House of Cards GM Log

IMC: Villains

posted by Ginger at 10:04 PM, July 24, 2003 | Filed under : IMC | Comments and Followups

Arref provides us with a handy-dandy and very useful list of ways to define villainous opposition and uses it to break down the villains of his Eternal City campaign. This is a valuable thing to do, and while I could easily do it for the long list of problems and “villains” the PCs are facing in House of Cards, I’d rather talk about another aspect of our villains: motivation.

One of the things that we decided in building the overarching plot of House of Cards is that while not all villainous people are sympathetic, they should all have motivations with internal logic of some sort. So, for instance, Dara is clearly an unsympathetic figure, but her motives are understandable: Corwin killed her father and stole her son. Who wouldn’t want the return of her child?

We have some opposition forces in House of Cards, particularly Chaosians, that may not meet this criterion, but our Chaos is not second-series friendly. Our Chaos is unhuman; the fact that it operates by incomprehensible rules (as opposed to, say, Dara, who looks downright human by comparison) is a feature rather than a bug. Human-scale villains like Dara are a deliberate contrast.

2 Comments

Arref
Jul 24, 2003 10:42 PM

Scale.

This is the thing it took me a while to really perfect in Amber's genre. Villainy and that logic are all about motivations and scale. A mother can destroy something valuable to get back a child or do vengeance and not realize how much evil they are adding to the mix.

The big villains aren't always the ones that really grab you.

I think you are doing a great job with Dara.

Novak
Jul 26, 2003 1:34 AM

Most human-scale moms don't want to eat their children's brains, mind you....

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