RPG a Day #16 Villain

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

RPG a Day finally beat me. I just could not come up with a way to talk about move. I’ve seen some interesting answers to the prompt floating around, but nothing jumped out as a way for me to cover it. Thus, I’m going with one of the other prompts; villain.

I thought about talking about some of my favorite villains that my players have dealt with over the years. There are quite a few that really stand out for me here. I even considered covering some of the ones I’ve encountered as a player. Harlequin from Shadowrun was a nice contender here. In the end, I decided to go with a non-typical villain.

One of my favorite games is X Crawl. The game is set in a modern world where magic exists and dungeon crawling is an extreme sport televised for the masses. Every dungeon is designed and run by a Dungeon Judge. Their job is to challenge the crawlers with physical and mental obstacles while putting on a ratings grabbing piece of entertainment. It would be easy to call every DJ the players have run against a villain but I don’t think it really applies here. You see, most of DJ’s are just people who do this for a living. DJ Cudgel Up sets her crawls to highlight the athletes and make them the starts. Sure, she’ll kill some of them but that doesn’t make them villains any more than the doctor who administers the lethal injection is one.

However, there are a couple of DJ’s that are absolutely villains. Some of them are from published crawls and I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll use one of my own. DJ Vine Child was the head of Napa Valley Crawl. She hosted her event as part of a large wine celebration in honor of Bacchus, god of wine and celebration. She was pleasant, funny, and to all appearances ran an extremely fair crawl.

Except she didn’t. She was an emotionless killing machine. How she hid this was to choose a type of person and target them on each team. Maybe she went after elves, healers, tanks, or blondes. Whatever it was she picked a type every year and set out to absolutely kill every one of them. She curated her teams so there would be exactly one of her target on each team. It didn’t matter to her if the rest of the team lived or died as long as she killed that one target.

The time I ran her, I randomly rolled a party member and made them her target. That year she was going after the teams healers. To do this she had to set it up in a way to escape suspicion. Sure the DJ can kill tons of Crawlers and no one would care. But those deaths had to be random; they had to be the will of the Fates. To specifically target someone was crossing a line.

This meant that she couldn’t order the intelligent monsters to focus her target she had to be creative. I did this by setting up some out of crawl events as part of the experience. First, she held a huge festival the night before opening of the crawl. The festival was filled with music, lots of drinking, and ran well into the night. She would then schedule one of the teams very early the next morning ensuring that at least one team would have a bit of a problem focusing.

Before the second level she set up a charity bachelor/bachelorette auction. She seeded the crowd with people who were specifically there to win the company of her targets. As part of the date each target was given a gift of cologne or perfume that was mixed with a specific scent that she dosed the food of her more vicious monsters. This made sure the creatures would focus her target.

For the final level she could put an emphasis on her one target since only one team went through the final level. If she’s only focusing one target its strategy not part of some nefarious plan. She also worked to alter their lives outside the crawl. She’d try and sneak a subsonic noise generator into their hotel room the night before the final level to mess with their sleep. If they were allergic to something she’d try and get it hidden amongst the refreshments offered in the green room.

And if any of them survived the crawl she’d congratulate the team and be outwardly happy for the crawlers. However, a few months later during the off season, accidents started happening. Maybe someone was caught in a hit and run, there might be a mugging, or possibly someone fell victim to an obsessed fan given just the right push.

Her goal was to murder that one person on each team. If she did it during the crawl it was her best victory. If not, she’d still find a way to secure her quarry. This to me as villain in X Crawl.

What are some out of the box villains that you’ve seen over the years?

Anyway, I’ll see you all tomorrow when I talk about Trap.

Until then, stay safe and be well.