I’m just concluding (1 more session to go) a long running Dark Heresy game. A Dark Eldar corsair Captain had torn up the party bad in an early adventure, and he got away. I kept bringing him back. I had him hire assassins to kill player characters as well as showing up from time to time.

Think small world, even if you have a Galaxy to explore. The PCs keep running into the same folk, because these people are movers and shakers and have reasons to show up again.

Even if you use published adventures, see if you can’t swap in survivors from previous games for NPCs in the current one. My players love to meet them again, it gives them a connection to the game world.

In one of my two current Star Wars Saga Edition games, we were facing a recurring villain who called herself “Lady Fury.” I won’t bog this comment down with the details, but basically, our campaign is in an Alternate History setting, the deviating point being that Obi Wan Kenobi didn’t make it to Luke in time, and he ended up being killed by the sandpeople. Somewhere along the line, Leia Skywalker turned to the dark side and became Lady Fury.

The recurring villain started in the beginning of the campaign, but we never really met her. She sent many different people to us, and each one would inform us that “Lady Fury wanted to meet with us.” Each time, our party would somehow manage to destroy whatever was trying to take us off the path we were following.

The final showdown with Leia was actually pretty terrifying. The fact that approximately every other session we were hearing about Lady Fury made the final encounter a lot more exciting and sent the adrenaline running. However, knowing my party, if Lady Fury had been presented to us before the plot was ready, we would have obliterated her. (We took on and desecrated a CL 7 when we were a party of lvl 3.) So our GM was smart to send mooks and messengers until the plot was ready for us to meet and defeat the real Lady.

Recurring Adversaries can be a great addition to your campaign, but don’t overuse them. If we’d been hearing about Lady Fury EVERY SINGLE SESSION (as opposed to the nice balance our GM hit with every other/every third), we probably would have gone out of our way to find and kill her. ^.^

But if I’m going to come into a new storyline, and there’s a new evil plan, and I’ve got a choice between taking a chance on a new villain who I have no history with, and seeing a favorite old villain come up, I’d rather see a familiar face. Even if it means I didn’t kill him all the way before.

Also, most players seem to believe that they can and should solve every problem by killing somebody. I don’t want to belittle or negate my players’ accomplishments, but I do try to send a message that killing stuff isn’t typically the ideal solution.

But it’s not always easy to “make” a recurring villain who’s worth it. I’d agree that sometimes you can just make potential recurring villains, and hope the players latch on to one. (Otherwise, they’re just repeat annoyances.)

Generally, I figure I can explain their survival by thinking ahead. Make the bad guy smart, make the bad guy plan ahead, have contingencies, etc. (I don’t know about everybody else, but I don’t always flesh out my regular bad guys to that level. Maybe plan out a few things, but not that much ahead.)

Any time you bring a bad guy back to life, you need to be careful. If the characters are running around getting raised every other adventure, they can’t really expect death to be cheap for them, but dear for the NPCs. Still, there’s something unsatisfying about killing the same bad guy over and over and over. Maybe one interesting raise/recurrence, tops. But over and over is just dull. At some point, it might be better to have a lieutenant take over, turn it into an organization that’s the bad guy. Or an ideology. Or whatever. Maybe people carrying on the struggle in the name of the bad guy.

Or, just throw a few more into the mix, and see which one rises to the top, to become the new recurring villain.

In response to the column in general, I think that overarching villains are a great idea. I’ve always had trouble implementing them with my group of players, partially because they really dislike it when the enemy gets away, but also because I find it hard to keep it from being heavy-handed (see above). I’ll definitely have to take a close look at this article for potential in my game.

Some ideas are cloning in a sci-fi universe, soul transfer in fantasy or horror, and weird powers in a supers universe. In many of those cases, the villain may not even realize that he has been cloned, or his soul is forfeit…

It started off well but my players tend to treat all NPCs in my games like shit. It’s horribly frustrating. With one recurring foil — which was requested by one player in particular — it’s turned into outright lack of interest in interacting with them. Sure, it’s entirely in character but it adds nothing to the game and cuts off my work to make a compelling story at the knees. There’s a general lack of interest at the table to peer into the motivation of the characters they meet.

So I’m at the point of dropping the (requested) foil or turning them into an outright adversary. If the players are going to treat them as such then I might as well have the NPCs push back and stand up for themselves.

So be aware that this concept isn’t necessarily suited for all groups.

Rumors float about that the villain has returned, but they are false. It might be an old rumor (made obsolete when the heroes destroyed the villain), or deliberate disinformation, or an imposter, or a case of mistaken identity.

Alternatively, the villain is returned but:

is so far reduced in power as to be a husk of his/her/its former self (Saruman in Hobbiton), or

has no memory of previous events, or

is reformed (like a certain character in Heroes), or

is forced to “behave” by a more powerful being (Q in some episodes of Star Trek TNG)

Speaking only for myself as a player, I respectfully disagree with this idea. Nothing would frustrate me more, and really sour me on the game, than to realize that no matter what the players do — no matter how carefully they plan, no matter how thoroughly they go about destroying the villain — it will make absolutely zero difference in the end.

This might work for some groups, or for some types of stories (ones where the players have signed up for the comic book/soap opera convention of “the bad guy is never REALLY down and out).

I have no problem with the GM making it challenging to take out the bad guy, such that s/he narrowly escapes before the PCs finally figure out how to take him/her out, or keeps the heroes at a distance and instead loses minions. But the “bring ‘em back NO MATTER WHAT” just doesn’t work for me as a player. It would thoroughly piss me off.

The villain team idea is another way to go about it. Sure, Superman defeated Lex Luthor, but the rest of the Legion of Doom is still out there. They might even break Luthor out of jail for a future plotline.

A great example of this is Adelai Niska from Firefly. Even though they would surely have run into him again had the series continued, the last encounter the crew of the Serenity had with him must have been a tremendous blow.

My Blog- http://bigballofnofun.blogspot.com/

So, I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that recurring villains are awesome, and don’t try to force a villain – make a villain annoying enough, and if the PCs want an arch-nemesis, they’ll create one, and loathe him/her all the more for it.