Inspiration Series: Villain Worldbuilding

And a delve into Wintersplinter, the Villain in The Sunken Fortress

David Foxfire

Aug 18, 2022

Trigger Warning

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In the next article in the Inspiration Series, I started with the little bits from the Dungeon Master’s Guide and expand with Minsc and Boo’s Journal of Villainy. I’ll use both to set up a framework for Worldbuilding Documents for villains to use here, and then take Winterspinter, the druid villain for The Sunken Fortress, as an example:

“Heroes play supporting roles, the villain’s the star.” – Schäffer the Darklord

While the player characters might be the main characters of the adventure, they’re not the main characters of the campaign itself. As you know, I don’t use the term ‘Non-Player Characters’ for the other characters in the campaign. The main reason is the belief that, while they are not the main characters in the campaign on the table, these very characters have their own lives in the setting and they are the main characters in their own story. Sure, the world they are in is ‘not real’ to us, but to them, they themselves, and the world they live in, are as real as Earth.

That, and I have another definition of the term ‘Non-Player Character,’ and I do not want to offend the characters in my campaigns by using the term. No, seriously. Have you seen our Non-Player Characters? With the dead-eyed Soyboy smile-like expressions and the constant parroting of what got put in their heads? Just about everyone in Toril would be offended to the point of violence.

This dynamic extends to what could be the actual main character in most, yet not all campaigns; the one character who spearheads the storylines and brings the player character together: The villain. We only need to look into Curse of Strahd to see this. In this campaign, everything revolves around Strahd von Zarovich: The player characters, the villagers, Ireena, Van Richton, Ezmeralda, and even the people at Wizards of the Coast. How else would Strahd get his name on the title? He is a true Vampire Lord, whose name can be breathed alongside Vlad Tepes and Remilia Scarlet.

Yeah, yeah, I bring a Touhou Character alongside Strahd and Dracula. Remilia could beat Curse of Strahd in less than four in-setting days and then get adopted by the previous record holder, Evelyn Marthain, and convince everyone that she is Dracula’s youngest daughter. Not bad for a 500-year-old vampire stuck in the body of a nine-year-old. Really…how else could she get an expandable mansion that can planescape into Gensokyo?

And it’s all because Tracy Hickman saw a Vampire in a rolled-up random encounter and cringed in levels Twitter would appreciate. What vampire worth their salt…and thirst for blood…be hanging around with all the riff-raff in the dungeon crawl. Whose bright idea was it to put the Vampire stat block in that rando? Any vampire would’ve hunted the person-like organism responsible for such an affront, and ensured that they do not rise up as a vampire spawn.

Ms. Hickman wanted to give Vampires a proper role in a D&D campaign and that means they get center stage, the top billing, the role of the Big Bad Evil Guy. The one with the castle and the throne and the minions and the villagers they can hunt down and schmooze and the goblet they lazily ponder while lounging on an ornate throne and intone something like “What is a man but a miserable little pile of secrets…er…I’d throw this, but Sakuya would kill me.”

Yeah. Remilia Scarlet would say something like that.

So she designed a vampire the way a vampire should be. That of a true Villain and the one whom all the lights shine on (the lights need to be fluorescent and LED, of course,) they have the center stage, and everything and everyone revolves around them, including the player characters. Especially the gods damned player characters.

Such was the genesis of Strad von Zarovich.

Designing a proper villain proves just as important, and can involve just as much worldbuilding, as the rest of the campaign, as I will show.

About the Villain

I usually don’t think up a villain until I worked on the campaign and the setting for a while. After I get into flow with the people, places, and things in the Four-Dimension Spreadsheet, I eventually think up what a proper villain would be like there. Only on a rare occasion do I go the Hickman route and start with the villain.

I often think of two things when I design a villain. One is Persistence. It’s the idea that a villain would return from time to time, sometimes from module to module to even campaign after campaign, or even in the setting’s entire history. Imagine the Briarwoods from the Vox Machina campaign of Critical Role reappearing to face the Mighty Nein a couple of times and then pop back up in Season 3. When making my own villains, I would see if I can give them the chance to get away in the first encounter. They can do the Nin Nin Vanish, fake their deaths, get bailed out, set up a decoy, raze a village and give the noisy kids something more important to worry about, have what they’d think was the villain actually be one of their flunkies, I can go on. As long as they run away and live to fight another day and then come back with payback in their minds. They will always have a way to escape, cheat death, or just bail to come back another day.

The second one is on the nature of the villain. The cliché bowl-hatted mustache-twirling putting your significant other in front of a buzzsaw villain is a time a dozen in amateur story writing, not to mention reams of fanfiction, as well as many a D&D game. I want my villains to have some depth, and the best way to do that is with his motivation. Sure, I can have the bad guys be motivated by some base vice. Wintersplinter will be running on rank jealously, after all. But maybe you could have a villain that doesn’t have evil intentions. Maybe, just maybe, they could be noble and honorable. Hell, they could’ve been the good guy if it weren’t for the rotten luck of them being on the other side of the party.

Think of Captain America and Iron Man facing off in Civil War. They were both in the right. Treating superheroes like they treated mutants never turns out right, I speak as an X-Man fan during the 80s and 90s. But somebody or something has to go “Who Watches the Watchmen,” in Earth-616.

Just because you have a character be the antagonist in a campaign doesn’t mean that they have to be Evil aligned. All they need to be is in opposition to the party. This ‘villain’ might be a well-known philanthropic industrialist trying to do good but he’s about to raze a building that had a portal to the Far Realm with some Cosmic Horror on the other side and he would not even know about it until it’s too late. If only there was someone who would get them to connect the dots. Most novice tables who don’t want too much heavy-handed conflict might consider going this route.

And then there is the kind of villain that fill my nightmares: The Lawful Good villain. This is a villain who is so convinced that they are so much on the path of goodness and righteousness that anything they can do is not only necessary but proper, decent, and righteous. If they weren’t so convinced in what they believe in, they would even recoil in horror over what they’re doing. Bonus points for those who are so convinced that anyone who opposes them is a clear and present danger to everything that exists that they are justified in any kind of action against them. Ethics, morals, and common decency be damned.

Maybe I won’t make that second type of villain. I don’t go on social media because I want to stay away from those kinds of people. But there are many other kinds of villains that I’d make up in Tales of Penumaria, I’ll share them as they come. That’s when the template comes in.

The Template

The Villain Worldbuilding Document template would follow this list:

The document starts with a General Depiction of the villain.
Followed by the villain’s History which details their backstory.
There there’s the list of the villain’s Goals.
Followed by their Modus Operandi which shows their usual processes and routines.
After which is the list of their Henchmen, whether they be individual henchmen or groups.
In the last parts, there would be thoughts on How to Defeat the villain is listed.
And the many situations and scenarios that show How they’ll Return.
Everything else that needs to be put here falls into the tried but true four-dimension spreadsheet.
- People will show all the Stat Blocks of the villain and all related beings, including their closest lieutenants and direct underlings.
- Places will show what their lair and headquarters would be like.
- Things will list and detail the various objects, relics, and tools they would use, especially those that are original and not found in the sourcebooks and previous worldbuilding documents.
- And Other is everything else, including specific procedures, scenes, story arcs, other rivalries, and the like.

The Example

When I created The Sunken Fortress to be a remix of The Sunless Citadel and then incorporate what I did with Curse of Strahd with Chronicla, I decided to remake Belak the Outcast (the druid villain in Sunless Citadel,) into something that links the two modules together. I started by naming him after the giant tree blight created by the bunch of druids in the thrall of Strahd, and I went from there.

I thought of Wintersplinter as a druid who, like Belak, discovered the Gulthias tree and saw it as a meand to achieve a form of immortality, but ended up being corrupted by the tree. As I worked on his backstory, I had him take this route because—keep in mind that Chronicla was still a Ravenloft Domain of Dread at this time—he wanted to take out the Dread Lord of Chronicla which he believes will permit him to escape the demiplane. Was Wintersplinter know that, in the eyes of the Dark Powers, if you kill a Dread Lord, you might just become the Dread Lord in his place? Things to ponder.

And all the pondering was moot thanks to Amaunator Izayoi. He too was going after the Dread Lord and doing it through proper channels and record time. However, Chronicla’s answer to Tatyanna returned as a vampire herself and slain the Dread Lord before the angel. He had to instead defeat her. This caused a loophole in the minds of the Dark Powers—Amaunator didn’t kill the Dread Lord, he avenged him—which was how Ama was able to bargain with the Dark Powers to release Chronicla.

But Wintersplinter wouldn’t hear a word of that noise. As far as he’s concerned, that meddling black-winged angel stole the glory and the throne meant for him! He’ll become immortal and become powerful enough to kill the angel and take what was rightfully his.

This will be discussed in depth with his Worldbuilding Document. I’ll have his full strength stat block here, while in Sunken Fortress, he would pretend to be considerably weaker. He would make it look like the party managed to defeat them, when in fact he’d fake his death before he got seriously hurt. He would make his escape and then return to become a recurring annoyance.

The Wintersplinter Worldbuilding Document is at: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AjNYReLtj6OIoT3bTA4R7oXcg7CA

Bonus Idea: A video game idea.

One of the things I have in mind in Tales of Penumaria is something I always wanted to make since I was a kid: An arcade-style video game. I can learn to create one with enough tutorials and experimentation. What’s holding me back right now is a lack of assets I’d like to work with. While I can pick some assets up with an occasional Humble Bundle, there are some items I need to make on my own, such as this item:

It’s an Amber sprite styled after Marisa from the Touhou Games. I basically took a Marisa sprite sheet from a Touhou Game, blew it up to a size I can work with, and traced over the graphics. I’ll work on an initial set of fairies and then start using that.

I’ve been off and on learning to code a Touhou-style shooter for quite some time, and I quickly found something that people who make game-making tutorials need to say: The first tool you’ll need to find is not a game editor, but a notebook. You need to figure out what kind of game you want to make, with all the storylines, characters, settings, and of course the assets. Both visual and audial. Creating a game doesn’t start with a script file, but something like a worldbuilding document.

The progress report:

Such a Worldbuilding document for this game will be alongside the other items in the Planning Stage, such as Universally Preferable Behavior. Since Wizards of the Coast’s Spelljammer set is coming out, I can finally work on my take on that setting and create an article on how Spelljammer works with Swifttail and Penumarian Lore.

Swifttail Rulebook, Volume 1, and the Sunken Citadel Dungeon Worldbuilding Document are in the First Draft Stage.

Amber of the Woods, Episode 3, is in the Proofreading Stage.

That means that the next upcoming article will be a filler of some kind. I’ll decide on what to put in there along the way.