"Before we have a hero, we must
have a villain..."
Mission Impossible II
GURPS Villains... what an idea.
Villains are the heart of most campaigns, the thing that makes a
Hero, in dramatic terms. The villain can be as personal as a brother,
or as impartial as disease. Action heroes spend much more of their
time reacting to the villain than actively advancing their own
agenda.
Villains are what any GM should keep
close to their heart, for without them, we have a docusoap, not a
drama. And GURPS Villains claims to have them in spades...
...and what it has is definitely a lot
of bad people, but villains?
Lets place this book in the context of
the mini-lines SJG have established in the GURPS schedule. We have
the wonderful Who's Who books, which provide statted-up
interpretations of honest to goodness historical folk to plagiarize
and modify for our own delight. We also have the GURPS Splatbooks,
Wizards, Warriors, and more to follow, with archetypes and templates
to trick out to round out recognizable heroic types.
GURPS Villians doesn't know which of
these two it wants to be like. It's broken down into sections of
different villain "types", from street scum, through madmen
and random "forces" (all with personalities, sigh), to
masterminds and groups. Yet the introduction to each section is
woefully short, and at times painfully uninspired and uninsipring; a
couple of hundred words for each type, while each example in that
type is given as much, if not more background text.
Down to the villains themselves... I'm
sorry to say that I find the vast number of them uninspiring. A
couple of buraucrats in two sections are far too similar (petty
abusers of power), the "secret psychic powers" ploy is used
woo often, and many of the others have only the GURPS stats to
recommend them over the entries in the contents page.
Now my next complaint will sound silly,
but bear with me: too many of these villains can be cut and pasted
into any campaign you happen to be running.
Yes, I know it's GURPS, but this isn't
supposed to be a monster manual: call me greedy, but I want to be
presented with Villains that demand their own time in a campaign,
that scream with ideas that pull a game in new directions, not
"expendable guest star of the week."
(Tries not to think of Lorne Greene
rolling out of a speeding car in the opening sequence of Police
Squad...)
To give another Pop Culture example:
remember in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Spike first hit town? The
first Vamp in the series that didn't talk like an Anne Rice or Hammer
films reject, who would just kill you if he fancied, not give you a
big damn speech about destiny, pain, blah blah blah. He changed the
series not only in plot, but tone, and had to become an integral part
of it. He was too much fun not to.
Remember Mr Trick. Yeah, he was fun,
but he had no plan beyond self preservation, no distinguishing
features beyond being stylish & black. He had to go. Too dull.
And that's the problem with this book;
too many Tricks, not enough Spikes, and no idea of how to make a
difference betweeen the two.
But when it does work, it shines, and
some of these ideas are almost worth the price of admission. I don't
want to go into details, as the surprise value of some of them is
their main strength (although, as I mentioned in connection with
Psychic Powers, this can go too far). There is an insane crossover
villain that can only have come from a Random Campaign Generator game
that I have to use. Of the 54 villains here, I'd arbitrarily rate
13-14 of them (and if I said which, I'd ruin the book for those who
are up against them) as really GREAT villains or organisations.
The acid test for these is: would my
players not know whether to lynch me or buy me a drink if I pulled
this one on them? A quarter to a third of the book is made of these.
Most of the rest are kind of fun,
serviceable, again like Columbo "guest murderers". Even
amongst them, there are some great ideas, or even lines waiting to be
stolen. I love the last line of Stephanie Rogers description of a low
level scumbag; "If the mere thought of some crimes makes you
feel like you need a shower, chances are (this guy) is making money
from it." Any other part of that villain's description is gravy;
we have the guy pinned down in one sentence.
Maybe I was hoping for a different sort
of book, like the old AD&D Book of Villains, or the new D20 Evil
book, that really took a good hard look at the black hats, and how to
build campaigns around their plots. Instead, this is a book of
raidable characters, but most of them pale next to the true life
folks of the Who's Who books, which I would recommend over this to a
GM in need of NPC's fair or foul.
The lessons I've taken from this book
is that good character ideas are simple, but not easy; and that truly
great villains have campaigns dropped around them, not vice versa.
And one last point; could no-one think
up a new twist to give a dark lord of evil in a fantasy game? The
vast majority of these villains are modern or futuristic based, and
very hard to change to lower tech levels, and this goes double for
the more ppowerful villains. Couldn't we have one Dark Lord out of
54, well, mostly lone wolves?
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