Quote:
Originally Posted by Asta Kask
Oh, yes. Both are good for a campaign, although you could have a memorable campaign without a recurring villain.
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Well, let me think.
In Zimiamvia, the principal villain of the storyline actually came up repeatedly: The king's bastard son by his long-established mistress. Ludovico grew up with a sense of his own privileges and a deep resentment of not having a claim to the throne. Early on he was largely a figure of fun, culminating in the scene where he serenaded Cassandra, one of the PCs, from outside her bedroom, and then climbed the balcony and came in, only to first have a chamberpot thrown at him and then be picked up bodily by Cassandra's bodyguard and hurled out the window, breaking his arm when he landed. (Of course they both said, "I had no idea it was the Prince!") Later on, when the king was away on an invasion of Akkama, he responded to a report of the Akkamite invention of rockets by proclaiming the king dead and himself Regent—and had to be captured and then executed by the royal armies.
One of the villains, so to speak, in Manse was The Lady, head of the House of Truth. She had taken a younger man, Jove, one of the PCs, as her lover, and at first failed to notice that Jove was attracted to her daughter Salvadora and that Salvadora felt the same about Jove; in fact she was trying to arrange Salvadora's marriage to someone who would be a credit to the House of Truth when Salvadora succeeded her. Then when Jove proclaimed his changed feelings she banished him from the House, hoping to cast him out of the aristocracy at the same time, only to have him adopted into the House of Light at the instigation of its head, Wresse, another of the PCs. She never did face any physical consequences, but found herself increasingly isolated by her obvious spite toward Jove and her putting it ahead of the welfare of the Manse (as Jove was the commander of its guard, and a good one).
I've already written about the Black Scorpion.
I confronted the British secret agent supers in Gods and Monsters with a Chinese band with elementally themed powers, led by the sinister Dr. Wong Feihong, who had used his mastery of alchemy and Chinese medicine to take one of Ch'in Shih Huang-Ti's terracotta soldiers to a hidden nexus where it could be animated, in the process gaining elemental powers for himself and his allies also. (I was thinking about the Chinese elements long before I wrote the GURPS supplement!) These were of course an analog for the Fantastic Four, right up to the flare rocket that put the character for "FIVE" into the sky above Hong Kong.
Possibly the most memorable villain in Boca del Infierno, my 18th century Buffyverse campaign, was Noctambule, a millennia-old sorceror who had been preserving the most beautiful women in history as wax images. Naturally, he tried to add the Slayer to his collection. She ended up turning him over to his own collection, who used his own waxwork process on him.
I think I'd say three things about my campaigns:
* A lot of the action isn't villain-driven.
* Often the thing that's memorable about a villain is a striking modus operandi.
* The villains who emerge as personalities are often the more soap operatic villains, whose villainy manifests in social schemes and maneuvers. Very often they can't be assailed directly because they have some measure of legitimacy; what's necessary is to create a situation where law or custom is on the PCs' side.
Bill Stoddard