Spotlight on: The Obvious Villain
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but there are some creature types that automatically get tagged as the villains as soon as they appear. This is true in D&D, in Pathfinder, in a superhero game, a pulp / horror game – you name it. These are ‘the obvious villains’ and today’s article is all about what they have in common, how to take advantage of the phenomenon, and things that you can do to put a fresh coat of paint on a concept that’s just a little too obvious or old-hat.
Who are the obvious villains?
I think the place to start is with a non-exhaustive list of the creatures that populate the classification of ‘obvious villains’. I’ve listed eleven (including a couple of ring-ins), but I’m sure there are more – I haven’t listed Demons, Devils, or Dark Gods, for example, (too obvious!) but they absolutely belong in this category.
1. Vampires & Necromancers
We all survive by consuming the lives of other life-forms, be they animal or vegetable, but there is something so much more direct about the way Vampires consume the lives of their victims that it feels more evil. This automatically elevates them to “the villain’ whenever they appear in a plotline – even when they aren’t.
Robert Asprin, in “Myth-ing Persons”, the 5th in the “Another Fine Myth” series, played on this expectation in the person of Vilhelm, the “Dispatcher Of Nightmares”.
But, unless you are very careful and creative, their natures as a vampire can overwhelm all sense of individuality about them, leaving them all feeling very much alike.
Closely allied to the perceptions of Vampires are the way players look at the presence of a Necromancer in an adventure. Like Vampires, these use the lives of others to empower themselves, which is frequently seen as inherently evil..
2. Liches
Liches are – conceptually – Vampires who have done away with the need to feed at all, subsisting directly on evil energies, and gaining still greater powers in the process. These changes do not make the sense of ‘evil’ more remote; these are always manipulative and evil, so opposed to the natural cycle of life that they have abandoned all humanity to preserve their existences.
As soon as a Lich or DemiLich is even hinted at in a plot, they are automatically elevated to ‘the bad guy’ of the plotline. Usage of this creature type usually falls into two categories, however – an evil plan of some sort, and some clever twist on where and how they have hidden and protected the phylactery that preserves their existence, and the lack of variety can become a detraction if they are over-used.
3. Other Sentient Undead including Ghosts & Mummies
These are all studies in obsession – so consumed with a desire of some kind that not even death can bring it to an end. In contrast to Vampires and Liches, there is something at least a little romantic in that notion that weakens the horrific edge that these creatures carry.
Even in The Mummy (Brendan Fraser version), there is that little edge of sympathy for the doomed lover who will do anything to bring back the lost love of his life.
Similarly, a ghost who yearns for Justice for some past misdeed perpetrated upon them carries a level of sympathy and understanding with them.
But it isn’t enough for these ‘creatures’ (using the term loosely) to achieve their goals, no matter how honorable, commendable, understandable, or sympathetic they may be; they have to be the instruments by which these goals are achieved, and will let nothing stand in their way. Their humanity has been sacrificed to their obsession.
It’s not quite so automatic to consider such beings to be the obvious villains of a plotline; it’s necessary for them to have some intermediate goals that reveal their villainy and capacity to influence events. In The Mummy, it is the way the titular mummy sacrifices others in order to restore itself and achieve its ends.
This is a natural outgrowth of their obsession, but the GM/writer still has to engineer an opportunity to put it on display. Doing so immediately elevates these creatures to enemies of the living, and the villains of the plot.
Often, the initial villain is not the obsessed Undead creature, it is the high priest who brings about the Undead creature’s return / escape; but obsession in no way permit such creatures to accept a secondary role; the roles between the two are soon reversed, and the servant becomes the master. The smartest such agents of resurrection recognize this inevitability and that – having brought the Undead back into the world – they have (plot-wise) served their purpose; conceding authority to the creature they have ‘created’ tends to preserve their existences a little further.
But there is always something appropriate in a Summoner who is so obsessed with achieving his goals that they sacrifice their own lives to unleash the monster, as was the case in the Dr Who two-parter “The End Of Time“, because this plays so directly into the themes of obsession.
As soon as it is established that the ‘monster’ will do whatever it has to in order to satisfy its obsession, and cannot permit anyone to do so on its behalf even if that amounts to self-sabotage, they are immediately elevated to the role of master villain in the adventure.
4. ‘Dark’ Dragons
Evil Dragons are so rarely handled in such a way as to make them the objects of awe and fear that they should be that I almost didn’t include them in the list at all. For a palpable example of how they should be perceived, read the “A Coming Storm” and “Scorched Earth” chapters of “The Bag Wars Saga” from Kenzerco / KODT..
There are essentially two different approaches to the characterization of ‘Dark’ Dragons: either these are so overwhelmingly physically powerful that they are used to simply overpowering opposition (which makes them a menace but not a Villain), or they are very well aware that their perceived natures makes them an existential threat to lesser beings, and use intelligence and wisdom to supplement and apply their raw power is clever and subtle ways.
In fantasy fiction, the latter is generally the only model that is acceptable.
And that model of ‘Dark Dragon’ can very definitely be the Villain. As soon as it is established that you are using that model, or as soon as you get a reputation amongst your players for doing so, the first hint of Dark Dragon elevates them to the status of Presumed Villain.
I should take a moment to address the nomenclature. In D&D, ‘Chromatic’ dragons – those named for colors (Red, Black, White, Blue, Green) are ‘evil’ and those named for Metals (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Brass) are ‘Good’ (‘Neutral’ Dragons are frequently named for Gems). Other campaigns and Game systems operate with different classification systems, or even treat this schema as a vast oversimplification.
Hence, i have used the generic term ‘Dark’ to refer to hostile dragons off whatever hue or texture.
5. Mind Flayers / Psychic Vampires / Parasites
Some interpretations would add ‘Doppelgangers’ and/or ‘Fey’ to this sub-category, whose members all subsist on, digest, or otherwise consume the self-identity of the individual.
(Refer to Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Dopplegangers for an interpretation of Doppelgangers, complete with misspelling in the title, which supports this perception, and The glass is half-Something: two variations on Fey for the equivalent treatment of Fey).
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In many cases, they also add the knowledge and/or skills of their prey to their own. Even when this is not known to be the case, folklore usually suggests to players (regardless of canon) that this is at least possible.
To keep players’ paranoia active, many GMs have local populaces also buy into this conjecture. Regardless, they are manipulative, and capable of worming underneath the hardiest of physical defensive capabilities and attacking a ‘soft underbelly’ that most characters don’t even consider and couldn’t protect even if they did.
Smart, manipulative, deceptive – it should come as no surprise that these qualities put these creatures on the ‘suspected villain’ list immediately they are encountered.
6. Drow
Speaking of which, Drow (a.k.a. Dark Elves) are another favorite of whom players will naturally assume the worst. This is two-fold – first, they serve / worship Lolth, who is evil, manipulative, clever, subtle and never inclined to take a back seat to anyone; and second, the Drow themselves aspire to be like her in both their internal social relationships, their politics, and their relationship with other species (especially those of the surface world).
Every D&D campaign that I’ve ever run has featured a different ‘take’ on Drow, it’s one of my ‘fingerprints’. And they are always Villains of one sort or another – even in those game worlds where the Schism between Elves and Drow has yet to occur.
7. Orcs
In a lot of low-level campaigns, Orcs are the source of the early villains. They are quite ubiquitous. As campaigns age, it is common for Orcs to be revealed as cats-paws for more serious villains, degrading them in respect of making them obvious villains; but this ignores the societal and cultural propensities that allow them to be so easily manipulated. It’s relatively rare for campaigns to explore that aspect of the setting at all.
Part of the problem is that relatively few GMs actually put any thought into Orcish societies, treating them as generic primitives in a gang-like social structure. This was something that I set out to specifically explore in the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign; I deliberately set out to map out a society for Orcs that contained elements of which Orcs could be justifiable proud. There had to be positives as well as negatives.
I refer readers to Not Like My Tribe – Sophisticated Primitives, Part 1 and Part 2;
… to the four-part Distilled Cultural Essence series;
… to Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3 (and to the Orcs & Elves series more generally),
… and to Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Orcish Mythology specifically..
8. Trolls
Strictly speaking, Trolls shouldn’t be here in this listing, because (once again) there is really no propensity to take them seriously except as Menaces in most campaigns. But the concept of Trolls has changed somewhat with the advent of modern communications (especially social media) and – somewhat generalized – the identification of “troublemakers” as Trolls has breathed new life into the concept.
Most GMs have not conflated the two definitions of Troll, but doing so immediately adds new life, richness, and depth to the traditional Troll.
I would argue that as soon as a demagogue shows up in a campaign, an ‘internet troll’ (with or without the internet existing as a platform), they get automatically tagged as a villain, and hence that they belong in this list; conflating ‘fantasy trolls’ with these agents provocateur spreads the joy (and the relevance).
Besides, doing so gives me the opportunity (a little later in the article) to share a fun encounter from the Zenith-3 campaign that literally left the players gob-smacked.
9. Goblin Hordes
How respectable are Goblins in your campaign? Many seem to treat them as ‘lesser Orcs’. In some of my campaigns, I introduced ‘Strategic Feats’ specifically for Goblin Hordes; these are feats that only work for characters in a group. In some cases, all members of the group have to have the feat, in some cases only one feat holder is necessary. Part of the inspiration was a discussion of overbearing rules, but I no longer remember where that discussion was located.
I’ve mentioned these feats before, and was sure that I had actually written them up, but a careful search of Campaign Mastery’s archives have failed to turn them up. An example might be +1 to archery-based attack rolls for each member of a group who had the feat – so a Goblin Horde with 200 members trained in this feat could add +200 to their attack rolls. This would translate to 10 automatic successes against any target attacked by the horde, each combat round according to the feat (as I remember it). But even a small unit of 5 goblins, all of whom get +5 on their ranged combat rolls from this feat, each combat round, suddenly make that unit a lot more terrifying. There were restrictions and limitations – the ‘horde’ had to outnumber the targets, for example, in terms of total character levels or Hit Dice.
This article is not about those feats, specifically, but the effects of those feats were sufficiently profound that Goblin Hordes were immediately elevated from Menace to Villains when they were encountered.
10. Sorcerers
I don’t know why, but it’s an observed phenomenon: people don’t trust Sorcerers, and by people, I mean ‘players’. At best, they are received with suspicion and paranoia. Mages can be good or bad, and get assessed on their personalities; but for some reason people seem to think the worst of Sorcerers from the word go.
11. Politicians
Finally, as soon as a politician who acts like a politician on the campaign trail turns up in a campaign, players are immediately suspicious of them. And the harder they work at ‘looking good’, the more untrustworthy they seem.
Taking Advantage Of Obvious Villains
The appearance of an obvious villain automatically makes players suspect attempts to distract them or manipulate them. There is an assumption of a master plan (whether there is one or not) and many events that don’t fit that master plan are easily dismissed as attempts to conceal or distract from that plan by the villain. How the villain achieved this is irrelevant.
In other words, as soon as an Obvious Villain is encountered, the presumptions about the role in the adventure of that Obvious Villain begin shaping the perceptions, assumptions, and thought processes of the players and their characters.
The thing is that, in most cases, there is no need to establish the villain’s credentials as a villain, or even the villain. That makes them much easier for GMs to work with, and that’s part of the reason why the groups listed earlier have the associated perceptions that they do – these tend to be the villains that new GMs reach for.
Using Obvious Villains as Misdirection and Smokescreens
As GMs become more experienced and sophisticated, they will usually stop being content to let the players’ assumptions do all the work, and will start trying to introduce less obvious villains or obfuscate the involvement of the obvious villain.
It isn’t long before they start looking for something more original and unusual to do with Obvious Villains.
Pretty much the first thing that they do is to use an Obvious Villain to occupy the spotlight and take the blame while the true Villain lurks in the shadows. The Obvious Villain is, essentially, a flunky who provides a public face to intimidate and obfuscate.
More subtle approaches are soon devised. Having the real villain make themselves appear to be an Obvious Villain so that their enemies target vulnerabilities that don’t actually exist – I once had a Halfling Illusionist create the deliberate impression that they were a Human Vampire, for example. Such misdirection not only bestows a level of threat that the true identity of the villain might not, but they work well as a defensive measure and can keep players guessing for quite some time. This derivative clearly smacks of The Wizard Of Oz.
A related trick is to have the Villain of a plot appear to be one type of Obvious Villain when, in reality, they are another – a Doppelganger posing as a Necromancer, for example.
The other thing that tends to happen fairly quickly is that the plots put in motion by villains, obvious or otherwise, tend to become more subtle and sophisticated, and part of that is the defensive measure of making themselves look like a traditional representative of their type while the villain has some secret abilities that enhance their prowess or capabilities.
And, of course, there is usually good value (if you can make it convincing) in having the Obvious Enemy turn out to be an ally (possible reluctant). In some cases, though, this has been done to death – Drizzt has ruined the concept of “Good Dark Elf” for many a campaign.
Repudiating Expectations
it’s a short step from these developments to devising ways to play against type. ‘A Vampire who is also a Paladin’ became the central concept of an order of Knights Templar early in the Adventurer’s Club (pulp) Campaign, for example.
These also tend to become more subtle and sophisticated with GMing experience. As an example, below is an encounter with a Troll from the Zenith-3 campaign:
117 Parkdale
Background
The PCs have split into two teams traveling through Texas and Arkansas (with a side-trip into Mississippi) in search of a base of operations. The “117” means that this is the 17th location to be scouted on Day 2 by Team 1.
Location
Information given to the players from a ‘Guidebook’ on the towns and locations of Arkansas (in reality, equal parts research and fictionalizing)
Twelve minutes after departing Hamburg, you approach Parkdale, a city of 412 people occupying 158 households in a 1.02 sqr mile area. The racial makeup of the city is 29% White 67% Black 2% Hispanic / Latino. Median income is half that of some communities in the state.
Perched at an elevation of 36 meters (118 feet above sea level), which is high ground relative to its surroundings, Parkdale (originally known as Poplar Bluff) is one of the oldest unincorporated communities in the county. A store was built at the present location in 1857, and several farmers were already working the land in the vicinity. The owner’s son worked as a clerk in his father’s store and later opened his own store. A Methodist church had also been built sometime in the 1850s, and it was joined by a Baptist church and a Masonic Lodge in 1857. The central point of the community was a steamboat landing. Key parts of the community were burned by Union soldiers during the Civil War, but after the war, the damaged operations were rebuilt and even expanded.
A railroad through the then Poplar Bluff was completed in the early 1890s. Because the railroad also served the larger city of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, railroad officials named the depot Parkdale. The name of the post office and of the city followed suit. In 1902, Parkdale was reincorporated as a second-class city. The Bank of Parkdale was established by 1905. Stores near the depot included a pharmacy, several mercantile establishments, and an auction house. A bridge was built across the bayou in 1908, costing $8,000 in Ashley County funds and an additional $1,500 in local funds. A telephone exchange was operating by 1912. The Baptist congregation, which had declined in size, was revitalized by a revival service in 1909.
In the early part of the twentieth century, Parkdale became notorious for violent crimes, including murders. Historian Y. W. Ethridge described Parkdale as a “boisterous community” due to the railroad, sawmills, and saloons. One citizen later said, “Parkdale was terrible. There were a bunch of outlaws. It was a shoot-up town. There was a rough and rowdy white element here. It was wild.” One of the most unusual crimes in Parkdale was the lynching of Ernest Williams, an African-American man, in June 1908, by a group of African-American women who had organized a league to enforce better moral conduct, and whose standards Williams had evidently fallen foul of. Consequently, they seized him one evening, dragged him to a telegraph pole on the outskirts of town, and hanged him. His body was not discovered by local authorities until the next morning, and no one was ever charged with the crime.
Parkdale is home to the Overflow National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1980 to protect one of the remaining bottom-land hardwood forests considered vital for maintaining mallard, wood duck, and other waterfowl populations. 17,000 acres including a seasonally-flooded wetland complex and a narrow strip of escarpment on the western boundary.
As late as 1939, Parkdale’s cotton gins led the county in cotton production. A fire in 1940 destroyed part of the city, but buildings were rebuilt, and the city continued to flourish beyond the middle of the twentieth century. Although several had struck in the vicinity over the years, one disaster that seemed to avoid the town were tornadoes, so there was some good news.
After 1970, when the cotton price collapsed, stores began to close, and many buildings were abandoned. Several more collapsed in the snows of early Ragnarok, including some which were still inhabited at the time. There are no longer any commercial operations situated in Parkdale other than the Post Office. The nearest restaurant, service station, and supermarket are all 5 miles to the South along Highway 165 in the town of Wilmot.
When the fimbulwinter snows topped two meters, a stranger came who seemed able to melt them with a touch. Without him, the locals feel they would not have survived. When the heat came, though, he vanished into the night. A statue in an empty lot in the center of town is dedicated to the helpful stranger.
Four properties in Parkdale are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the Baptist church built in 1910, the Methodist church built in 1926, the house of Dr. M. C. Hawkins built in 1912, and the house of Dr. Robert George Williams built in 1903.
Lawyer and judge Turner Butler was born in Parkdale when it was called Poplar Bluff. John Caldwell was a well-known banker and community leader in Parkdale whose art career took off late in life when he became widely known for his award-winning wood engravings and woodblock prints.
Encounter
Things immediately take a turn for the interesting when you approach the western edge of town, and the bridge over the Batholomew Bayou. The paved road continues straight ahead to the historic bridge, which seems to have caught fire at some point and is officially out of service. A rough gravel dogleg leads to a very rough new bridge with a very rough and unusually large stone hut situated at the side of the road. (25-117a, 25-117b).
“25-117a” & “25-117b” refer to illustrations. “25” is a sequential code used to put entries into playable sequence so that I can switch back and forth from team one to team two; the “117” is the team and location code again, and the “a” and “b” indicate the first two photos / illustrations for that location.
25-117a Wooden Bridge
Image Source: Wikipedia, “wooden bridge over tarang river” (actually located in Thailand), released into the public domain by the author; cropped with ‘windscreen tinting’ added.
25-117b The Hut
Image Source: Uncertain, but it matches a smaller image from Pinterest, described as an Irish Cottage with a thatched roof. The same hut from slightly different perspectives appears on several commercial clip art sites such as Alamy.com and dreamstime.com, and on a number of travel sites. Some of these identify the location as Ennis, or County Claire. I have vague memories of painting out a watermark in the lower right corner.Encounter Content:
A stout tree has been trimmed of it’s branches and lies across the entrance to the bridge next to a sign which reads, “Pay Toll”. From the hut, a huge man-like figure, 10′ tall, emerges and stomps over to your car window. Greenish skin, a brown loincloth, long and greasy green hair short legs and arms that reach almost to the ground, sharp white teeth and long, savage claws complete the picture. (25-117c)
’25-117c’ is the D&D5e representation of a Troll. Not reproduced for copyright reasons even though the image appears on a number of RPG-related sites such as RPG Museum (hosted by Fandom.com), Critical Role Wiki (also hosted by Fandom.com), and Enworld. Click on any of these links to view the image, especially the last. I seem to remember cropping and tweaking the background.
Carefully, it reaches up and taps on the window [if the PC hasn’t already rolled it down]. “Toll. Eat Lunch and Speak News or green money in each basket” it says in a rough, crackled voice like that of Louis Armstrong on a bad day, as it waves it’s other arm at four baskets placed beside the road.
While you could pay the toll, it will cost you $27 based on the notes that you have at the moment – two ones, a five, and a twenty.
IF THE TEAM ATE BREAKFAST EARLY (they didn’t): Breakfast was a good five hours ago, and even though you aren’t due to stop for another half hour or so, the notion of an early lunch and providing the creature with news and some company for a few minutes is undoubtedly attractive. Besides, if the locals are used to his presence, perhaps even accept it as continuing the trend of the helpful stranger, they might accept some strange new arrivals like the team. So this could be quite a significant conversation to have.
IF THE TEAM ATE BREAKFAST LATER (they did): It’s about 3 hours since you had breakfast and you aren’t due to stop for lunch for almost an hour. But it might be better, and would certainly be cheaper, to accept the invitation and stop for an early meal and provide the creature with news and company for a short time. Besides, if the locals are used to his presence, perhaps even accept it as continuing the trend of the helpful stranger, they might accept some strange new arrivals like the team. So this could be quite a significant conversation to have.
If the team decide to stop for lunch, the huge figure will point at a spot beside the hut and say “Me Grobhan. My Kind you call Troll, I call Darenwu [Pronounced “Darnwoo”]. Put car.” Anyone who knows Mandarin will be able to translate Darenwu as “Big Shot” – assuming that his language actually is Mandarin, and this isn’t a coincidence!
“Mandarin” is based on, and related to, the Chinese language – but with 10,000 years of additional evolution.
When you have parked, he leads you into his hut and points at a round table of normal height, about 10′ in diameter. Your host could easily reach from one side of the table to the other while seated. He turns a knob on a large stove and runs his fingernails down a slab of stone of some kind, generating a shower of sparks, one of which ignites the gas. He then places a large copper-bottomed pot with a spout on one side, capable of holding a good twenty liters or more of water, onto the stove. The sound it makes clearly shows that it is reasonably full of some liquid. A shake from a packet tosses a handful of dried leaves into it, and the figure turns to a cupboard full of crockery both oversized and human-scale. “You will have tea,” he announces. “And deer-meat pie. And seed-cake.”
A deliberate inversion of the “Don’t feed a troll” meme / advice, which relates to the ‘internet’ troll variety.
You notice that the far end of the tree blocking the road projects through a hole in the wall. Every couple of minutes, the sound of an engine arriving at the toll bridge can be heard, and Grobhan bellows out the window, “Pay Toll. One green money in each basket. Or go away.” Most pay, a few turn around after eyeing the size of the tree-trunk. One yells back, “My wife is ill and I must buy medicine. I don’t have money to pay a toll.” Grobhan bellows back – “I smell your car, I know its name. Do good thing for stranger, help wife get well.” As he does when someone pays, he then uses the wall as the fulcrum of a lever and raises the tree by pushing against the protruding end. His strength might not be at Blackwing standard, but it’s not inconsiderable – at least 50 times human, and probably more.
When the foodstuffs are presented – sliced by one of his nails – they look strangely like fairly standard supermarket manufacture, right down to plastic wrapping – Grobhan sits down on a creaking wooden chair and begins to eat. “Eat, and Speak Of World and News,” he instructs you.
After about 20 minutes, the food is consumed, and Grobhan has eaten as much as the rest of you put together. You kept trying to steer the conversation toward him and the town, and each time he gave a succinct answer and then redirected the conversation back to news of the outside world, in the process showing that he was a lot smarter than his appearance or conversational English would suggest. At the end of the meal, you have learned that:
He came from a vast city (probably Mandarin’s Capital), where he worked as a stonemason and carpenter. He was welcomed here but treated with some suspicion until a roof started to collapse as he was walking by. Running into the building, he held the roof up while the family escaped. He then drew plans in the dirt showing how to repair the collapsed roof and reinforce it in the shortest possible time, taking advantage of his strength.
After that, he was considered one of the locals. They asked him to rebuild the bridge. He told them he could not afford to do so, he needed to find work for food. They agreed to let him charge a toll to use his repaired bridge. There are four baskets because one goes to the town, one goes to the family who buy him food from the market in Wilmot every week – they get to keep whatever’s left but have to pay anything more – one goes to improve and maintain the bridge, and one provides him with spending money for other things.
He built the cottage himself. The bridge took about a month to construct, but he had a temporary thing for humans to walk across in a day or two. It then took him another month to create the one-room cottage.
A quick round of introductions:
Blackwing was the superhero identity of one of the PCs when he was transformed into a gargoyle by the mystic armor that gave him super-strength, amongst other abilities including shape-changing.
Basalt is a new superhero ‘secret identity’ for the character formerly known as Blackwing. Using his shape-change, he transforms into a 10′ tall figure of Rock (permitting him to use his super-strength openly). The new (and completely fake) civilian identity that goes with ‘Basalt’ is Frank Hudson, a man-hunter.
Specter is a new superhero ‘secret identity’ for Runeweaver, the team’s mage, who uses magic and tech to appear to be a revolutionary-war-era ghost. When not in super-identity, his new and completely fake civilian identity is Isaiah Lucas, a ski instructor and competition Woodlogger.
Zantar is a new superhero identity for the Kzin Martial Artist member of the team, who usually operates under the nom-de-plum “Defender”. His new civilian identity is Brust, a Kzin tourist and inveterate explorer. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Earth and Kzin, there are plenty of ‘tourists’ running around – they seem to regard the political [situation] currently being experienced as a curiosity of human society to be ignored whenever it’s inconvenient. In this identity, he has foregone the clan markings (stripes) on his arms and (while undercover ) is wearing “typical Kzin tourist apparel”, not too inappropriate for the season, consisting of Sunglasses, baseball cap, singlet, shorts, flip-flops (called ‘thongs’ in Australia), and a large gold earring.
The PCs and Zantar are currently in their ‘civilian’ cover identities.
Mandarin is a former enemy of the team’s parent group who was permitted to conquer a neighboring alternate-history world in which that was adjudged to be the lesser of two evils. He used his magic to accelerate time in that dimension and established a multicultural Galactic Empire based around magic instead of technology, slowly becoming an ally to his former enemies. That space-time was destroyed in Ragnarok, but many of his subjects were saved by ‘seeding’ planets throughout the Milky Way with refugees. One of the more profound discoveries made by the PCs is that there were a LOT more of these refugees on Earth than they thought, mostly keeping themselves out of the public eye and dismissed as myths and legends. Some have begun to assimilate into the local culture, however.
Basalt notices, in the course of the meal, that the stones have actually been shaped more perfectly and exactly than would be possible with unmodified natural resources. Conclusion: there’s more to Grobhan than meets the eye. What’s more, you haven’t seen any stones of this type anywhere in the region – you couldn’t prove that Grobhan manufactured them himself, but it’s far from out of the question!
Specter, you notice that Grobhan is radiating a low level of magic – not enough for him to be a significant spellcaster, but enough that he could be a low-level mage or some sort of more expert but specialist mage. Which makes a certain amount of sense: in an Empire the scale of Mandarin’s, you would need to be something exceptional to be allowed to migrate to the capital. You suspect that this particular Darenwu is a trained stone-mage, and maybe a wood-mage as well, and that he may well have magical devices hidden away to enhance his arts.
Zantar is quite certain that Grobhan isn’t as thick as he looks, not by half. He is probably a trained Imperial Master Artisan, specializing in Wood and Stone-crafting, and trained to utilize magic the way human carpenters, masons, and builders might employ apprentices and subcontractors. He could just as easily have planted a medieval castle with a drawbridge as he did a simple tree-trunk, he thinks, but he went simple so that he would better fit in, locally.
IF THE PCs PAY THE TOLL (they did): They will barely get across the bridge before their car will have a blowout in it’s left rear tyre, possibly punctured on the bridge. Grobhan will emerge from his hut, walk across the bridge (which sways alarmingly) and assist by holding the car level like a jack while you change the tyre. As a result, the wheel is changed in about 10 minutes – but you will need to stop somewhere and get the spare repaired or replaced, which will take more time.
I seem to have been so confident that they would do so that I did not spell out what would happen if they refused. In retrospect, I can see that there were too many possible outcomes to have done so, anyway; it would have to be improvised and exactly what was said and done would have a material impact on the course of developments.
This was also a complete inversion of the mythic trope of the Troll “living under the bridge”. It was a completely unexpected encounter but one that made perfect sense to the players in hindsight.
Stating The Obvious
Using an Obvious Villain creates certain expectations in the minds of players, and these can then be manipulated by the GM to lend color, drama, and/or distinctiveness to a plotline.
Sabotage assumptions, or play into them. Throw surprises and plot twists into the plot. So long as you make sure that everything makes sense in the end, the end result is a game word that is richer and more complex than the overt simplicity created by the Obviousness of the Villain.
Even if you decide to play with a straight bat, with no significant twists in the plot, the expectations can blind-side you if you don’t take them into account.
For some reason, that reminds me of the Cybernetic Eco-terrorist Druid from the far future that I dropped into one of my fantasy campaigns at one point, complete with his robotic dogs… No-one expects a Druid to be the bad guy, never mind one of the most dangerous that had been encountered to date!
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June 11th, 2023 at 11:17 pm
Hello… thank you so much for the advice! Amazing article. I’m glad I found your blog, it’s very useful! Definitely, I will subscribe to it! Can’t wait to read your newsletters! It’s a great idea for commenting on other people blog!
June 13th, 2023 at 7:57 pm
I’m afraid I don’t put out a newsletter, but I try to post something new every week here at the website :)