Monsters and big villains don’t interact like normal PCs.
With a normal PC, interacting is often as simple as just walking up to the fire. But walking up to the fire with a monster will probably just diminish the monster. Imagine how much less scary a horror movie monster becomes when you see them in normal lighting and a clear view.
A good way to think of your interactions with an antagonist is to imagine that you’re the director of a horror movie. In a horror movie, the director hides the monster deliberately. He uses lighting or clever camera work to make sure you never see more than a glimpse, because the things your imagination substitutes will be scarier.
Meanwhile, in more action-oriented movies, direct confrontations between the hero and the villain tend to come up with an enormous amount of buildup. Consider this tense interaction in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight:
This encounter occurs midway through the movie. But almost the entire movie prior to this is spent building up towards this one scene. Before Batman ever meets the Joker, he learns about him in all kinds of different ways – by seeing the people he’s killed, by sneaking into his hideouts, by hearing about him from others.
This is how you want your villain to feel. Instead of just approaching people, think about how you could set up a scene where others get a chance to learn about you. What kind of aftermath does your villain leave behind? What problems do they create that a good player could solve? How might they menace someone beyond just facing that person directly?
Scene-Setting
If your villain is an evil scientist, do they create strange experiments that others could find? What if one of those experiments got loose? Could you set up a scene with the player tools where someone discovers one, half-finished and seeking death? Could you set up a scene where players stumble across your character’s own lab?
If your villain is a blight-walker, do they lure people into ruined or blighted areas of the woods? Do strange fey beauties approach them promising gifts, only to turn out to be horrible creatures?
Whatever your villain is, you want to think about and imagine what their impacts might be. What they’d want from the players and the world, and how they might try to get it. These impacts are the basis of your first scenes, a good way to set up your interactions with others.
You can even go further than this, and set up NPCs with the player tools that the good guys get to know, connected to your villain. Maybe the knight who approached Roland earlier finds him again to ask for Roland’s help investigating a strange disturbance. Along the way you develop the knight’s character more, let him and Roland become friends. Then if your antagonist harms the knight after a few scenes, you’ll have this established emotional connection between the knight and Roland to play off of. Roland will feel your character’s impact that much more.
Aesthetics
When figuring out how to set a scene around your character, it’s important to think about their aesthetic.
When I was building the moonlit circus, the Grauer Witch was always accompanied by these specific cat-like creatures with a rare model. And while these cats didn’t turn out to be that important to her story in the final draft, just building a strong aesthetic association between the Grauer witch and the cats gave players something to talk about and a mystery to solve. Giving your villain a few memorable aesthetics can really help you in setting up scenes where people learn about them.
This is one place that it helps to be very specific about what your villain is and what they aren’t. It’s easy with any kind of character to just give them every power at once, or to not be very careful how you present their aesthetics and abilities. This is where knowing your own character and their limitations becomes really important – these aesthetic scenes are all about presenting information, so it’s very important that the information you present is consistent and correct. You don’t want to show your villain doing things they aren’t actually capable of, or muddy your aesthetics by letting them use powers they shouldn’t have.
In fact, with most villains (and most heroes) it’s beneficial to focus on just a few very specific ideas. D&D characters are sometimes presented as these swiss-army knives with a solution to every problem in their bags. But the more specific you are in presenting your villain, the more the players you’re conflicting with will be able to understand it and respond with pitches of their own.
Taking Hits
In conflict scenes, it’s also important to sometimes show your villain taking a hit. Don’t be afraid to have them take losses at times, or suffer when the player strikes them in a /duel. This doesn’t diminish them in the eyes of players. Instead, showing that your villain can be vulnerable will be seen as a signal that you’re willing to work with others and respect their roleplay.
More than with a typical character, you really want to think carefully about how and when people will encounter your villain directly. It’s easy to overexpose your villain, or put them in a situation where the good guys have little choice but to simply try to fight and kill them.
If you carefully plan which moments people encounter your villain, you can avoid these awkward situations where someone just tries to murder you. Because you’re in control of when and how your villain appears, you can create reasons for real conversations and interactions to occur.
Maybe by the time the meeting occurs, you’ve established that your villain has something the good guys want. Maybe your villain isolates people away from one another so it’s hard for them to simply start a fight, or she only appears when she has overwhelming force on her side.
Or, as when Hans Gruber meets John McClane in Die Hard, maybe they don’t even know who they’re talking to:
That’s all for this installment! In the future, I’ll be posting the following sections, with a link here to each of them.
Part 2: Interacting with Others
Part 3: Relationship-Building
Part 4: Creating an Arc
