in dramatic terms, the victim of the thousands individual compromises that rob it of its singularity of purpose.

Uniformly Evil, II?

That doesn’t mean that no members of the Nazi regime will be without sterling qualities, even in game worlds where it is the ultimate menace. There will still be individuals with redeeming traits – you could be a supporter of the regime, or of Hitler personally, while maintaining a sense of honor, for example, or while being kind to children, or while being a loyal friend and loving husband or wife. But those individuals will be isolated, deliberately emplaced exceptions to the rule provided by the GM; the faceless horde remain either true believers or too intimidated/apolitical to disagree, and they, by their very presence, enforce and reinforce the system whenever our slight-shade-of-gray character is among them.

The implication is that freeing almost any member of the Nazi “cult” is enough for their human qualities to emerge, only the true fanatics excepted. Even then, following the party line for more pragmatic reasons cannot be rules out.

The Psychological Effects of Power

Power brings out and amplifies the true nature of the individual, according to psychologists. There’s an excellent article on the subject here. Power, in summary, gives the wielder licence to do whatever they really want (sometimes without realizing it) while suppressing social, cultural, moral, and other forms of personal inhibition.

Power changes the way individuals think about subjects. The phenomenon is called “groupthink”, and you can read the Wikipedia article on the subject by clicking on this link. “Groupthink” is described as “a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.” Personally, I can’t help but associate the concept with the “social media echo chamber”, but that needs a lot more deep thought and may not be all that RPG-relevant.

The impact of power runs even deeper and more perniciously. Anyone who hasn’t already heard of it should read Wikipedia’s article on the Stanford Prison Experiment in which “guards” and “prisoners” were chosen randomly from the volunteering college students. Some “guard” participants began to respond to the situation of overseeing the “prisoners” by becoming increasingly authoritarian, ultimately subjecting some prisoners to psychological torture, in a complete break from their normal personalities, which were previously assessed as being the most psychologically stable of the student volunteers. Many of the prisoners, in contrast, passively accepted the psychological abuse of both themselves and others, and (by the officers’ request), actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. Nor were the researchers themselves immune to the effects; they began to lose their own moral objectivity, becoming so wrapped up in the ongoing experiment that their own capacity to make moral choices began to be compromised. Although the experiment was supposed to run for 7-14 days, so profound were the effects on the participants that the experimenters aborted it after only six days, following the raising of moral questions aboout continuing by an outsider who was brought in to “interview” the prisoners objectively.

A similar phenomenon has been used to explain why ordinary people in Nazi Germany tolerated and even perpetuated atrocities. But, in gaming terms, there’s a simpler way to think about the picture that emerges: think of “permissiveness toward evil” as a plague that spreads from a leadership whose own thoughts have been distorted by the “corrupting influence” of power. A few will be naturally immune, some will contract milder forms of the condition, but most can have their personal morality shunted to one side in favor of the abusive qualities inherent to authority revealed by the Stanford Prison Experiment rendered contagious through the power of Groupthink.

This explains a natural trend to, and amplification of, evil – unless it is actively opposed by others. No matter how lightly shaded a population are, once the capacity to dissent is stifled – within the population as a whole or within a subgroup – that darkness will immediately begin to deepen until it is the blackest of blacks.

This explains the similarity between dictatorships throughout the world, regardless of cultural differences and foundations, and the seeming fanaticism behind many of the modern political movements, be it the Tea Party, White Supremacists, or the extremely partisan attitudes of Trump supporters. So bear that in mind when constructing societies in your RPGs!

I should add that these effects also play out whenever someone becomes a GM. The authority that they have can go to their heads in exactly the same way, and lead to the ruthlessness of the killer GM, the overgenerosity of the Monty Haul GM, the tendency to railroad players and characters, and – in fact – to every possible variation of GMing style. But forwarned is fore-armed; if you know what is happening, you can take objective stock of your patterns of behavior behind the GM’s Screen and react accordingly to moderate and control those trends and tendencies.

It also explains why players tend to oppose even benevolent exercises of authority by the GM if repeated excessively.

In other words, we can all become better at what we do if we understand it more clearly!

We are aided in this by two things:

1. the social phenomenon of our authority being temporary in nature. At the end of the day’s play, the social dynamics of the group change completely; the GM no longer has authority over everyone else and all participants are restored to positions of equality; and
2. the fact that most excesses will be opposed by experienced players who have seen the consequences before, producing a natural check to any such tendencies on the GM’s behalf. That’s why “Monty Haul” syndrome is most commonly associated with newbies and beginners.

The Ubiquitous Enemy

Every game needs at least one group or organization of this nature to serve as use-anytime generic villains. In the Adventurer’s Club campaign, we actually use Nazis for the purpose, with the KKK as second-stringers cut from the same general pattern. The goals are different, the means are different, the rhetoric is different, the people are even a little different – but the pattern is highly similar.

In the Zenith-3 campaign, the Roman Catholic Church serves that function, backed by hard-right evangelists from the American South, driven by ideology to fanatical ends. No matter what you think of evangelists and the Church, these fictional versions have about as much resemblance to the reality as Hitler does to a boy scout; they are deliberate caricatures. And no, these won’t turn out to be the ultimate example of this sort of group in the campaign; the real always blackest-black villains have yet to show their hands.

In my D&D campaigns, the prototypical examples started off being the Drow, but the cult of personality that held them in thrall was broken when Lolth abandoned them. That was when the Chaos Powers stepped forward to take the Drow’s place as the Ultimate Evil (with the occasional rare exception when you caught one on his own).

The Dr Who campaign is a little unusual in that while the Lovecraftian Horrors fit the bill as a group, only the one antagonist representing them ever appears in the campaign – and has been revealed as not being entirely dark; he can set his “evil ways” aside in the face of pragmatic need and the service of his ultimate goal.

The Moral Quandary

The presence of such evil groups in an RPG raises interesting moral questions for the PCs. How far are they justified in going in order to stop them? When they encounter one of these slightly-gray examples, should they try and sway him – and how hard should they go? Don’t push enough, and they will not break the peer pressure and indoctrination. Push just enough, and they gain a sometimes-ally who is caught in a difficult position. Push too hard, and that ally will say the wrong thing to the wrong person – or even the right person at a time when they are not receptive – and execution will surely follow.

You don’t need to seek out these conundrums within your adventure; they will arise spontaneously, given only the Ubiquitous-Evil-with-rare-exceptions model.

This is an approach that works for any campaign, any genre. I strongly recommend it. Every campaign can benefit from a Greater Society Of Big Bad Wolves!