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Author Topic: Create a Hero and Villain duo  (Read 3385 times)

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Offline legomaestro

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Create a Hero and Villain duo
« on: February 26, 2021, 05:57:55 AM »
Keep it simple, or is it not as simple as you'd think? Create a hero for any narrative, whether fantasy, drama or sci-fi and their complementary villain.

Does every Superman have an overpowered enemy as a villain, or does your every-day high-school kid have a bully? What if the villain is simply someone with a drastically different way of seeing the world than the hero? Indeed, what if the hero is bad themselves hehe.

Go wild or go simple. But they have to at the very least play off eachother in some way or form.

Already created characters are welcome so feel free to simply discuss the heroes and villains of stories you're already writing.

Offline NO1SY

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Re: Create a Hero and Villain duo
« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2021, 11:36:57 AM »
So I've been reading the "Red Queen's War" Trilogy by Mark Lawrence, whereby a supposed "Daughter of Loki" resides within the protagonist and talks to him at night. Alongside an Archfiend Patron I was running for one of my Warlock players in D&D, I've kinda been on a villain within/behind the scenes type bend recently. I say it's recent but really that was a huge reason for my infatuation with the story of The World Ends With You actually... So everyone look forward to that when the anime drops I guess! So here is what I've come up with based on my experience running the Patron-Warlock relationship in that concluded campaign:

The protagonist is a young person of short stature and good-heart. They belong to a small family of simple means, alchemists by trade, trying to stay afloat within a large city of guilds and artisans. Still they are always content and optimistic, driven to goodness through the family bond. Their elder sibling however, heir to the family business, is ambitious and seeks to create the ultimate alchemical elixir. Having found an ancient text of questionable repute that speaks of a Pit of Flames that burns with pleasure and purification enough to heal wounds and sustain life, the sibling set about experimenting with rituals and magics to attempt to bottle some of this miraculous fire. However, the Pit of Flames is in fact the volcanic centre of one of the layers of Hell; a place of pain and punishment as much as pleasure and purification, and only able to sustain and benefit the most powerful of fiends and devils. The rituals tore open a rift to this place, inside which resided a monstrous Pit Fiend, returned to the pit to heal from a mortal wound and in the process of metamorphosing into something greater. The Fiend threatens to bathe the house in hellfire, seeing as the sibling sought the fire in the first place, but the protagonist steps in and strikes a bargain with the Fiend, offering their servitude in exchange for no harm coming to their family and home. This is an attractive proposition for a Fiend, seeing as their status within the Hells is one that is won by strength of arms, and they must build an army from damned souls. The Fiend is unable to leave the Pit of Flames so having a proxy within the overworld will give them the hands required to corrupt and build whilst still recovering. The protagonist and the Pit Fiend form a pact, bestowing some of the proto-Archfiend's magic upon the person - a volatile magic of fire - and maintaining a sliver of the open rift in the mind of them too to provide a window for the Fiend to peer through. When the Fiend speaks through the window its voice is a rumble laced with wicked amusement, backed by a choir of spitting lava and crackling flame.

The protagonist, afraid of the wild and vengeful nature of the magic within them, leaves home to protect their family and does their best to act in accordance with their truly good nature - helping those in need and just generally being friendly. The Fiend, however, seeks to corrupt the protagonist, as well as lead to the corruption of others, e.g.: Resorting to minor acts of arson by flaring the magic within the protagonist to incriminate them and force them into conflict with other good people; or pretending to have insights into the motives of others, causing arguments and obfuscating the truth of matters; or reducing the protagonist's access to magic at critical moments, forcing them to make further promises in order to survive. On top of this, where cults to the Pit Fiend do exist, the protagonist is expected to stand aside and allow bloody rituals to be completed.

In one instance the protagonist came across a ritual where cultists and disguised lesser fiends in red robes were attempting to create a weapon befitting a general of an army of Hell. At the centre of the ritual, a captured paladin, surprisingly young, lay impaled by his own sword to a stone altar, still alive. Surrounding the altar, forming the points of a pentagram stood large metal cages filled with wailing devotees to the paladin's god. The ritual continues with chanting in an infernal tongue, and a red-robed figure lights a torch with a violent orange-red flame in the centre above the altar, ripping the paladin's soul from his body. They proceed to slowly walk out, in time to the chanting, to the first of the cages, and light a large brazier that stands behind the cage.The fire catches in the brazier, and a split second later the prisoners in the cage scream as they burst into a horrifying tangled conflagration that rises into a fiery orb above the spiked, black iron. The Red robed figure begins his slow, timed walk back to the centre, and passes the torch to another, who begins to turn towards the second cage. When the ritual completes, the soul-fueled fire will meet in the centre and bind the paladin's soul to the weapon where it will be tortured and corrupted whenever weilded. The instructions come through loud and clear in the back of the protagonist's mind, "Do not intervene". However, they have seen enough. In an act of direct defiance, they interrupt the ritual and free the prisoners. The incomplete ritual binds the soul to the weapon, but free of corruption - creating a weapon with the paladin's sentience. The Pit Fiend is enraged and punishes the protagonist but cannot sever the pact themselves.

Unknown to the protagonist is that a Fiend's True Name holds power over it. They know the fiend by the name it has provided but, should they discover its True Name, then they will control its power and be able to free themselves from the Pact.

So yeah, this was something really cool to play out in D&D and I think it's a quite cool story in itself :)
« Last Edit: March 01, 2021, 04:58:04 AM by NO1SY »

Offline legomaestro

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Re: Create a Hero and Villain duo
« Reply #2 on: February 28, 2021, 11:43:51 PM »
The Paladin situation and the calling of the true name speak to me a lot as interesting situations, and damn that's an awesome DnD campaign you had there. How long did it last in general? Gawd I want to get so much back in the scene.

(That being said, how goes the Bleach RP? Hehe. That looked swell.)

Cool one dude.




My Hero-Villain Duo is very two-facy and a sort of watered down version of another plot that I have on a backburner: Cassandra (Cassie) Wolf is a bookworm who has a compulsive disorder to flip coins every few hours. When it's heads she is a loveable bookworm who listens to classical music almost religiously, sometimes simultaneously composing her own music even as she devours a ridiculous amount of literature in record time. She's a bit of an air-head though in this state and easily distracted.

If the coin lands on tails she pulls up her hoody (and her hair bizarelly droops regardless) and she brings out her infamous 'Black n Red Books' She has a black notebook full of a precise psycological breakdown of anyone and everyones' weaknesses that comes to mind. She compulsively analyzes people and summarizes how and who they are to a scary amount of accuracy. Her red nootebook is where she actively lists any people she feels have wronged her or people she likes and acts upon plans to ruin their lives over time.

What is an interesting quirk in her earlier kindergarten days becomes quite an issue for Cassandra as she grows older and the extreme sides of both of her personalities cause more serious conflicts and problems.

An interersting solution to the problem is her parents keep her away from coins as much as possible, with her father even successfully programming a rigged coin-flipping app that gave Cassandra a blessed month of relative peace being the 'Heads Cassie'


Offline NO1SY

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Re: Create a Hero and Villain duo
« Reply #3 on: March 01, 2021, 05:09:15 AM »
Ah I see that you are also influenced by the villain within! I love how her parent's solution was to just keep her away from all coinage!

That D&D campaign lasted about 20 sessions over 2 years. It was slowed down by one of our players moving back to Geneva and two others finishing up med-school and starting odd hospital shifts, and in the end I decided to shut it down in favor of new campaigns with more focused groups. I was actually quite upset that I never got to see this character plot through to its completion, because I was very proud of the idea. I'm also very glad that my player chose the "good" route with the cultist ritual with the paladin, because I now think that the corrupted weapon I homebrewed for the "bad" path was super broken and imbalanced!

Bleach RP... yes... I was writing that wasn't I... been a bit side-tracked....

Offline Jackhammer

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Re: Create a Hero and Villain duo
« Reply #4 on: June 27, 2021, 04:05:54 PM »
I'm really bad a creating a single, overarching BBEG. I usually have several antagonists, who have a certain thing they wish to achieve and that isn't necessarily evil. It's just at odds with the protagonist(s).

As an example, an upcoming homebrew DND campaing, I have several antagonists.

The "main" antagonist is an ordinary, run of the mill thief. Nothing special about him. He is self centered a-hole, who decided to gain some fame by stealing a frozen heart of Auril (pendant of eternal ice shaped in the form of a heart with a sapphire embedded at the centre) from the High Priestess of Auril in Icewind Dale. Pendant itself isn't special, but the dude decided to play for the long game and managed to seduce and make the priestess fall in love with him, before he stole the pendant and as a last "FU" he wrote a letter, confessing everything.

This in turn causes the High Priestess to decide that she will hunt down and *insert graphical description of mutilation and torture applied to every inch of human male body here* the thief. This hunt pushes the northern barbarian tribes south, which pushes the goblin tribes south, that accidentally dig up some ancient ruins that unleashes a tide of strange constructs and undead, that cause the local fauna to flee south that causes Bryn Shander to be first assaulted by a stampede of wild animals, then goblins, then undead, then barbarians, then frost giants followed by Aurilian priestesses.

Why are the "heroes" there? They are a relative new yet established squad of mercenaries. They are hired by a man named John Goldman, a somewhat famous merchant, who has basically monopolized the trade of Skrimshaw out of Icewind Dale and he has heard at least two accounts random bunch of misfits saving the Dale: So, he decided to pray to his patron god Waukeen and hope a bunch of gul*cough*brave heroes would appear and solve the problem for him for an adequate reward. The skrimshaw trade has all but stopped due to the "minor disturbances" in Dale so Goldman has hired several troupes and expects good results soon.

At the end of the campaing, the players should be at a point that when/if they confront the thieve, they can basically slap him and he would die. End of story.
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Offline Crackhead Johny

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Re: Create a Hero and Villain duo
« Reply #5 on: June 30, 2021, 03:17:16 PM »
OK googling Auril, is the High Priestess an ex High Priestess who is now stripped of her powers and cursed by her god?
It sort of seems like that is what would happen with that god, if you began ignoring your duties for a personal vengeance quest. Google had nothing on how the god feels about their clergy and relationships.
 

Offline Jackhammer

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Re: Create a Hero and Villain duo
« Reply #6 on: July 04, 2021, 10:04:40 AM »
My thought process with the Head priestess is as follows:

Aurils is depicted as a beautiful woman with blue skin. She is also known as being a vengeful and angry goddess, who wishes to bring eternal winter to all of Faerun. I took some liberties with he lore and decided that the head priestess is tasked to seek vengeance by her goddess, since the thief brought the warmth of Spring to the head priestess' heart. So she must cast that warmth away and become cold as ice once more. If she succeeds, she will remain head priestess. If she fails, she will be turned to one of the ever weeping ice statues in the hall of warm winters, where all the failed priestess' are taken after their punished.
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