…now where did I put the glue?
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Confessions Of A Dungeon Master
Building Bad Guys, Or, The Search For A Serviceable Villain
I’ll confess right now, I mine the hell out of books and movies for NPCs and villains. Professor Moriarty? Gave him a new name and look and used him many times in several genres. Fu Manchu? Made him white and the big bad guy in a street level superheroes game. Lex Luthor? I turned him into both a ruthless mad scientist in a pulp game and a dragon in a D&D game. The Joker? Made him an elf in AD&D, then moved that character into an X Files type modern game. Norman Bates? He ran a small in on a little used road in an AD&D one shot. Spoiler: Mother was dead, but up and around.
Some DMs will tell you that you need to make enough changes to a character that your players won’t recognize them as the original.
I say fuck that. The look on my player’s faces when they saw that bleached white elf with the hideous smile was priceless, as was the blind panic after they picked up their jaws.
So, yeah, there are a bunch of villains out there that you can use. I’ve played in games where I recognized Darth Vader (as a not quite undead necromancer), Doctor Doom (alien/human hybrid trapped in his armor and pretty pissed about it), Cruella DeVille (actually dog meat loving twins in a game where we were we playing dogs), Henry Jekyll (female, Hispanic/French, and with her Hyde side right up front), and Dr. Miguelito Loveless (a halfling in an almost steampunk AD&D game). In some cases, I recognized them fairly quickly, but we were ass deep into things before anyone tumbled to Henrietta Jonquell. Until then, we thought she was just a moody bitch. The halfling had us fooled for about 6 sessions before we realized he was the villain and who he was based on.
The trick with recycling a famous villain is to either hold off on the reveal until the players are in the middle of deep shit, or make them recognizable, but have them act differently than expected until the PCs are again in the thick of it. Sometimes, the players take longer to tumble onto things than you expect. That was the case with Norman Bates, because none of the 4 players had actually ever watched Psycho. I had to have him kill an NPC in a shower to get one of them to the “Oh shit!” point.
That actually got me thinking about using different villains for different groups. Some villains are recognizable by almost everyone. Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Gollum, Voldemort, Darth Vader, Dracula fall into this group.
For movie buffs, you could probably use villains from lots of old movies. Kasper Gutman & Joel Cairo from The Maltese Falcon, Noah Cross from Chinatown, Cody Jarrett from White Heat, almost any non-Sherlock Holmes role of Basil Rathbone…the list is very long.
Female villains are not nearly as plentiful, but they are out there, especially in books. In movies, female villains run more toward insanity than evil mastermind. I’ve yet to use Irene Adler as a villain model, but it’s only a matter of time.
Finally, we should not overlook real life villains. History is chock full of them. Hitler is WAY too easy, and he was an inept idiot to boot. Stalin, on the other hand, was no dummy and a full on fiend. Getting away from genocidal bastards, you need look no further than the robber barons of the USA for some great bad guys. Of course, the politics of pretty much every nation ever have produced hundreds, if not thousands of villainous jerks.
So get yourself some fictional villains, give ’em a light coat of paint and maybe a sex change, then set them against your player’s and their PCs.
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