Kids are scary. Don’t think so? Watch The Grudge, or The Ring, or play through the F.E.A.R. series of games. Actually it might be more accurate to say little girls are scary but boys can be scary too. Right? Well at least when he’s the antichrist. The point is that children, when driven to murderous rage or born to a dark and terrible purpose, are a scary thing.

I recall in one of my games long ago where my group of then 10th level characters (D&D3.5 btw) was facing off against a mutant abomination who first appeared to them as a well spoken and beautiful young lady who described in great detail about how she was going to murder them violently over the death of her brother. She turned into some terrible monstrosity and naturally they took care of her in the way that PC’s tend to do; with extreme prejudice. Later on though the players told me they would have been more unnerved to have had to fight her in her normal unmutated form rather than the monstrous form I chose for her. The conversation stuck with me and I’ve had a long time to stew over why that was.

Is there candy in your skull? Let’s find out.

So what’s scary about innocent looking children? It might have a lot to do with our parental instincts. When we see a child, alone, crying, or otherwise out of place we feel a natural urge to help them out. We never consider that the child might be harmful, or murderous, or a secretly disguised entity of massive evil. Heck sitting here in the obstetricians office I’m surrounded by books with pictures of soft skinned toothless smiles with about as much malice in them as a gummy bear.

The thing about children is that it’s the corruption of something so pure and innocent that we are revolted by it. The key word here, I believe, is innocence. Innocence does not equal good. Innocence means ignorance between what is right and what is wrong. As I’ve said many times before good and evil are ultimately matters of perspective ground into us by our society to let us know what’s right and wrong, good and proper, taboo and acceptable. If however, we remove that capacity for deciding what’s right and wrong we can easily create the most terror inducing abominations possible.

Just think about common motives for murder. There’s profit, passion, illness, jealousy, religion, duty, politics, etc. and all along the way we have invented numerous and colorful reasons to justify our morality for the pursuit of taking someone’s life. It’s so common that we hardly bat an eyelash at the thought of someone being murdered for god or country. What unnerves us is the idea that someone half our age and bodyweight might scoop out our organs and throw them across the wall because it looks pretty. We are unnerved because we fail to understand what it’s like being a little girl with the desire, power, and will to murder thousands over any number of perceived slights. Innocence is a funny word that ascribes neither to right or wrong which is what makes it so scary.

Children of the Scorned

However the idea of a “true innocent” can be a bit difficult to pull off right as a capacity for immense evil can also mean a potential for great good. The little girl could be scooping out organs only because she feels it will please someone she likes. Thus she isn’t intrinsically evil, simply unaware of the subtleties of right and wrong. However what’s easier to pull off in a game is not true innocence but rather a skewed perspective. Nations of all sorts have hammered their twisted ideologies into the youthful with the idea that they can build perfectly loyal and productive citizens from a fresh uncorrupted stock of young children.

It’s a theme rarely considered in your typical campaign. But why not? It tells us three things about the villain. First, they are playing the long game; they want to improve on the loyalty and training status of their minions by ensuring these things at an early age. Second, they are not above involving children in their schemes and lastly the villain will leave no innocence untouched. So now you have these camps where the mad wizard is training apprentices, or the evil emperor is creating a new Praetorian Guard. This creates a delightful dilemma for your players. On the one hand it’s an enemy encampment training a new group of zealots you have to cut down. On the other they’re children who are following a madman out of a warped sense of duty and could potentially be saved from a grisly fate at the end of your Holy Avenger. So you risk a child inserting a dagger into one of your kidneys or allowing this evil to fester and grow into something greater. It’s this kind of dilemma I like to spring on my players every once in a while to really shake up the group integrity tree as each member will come up with different opinions and approaches and all will be hotly for or against certain ideas.

As an extension to this idea you could have the villain be training an apprentice or young protégé to be an eventual successor to the throne of darkness. Such a child pushed by the harsh training of their master can prove an unnerving match to the strongest of the characters in terms of combat prowess and cunning enough even to give the most intelligent of the characters pause. When and if your main villain dies the protégé can be set up as a villain of the next level with the added benefit of vengeance for their former master they can gleefully inflict.

Let’s put them in a jar together and see if we can get them to fight!

A rarely used but often effective concept is the idea of a massively powerful god-like entity with the mindset of a child. It’s a concept that is borne out of the casual cruelty small boys and girls have for small animals and insects. There’s something chilling about being tormented and tortured not out of some hatred or vengeance, which is something easily understood even at its most nonsensical, but out of petty amusement, boredom, or just because. Now of course this method has been used for more than just children. Changeling: The Lost uses this mechanism brilliantly to describe creatures filled with infinite power but no sense of compassion or morality that torment their victims in any number of ways purely for amusement or aesthetical reasons. We see this mechanism used again in Exalted where the Fair Folk of that setting feast on the emotions and dreams of their victims out of a bizarre sense of theatre. The Twilight Zone had an episode with precisely this concept in mind and lastly I believe one episode of the original Star Trek series featured a being exactly as I described.

The thing to remember with this scenario is that the characters should not be able to physically overcome the threat. However, the threat itself is childlike and perhaps not as cunning as the characters. Therefore the character provides a daunting mental challenge to the players. Since sword, spell, and overwhelming firepower can’t prevail it is left up to the talkers, thinkers, and charmers of the group to somehow overcome this threat. It can provide a change of pace in some groups where most enemies are easily dealt with via the pull of a trigger or swing of the blade.

Short, not Sweet

Child (or child-like) villains can provide a disturbing twist to an otherwise vanilla form of evil. They remind us that evil cares nothing about concepts like innocence or motherhood. It invades and corrupts everything it touches without a second thought to the victims it leaves behind. All in all however they’re best used sparingly and unexpectedly to maximize the shock value. Simultaneously you need to keep the particular personalities of your players in mind. Some, particularly parents, are going to be strongly opposed to any action against the child that would bring them to harm. This is fine and some sort of alternative should be provided in that regard. Just don’t be afraid to try it out.