Red Courts and Black Courts and Villians, oh my.

[catnip13]

So after I read How to Build a Villain, I realized that the villains in my game are not up to the caliber they need to be.

Certainly I can see the admirable qualities in Marcone, Lara, and Nicodemus. I don't see them so clearly in Mavra, the Eebs, Dutchess Arianna, or, say Tessa.

I have two Red Court vampires and a Black Court vampire that are major enough that they need work. Can we discuss some of the admirable qualities and motivations that we've seen in the series and can you nice folks help me build these guys to have some more depth to them?

[Masurao]

I think it wholly depends on the role you want a villain to play. I haven't read your link yet, but if you want villains to last longer and be occasional part-time allies, then they certainly needs admirable qualities. Marcone and Lara, while cold and calculating, are not inconsiderate of others around them and how their businesses affect these people. You shouldn't expect any mercy if you cross them, though.

Nicodemus is such a powerful player and has such a breadth of scheming, planning and manipulating that he has the luxury of civilization. Even if it is a thin veneer. His admirable qualities stem from his arrogance and practicality, I'd say...

Anyhoo, first I'll read that link before going more in-depth

[gojj]

My favorite villains are the ones that the players are forced to work with (or at least have the choice to work with) and one that the players may even be tempted to join; a bear outside the house is not nearly as scary as a snake inside if you get what I'm saying. Take a look at Silence of the Lambs and my favorite villain ever, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Even though he gave Clarice the info she needed to catch the bad guy and he was imprisoned nearly the entire time, the ball was always in his court, he outsmarted the protagonist every step of the way. Going down Jim's list in your link: he is definitely motivated by his need to toy with some and kill (feeding dependency maybe?) others. His power and admiral quality are one and the same, he is unquestionably and creepily intelligent. He knows you better then you know yourself and is sharp enough to know how to use it against you. And lastly, yes Hannibal is definitely unique and instantly recognizable.

I would use Hannibal as a template for one of your Red Court, a guy that may be obviously bad (due to the fact that he is a Red Court), but he is also smart enough to never let the evidence stack up against him so your players will not know the full extent of his "evilness" or be able to link any crimes to him directly. You can also have this guy approach your PC's (I'm not sure if your PC's are an official group or just random people working together but I assume their power levels make them stand out when they are all together) to work against the Black Court baddie. If the players don't dig they might be fooled into thinking that Mister Red is being genuine, that it is in his best interests to be truthful and not harm the PC's, but of course he's lying.

Now for the Black Court guy you can take a different approach. Because they are on the decline we can assume (and I believe both YS and OW mention this) that any Black Court left are powerful and clever to have survived this long. In one of my past games the GM had the Black Court hide in plain site. He was the head of some powerful multi-national corporation with so many political ties that he was nearly untouchable. This kind of villain is so frightening due to the sheer amount of resources at their disposal and it is difficult to trace anything back to them, they have so many favors and blackmails set up that they can hit you five different ways at once, all of them untraceable. Of course with this powerful an NPC you will need to give your PC's a helping hand in dealing with him. You can give them the help of some benevolent organization (a Knight of the Cross, some ex-cops that want to take him down), but it's more fun to give this help in the way of another villain, like the Red Court I previously mentioned. This way your players have to constantly watch their back and try to not get tangled in the web of politics, lies, and double-crosses that all the baddies will try to tangle them in and just makes for very fun games in my opinion.

Just remember that "admirable quality" doesn't necessarily mean that your villain is admirable in some way, just that something about them taken out of context is admirable. I wouldn't call Hannibal admirable in anyway, but when you consider just of smart and good at reading people he is (and ignore how he has chosen to use it), you can't help but respect the guy.

[Drulinda]

Certainly I can see the admirable qualities in Marcone, Lara, and Nicodemus. I don't see them so clearly in Mavra, the Eebs, Dutchess Arianna, or, say Tessa.

I have two Red Court vampires and a Black Court vampire that are major enough that they need work. Can we discuss some of the admirable qualities and motivations that we've seen in the series and can you nice folks help me build these guys to have some more depth to them?

Depending of what you consider admirable qualities, it sounds like your looking for qualities that make them a little bit more then mindless monsters so lets see...for the Eebs and Arianna as well as Mavra one somewhat redeeming qualities they share that a denarian like nicodemus lacks is that they keep their word and appear to be capable of a level of affection for their own kind. With the Eebs its apparent with each other even though this seems based more on complememtry insanities then love. Based on what lea says in Changes about Ariannas husband Don Paulo having his heart repeatedly broken by Arianna it seem  that the reds are capable of loving thier own kind to a degree. Arianna before her fight with dresden says she love her father the red king

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even though this want enough stop her from trying to knock him off the thrown

given the circumstances i find it unlikely she would lie about that. You could pherhaps agrue that she did have the best interests of her Court in mind, same with he late husband who if you read DM, know he was suicidely loyal.

For Mavra..well in GP

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she appears to be avenging her Children and Grandchildren against micheal for their "murder"

so you could probably have you BCV character capable of a degree of affection for their own kind though unless insanly patriotic like Don Paulo (which is possible) its probably unrealistic for them to sacrifice themselves for one another unless one is a minion following orders. Woj its possible for blampires to feel something for those they cared about in life but the feelings wouldnt really motivate them towards a particular behavor, if their hungry they eat though if they have a self centered reason to keep mortals alive they will and its possible that a few have enough of an enlightend sense of self interest to perserve mortals that have proven useful until they dont. Maybe if you had a BCV character who had somehow lost to ability to enjoy the taste of blood you could get a more abmirable character. The full woj was that if a bcv is eating their own child from life they might think that they should feel bothered by it but the taste is just so /good/.

With Tessa she hasnt really shown any admirable qualities apart from being admirably intellegent  like nicodemus who is said by jim to be pure evil so maybe they dont actually  have any amirable qualities aside from master planning. Though pherhaps we need to see more of tessa before we say for sure.

[catnip13]

I should probably mention that these guys are being built for a six hour one-shot LARP with a house-made rules system cobbled out of a couple of different sources. So characters that would be unsuitable for PCs in the DFRPG are PCs in this game. The scenario is a pressure-cooker disguised as diplomatic gathering. 20 characters locked in a small nightclub with mortal enemies for a few hours. It's run beautifully twice now, but I want to make it better.

Ok, right now the primary motivation on the female Red Court is revenge on one of the White Court vampires for seducing and destroying what was to become her 'child.' Of course, our hapless WC doesn't even remember the mortal in question. She's smart, and a schemer.

The Black Court vampire was a rather blatant monster. After reading that essay, I'm scrapping him completely, and starting over with a cold, jaded, dispassionate intellectual.

The male Red Court is currently, again, sort of a dumb thug. And while I want to have a few primarily physical characters, he just ... sort of isn't working for me. I do sort of  like the Hannibal Lecter model, but at the same time, I don't want to make this guy too smart. Sometimes people just want to play a barbarian with thews, you know? But he needs something to make him fun to play.

To me, Nicodemus, while unrepentantly evil, is brilliant, scrupulously polite, and has style. Lara, again, brilliant. With her own code of honor, and loyalty to her family. Marcone has his whole 'set of rules' thing going on. He's a born leader, and he's, again, brilliant.

In Even Hand, we get to see Hendricks has admirable traits that Harry never notices. And that sort of makes sense, because just because Harry doesn't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

[Sanctaphrax]

I don't think that villains have to be at all admirable in a moral sense. They can just be impressively skilled or competent or determined.

Shakespeare was admirable, right? Well, his admirable qualities would be no less admirable if his hobby turned out to be raping little girls on the subway. (Cookie for anyone who gets the mangled reference.)

Your Red Court thug could be very brave, I think. Maybe he has the hot blood and never-say-die attitude of a shonen hero.

Speaking of shonen...are you familiar with One Piece? Basically, Jim Butcher is advocating Rob Lucci over Spandam here.

I think.

[devonapple]

Catnip13, is this game going to be run at BigBadCon?

[Ren]

In addition to giving the villains admirable qualities, you can also make them a character the PC's can sympathize with, that that could technically fall into the Motivations section but it can also add another layer to the character.
example; in the Game I run that is set in Miami one of the major Villains is Simon Magus, a 2000 year-old sorcerer who had been cursed by Saint Peter with a body that could never die, but never fully heal either. So by 2011 he was a very angry, highly intelligent, very experienced and practiced wizard who's had 2000+ years to put create and put his plans into motion all while living with the excruciating pain of the numerous injuries he accumulated over the long centuries. The characters KNOW he is an evil bastard and that is never likely to change despite all he has been through and they also know he's incredibly dangerous and probably three or four dozen moves ahead of them. But they also understand his pain and his motivations...well some of them anyway, he always has a half-a-dozen other plans running at the same time.

[Richard_Chilton]

The best source of villains I've ever seen were the Black Company novels.  The books are good (Harry Dresden is a fan*) and in this world of Grey the villains really standout.  It's a world when if someone knows your True Name they can defeat any magic you cast, so even the villains' name are colourful.  Sorcerers with names like Soulcatcher (who speaking used a multiple of voices - reportedly of "caught" souls), the Limper (who took a beating but kept limping along), Hanged Man (who had the scar and broken neck of a man who had been hanged), Shapeshifter (who could take shapes at will), Dominator (he who Took the Ten Who Were Taken), Lady (someone that was too power for Dominator to Take, so he married her) - the list goes on and on.

None of those villains were "I'm evil because I'm evil" - most had their own reasons for doing what they did - mixed with huge amounts of power that allowed them to ignore society's rules.  The closest anyone got to that was the Dominator (who doesn't appear much in the books, but his power still casts a long shadow) who wanted to rule the world - believing that Power was its own justification.  Most of the early villains were playing games of payback over things that had happened centuries ago - with the exception of Lady who wanted to impose "order" on the world (i.e. conquer all the small kingdoms and rule the resulting empire).  Villains in later books had meddled with power forces (Shadows with a capital S) and now had to keep growing in power or risk being consumed by the forces they had unleashed.

There were even regular people doing bad things because they didn't see much of a choice - like an innkeeper who was behind on his debts so he sold bodies to "the Black Castle" - feeding it and its evil so he could make his loan payments.

Some of the better villains in the later part of that series were people who were screwing the heroes while believing what they were doing was for the best or in their nation's best interest.  Misguided good intentions can be wonderful motives.

Bringing this back to the game - the more backstory you give a villain the better the villain is, even if he doesn't see himself as a villain.  How about someone who wants to wipe out those dangerous freak that are obviously monsters (the PCs or harmless NPCs)? Working to protect his family and community he does things that look evil (and are evil) but he's convinced he's doing good.  Or the local politician swimming in graft who is arranging for <place of power> to be bulldozed because a local developer is paying him off - and if the PCs push him then it becomes a matter of pride as he pushes back.  Or the social worker that wants to help a changeling in his early teens to be a "normal" kid.

Then you can have those whose "opposition to the PCs" isn't central to what they are doing.  For example, a local gang could be unknowing supporting a death cult - they don't know what the cult is up to but they do know that the cult can provide them with drugs to sell.  Or a normal thief could steals an IoP (or a McGuffin that the PCs need) because he wants to fence it (Butcher used this one in a novel - things didn't work out well for the thieves).  Or a city politician who honestly believes that he's doing the right thing by expropriating the PC's place of power to build a new Hotel/Golf Course/Factory/Highway.

Spending time on villains is important, because the heroes can't shine as brightly without the villains being there as a foil.

Since the DV usually isn't black and white, I highly recommend the Black Company novels as a source of villains.

Richard

* = in the short story about Harry's Day Off, the Black Company hardcovers fall off a bookshelf and on to Harry's head.

[catnip13]

Catnip13, is this game going to be run at BigBadCon?

Why yes! Hi, Devon!

[devonapple]

Why yes! Hi, Devon!

Hello there! Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. I'll recuse myself from the discussion in case I somehow get into the game. Good luck with the tinkering!