Arkham City: Villains

November 14, 2009 1 comment

Adventures Into Darkness offers up a plethora of villains either lifted from or inspired by Lovecraft’s original works. The one that’s setting the tone for my campaign is Devilfish, a Deep One mobster. He sets the tome for a couple of reasons. First, the Golden Age comics seemed to have heroes battling gangsters more often than supervillains. Second, I really like the trope of the grotesque villain as expressed in Dick Tracy and Batman, the former of which were almost always organized crime figures of one sort or another. In the one-shot adventure I ran at RinCon, I dialed it back and had mobsters with the Innsmouth Look, rather than flat-out fish men, controlling the docks and by extension all sea-based smuggling in the region. Having all of the mobsters be full-conversion Deep Ones was too over-the-top, and I felt it detracted from having the singular, super-powered villain.

It fits with Lovecraft, where dark ambitions twist one physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Being a criminal is a corruptive force, and the sins of peddling drugs, operating prostitution rings, and committing murder are as foul as any Mythos corruption — assuming, of course, that those activities aren’t Mythos inspired to begin with. Anything that degrades the human spirit and eats away at the human soul feeds the powers of the Mythos, whether wittingly or not.

Going with grotesque gangsters also allows me to make villains more personal. I can do Communists, Nazis, Mad Scientists, Cosmic Horrors, but all of those types of villains are generic, with nebulous goals that don’t tend to affect the heroes’s lives directly. Yes, I know that Lovecraft’s point was that the universe is a cold, impersonal place and that the human race, let alone individual humans, barely register as a blip if they register at all. I find it’s hard to engage players in those sorts of no-win scenarios. It’s not really in keeping with my scheme of “supers with Mythos influence, not the other way around”, and in Lovecraft’s tales most people went mad because there was some personal impact.

That’s not to say those other forces won’t come into play. A strong inspiration for me is the Adventures of Superman television series from the 1950s. As a kid, I never understood why Superman was always fighting gangsters (answers: 1. Golden Age trope, 2. low budget). Invariably, though, someone close to Superman was placed in peril by gangsters, usually Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen, but sometimes Inspector Henderson or my favorite “NPC” on the show, Professor Hamilton. When weird science did show up, it typically invovled organized crime figures stealing it, or attempting to steal it, so they could either use it to commit crime, or eliminate Superman so they could commit crime without interference.

So, instead of a mad scientist, we have a mobster using a weird gadget he doesn’t really understand. Or a strange artifact. Or engaging in a weird ritual he thinks will benefit him. For their own perceived gain, mobsters will team up with Commies, Nazis, and cultists. They’ll have to place the player characters and their loved ones in danger to do it.