Choose from the following characteristics for your creations or foes to gain insight into their character.When creating or combating villains, it’s important to know how to classify them. Understanding aspects of their personality, behavior, and aesthetics might tell you more than their alignment.
Choose from the following characteristics for your creations or foes to gain insight into their character.
Understanding what makes a villain dangerous and how that danger manifests is critical. As a GM, this understanding gives you insight into which situations cause your villains to thrive and lets you know when they perish. As a hero, it lets you know when to be afraid and when to strike.
Mastermind: A creature that behaves with calculated forethought. On the high end, you have someone who plans wicked deeds with genius precision. On the low end, you have dimwitted or impulsive creatures.
Force of Nature: Something that behaves instinctually or perhaps even mindlessly.
Strong: A creature or force that produces deliberate and overt harm. It is easy to understand and difficult to conquer.
Subtle: A creature that attacks indirectly or has no obvious way to be interacted with. This could be a physically weak creature or a force that is simply inscrutable and understated.
Even villains of a similar type react to motivating stimuli differently. Charting this behavior as a GM will dictate how to faithfully react to player choices. Charting it as a hero will help you navigate the risk of striking your most dangerous foes.
Vindictive: The type of creature that holds grudges and refuses to suffer insult. Anything that inflicts curses or plots revenge.
Callous: A villain unconcerned with people or a force that is incapable of empathy.
Cruel: A creature that commits horrible acts because it delights in pain and suffering.
Dispassionate: A creature that commits horrible acts due to its nature or duty. It derives neither joy nor pleasure from evil, but it is committed to it nonetheless.
Understanding a villain’s aesthetic is mostly important for GMs, who can use it to style their strongholds and choose their allies and supporters. A villain’s aesthetic might signal to heroes his or her terms of engagement and where he or she expects to fight. A villain’s ideology can also be reflected in his or her style; it’s a fun way to play with symbols in games.
Skulls: These represent an overtly macabre sense of style. Anyone who decorates himself in dark colors, frightening images, and actual bones is shifted toward skulls.
Masks: These are for villains who hide in plain sight or don’t hide at all. Any character who is able to commit evil deeds under scrutiny is probably shifted toward masks.
Finery: This is for a villain with elegant or grandiose tastes. He lives in castles, drinks fine wine, and tortures people to the sounds of opera.
Rags: Rags are for a villain unconcerned with material goods beyond the tools that allow her to function.