I like a Villain with a plan

I really the enjoy the Villain's that have a plan or at least a story to them. It makes it easier to explain to new players. 

Some nice  examples:

Baron Blade - He is great for this. "We have to stop him destroying the Earth."

Grand Warlord Voss - Easy. "He is trying to invade the earth."

Gloomweaver - Good. "He is trying to get all of his Relics so that he can become stronger."

Spite - This is a good one. "He is a serial killer. We need to stop him before kills more innocents."

Dreamer - One of my favorites. "This is Visionary as a child. We need to save her from herself and the environment."

These are ok:

Ak'shabuta - This one is ok. "She is force of chaos trying to destroy the world." But if we do nothing for awhile nothing bad will happen. Maybe if the environment deck flipped two or three times she could win?

The Chairman - This is ok, too. "There is a secret underworld boss that we need to unmask so that we can save rook city from his grasp." Would be nice if he won if all of his underbosses and thugs were in play, perhaps. 

Some Villains, I don't have a good story. For example?

The Matriarch - ahh???

Apostate - "Wants to capture Fanatic, maybe? Are we playing Fanatic? Do we lose if she is captured? Ahh?"

Kismet - "She is lucky. Not sure on her plan... to kill heroes I guess. Why? Uhmm?"

I guess I like it when the Villain has a plan other than let's beat on the heroes. Even if that plan hardly ever happens, it at least gives the heroes more things to think about. By the way I love Apostate, but I wish he won if he got all of his relics into play or something.

Anyway, I would be happy if people had some good stories about what some of the less obvious Villain's are doing. Thanks for the help.

Apostate, from what I remeber of the bios, doesn't only want Fanatic. He told her he is the one who made her, and that she is really a fallen angel like him instead of God's servant, but this seems more like a ploy to get her out of the picture. The next line or two mentions how he began summoning hell to Earth. So I think unleashing Hell upon the world is his end goal, Fanatic is just someone he likes to toy with along the way. Plus she is the biggest obstacle to his plan.

The Matriarch wants to be feared and respected. To pull this off, as I understand it, she summons hordes of birds into the cities to attack people. She is a whiny teenager with unimaginable power, I like to think that if she succeeded she would want people to worship her as a Goddess.

Kismet is a sociopath, again as I have been led to believe, she just wants to toy with people's lives for her own amusement. She has no longer goals or deeper motivations. She just likes being the puppet master of all these inferior beings.

Akash'Bhuta, in the comic-verse, would be a lot scarier. Looking at a lot of her cards I imagine that she leaves a blasted wasteland of sands and volcanoes in her wake. She may not move quickly, but with that kind of power she doesn't need to.

Lets also not forget that Kismets an escaped convict. Perhaps the heroes are teaming up with authorities to bring her down.

I also like to incorporate the environment with the narrative of the game. So, if we're fighting apostate in the Tomb of Anubis, perhaps he's trying to find a mystical artifact to further his plans. I'm not the best storyteller, but this is silver age stuff, so that's not as important. Just a thought.

I thought that fight was about the Cultists using the relics to summon Gloomy into this dimension.


Matriarch gets easier if you can reference Hitchcock's The Birds and then say "she's causing it. For emo teenaged reasons."

Yeah, Gloomy is a sort of Nightmare Demi-God thingy existing in another realm - the cultists are trying to open a rift to bring him through into this world, for which they need to gather those three relics. Gloomy can still affect this world from the one he's trapped in, of course (hence his being able to do damage, eg through voodoo pins), but only if the rift is fully opened and he comes through will he truly be able to manifest his power.

I think he has won at that point. If someone can make a come back with 17 deadly villian targets in play it would be a miracle.

Thanks all for some good replies. I really like the Kismet as an escaped convict, that is good. Some more questions

I like the idea of Apostate trying to open the gates of Hell. How does Apostate get them open? Why is he only interested in attacking the heroes? Perhaps he needs hero blood to opent the gates?

Matriarch is a emo teenager, ok good. Why is she attacking the heroes? Or is her plan to attack everyone, and the heroes are interfering? Not sure. 

If you want some story ideas for gloomy and nightmist, go read some H.P. Lovecraft. Seriously. He is awesome. Gloomy and nightmist are both direct references to all of Lovecrafts big bads and heros. There is always an other worldly being of great and immense power that you never see or interact with directly. His protagonists learns about these massive evils (like cuthullu for instance) through their interactions with the various occults that worship these gods.

Everything about those two, from nightmist being from Arkham, to the Elder signs and everything screams Lovecraft. I highly recomend his novels not only for the SotM tie ins, but for anyone even remotely interested in the Horror genre in general.

She mostly just wants the attention, I think, but being in her cousin's (Tachyon's) shadow certainly doesn't help. There's a hundred-page thread on why they're nemeses (which I'm sure has drifted from that topic since I last checked it). I just think of her causing massive trouble for civilians and the heroes have to give her a super Time Out.

No reference to Ambuscade? Those are my favorite villains... the ones that are there for a paycheck. I'm guessing he is modeled after Deathstroke but in general those badguys who just want a paycheck (Rhino, Bullseye, etc) often make more sense to me than the world conquerors.

I had a similar problem the first time I saw Plague Rat.  He doesn't seem to have an agenda, and in fact would probably prefer to be left alone.  I'm not even sure he'd be a problem at all if the heroes didn't go poke at him, although I suppose we're supposed to think that he's passively poisoning people or something (?).

This is why we need a stack of alts for the villians.  I'd love to have five Plague Rat alts, each of which was slightly different, each of which had a different villainous plan we needed to thwart.  We could choose between fighting "just leave me alone Plague Rat", or "poisoning the water supply Plague Rat", or "getting revenge on people he feels have wronged him Plague Rat", etc.

But I agree that having a semi-specific thing you're trying to stop is more fun than just fighting for the sake of fighting.

Truth! I mostly play solo games, so I really try to make a story out of what I have on the table. For Plague Rat, I normally just pretend like it's a whole monster movie kind of thing: there's a monster living in the sewers, and every so often, it drags a civilian or an innocent or someone down into the depths to be...eaten? Infected? Turned into more Plague Rats? Either way, I have to stop it

Citizen Dawn is actually one of my favorites. One of the few times I played with my friends, we got into a discussion about Dawn's political motivations, why she's being such a big b*tch to the world, etc. Kind of stopped the game cold right in the middle of it, but hey, it was fun. We finally decided that, much like Magneto, it all came down to fear of normal humans, as opposed to her *proposed* superiority. After that, we "fixed" the ending: instead of defeating her, then sending her off to jail or killing her outright or something (we had Expatriette on the team), we had the heroes reason with her. After which we spent about an hour or so attempting to put together a Dawn hero deck, but that was a bust. Oh well :))

Spiff,

   I agree. I would love a bunch of alts for all the Villains, each with a different evil plan. That would be really cool. 

I think the idea with Plague Rat is that he's mutated, and that he's capable of spreading that mutagen to other creatures by infecting them with it. Don't forget that he was the main cause of Earth being turned into the Final Wasteland - if left unchecked, he manages to infect/destroy humanity to the extent that they stop being a threat to all the other nasties lurking out there, which in turns leads to those creatures emerging and eventually becoming dominant as they roam around generally destroying stuff.

Going with this, alts of other villains that have been infected by the Rat.

What a joker.

This is always my assumption with Plague Rat – the infection cards are an indication of his grand plan for the City.

With Plague Rat I tend to go pure monster movie, or perhaps a less scientific version of the Lizard from Spider-man. He is attacking the populace (perhaps to spread infection or perhaps just because he is a rabid carnivore) and the heroes show up to stop him, perhaps they even chase him down to whatever location they end up at when the battle starts (Chasing him through sewers, find ancient entrance to Atlantis). I find it hard to give him bigger motivations simply because I find it hard to give him high level intellect, he's a mutated animal, nothing more, (picturing Jim reloading in a dark sewer, green eyes open over his shoulder)

Yeah, I don't have any evidence that I can point to on this, but I figure that Plague Rat is pretty much all animal instincts and no rational thought. A very smart animal perhaps, but still animal.

One little thing - rats are omnivores, not carnivores ;). And isn't Plague Rat a mutated human, not a rat? He's developed ratlike attributes due to his being exposed to all the chemical stuff from Pike Industries, but originally he was a human, I thought? And incidentally, rats are pretty clever. Maybe not sentient, but definitely not short in the brain department. Guess what my answer would be if someone asked me what my favourite animal is?

Well yes. Rats are very very clever. But, there's "clever enough to solve complicated mazes" and there's "clever enough to plot to bring down humanity by infecting its water supply or via some other complicated means."

If Plague Rat wanted to infect the water supply I think all he would have to do is bathe in it... Since he already lives in the sewer the water supply already may be tainted... Also by the deck of Rook City I don't think I would want to drink the water in the first place...

Humans?

The black plague comes to mind.

The black plague was not a plot by the rats or the fleas or the amoebas to bring down civilization though. Plague Rat's goal is to feed, kill and/or infect; the fact that he may or may not be poisoning th water supply is largely irrelevant.

I never gave even a thought to Plague Rat having some overarching plan. I've always just seen him as a feral beast who is feeding on unsuspecting citizens, and the heroes are going to hunt him down. His fight--much like Spite--is a case of the heroes taking an active role to hunt down an evildoer.

One of the things is that... you can give most villains any plan you want, and then that plan becomes "Stop these meddlesome heros from ruining my schemes!" once the heroes show up with their plan of "defeat this villain so we can ruin their schemes!" Like, maybe Citizen Dawn is traveling to the Silver Gulch 1883 in order to conquer the past and get a 130 year headstart on that whole superhuman supremacy thing? Maybe Apostate wants to subvert Wagner Mars Bases's teleportation experiments so he can open a portal to hell? Maybe Iron Legacy has kidnapped Tachyon's wife because he's a giant douchebag and figures he can use her as leverage against Team Leader Tachyon back in his own timeline? The sky is the limit!

The Bio on plague does mention drug dealing as an occupation. Thus I can't really envision him as a mindless beast but more as something much more threatening to those who don't pay their drugs. I could also conceive him as kidnapping others to test new drugs on. Or even better plague rat might have been transformed by such a drug and plan on transforming others in mutated rats. Thus the count down of keep the pest under control or you'll be overunned by a legion of rats.

Sometimes, especially, when I end up fighting the Rat in some weird place like Mars or whatever, I like to pretend that someone like Baron Blade (or even better, The Chairman) put him there to distract the heroes from their true plot... Of course, the Rat is basically just a mindless animal that just attacks everything and everyone in sight, so yeah.

Think of it as a sort of "RELEASE THE KRAKEN." thing.

Plague Rat was a drug dealer, then he became PLague Rat due to hiding in the Sewers. I don't know if we have any indication he does anything with drug dealing anymore

I don't see him as mindless. I think he's pretty cunning. There's nothing to suggest he's lost his sentience since developing his rattish attributes. They probably just buffed his human ones - whiskers, claws, sense of smell, better agility, a tail (I think?), teeth, excellent swimming ability, stuff like that. And probably a preference for staying in enclosed spaces - tunnels, etc. Plague Rat is what happens if a human gets mixed up in all those chemicals that rats run around in. I think the mutated rat thingys (forgot the exact name…the ones from the Pike Industries environment deck) are what you get when rats get mixed up in all those chemicals which humans have poked around in.

I think the point of all of this is that we all are pasting our own imaginings onto what we think Plague Rat is up to, as opposed to actually knowing what he's up to with folks like Baron Blade, Voss, and Spite.

My wife does that too - I'll point out a plot hole in a movie and she'll tell me all of her imaginings of what could have happend to make the illogical thing we saw happen, even though none of that was actually in the movie.  She just figures it could have been and that's good enough for her.  I call it sloppy story telling. :)

My wife just avoids watching movies with me. Or, at the very least, she refuses to talk to me about the movie afterwards.

(On-topic: I like the idea of thinking about this stuff, but I'm a 100% power gamer. You could name the heroes and villains Hero A, Hero B, Hero C, etc., and if the game was fun to play [like this], I'd still enjoy it. I understand that I'm the minority Villain background is GREAT for first-time players though. It really gets them into the game.)

Everyone wants to know why I do what I do? I'm a 7 foot tall mutant rat/human hybrid living in the sewer... what else am I going to do? I get board. You think it's easy to infect an entire city biting one person at a time? NO! And don't get me started on "rat men." Yes, the first few were my doing but do you know how many reject compounds from Pike Labs I had to use to re-create what happened to me? You don't get this way by toxic sludge, rat terds, and cocaine alone, ya know. It's made more difficult by the Freedom Five coming down here every once in a while or some joker with a revolver shooting at me because he thinks that "you took my arm" when I've never seen this cowboy before in my life!

And because of the mutation of my jawline, typing is the only what I can communiate. Hard to sell ANYTHING when you can't talk and scare the crap out of a junkie EVERY time he sees you. Money has been tight lately. Seriously, I'm using a laptop that I stole from a business man I ate two weeks ago with WiFi access under a Starbucks right now.

Now what was that about infecting the water supply?

Plague Rat, I give up. I want to join your underground community. You probably have more fun.

With the exception of the occasional hero infestation and bad smells, life really isn't all that bad. I need someone who can talk to every day people to find things out for me. Like where to find PL626 Compound XI or PL602 Compound Omicron because I could REALLY use them drugs. After all, I was human… once.

I'm in, Plague Rat. I'll be your human eyes and ears, as long as you take care of Spite if he chases after me for stealing the compounds. That dude is messed up.

Look after him, Plague Rat. This community really wants to see the end of Naturalization, and that's not gonna happen if celette gets herself killed by Spite.

Herself, BlueHairedMeerkat. Herself.

Going Harley Quinn on y'all. Sorry.

Where is Iron Legacy when you need him? 

… or maybe I could just infect Spite. Now my mind wanders to THIS probability. Hmmm…

Of course, Celette. Herself. It has always been herself :P

Oh gods, drug-wracked Plague Rat. Now there's a possibility...