Adventure! RPG - Pulpy Villians

[Slagheap]

Any good pulp needs signature villians that just won't stay dead, who are yours?

Right now my most common is Dr. Mephestos a powerful, suit wearing imp of a man with tiny horns. He's petty and violent as well as scheming, everything I need out of a bad guy...

At present he's all I have left as all my other stock baddies bit the dust in the climactic finale of my last game.

Who ne're doing well in your games?

-Slag

[madcat82]

Hmm, You shall all see when x-factors plot thickens...

::ninja

[Tumbleweed]

Well, to tell the truth, I'm rather fond of one of the particular villains from the book. That is, The Baron Von ZORBO! Zorbo rules. Even had a player who made a character that was his estranged daughter- took, like, 4 points of Nemesis for it, too.

Other than Zorbo, I didn't have much in the way of reoccuring villainy.

Though one of these days I need to bring back Dr. Sanguinis, a mad scientist turned Science-Vampire. Just because he had an awesome, AWESOME name...

One which I forgot to mention when he was actually fighting the heroes. D'OH!

[Arcanum_V]

Even though my Adventure! game is set in 1999, I've kept a couple of the signature characters from the core book.

It just seemed wrong to have pulp without a Fu Manchu, so I've kept the Daochu Long, only I've renamed to "Yin Shen Long" ("The Hidden Dark Dragon" or "The Obfuscated Dragon") and made him a Kuei-jin. His immortality comes from his undead nature and sorcery, and through his mastery of the dark arts found in Hsan de Qi Mimide Jing ("The Seven Cryptical Classics of Hsan"), he's able to do several other things as well.

I've also kept the Machinatrix around, although she's looking less and less human than ever before. She had a pretty bad lab accident in the '70s, and now her skin is shot through with streaks of silver where her nanites flow and her hands are more like talons. She looks sort of like a nightmarish version of The Authority's Engineer. She runs a subterranean technotopia in Russia.

The nemesis that appears most often is Regis Ventru, an enormously fat fashion designer/art smuggler that combines bits of Spider-Man's Kingpin, The Maltese Falcon's Kasper Gutman, and Zoolander's Mugatu. He really doesn't do anything "evil," but he's always present and usually providing the backing for a rival team of Adventure!rs. Besides the opposition inherent in the story, the PCs are often competing against an evenly matched team pursuing the same goal for less-than-noble purposes.

The nemesis that I never got around to using before the game ended is Aeneas Romulus Octavianus, Imperator Aetherius. The Emperor of the Air is descended from a lost Roman century that lived beneath England for a couple thousand years until a modern man found it (see Joseph O'Neil's novel Land Under England). In my game, that man infused the Roman population of the underground world with new ideas and new vision, and one of them came forth to establish an airborne empire on a Roman model. This is basically the dirigible villain that's so popular in pulp, only Octavianus has a helicarrier, modern technology, and he's not German or Russian.

[Pax's_Pimp]

Though it has been a while since I have played A!, one think I remember that my group really got a kick out of (which could be better translated as were perpetually irritated by) was a mortal villian. One who was not and type of inspired, but was just a crooked cop from Chicago PD who was simply lucky. They were constantly trying to kill him.

IMHO the best villians aren't the ones who can stomp all over the characters and wipe the map with them, but one who can provide a constance annoyance and even some what of a threat. You can then not worry about whether this person will kill a character accidentally, unless the player screws up majorly.

-P