The Bad, The Worse, and the Vile: The Art of Being Evil
So, when the characters do come across competent, cunning, and surprisingly lethal henchmen it’s always memorable. This month’s column focuses on 10 uncommon but very good henchmen archetypes you can bring to the employ of your main villains and give the enemy a dimension beyond the thousands of masked mooks.
1. The True Power
In an evil organization one has to question if it really pays to be the top honcho. The heroes are after you, the lower level guys are after your job, you have to deal with all the problems, in the end being a big bad is kind of a crap job. So, where can someone go to maintain near complete control over the organization without being in poisonous dagger range? The advisor? Too obvious.
In truth the true power is in upper middle management. The general who leads the armies, the treasurer who holds the coin purse, the public relations guy who talks to the lower employees and deals with the local media. The court wizard, the company network security guy and the organizations super intelligent AI are all the type of people who hold great people within an organization. These are the people who truly run the organization and should never be underestimated in terms of capability and power. The guy on top is merely a powerful figurehead. Without those lower level guys they could never efficiently run their organizations. The best time to reveal these guys is actually to underplay them when they’re first discovered. They have the figurehead to take the hits from protagonists so they have no problems stepping out of there way. It’s only when this figurehead has fallen and the organization itself doesn’t topple that the power of this person is revealed. Soldiers aren’t going to go anywhere if the purpose and money haven’t gone anywhere. In fact the power of those henchmen might increase a dozen fold if they convince the rest of the group that the protagonists are true enemies and the figurehead has been martyred.
2. The Innocent
There is a point in everyone’s life where we are unaware of the concept of good and evil, right and wrong. This is the true definition of innocence; ignorance of morality. Most of us get morality along with the concepts of right and wrong ingrained into us at an early age and since we take to it so easily we never regain that innocence. However what if a powerful being never lost it? What if right and wrong become alien concepts and the result was a powerful and selfish being driven by selfish desires? Now what if a villain harnessed that person, gave them everything they desired and even introduced them to certain hobbies that made it look like fun to burn down villages, and murder innocents.
This tends to create a cold, child-like and terrifying henchman. These antagonists do what they do not out of a sense of duty, or purpose but out of pleasure and desire to please their patron. Right and wrong are twisted into what makes them happy and what upsets them. IF what makes them happy is watching people writhe in agony and scream in terror then the player characters are bound to have a rough and particularly disturbing time. At the same time they offer up the possibility of complex and satisfying redemption stories. They shouldn’t turn on their handlers at the drop of a hat but the opportunity should be granted for players to learn the true nature of the monster before them and given a choice on whether or not to attempt to redeem that monster or slay it for the good of the world. Bonus points are granted if the Innocent is an actual child rather than merely child-like.
3. The Tortured Servant
Fear and pain is a powerful tool. Stalin single handedly dragged his country out of the depression by putting a gun to workers heads and forcing them to either do their best or be executed as enemies of the people or sent to the gulags. Saddam Hussein kept many of his closest agents in line with random and terrifying tests of loyalty while torturing people and their families on a regular basis. If you ever wonder why perfectly normal people can perform some rather despicable acts all you have to consider is that one, people don’t like pain and two, people don’t like being afraid.
Taken together you can have some rather loyal and sometimes outright zealous servants born of pain and misery where love and respect will often falter. Villains often drive their henchman through the fear of pain and death for failure. However, it should be noted that your villain should try not to fall into the cliché of murdering servants who fail. This is a dumb cliché and you know it. A servant canny enough to survive a bad situation and brave enough to bring the villain bad news is worth keeping. Torturing them is perfectly acceptable, especially if torturing them actually empowers the henchmen further.
4. The Misguided Hero
I’ve explained before that villains tend to be a hypocritical bunch. They bring about pain and misery in the name of a better world. So who’s to say that the people who work for them believe in the vision if not necessarily the methods? They may feel that with their influence they can direct the final product into something relatively pure and good where the lack of their presence might corrupt the villain’s vision irredeemably.
In their minds there is no such thing as an innocent nation and all groups have blood on their hands. The only difference is the aftermath in which the vision of the nation’s founders come to life and can make either a better life for its people or create a miserable era of slavery and war. These good characters can often surprise and confuse players making them question their opposition and whether or not the villain is truly evil or merely a representation of a new world order they should get behind rather than a wave of evil they should oppose. It makes them want to explore the intentions of the villains and the actions of their organization beyond the mere offensive edge that they’ve made themselves familiar with. This can lead to some interesting directions in your game where the player’s goals and ideals might shift a bit thanks to this one surprising encounter.
5. The Wild Animal
This is the henchman that’s more beast than man. They live savagely, answer frustration with violence, and have zero hygiene. They’re a living tragedy, a villains example of the depths he can drive a person. They’re typically loyal to the villain only out of fear or a twisted form of love. They live in isolation and consider the primary villain the only person who understands them.
On the flipside the villain may see something in themselves in the savage beast that slavers at their feet and chews off the faces of the people that annoy them or at random passerby’s just for the villain’s amusement. Perhaps the villain is the reason that the person is so beastly, maybe the villain is not the reason and they keep the person close to them out of a twisted sense of charity.
6. The Arrogant Champion
The arrogant champion I something of a staple among villains. They hire someone so badass, so awesome that their default state of being is bored with his easy assignments. When they are first defeated by the heroes they may actually become interested and even a little obsessive about defeating the heroes. This creates a persistent and effective henchmen who is very personally tied to the heroes.
The evolution of such a villain can typically go one of two ways. Either their repeated defeats at the hands of the heroes should drive them further and further into the depths of an obsessive insanity or it should make them reconsider their position within the villain’s organization.
7. The Secret Weapon
Every time the villain is seen there’s always some non-descript and relatively benign creature or person. Or some hint that the villain is preparing something truly nasty on the world. Then when the villain is ready, or truly and utterly fed up with the actions of the heroes he unleashes this person who can truly and utterly annihilate the characters and the surrounding area in a flurry of destruction and fury that goes to the background noise of the villain laughing maniacally.
The secret weapon differs from other henchmen in that direct confrontation should be suicidal. This gives you the opportunity to introduce new and interesting methods of defeating a henchman. Bonus points are granted if the best and most efficient way to defeat the villain is to turn the secret weapon against the villain. Just make it surprising and make sure that when the secret weapon is unleashed you give your players a chance to escape its wrath if only temporarily.
8. The Gimmick
Simply put the gimmick is a henchman that fights or acts in a certain way that makes him memorable. His effectiveness as a henchman is irrelevant to how well he sticks to his gimmick. Even if that entire group of sentai villains complete with poses and transformation sequences gets murdered in a few short turns it’ll be a fun encounter. More importantly you yourself will have fun writing up and playing said henchman.
Building one is easy. Just pick a theme like “loves fire” or “summons kittens” and stick with that. Give them some cheesy back story explaining their gimmick then let them go.
9. The Blunderer
Competence is overrated. Sometimes a henchman is picked not for his ability to murder, his loyalty, or even having unique skills. Some henchman becomes important through blind luck or merely to serve as a necessary distraction and low value sacrifice while more competent bad guys work towards the heroes defeat. The blunderer fights, escapes, and fights again through a combination of blind luck and comedic effect.
It’s difficult to emulate this in hard gaming systems where competence is based on hard numbers. The best way for a game master to emulate the blundered is with simultaneously loosening up the numbers of the henchman while describing his most competent and seemingly effective actions as simple blind luck. An alternative to this is the quiet implication that his stumbling and luck is actually an extreme form of showing off their true skill wanting to make the characters merely believe that they are blundering fools and their true skill, if ever unleashed, would be terrible.
10. The Smart One
The opposite of the blunderer is the smart one. He may be gimmicky. He may be arrogant. Yet, his one distinguishing feature of all these things is that he’s competent, crafty, and well aware of the mechanics of the world and how to take advantage of them. The smart henchman should be used sparingly as every encounter with him could end in a potentially game ending total part kill.
The smart henchman is rare for a reason they know how to kill heroes, how to handle the main villain and how to make the best use of the resources they have at end. They have no qualms about fighting opponents at their weakest, doesn’t waste time bragging and never tells the characters things they don’t already know or can use against them.
As I said before use the smart henchman sparingly. You’d be surprised at how much the player characters depend on villainous tropes to save the day. When and if you unleash him it won’t only be surprising but put the fear of the villain’s wrath into them.
