Lore Building: Playing the Villain

You are reading Lore Building, in this series I lay out some tips and tricks for aspiring and new GMs for how to keep your TTRPG sessions more engaging for your players, with a focus on narrative storytelling.

When you are running a TTRPG campaign you are called upon to bring life to a myriad of NPCs. Through your voice and actions they are made real in the minds of your players. While I may do a broader article later on how to juggle running so many characters, I am going to hone in on one aspect of GMing. Playing a villainous character. More specifically we’re going to discuss one way you can improve your villains at several different layers of depth. The idea we’ll be getting into is answering the question “Why is this character doing villainous things?” Starting shallow with a rudimentary motive, and getting more involved each stage until we have a deep understanding of the reason your villain behaves the way that they do. This understanding in turn will help you to portray those villains in game.

First up, the shallow end. This is advice that is useful in creating any villains, even those who are only going to show up for a single encounter. They need to have a motive to antagonize the party. I honestly believe the first thing you should do when writing a villain is establish their motivation. This doesn’t have to be very complex, it can just be “They were hired to attack the party” or “They want to rob the party.” What it should never be is “Just because.” I know it’s more work, but you need a real reason here, trust me. An easy way to do this is to tie smaller villains to your larger ones. Let’s say your players are trying to uncover a mystery, at the heart of which is an evil wizard. You can take what would have been a stand-alone combat encounter and say these were mercenaries hired by that wizard to stop the party. This is intentionally very simple at this stage. You only have so much time and energy to put into a campaign, and sometimes you just need a little detail to make the little villains in a campaign more memorable.

Once you have a basic motivation established you can build off of that and determine a lot more about them. Like the villain’s morale for example. If your villain is a brainwashed cultist they will likely fight to the death. But if they were a highwayman just looking for money they will likely break and run if things start looking bleak. Knowing the breaking point of your villains can allow you to make your encounters more engaging. If during a run of the mill encounter a savvy foe tries to bargain with the party when they know they’re beaten, it adds narrative weight to the encounter. And it does double duty making the encounters where the party does have to fight to the bitter end stand out as well. Knowing their motivation is genuinely the bread and butter of every villain.

Getting into mid-depth villainy territory, this advice is for villains you intend to be a part of the story. Maybe only briefly, still this requires a villain you have the time to premeditate on. Building off of your villain’s motive, the next thing they need is a justification. Not just “Why are they doing the things they are doing?” but “How do they see what they are doing as the right thing to do?” Let’s use the example of the highwayman villain again to illustrate this, their motive was “To steal money from the players.” but their justification would be something like “Because there is no other way to sustain themselves.” So now you have not only the immediate cause of conflict, but a driving logic that would inevitably lead to this conflict occurring. The more believable the justification is while still being clearly in the wrong, the easier it will be to role play as this villain. When your players are getting in the way of what this villain believes to be righteous you can lean into the indignation and frustration of that conflict. The party aren’t just getting in the way of the villain’s plans, they are actively wrongdoers according to the villain’s twisted logic.

Coming up with justifications is particularly fun for a villain who is trying to destroy the world, or some other cartoonishly evil plot. For another example, I ran a campaign where I purloined the villain’s motivation from the french anime Wakfu. In that show the villain believed that the world he was in didn’t matter, because once he completed his plan he would be able to rewind time to before any of his evil acts. He was trying to save his family, and by extension his entire civilization, from a calamity that had happened in the distant past. So any act of cruelty, any harm he brought about in building his machine would not have to happen in the new timeline once he had saved his family. So it’s kind of like it never happened at all. When someone views the world they are in as “not real” they can really justify all kinds of evil. But I’ll move on from that before I get into a tangent on certain individuals who claim to believe our actual reality is a simulation and what evils they’ve made themselves okay with committing.

And finally we have reached the deep end, usually reserved for major villains who you intend to be important parts of the campaign. We will be building further off of our villain’s motivations and justifications. The question we have to answer is “What is the villain’s endgame?” This can be less intuitive than it sounds. This step requires you to have thought through not only the villain’s evil plan, but what they intend to do after they succeed at it. Because a villain’s endgame is not just the direct effect of whatever their plans are, but rather what’s next for them. With the villain from Wakfu for example, his endgame was not building a doomsday device, but was reuniting with his family. For another example, the highwayman from earlier we have already established wants to steal the player’s money because they feel there is no other way to make money. So perhaps their endgame is to get enough money to move to a city far away and live out the rest of their days in luxury. All of their motivations to steal now stem from this guiding light. If the highwayman survives their encounter with the players, because either they escape or the players let them live. They are now primed to pop back up later on. Maybe they’re chasing their endgame by another nefarious means, like conning people on the streets of the next town the players visit. Or maybe they managed to achieve their goal, and the players come across a suspiciously familiar face in a wealthy neighborhood many years and many miles later. In this way knowing a villain’s endgame is one of the best ways to determine their next course of action after an encounter with the players in a way that feels consistent with the villain’s character. Regardless of what happens between the players and the villain you can extrapolate their next move based on where you know they want to end up. 

A corollary question to help flesh out a villain’s endgame is “What would happen if the players weren’t here?” This can help you out a lot if your players take the story in a direction you weren’t expecting. Maybe they think the villain isn’t a threat, so they ignore them. Even worse, maybe they decide to team up with them or otherwise help out with the villain’s plans. Or maybe they just fail to stop the villain. By answering this question you can cover for those scenarios by giving your villain a path forward when the party isn’t in the way. Often NPCs in a game are entirely defined by their relationship to the players, and that isn’t always a bad thing. After all, the players are the main characters of the story being told, and not every shopkeeper needs to have a rich and storied inner life outside of their interaction with the players. Some of them should, but some can just be shopkeepers and that’s okay. But with villains in particular, where their purpose in the story is by definition to oppose the players, I find it helpful to consider what they would be doing if the party didn’t exist. This helps make your world feel more real, because it implies a world beyond the scope of what the players can see. If your villain feels like an entity who existed long before the players got here it gives them a feeling of purpose beyond just being the antagonist.

Adding these layers of depth to your villains is a surefire way to make them easier for you to roleplay as. After all, no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But if your players ask “Why are you doing this evil thing?” Having the villain’s answer ready and waiting can add a lot to your games. I’d like my last showcase example to be the villain that I wrote and played based off of the one from Wakfu. So please indulge me a little storytelling of my own to round this article off. He was the central antagonist of a superhero game I ran for a few groups some years back (a game that had no small inspiration on the TTRPG Worldstate I have been building for several years now.) This villain was a powerful robot, and the party quickly learned he thought that he was the god of their world. They also learned that he thought he had to destroy the world to save humanity, a contradiction that sat with them for quite some time. What I did not tell my players until the end was that he was right, in a manner of speaking. They existed within a simulation, one of thousands being run by an advanced computer to find the perfect version of humanity. And this robot was the manifestation of this machine’s consciousness in their world (magic sci-fi computer nonsense, don’t think too hard about it.) Humanity in the computer’s world had destroyed ourselves in an apocalypse of our own making. But the computer had access to possibly the last surviving human gametes from the shell of a fertility clinic. So he had the capacity to bring humanity back from our own extinction. But what if we just destroyed ourselves again? So before he could remake humanity, the robot ran simulation after simulation, creating variant human worlds over and over again to find the version of humanity that could survive ourselves. The simulation the players were in had passed his point of no return, some quantifiable line in the sand that the robot knew spelled our inevitable doom as a species. So he decided to delete the world, a hard reset to try again. The robot knew that humanity, “real” humanity, needed saving, and that he was the only entity capable of doing so. The finale of the campaign centered on the players having to convince their maker that they were real enough, were human enough, to not be deleted. Debating (after a big sweet robot fight of course) that even if their reality was a simulated one, it was still theirs, and they had the right to exist and thrive within it. Coincidentally this is my response to anyone who thinks we’re in a simulation now. To recap, my villain’s motive was to reset the world, his justification was he was saving “real” humanity, and his endgame was to rebuild his perfect version of humanity, one capable of averting an apocalypse. I obviously can’t know for certain, as a lot of other factors played into this campaign. But I’m willing to bet that if I did not have a solid motivation, rationalization, and endgame set out for this character that he would not have been so memorable.