The Making of a Villain

Since I promised to share some stories about adapting and running with players’ ideas along the way, here’s a topical one.  It’s about a superhero campaign I ran almost ten years ago, and how through sheer serendipity I ended up with a villain who became a recurring antagonist through much of its run.

The Enigma was never intended to be a recurring character.  He was a fairly stock character — a “superhumanly-skilled normal” motivated, originally, by fame.  His modus operandi was the theft of bizarre objects; his targets included the world’s largest ball of string, a symphony orchestra, and several hundred tons of green tea.  And he’d leave his calling card, reading “It’s an enigma,” in anticipation of the inevitable question:  Why?

The Enigma wasn’t a very dangerous guy.  He could have been; he was a technical and scientific genius, a talented athlete, a well-trained thief, and pretty handy in general.  But he wasn’t interested in causing outright harm.  He was certainly no murderer.  He was simply an audacious headline-grabber.  I imagined the characters would hunt him down, confront him, and ultimately emerge victorious.  The Enigma was a gentle sort of villain-of-the-week, a four-color-style antagonist to throw into the campaign early to help establish the high-heroic flavor I was after.  This was at a time when dark anti-heroes were all the rage, but none of us wanted to play that way, so the Enigma would be a bit of insurance against it.

I had a backstory worked out for the Enigma.  I don’t remember what it was, exactly — something about an old-school showman wanting to show the world exactly what he was capable of.  I don’t remember it, because I never used it.  The players came up with something better.

During the first sessions of the campaign, they’d already met a number of support-cast NPCs.  These were the kinds of people who turn up in superhero comics as non-supers with speaking roles:  the reporter for the local news channel, a local politician or two, a researcher at a science lab, a historian at the local university, a couple of cops.  One of those cops was Detective Shawna Walker, recently recruited to the Capes squad.

Shawna was a relatively young cop.  She’d moved to the campaign city a year prior to the campaign’s kickoff, from a smaller city in middle America where supers were rare and she’d worked Vice.  Now she was in a different world.  She was still a little overwhelmed, and a bit shy around costumed heroes, but she was a competent detective with a real flair for piecing together bits of information.  This was a talent that the PCs could make good use of, if they were hard-pressed to find leads, and if they were generally law-abiding and didn’t otherwise antagonize Shawna, her partner, or her superiors.

The PCs had gotten along fairly well with Shawna, in fact, and she’d provided a clue or two in their early adventures.  Nothing major — Shawna wasn’t superhuman, after all — but enough to establish that, awestruck though Shawna might be, she did her job well.

Enter the Enigma.  The party tried a few basic ideas to track him down — speaking to contacts, shaking down the underworld.  They had little initial success.  One of them naturally suggested trying the police, and in due time a scene between the party and Shawna commenced.  Shawna was working the same case, as it turned out.  She offered what help she could, but it wasn’t much (in part because I didn’t want the NPCs overshadowing the PCs).  And during that scene, I made my mistake:

I began to say, while speaking as Shawna, “It’s an enigma.”

I caught myself and substituted with, “It’s an extremely puzzling case.”  The scene went on without a pause, and I thought I’d pulled it off.  Until afterward, when one of the players turned to another and said, “Holy crap… Detective Walker is the Enigma.”

There was some skepticism, particularly because the players had encountered the Enigma as a man… but as the ringleader of this particular circus pointed out, the costume the Enigma wore concealed his — or her, as the case might be — entire body.  Furthermore, it was a bit bulky, and featured a hooded cape on top of all of that.  Shawna, he maintained, was using some theatrical trickery to appear to be a male criminal.  Why?  That, he couldn’t figure out — yet.  But he had some ideas to propose…

There ensued nearly two hours of in-character argument between the characters, during which I had to do very little.  Which meant I had plenty of time to take a few notes.  Ultimately, the party decided to follow through and investigate Shawna.  Not everyone was entirely convinced, but they all felt it was worth a shot.

There was a time when I would have stuck with the plot I’d come up with, and their investigations would have come to a fruitless end.  When I was a less experienced GM, I’m sorry to say, I tended to put my plot and my world first.  Established facts, such as the identity of the Enigma, could not be changed — even if they hadn’t actually been established in-game.

Fortunately, by the time of this campaign, I’d started to come around to a more story-based approach.  And after watching two hours of some brilliant in-character roleplay — and near the beginning of a new campaign, no less, a time when the characters most needed to be established — I wasn’t about to let all of that effort and all of that creativity end with a “Sorry, no.  You were wrong.”

Before the next week’s session, I rewrote Detective Shawna Walker’s background a little bit.  She was still a competent policewoman — even more competent than she allowed herself to appear, in fact.  But she had a bit of a grudge against supers.  In her earlier life, she’d resented the attention the capes drew away from the less-glamorous local news.  After her move, she also became frustrated by the way she felt the press undervalued ordinary people, by how hero-worship was “out of control” in the popular culture.

So she became the Enigma to show just what an ordinary person could do.  She’d tipped the press off early about the Enigma’s lack of superpowers, and she planned crimes that were outlandish enough to draw attention, but during which, she judged, society would suffer very little damage.  She justified her thefts as akin to the illusions of a stage magician — and, to be fair, she generally returned the oddities she’d stolen, further down the road.

She was caught, of course, but she came back.  And again.  And again.  She wasn’t a constant nemesis, but she was a persistent one, and hard to keep imprisoned.  Every once in a while, the Enigma would pop up again, and she’d have some elaborate and improbable scheme in mind.

One of the things I liked about her appearances was that I could count on some strong roleplaying during the encounters.  Her motive and her history with the characters led to some memorable exchanges.  The best of them, though, came near the end of the campaign.  The party had deciphered the cryptic clues she’d left, tracked her to her lair, circumvented her (nonlethal) traps and defenses, and burst into her command center…

And then they didn’t fight.  They talked.  And the upshot of it was that, through some very impressive roleplaying and a bit of luck with the dice, they convinced her that she’d become what she’d hated:  the press that covered her didn’t do so because she was showing the world what a normal could accomplish, but because they thought of her as a supervillain with her daring schemes and her elaborate methods.

The Enigma surrendered quietly after that and “retired.”  Her stay in jail wasn’t very long, thanks to a direct plea from one of the (by then very popular and influential) PCs, and by the time the campaign ended, Shawna Walker had become a community activist and a frequent voice on the local talk circuit.  The Enigma never appeared again.

Almost a decade later, the players still remember her fondly.  Part of that, I’m sure, is just the nature of her exploits.  But I think most of it is because of who the character was, what she meant in the game, and what she became as it proceeded.  And all of that, I owe to playing along with a single mistaken conclusion drawn by a player, one that was bizarre on the face of it.

Related posts:

1. Adventure Design 101: The Villain
2. Adventure Design 101
3. Character Development: Hot Potato
4. Character Development: Quick and Dirty Backgrounds
5. Murder Most Foul: The Deed Itself