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I love designing little NPCs for players to interact with and as much as I love a colorful storekeep, I really love a fun little villain. Today I’m gonna walk through how I built an upcoming villain for my Vaults of Vaarn campaign.
My Vaarn campaign is rooted in my love and close relationship with the American southwest. With the history of the southwest it was inevitable that I wanted to make some sort of science-fantasy cowboy sort of character. I started with the loose idea of the “man in black” archetype from western films and sat with it for a bit, and then realized, there’s some real cool options for inspiration.
Night of the Hunter is an incredible film, the only one by director Charles Laughton and it is a HEATER. The main antagonist is a serial killer, played by Robert Mitchum, masqurading as a preacher who is dead set on murdering a family for the prospect of $10,000. He’s a great blend of cheery and pants-browning levels of scary. We’ll borrow this strangely cheery demeanour as a way to set up this character, as well as the religious aspect to him.
I’m a mid-30s dude living in America trying to add a villian that fits into a Desert setting, you could have figured this out. Anton Chigurh feels like the logical extension of Mitchum’s performance in Night of the Hunter, oddly charming but also incredibly scary the moment you spend some time thinking about it. I did toy with the idea of using his godawful bowl cut thing he has going on here, but I think I’ll stick to some of his mannerisms, particularly the part where he feels like a force of nature more than a man, he just exists to achieve a goal, not to linger on it and consider things too much.
When prepping RPG content I need some sort of music to keep the brain juices flowing. For this sort of character, there was only one real option on the table: dark and menacing country and folk music. This has actually been a cornerstone for this campaign and probably incepted the idea in my head to begin with. Some highlights were as follows:
These are all cool artists who if you haven’t checked out, you should! I’m a huge fan of using these Southern Gothic style artists as an influence on any setting that needs that certain desert twang to it.
Ok, we’ve got some starting points, how do we pull it all togehther, and how does this character fit into the world? Villains/antagonists come in a lot of roles, and the role that I want to use for Morrow is that of a bloodhound style villain who follows the players around, but is willing to retreat for tactical reasons. The game makes reference to bounty hunters, so that feels like it fits. At this point I’ve got an idea of him in the big dark duster, very austentatious and ridiculous, but also expensive, he’s good at his job and has seen success. That sort of success points to Vaarn’s Hegemony, a nebulous implied fascist regime far away from the deserts of the interior but still exerting influence.
Ok, so we’ve got an idea of what he does, who he works for, a bit of a personality to him, why does he do this, what motivates him? Well here’s where I’m tossing in some odd stuff. In my game, the PCs bought some synth dogs (read: robot puppies), one of which has the very normal serial number of T1N-D4L05. For those unfamiliar with the wider Cthulhu mythos, there’s a type of monster in that setting called the Hounds of Tindalos. As this campaign has grown I’ve been slowly but surely seeding strands of cosmic horror into the setting, and here we find the motivation that I’ve settled on.
One of the key inspirations here being a faux-preacher was by no means a mistake and is going to play into the core drive of this character. I’ve chosen to make his skin a brilliant Jade hue, and while not revealing the reason to players, this is part of a bargain struck with some old thing out in the wasteland of the interior, some outer deity reaching out and offering a deal to keep him alive in exchange for his service. While we see blue skin, various human animal hybrids, even rock people, this green skin should stand out as an oddity, hopefully sparking interest in my players. This motivation of a supernatural extra-dimensional pact is more pressing than any sort of bills to pay or some days even food to eat. This debt shouldn’t be worn on his sleeve, but being a man of faith certainly should be. This is also the root for his last name, the first was just rolled on the big ol’ table of Vaarnish names.
So to recap, he’s after these Synth dogs, on a job from some high ranking hegemony official, driven because whatever old thing speaks to him in his dreams told him one of these dogs is very important. He does not hate nor particularly want to harm the PCs, he simply wants to follow through on a job, but will get violent if need be. The ominous man of the cloth portion is still present but devoted to strange unknowable entities out in the desert.
I recently got back into drawing because I scored a cheap wacom drawing tablet, so We get to actually see an idea of what this character looked like in my mind.
| Morrow Fidelus | |
| Level: 8 | Armour: 15 |
| Morale: 10 | Appearing: 1 (Unique) |
| Attacks: Heavy Revolver (1d10), Heavy Revolver (1d10) / Knife (1d8) | |
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Dedicated Tracker: Attempts to escape from Morrow following after a player are made at disadvantage Talented Escape artist: As much as he is a talented tracker and hunter, Morrow’s combination of skills and unearthly connections allow him to seemingly vanish. If he is is not engaged in melee combat, if he attempts to flee, it automatically succeeds, vanishing in a burst of dust. |
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| Character Notes: Smooth talker, slower paced southern drawl, has a level of menace to conversation and speaks using a variety of antiquated and technical words. Personality like a finely inlaid and etched firearm, beautiful and classy, but very much so with an implied danger to it. Has a strong internal code of ethics, filtered through his own justifications and rationalizing. Tall and broad-shouldered, skin has a slight translucency like fine jade. | |
As you can see, Vaarn’s stats for Foes are kept pretty light. I’ve added in something to reflect his ties to the supernatural, while still feeling like the type of ability that would be useful for someone in his line of work. I’ve included some general notes on how I invision his character both physically and in terms of mannerisms. He’s a very heavy hitting NPC for a loosely human threat, but unlike other big bruisers, he can be reasoned with, if he wasn’t sent to kill someone, he’s not going to create excess mess if he doesn’t have to.
