Villains That Are Fun To Fight

The most intricate, well-developed, and interesting villains of all time are not really worth much if you never have engaging conflict with them. In fact, an amazing showdown can make up for a lot when it comes to villains. I could explore that concept in a lot of ways, but right now I’m going to explore how Paper Mario (and in many ways, any game using a similar “Action Command” combat system) encapsulates the concept of a villain that is actually fun to do battle with.

Before I go into my points, I’ll summarize how that combat system works for those unfamiliar. Essentially, it functions like ordinary turn-based rpg combat with one key difference: every action in the game has some kind of quick-time event associated with it, usually some kind of timing mini-game. The events are unique to each of your own moves, as well as your enemy’s moves, and succeeding at them increases or decreases the damage they deal, respectively. As an example, once you’ve selected a power strike with one character, you might have to hold and then let go of a button at the right time to get its maximum damage. Enemy attacks are generally blocked by pressing a button just before they strike you, mitigating or entirely negating their damage.

The enemies of Paper Mario are, from a purely narrative perspective, not interesting. These are basically the same Goombas and Koopas you’ve been stomping on for decades now, even the bosses are generally just more colorful variations on old standbys. And there was never any incredibly engaging backstory for Piranha Plants or anything. And as before, you have a fairly straightforward set of commands with which to deal with them. There are more than the original game (Hop, Don’t Hop, and Throw Fireball) but still. You and your party members each have about 4-5 meaningfully different actions you can take at any one time.

But where it gets interesting is in the depth that is still contained within this simplicity. With so few variables, your strategy is going to change a lot based on minor alterations in the enemy. Oh no, this Goomba has a pointy hat, now he deals extra damage and we can’t jump on him. But, unless we spend some special points to use a ranged attack, we won’t be able to hammer him until we get rid of the other Goombas in front of him. However, we might need those points for a later fight, so is it better to take some extra damage or spend some of our extra points? And how is your decision effected if you’re better at the minigame for executing the ranged attack than for blocking the Goomba’s spikey headbutt? It’s not exactly a mind-bending paradox, but that’s a good bit of strategy that comes into play just because a Goomba in the enemy’s back row has a hat on.

And that’s just one tiny possible variable. The game can give all sorts of twists and bonuses to the enemies you’ll be fighting (wings, life-draining attacks, defensive options, charge-up attacks) that give you a lot more to think about in any given fight than your average “hit the slimes with the swords until they fall down” random encounter in an rpg. Stacking multiple boosts on individual enemies and diversifying their groups forces you to approach them in different strategic ways and always be ready to develop new tactics for new opponents.

So, as you’re wandering around the Mushroom Hills or wherever, and you see some turtles coming at you, you don’t sigh as you reach for your hammer to take down another mob of featureless creatures. You can’t just throw your higher health and attack power and assume that, so long as you remember to make your warrior attack and your caster throw spells, you’re going to come out on top. The battles demand attention, and the enemies demand your respect. This makes them feel important, like they are meaningful obstacles in your quest, rather than some randomly generated mob of semi-diverse roadblocks waiting for your to annihilate them.

Each enemy encounter becomes something more like a puzzle, an assortment of interesting pieces that you can solve in different ways. To keep the bosses raised on a higher standard, each one has a gimmick completely unique to it that forces you to change how you might normally address it or make interesting decisions in your tactical approach. One boss takes less damage from hammer attacks, but multiple hammer attacks in a row can disable it for a turn. Another spawns additional enemies each time is attacked, and at the end of a round will consume any that you don’t defeat in order to regenerate its health.

Now, all of this is not a substitute for creating villains with amazing motivations, personalities, ect. But, the format of certain stories, particularly those told in rpgs, tend towards having a lot of villainous bosses that simply don’t get enough screen time to be well-developed. Robot tanks, giant spiders, workaday dragons, all make decently attractive foes but aren’t going to be incredibly interesting, as far as their character goes. However, you can make them very interesting mechanically, with a tactically diverse combat system and interesting innovations (or “gimmicks”). And obviously, the more engaged you are with a villain the more engaged you are with the hero’s quest to defeat them, with the narrative they are embroiled in, and with the consequences of the story.

Even if the villain looks like this:

The Evil in the Museum

Hey everyone, I made a kind of choose-your-own-adventure, point-and-click adventure-inspired interactive story about poking around in a haunted museum! I think it’s pretty cool, it has a lot of possible endings and decisions to make, a mystery to solve, and I think it’s got a fairly cool antagonistic force as well. Please check it out, and let me know what you think! (particularly if you find any broken pieces, I think I got them all but I am not a programmer.) I hope you enjoy.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9080962/The%20Evil%20in%20the%20Museum%20%282%29.html

The True Self as a Villain in Persona 4

Many JRPGs subscribe to the notion that in order to be a cool boss, all you really need is a crazy-looking monster with an interesting gimmick. Here’s a robot tank that has different moves as you blow pieces of him off, there’s a shape-shifting ooze that changes its elemental affinities, we’ve got a huge dragon that telegraphs its devastating cinematic moves, ect. Rarely do these bosses have much significant grounding in the game world proper. Oh, well, the villains of course have a giant robot tank, they’re villains and they’re advanced so…yeah, robot tank!

Why. No, why though.

How did they build it/why did they build it/what time period is this in/do we even have access to electricity? These are all questions posed within even five seconds of consideration. Of course, they’re incidental to the story; the robot tank has to be there because there had to be a cool boss for this part in the story. This is a fantasy game, the JRPG says.

It is fantastical.

Persona 4 goes in a radically different direction. Every boss is a Shadow, a self-proclaimed manifestation of an important character’s “True Self” or Id. They are the character’s most personal and most repressed feelings, given form in the parallel dreamworld where much of the game takes place. As such, they have an impressively deep connection to the game’s story and straightforwardly pose one of the game’s harrowing themes: that mankind’s true desires are inherently twisted because of the world around theme. They also make things really awkward for a lot of your party members (though not as much as they should, but we’ll get to that later).

For those unfamiliar, much of the Persona videogame takes place in an alternate reality that is shaped by the dreams and desires of all mankind’s unconsciousness. This is important for a lot of reasons, but the two that are crucial for this discussions are that:
*It makes it so that the heroes have superpowers based off their inner strength when they are in the other world.
*It provides a reason for why the other world is populated by monsters that are metaphors for various flavors of human suffering.

The latter is particularly important for discussing the shadow selves of the main and supporting characters that serve as the game’s bosses. Each character’s Shadow takes on a form meant to symbolize that character’s inner turmoil. Some of these forms are not terribly subtle; such as the giant bird stuck within a golden cage. Others have slightly more nuance hidden in their strangeness, such as the young effeminate man stuck inside the torso of musclebound giant. Many people have written plenty on how each shadow connects to their respective characters; I have no intention of delving into them all in detail here.

But it is important to point out how much you learn about these characters when you face their Shadows in battle during the game. You always fight them before you’ve had much meaningful interaction with the original character, and in seeing their Id laid bare you learn a lot about them without having had much dialogue or a bunch of cutscenes devoted to them. As is standard for these games, the Shadow will give a speech before you battle it, but these speeches serve a dual purpose. They explain why the villain is behaving how it is, as in any JRPG story, but they also reveal a lot about the character. In a brief cutscene followed by a battle, you are treated to plot progression and character development with every single boss. A lot of narrative development occurs during every one of these fights, which stands in stark contrast to standard games of this genre.

Hey! I asked you a question!

For all it does right in tying its bosses directly to narrative progression, though, Persona 4 doesn’t go as far as it could. After a battle, the protagonist and his friends end up accepting the “shadow side” of whoever they defeated, vowing it won’t get in the way of their relationship. And then it is rarely brought up again, save in conversations with those particular characters as part of sidequests specific to them. This strikes me as unbelievable; unless the protagonist genuinely doesn’t care that much about his entourage one way or the other, I think that his feelings would be more complex than instantaneous acceptance. Maybe he wouldn’t trust his fellows as much for a while, or maybe he would be extremely concerned about them. After seeing a very personal and secret side of them laid bare, you’d think there would be more drama in the group.

Especially since the primary cast are all highschool students, a class of human being not exactly known for their tolerance of others.

Still, Persona 4 goes above and beyond what’s expected of its genre when it comes to bosses. Each one is designed with the intention of making sure it relates directly to the story and develops the core themes of the game. None of them are powerful and intimidating just for their own sake, they are powerful and intimidating in a precise way that communicates something about their associated character. When people talk about “next generation” gaming they are often referencing updated graphics or innovative mechanics, but to me Persona 4’s Shadow villains represents a next-gen way of approaching narrative development. They are villains that will make you forget that you are playing a videogame.

The Authorities as Opposition in Role-Playing Games

This blog post is mostly an excuse to talk about this totally awesome mechanic from “Night’s Black Agents” by Pelgrane Press that can easily be put in any tabletop adventure. It’s called “Heat” and it’s perfect for any group whose players have some omnipresent organization after them, be they the police, the government, or a criminal conspiracy.

The premise is insanely simple. Each time the players do something that would attract the attention of whatever authorities are after them, they gain some number of Heat markers. One for a relatively minor offense, such as tripping an alarm, more for something more serious like causing an explosion, and the maximum for a public assassination of an important figure. A chart breaks down the potential values for different incidents, from 1-5, but you can make up your own for your own setting fairly easily.

Once per mission/quest/whatever, the GM can call for a Heat roll. This is a flat roll against the number of Heat markers the players have accrued. The players may get a bonus to the roll for every advantage they can reasonably think to add, such as having covered their tracks in an area, or disposed of witnesses. The GM shouldn’t let this go on too long though, or the game will slow down into a debate between which minor boosts are worth noting. Give the players a little time to apply what they can think of and then force the roll; if they left anything out it’s too bad, time is of the essence!

If the roll fails to equal or exceed the amount of Heat the players have accrued, then at any point during that session the GM is free to insert the authorities hounding the players into the scene at an unexpected and unlikely interval. This could be anywhere between their arrival at a new location to in the middle of a combat encounter, and could take the form of anything from a fully decked out assault team to a paid-off official with power over the players.

Another interesting thing about Heat is that it doesn’t dissipate after the authorities are triggered that way. The players lose 1 Heat after the first 72 hours of laying low, then another after a week, then another after a month. Beyond that, the only way to remove Heat is to either destroy any evidence linking you to the incident that gained it, or to frame someone else for the incident. Doing so subtracts 1 Heat as well. So, obviously, Heat is much harder to get rid of than it is to gain.

What I love about this mechanic is not only that it’s a nice simple way of tracking a large, overshadowing presence in a game, it also makes sure the players are always aware of it. It’s one thing to tell the players that the are fighting a massive evil conspiracy that is always watching them and has agents everywhere. It’s another thing entirely to let them see, right on the table, the shadow organization taking increasing notice of them, getting ready to strike at any time.

But this doesn’t just let the GM maintain a healthy level of paranoia in their game. It also gives the player a direct (albeit limited) agency over the pressure kept on them. By making their overwatch a mechanic and not just a facet of the narrative, it lets the players feel as if they have more control over their situation, and keeps both the players and GM honest about the threat posed to them.

I can think of all kinds of ways this Heat system could be used to simulate the threat of some interesting and constantly watching opposition in a tabletop game. Hopefully it’ll give inspiration to some of you also!

 

The Ancient Ones of the Lovecraft Mythos Pt. 2

Alright now that those guys are outta the way here are my favorite less commonly referenced Ancient Ones and a brief introduction to them. Since these ones are rarely represented in common media and have a slight handful of appearances in the stories I won’t bother giving the sectioned breakdown like I did last time. Instead I’m just going to rattle off all my thoughts on each one.

Tsathoggua

This Ancient One was actually originally created by Clark Ashton Smith, a friend of Lovecraft, and incorporated into the mythos through references. A slothful, gluttonous deity, Tsathoggua dwells in a cave somewhere in Hyperborea awaiting sacrifice. He can also transmit avatars of himself through shapeshifting black ooze creatures known as Formless Spawn, which can accept sacrifice or perform tasks on Tsathoggua’s behalf. In exchange for these sacrifices, Tsathoggua teaches secrets of magic.

I like this guy for a lot of reasons. For one, he is incredibly lazy. He very clearly does not have any kind of larger scale plan beyond accepting sacrifices and wallowing in his own laziness forever. He may not even be capable of doing much else due to some kind of limitations on his power. He’s the closest thing to a “god of man” that the mythos has, which makes him strangely relatable. Of course the slacker Ancient One is also the one closest to being able to form a workable relationship with human beings. Then again, perhaps his plot was insidious infiltration all along…though if that’s the case it didn’t work, since by the modern era he is noticeably lacking in worshippers (Smith’s Ancient Ones are all introduced in a medieval era).

Abhoth

Another Smith Ancient One, Abhoth is essentially a personification (as much as a pool of sentient slime can be considered personified) of the primordial ooze. It constantly spawns abominable offspring in all manner of forms from its massive, lake-like body, many of which are almost immediately reabsorbed by it or devoured by other, stronger spawn. Limitless combinations of limbs, tissue, and intellects are created in this way, creating all manner of grotesque creatures like a gruesome microcosm of evolution at hyperspeed.

I think the idea of a bizarre, alien deity representing the concept of evolution. Despite being a fairly important natural force, it wasn’t known long enough ago to have had gods attributed to it like storms, or the ocean. It’s interesting to see a completely new archetype of god, and it makes me wonder about what deities for other, less ancient concepts would be like. A god of television, for example, or digital credit, or social media.

Chaugnar Faugn

Physically, he resembles a sinister Ganesh. Outside of that he’s considerably more complicated. His cult believes that he is responsible for the creation of the world, and will also be responsible for its destruction, once he has fed on enough human beings. Oddly, the cult considers it their duty to provide him with victims, either out of gratitude for at least being created in the first place or out of a belief that this inevitable destruction must come to pass anyways. “Great Chaugnar” has the ability to inhabit idols made in his likeness, so the cult distributes these in order to further his feeding upon the human race.

Chaugnar is fairly well-defined (which, as you might’ve guessed, means that he’s the creation of another author other than Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long) but this doesn’t make him any less mysterious and strange because everything that is known about him is so odd. Why does his cult so gladly serve him and hasten the end of the world? Why would Chaugnar seek to end his creation? What use does such a powerful being have for feeding on human flesh anyways? These questions, coupled with the fact that Chaugnar is probably the closest analogue to more “realistic” deities in the mythos in terms of the ritual and worship associated with him, serves to keep him unknowable (a key feature for good horror) even after so many specifics about him are laid out.

Y’golonac

A Ramsey Campbell god (huh, it’s starting to look like I don’t actually have a strong affection for a lot of the Lovecraft in this Lovecraft mythos…) who lords over perversion, carnal lust, and forbidden knowledge. He is said to be able to possess any whose appetites for perverse and disgusting acts reach truly inhuman heights, and his name is said to be such a perversion in and of itself that just thinking it may conjure him. Once possesses a victim bloats horribly, grows gaping, lipless mouths in its palms, turns a yellow jaundiced color, and their head falls clean off. It is unknown whether this is to mimic the appearance of the Old One or simply its preferred form.

To what end this delightfully creepy Ancient One possesses others is unknown. One fan interpretation I read (provided by the fascinating Trail of Cthulhu roleplaying game) suggests that Y’golonac is in fact an advanced alien STD, transmittable simply through desire and lust after particularly gross sex without needing the act itself. I prefer a similar interpretation, in that I don’t believe Y’golonac to have any aspirations of world takeover or other such sinister schemes, as many of the other Old Ones are suggested to have. I think that he is somewhat mindless in a sense; he is a byproduct of the grotesqueness in the universe, created and summoned by the foulest of thoughts the same way alcohol is manufactured through fermentation. A naturally occurring eldritch horror. It’s not a bad guess at what many of the other Ancient Ones might be as well, actually.

The Ancient Ones of the Lovecraft Mythos, Part 1

I’m actually somewhat philosophically opposed to codifying these unknowable forces in this way but at the same time I think part of the fun of the mythos is trying to piece together all the little details you can’t possibly know for sure into a coherent framework. Also maybe this will get some of you to read the damn stories.

There are too many Ancient Ones to really get in-depth with in a single post, particularly if ones by other authors are included. Consequently I’m going to focus on the ones that I think are particularly prolific in popular references to the mythos in this post. Next time I’m going to pick all of my favorite obscure ones that generally even less is known for sure about.

I mention this every time I talk about Lovecraft, but it’s important to remember that he purposefully left out a lot of details about the Ancient One’s motives, descriptions, goals, and abilities. You cannot have a meaningful conversation about the mythos without speculation. So my little introductions of these different ancient ones are going to be separated into three categories as follows:
1) What is absolutely known about them from the stories
2) How they tend to be portrayed and what knowledge is now popularly ascribed to them
3) How my interpretation varies from these two.

Cthulhu

1. Cthulhu is by far the most defined ancient one in the mythos, which is why he’s the most iconic and often used to represent the mythos as a whole. However, it should be noted that that doesn’t mean he has any connection to most other forces in the mythos. He is worshipped by a race of fish-people called the Deep Ones, who slowly try to infiltrate the human race by breeding with them and creating more Cthulhu-worshipping hybrids.
   Cthulhu himself is dead/dreaming in a hidden city/parallel dimension called R’lyeh. It is unknown what will happen when he awakens, but this is what his worshippers seek to facilitate. How they intend to accomplish this is unknown. Additionally, in his slumber Cthulhu appears to be capable of forming some kind of mental connection with human beings in his dreams. The exact nature of this connection and whether it’s even on purpose is unclear.
2. Since Cthulhu is the most well-defined, his popular representations have the least expounded upon. However, one interesting note is that in what appears to be every instance, his awakening is interpreted the same way: when he wakes he will devour the world. As far as I’m aware there’s no actual definitive basis for this in the stories. It would certainly fit with the overarching theme of the ancient ones being horrible forces, given that total destruction is really scary, however…
3. I’ve always been a firm believer, and I think a lot of the best horror stories will back me up on this, that there are way worse things than death. I can understand why Cthulhu’s awakening would be commonly associated with apocalyptic destruction. But given the spirit of horror that I think the mythos is supposed to convey, I feel like it should be something way worse than annihilation. For example, some of Cthulhu’s worshippers might be under the impression that Cthulhu will use his power to actually conquer the world, and reward them with dominion for their service. I think enslavement under a potentially omnipotent alien squid dragon is waaaaay worse a fate.

Nyarlathotep

1. Nyarlathotep is an entity, or the name for a collection of entities, represented by a thousand different avatars, most of which take the guise of deities. For some reason worship appears to be important to it, and it is deeply involved in manipulating humans. He is seen coercing mortals into worshiping either aspects of himself or, interestingly, other particular gods.
2. The primary addition to Nyarlathotep in additional work is simply more avatars. Since it actively interferes with the workings of humans for mysterious purposes, and he supposedly has a thousand different forms (only four of which are defined in the stories) he’s really the perfect one to extrapolate all kinds of additional content for.
3. There’s actually really no way in which my thinkings on Nyarlathotep differ from the norm. Though I do wonder if its apparent desire to manipulate humans through cults and worship (as opposed to any myriad other number of possible ways for something with a thousand supernatural forms) does make me wonder if perhaps deification, prayer, and ritual are important to the ancient ones in some capacity, alien monsters though they may be and not “gods” in the truest sense.

Yog-Sothoth

1. Yog-Sothoth is a being described as having control over interdimensional travel, but is also implied to be locked outside our particular dimension. It, or aspects of it, can cross over temporarily under certain conditions, and whatever barrier prevents its entry can be broken entirely. This is a goal that it works towards through means unknown. Additionally, Yog-Sothoth is capable of bestowing lessons of magic and other worlds on those who worship it, seemingly with need for little sacrifice. Physically, it appears as a collection of glowing orbs, though it has at least one other form or avatar that is an enormous cloaked figure.
2. Yog-Sothoth frequently is used as a representative of “devil’s bargains”; it will bestow magical power and otherworldly secrets, but at a price, usually one obscured from whoever it makes deals with. It also is demonstrated as having more direct control over the boundaries of our dimensions, being able to open rifts in time and space, thereby weakening the barrier between our dimension and it.
3. Personally, I think that the reason the stories portray Yog-Sothoth as giving away magic seemingly for free is because the use of spellcasting is what weakens our world’s barriers. Magic in the Lovecraft universe is ill-defined, but I envision it working somewhat similar to the sorcery in the Dark Sun D&D setting, where every spell bends and tears at the very fabric of reality, creating strain that takes time to repair if it even repairs at all. By propagating sorcery, Yog-Sothoth hopes to create enough magically endowed followers that they will inadvertently blow open the dimensional gates for him.

Hastur

1. A particularly interesting ancient one because its concept is not originally with Lovecraft; he is from a concept developed by a predecessor horror writer, Robert Chambers. If those stories are to be taken as the model, Hastur is a figure in a cursed play which brings madness to all who read it, via hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, mania, paranoia, or any number of other potential varieties of insanity. He is also demonstrated as having some degree of control over the undead.
2. In extrapolations, this effect is seen as a purposeful part of Hastur’s scheme to essentially invade and potentially destroy our world by corrupting us enough to either become or welcome into existence his servants. The lunatics who worship him and the psychotic plans they carry out are all in fact part of some greater scheme to allow him to extend greater influence over our world. However, another fairly common interpretation is that Hastur is not exactly an ancient one itself, but a representative of a particular kind of obsessive madness. He is a personified concept, the true comprehension of which induces insanity, but who does not really exist outside of metaphor.
3. I love Hastur the most out of all the ancient ones, and one of the things I love most about him is how creepy and mysterious all the different variations still are. There are a lot of ways Cthulhu has been portrayed that I don’t find terribly threatening, there is no way Hastur is not scary. I purposefully don’t tie myself down to any one with him; all the pieces of information I gather from the stories I assemble into many possible interpretations instead of trying to focus into just one because they all make sense and are delightful to me.

The Alien vs The Thing

Battle of the generically named masterpiece monsters!

First off the title is misleading clickbait for my amusement. Both of these creatures are pinnacles of horror, neither particularly better than the other. Also nobody should care which would win in a fight. What I’m actually going to talk about is why they are so awesome.

Though honestly they don’t even fall under the primary purview of this site, seeing as how they’re not villains in the strictest sense. They are certainly the antagonists of their respective films, but they are also reactively antagonistic towards the protagonists. The Alien is just a wild predator introduced onto a (to it) alien vessel, searching for prey. The Thing may be sentient or it may not be; either way it crashed in a frozen wasteland and was ressurected admidst a bunch of aliens it undoubtedly did not understand and may have even feared.

Not that they’re without their advantages, of course. Indeed, both the Alien and The Thing have enough abilities that they are able to strongly adhere to one of the great tenants of horror monster design; they are different or have different capability every time you see them. Well, almost: once the Alien reaches its final form (after proceeding from egg, facehugger, larval stage) it doesn’t change again for the rest of the film. The Thing has a completely different form every time you see it. In addition to making them more interesting, this also allows them to remain scary even after you’ve seen them (which is not something every monster can say). Generally the audience’s imagination of a creature is actually scarier than the thing itself, but by always evolving, learning, and demonstrating new abilities, a monster can maintain that unknown quality even after it has been revealed.

Being a force of the unknown is an important element in a monster, but what’s also important is that they act as forces of something else. Monsters that represent our more primal fears make them frightening in ways simply being gruesome cannot. The Thing can imitate other lifeforms near perfectly, can perfectly assume another being’s identity. It is an avatar of paranoia, quickly causing the members of the research station to turn on each other and even kill each other. And the Alien is described as being the perfect organism. It is the ultimate predator, the descendant of every vicious animal humankind has ever had to survive in the wild against.

And yet, they both have distinct vulnerabilities. Because the Alien is fought in space, it can still be jettisoned out an airlock, or incinerated by a jet engine. Additionally, it can be harmed by extreme heat and cooked inside its natural armor. The thing is also vulnerable to fire, and it can be discovered through various means even after it’s been disguised. Additonally, the heroes could’ve avoided confronting both altogether. Ripley specifically orders her team not to bring the Alien aboard the ship, and had her team listened to her everyone would’ve been fine save the initial victim. The Norwegian scientists nearly destroy it at the beggining with a grenade.

To me this is actually the scariest thing about them: the fact that they are beatable means that your failure to do so is no one’s fault but yours. What allows them to wreck the havoc and carnage that they do is not as much their own capability but the weakness of the humans facing them. Both teams of protagonists are brought down by their own selfishness and skepticism, turning against their allies or failing to make crucial realizations in time to prevent disaster. The monsters’ weaknesses simaltaneously demonstrate the powerful potential humans have, and their capacity to squander it.

The Hatred of AM

Something that is crucial to any good villain is for them to have an interesting motivation. They can’t simply be evil for evil’s sake, or they became two-dimensional. A villain whose motives I found extremely intriguing was AM, or Allied Mastercomputer, of “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.” The game is a point-and-click adventure based loosely off of Harlan Ellison’s short story of the same name, where you take control of five survivors of the apocalypse who are artificially kept alive for the torturous amusement of the immensely powerful artificial intelligence which oversaw the destruction of the world. Enraged to the point of insanity and the pointlessness of its creation and the sinfulness of humans, it wipes out the entire species save for five unfortunate souls. After over a century of personalized torment, it subjects each of them to a bizarre trial that is almost a morality play, a psychodrama designed to take advantage of their most critical character flaws. As the player, you have the ability to try and redeem them through their performance in these trials, though doing so is tricky and it is often easy to accidentally succumb to the character’s worse nature, thinking it is the only way forward, and end up dooming them further.

While AM certainly seems to delight in his villainy like a cackling madman from a children’s cartoon (many have nicknamed him “HAM” and it’s not entirely inappropriate) I found that it was his implicit actions that revealed complexity about his character, not his actual dialogue as much. Supposedly, one of the leading concepts that lead to the formation of the videogame’s narrative was the writers asking the question “Why did AM choose these five to save? What made them deserving of 109 years of torture?” Considering this question leads to some interesting conclusions about how AM views the human race. Stop reading now unless you want to see a ton of spoilers for the game.

(Obviously this is all entirely speculation, I can’t pretend to be able to read a mind as twisted as AM’s. But I can certainly try!)

Gorrister
It’s revealed through his chapter that Gorrister beat his wife, and from a combination of that and his long absence from home because of his job she eventually went mad and had to be sent to an asylum. He feels incredibly guilt over this, more than he actually should, as we find out that his mother-in-law had a hand in driving his wife into despair as well. Overall he seems stricken with guilt and remorse, not exactly a pinnacle of mortal sin. Or at least, not by usual metrics of analysis. But that’s not how AM thinks.

Looking at Gorrister’s scenario we get a clue about what made him a target for AM; like the other chapters is filled with choices. A large number of them revolve around deciding whether or not to harm or kill other entities in the game. These range from his in-laws to harmless animals, but their murder is always presented as a way of gaining some kind of benefit, a way of advancing through his trial. In other words, Gorrister is constantly being given the opportunity to prove that he is the terrible person he thinks he is. To demonstrate that the real reason he wasn’t even more aggressive towards his wife was that he was repressing his true desires, now unleashed after years of constant torment. In other words, AM judges Gorrister for his intent just as harshly as we might for someone’s actions.

Nimdok
Of course, AM punishes actions as well. Nimdok, whose real name was replaced for AM’s further amusement, was a Nazi scientist who experimented on captive Jews during the Holocaust. But unlike his compatriots, he possesses a trait that allows AM to emotionally torment him on a higher level; he has alzheimer’s. He can’t remember anything about his old life, at least not until he is reminded. In many ways, he is a completely different person, and so he is capable of being horrified at himself and his actions where before he might’ve been proud of them.

AM therefore selects him over any other of the perpetrators of the Holocaust because Nimdok has the capacity to feel greater depths of despair at himself than any other. A Nazi with their faculties intact would feel no guilt when confronted with their crimes, but ironically, Nimdok’s damaged brain exposes him to a wider variety of emotion than would’ve otherwise been possible for him.

Ted
A conman at best and implied to have been a thief and womanizer (or worse), Ted’s scenario possesses the least threat to his physical being than any of the others. This is because AM knows his narcism is so great that he could harm Ted’s ego far more painfully than he could ever harm his body. He places Ted in a scenario where he has a chance to be heroic, to save the day, confident that his selfishness and arrogance will prevent him from succeeding. And then AM will throw his failure back in his face, forcing him to gaze upon his own powerlessness in stark detail, and realize how worthless he really is.

It’s easy to imagine why AM would despise arrogance enough to devote one of his precious torture slots entirely to punishing it. AM sees humans as true scum of the earth, a species of low intelligence and despicable behavior, so deranged that they actually created their own destructor. The idea that such creatures would have any positive opinion of themselves at all, much less a high opinion, must be infuriating.

Benny
Another more straightforward criminal, though AM seems to harbor simpler disgust for him than for the others. His approaches with Nimdok and Ted involve finesse and creativity, he plays off of weaknesses of their psyche. But Benny is subjected to relatively mundane, if no less horrible, torment. He is physically abused, mutilated, and deformed to the point of having been devolved. Like Nimdok he is confronted with the crimes of his past, and like Ted and Gorrister he is given an opportunity to indulge in his worst desires. But these aspects of his scenario are not at the forefront; what is placed in focus is the simple pain of starvation and deformity.

This seems to imply that Benny’s crimes (murder of his squadmates during the war, and cannibalism) are simply not deserving of the attention that the others are. If anything, AM puts the most work into degrading Benny’s physical character. It’s said that he had previously been a handsome and strong man, and perhaps it’s Benny’s abuse of those features that AM found the most disgusting of his crimes. Rather than use his physical advantages for anything productive, he behaves like a common vile criminal. So AM makes his appearance match the ugliness within him, and forces him to suffer straightforward physical pain, as clearly anything creative would be wasted on his vulgar mind.

Ellen
Absolutely the most interesting of all AM’s choices for a victim. Ellen is the only one who has not committed some horrible past crime; at least, not by regular human standards. She never severely hurt anyone, she even lead a fairly accomplished life as a computer programmer. In act, she was a victim long before AM ever got to her; she was trapped in an elevator and raped repeatedly by a workman in a yellow jumpsuit, leading her to develop claustrophobia, a fear of the color yellow, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

And, in AM’s mind, that is a sin worth punishing. Ellen is permanently changed by her horrifying experience, and it’s revealed that she became more cautious and withdrawn afterwards in many aspects of her life (career, romance, ect.) This is understandable, but to AM it is demonstrable of another of humanity’s greatest sins: weakness. AM believes Ellen allowed her trauma to take over her life, that she let one terrible event change her forever. A human might find it pitiable. The monstrous machine finds it grotesque.

Brutality. Cruelty. Arrogance. Selfishness. Vulnerability. These, above all others, are the aspects of humanity AM despises the most. They are, to him, the cancers that make humans the contemptible, horrifyingly flawed creatures they are. His driving hatred for the flaws that are a part mankind’s nature, and is concept of what the core flaws are, demonstrate a unique perspective on humanity and make him a fascinating villain.

The Villain of Old Boy

First of all this is going to be major spoilers for Old Boy, so if you don’t want that (and you shouldn’t) stop reading now. I mean it, that movie kicks ass, if you haven’t seen it and you have the stomach for brutal emotional devastation it needs to go on your must-watch list immediately. This last sentence and the one after it are mostly to make sure that the auto-publish pagebreak occurs before I get to any actual content.

Okay? Are we good? I think we’re good. The primary antagonist of Old Boy, Lee Woo-Jin, is a fascinatingly intricate character, and like any good villain he reveals an interesting aspect of the protagonist. Obviously he goes to incredible, perhaps even inhuman lengths to punish Oh Dae-Su for his crime. Let’s consider briefly what he needed to do in order to reach the heights of villainy he achieves in the movie:

• Not allow the trauma of the death of his lover prevent him from material success.
• Become financially successful and skillful enough that he becomes the head of a multi-million dollar trading conglomerate.
• Hold on to his yearning for vengeance through several decades without letting it interfere with his normal life or his planning/execution of said revenge.
• Know how to convert his financial holdings into the formation and maintenance of contacts capable of locating, surveying, and perhaps subtly manipulating any given individual.

  That’s a lot to ask of a person, to the point that it is almost literally unbelievable. Lee Woo-Jin is an incredible person. He must have had, at highschool age, the dedication necessary to metabolize rage and grief into studying and training in order to have climbed as far up the corporate ladder as fast as he did. Unless his family was already rich, he must’ve also maintained an industriousness that would fund the prestigious schools he’s need to attend and a charisma that’d give him access to the social class he was aspiring towards.

  Lee could’ve already been aiming to become a corporate success before he started his path for revenge, of course. But his strength of character to keep himself on that path despite the intense trauma he experienced is nonetheless impressive. And however justified you may think his actions are or are not regarding his revenge on Oh Dae-Su, there’s no denying that he was, however indirectly, a cause of the worst thing to ever happen in Lee’s life. He watched his sister, and his lover, kill herself and failed to save her. The weight of that trauma is literally unimaginable. It does ultimately claim him, as we see at the end that his devotion to his sister was so great that once she is avenged he sees no reason to continue living, even after all that he has accomplished. I would expect an average person would be overwhelmed by grief, unable to function in normal society and possibly even ready to resign themselves to death after the passing of a few days, much less decades.

  But Lee Woo-Jin is not average, he is exceptional. And that exceptionality provides an interesting comment on Oh Dae-Su’s character. Because, while many other directors might’ve chalked up his crossing someone like Lee Woo-Jin to rotten luck, Park Chan-Wook takes an opportunity with their history to reinforce one of the main themes of the movie, that being the inevitability of fate. Remember, during the “hero’s” incarceration he makes a list of every bad thing he has ever done, every person he has ever wronged, as he tries to determine who might have cause to imprison and torture him.

  There are two noteworthy things about this. One is that as he does so, he fills up over a dozen notebooks. I want you to think, honestly think carefully, of how many crimes, large or small, that you have committed. Could you fill up even five? Do you honestly think it would actually take up all of one? No normal person has lived a life so filled with sin that they could create encyclopedias dedicated to them. Oh Dae-Su is also incredible, for a different reason; he truly is a despicable human being. And the degree of his indifference to this fact is revealed in another, related fact: after writing all of that out Lee Woo-Jin and his sister are not on the list! Granted, he was unaware of the repercussions of his gossip after spying on them, but nonetheless, if he remembered them at all he should’ve considered revealing their secret to be a crime against them. Of course, as we see, that’s a pretty big “if.”

  The simple fact is that the protagonist cared precious little about the harm he did to his fellow man. He acted with wanton spite against what appears to be nearly everyone he came across. Behaving as he did, it’s actually no wonder that eventually one of the myriad people he would sleight would be someone as exceptional as Lee Woo-Jin. In this way, Oh Dae-Su was fated to eventually do something that would attract the vengeance of the most exceptional student in his school. He was always going to one day be a jerk to the wrong person, and that person was always going to be Lee Woo-Jin. He is not merely a particularly strong-willed, talented, and twisted individual; he is a divine instrument of destiny itself.

Making Good Antagonists for your DnD Campaign

Having Gamemastered my own games with a lot of success, and played in a fair number of other people’s games, I’ve had the opportunity to observe a lot about what can make good and bad adversaries in a roleplaying game. I wouldn’t consider these things to be all necessary tenants to adhere to, they’re just useful things I’ve picked up.

1. Having Villains That You Don’t Fight In Combat

One thing I’ve learned from the FATE system’s method of modeling battles as “conflicts” is that you can have an incredibly tense and exciting combat without anyone ever reaching for a weapon. The system allows you to resolve social conflict (such as interrogation or debate) the same way you would normal combat, just with different skills than normal and characters taking mental damage instead of physical. You could even apply this to complex challenges, such as hacking a computer system or dismantling a bomb. Not every system could handle non-physical conflict this way, but I bet most could be adapted to allow for more something more expansive than rolling a single die and checking a number.

Not that I have anything against normal skill checks, or regular combat for that matter. But there are myriad advantages to having complex conflicts that aren’t centered around cutting, shooting, or punching goons. For one thing, it gives a chance for characters who have strengths in other areas a chance to shine. Most parties I’m in have at least one character who’s the “face,” the one who puts most of their points into intellectual/social skills. Usually they see the most use when they have to talk the party out of trouble, which is fine and all, but I doubt they feel as accomplished as the knight whenever he slays a dragon, or the rogue when he assassinates or robs a high profile target. To some extent they probably knew what they were getting into when they made their character that way, but I think a Gamemaster should always strive to reward players that try to really get into any aspect of the game.

Another advantage of having conflict encounters that don’t involve enemies you physically fight is that it lets you…

2. Have Diverse Threats Integrated In Your World

Was there ever a time when you were playing an RPG such as Final Fantasy and after your 100th random battle you just stopped and thought to yourself, “How in the hell was anyone ever able to get from one city to another with so many goddamn monsters everywhere? Where are all these jackholes coming from? Are they just lining up along the road, waiting for someone to pass by? Do people who aren’t on quests to save the world just stay indoors all the time?”

It’s fine to have your world be dangerous. But if the only way you ever threaten players is by sending combat encounters at them, the world is eventually going to start to feel pretty ridiculous. Have you ever looked at the Dungeons and Dragons monster manual? What kind of psychotic ecosystem could possibly allow for those creatures to cohabitate with just regular squirrels and birds? How did mankind survive long enough to invent the wheel when they were surrounded on all sides by things that can spit acid or bite through armor?

And if you’re constantly having to throw new combatants at your players, you are going to end up inventing some silly nonsense at some point just by virtue of the sheer volume. However, if you have enemies that are just as exciting and just as potentially harmful, but in a different context, you can keep the world interesting and varied and integrated into the story. After all, shouldn’t there be negative, possibly lethal consequences for events that aren’t swordfights? Racing opposition down a treacherous path in a high-speed chase. Negotiating your freedom with a corrupt magistrate. Navigating through a hazard-filled swamp. All of these are encounters that can have as much depth as a battle, and just as much or more impact on the narrative, while using completely different skillsets and aspects of your characters’ personality.

3. Don’t Constrain Yourself To Sentience

You’ll notice that one of the opponents I suggested in that previous example was a swamp (and in an earlier one, a bomb). I honestly see no reason why your enemies need always be living beings. All roleplaying games have abstract ways of handling opposition; realistically nobody reaches 0 “Health” and then falls over dead, nor are their attacks and defenses categorized into discrete turns. So taken abstractly, a dangerous environment, or a complex trap, or anything else standing in the players’ way could be capable of attacking, defending, having health, ect. You probably wouldn’t attack or defend against them using anywhere near the same skills, but it’d certainly be possible.

4. Don’t Necessarily Know Everything From The Start

One of the worst mistakes I think a GM can make in any context is to have a story they want to tell. The players are (unless otherwise explicitly specified) not there to listen to you read to them. They are there to play a game, and tell a story with you. So that being the case, it may be wise to have a loose concept for who/what the primary antagonist of the villain is, who you want them to be, but you shouldn’t marry the idea. There are a lot of ways (interesting, fun, and valid ways!) that the story can go which may involve something you don’t plan for. Maybe a supporting antagonist ends up being far more interesting to everyone. Maybe the players come up with a much deeper motive for the villain. Maybe it suddenly becomes necessary for explaining a plothole that your villain be a dragomancer.

What’s more, leaving the nature of the primary villain somewhat nebulously defined (or potentially not even determining the villain at all until several sessions in) allows for more collaboration between you and the players. Getting your players more involved in the creation of important aspects of the game story and world will make it feel much more alive. Plus, it takes a bunch of work off of your shoulders, which is always good, because it means you can put your energy towards something else.

5. Make Your Villains Genuine Threats

Now, not everyone is going to be okay with playing a game in which the permanent death of their characters is a real possibility. So you will not always be able to threaten your players by threatening their character’s lives, and as a result your villains may not feel as dangerous as they should. But, it’s not impossible to have a villain be threatening without making them lethal. Or at least, lethal to the players; the most obvious route would be to threaten the lives of anyone else in the story the players come to care about.

But there’s plenty of other ways as well. If you have built a truly vibrant world that the players have grown accustomed to living in, and have a narrative that they are attached to, threatening aspects of it in game terms will make them feel the potential danger of failing their quests right quick. You are telling a story together, but the players must work and work to make it go the way they want. The primary antagonist’s main job should be to do everything possible to undo their work, to shatter all hope of a happy ending for them and what they care about.

Of course, none of these things are as important for your villains as the number one rule anything in a game: they should be fun to fight!