Heroes, Villains, and Supporting Cast
Any MythCraft campaign should revolve, first and foremost, around the heroes and villains of the story. The Heroes will be the characters played by the various players at your table, while the villains are their direct or indirect adversaries.
This page provides tools for thinking about your campaign’s heroes and villains, along with fleshing out the supporting cast of NPCs that are not necessarily for or against your heroes.
If you need to quickly improvise an NPC, use the NPC Roll Tables for inspiration.
Heroes
The adventurers that your players present to you are the main characters of your story. They should be the focus of your campaign, and you should seek to elevate them as the protagonists.
As you work with your players to craft their heroes, think about how they fit into the world that you have in mind. It is okay to turn down a player’s idea for their adventurer. A space smuggler with a laser gun does not belong in a world that has not yet discovered electricity. That said, work with your players to incorporate as many of their ideas as possible into your world. This will make them feel invested in the world before the first session.
Think about your adventurers’ backstories and your players’ vision for their adventurers to grow. Are these heroes well known in the world already have they yet to earn their renown? Typically, adventurers at the beginning of a campaign are not yet well known beyond their homes unless they are politicians, entertainers, or similar public figures.
Be sure to integrate the heroes’ backstories into your world. These backstories don’t need to come up every time you play the game, but when possible, tug on a plot thread from a character’s backstory so that the player feels more immediately invested in your campaign’s story as it unfolds.
Villains
It is often said that a story is only as great as its villain. It’s usually best to have one or more clear villains in mind when you conceptualize your campaign. This can change once you actually start playing the campaign, as your players might take the story in a direction that steers you away from using the villain that you had originally planned. Even so, having a few clear antagonists in mind will help you plan the milestones that your adventurers might achieve over the game. These principles also work for considering a new antagonist if your party takes the campaign in an unexpected direction.
As you plan your campaign’s main villains, ask yourself a few questions to better understand the villain’s motives:
- What does the villain want?
- What does the villain need?
- Does the villain have anything that the heroes need? If so, what?
- Do the heroes have anything that the villain needs? If so, what?
- What are the villain’s driving motives?
- Is the villain supposed to be sympathetic or redemptive in any way?
When creating your villains, take some time to consider how they might act and react in different situations. What might they say or do when your campaign reaches key milestones? Using the Values, Drives, and Quirks can help you create much more nuanced and realistic villains. Think about what motivates your villain and what event in their past led them down the path that they are on now. Even if the villain never tells their story to the heroes, it will be very helpful for you to know why they make the decisions that they do. Consider a list of things that will trigger them to act in certain ways, or events and circumstances that might give them pause or even make them reconsider their actions.
A Villain's Driving Motives
Villains seldom think of themselves as such. Most are firmly committed to their actions and believe themselves to be heroes, or at least to be a necessary evil for some ultimate greater good. Consider what your villain’s driving motive is. If you want some inspiration, feel free to roll on the table below and see if the result triggers an idea for your villain.
| d6 | Villainous Motivation |
|---|---|
| 1 | Security. The villain wants to fill safe or in control of a situation. |
| 2 | Love. The villain wants to be loved, accepted, and feel like they belong. |
| 3 | Retribution. The villain wants revenge or justice for past wrongs committed. |
| 4 | Power. The villain thinks that things would be best if they were in charge. |
| 5 | Fame. The villain wants to be renowned and celebrated. |
| 6 | Legacy. The villain wants to know that when they die, they mattered and will be remembered. |
There are many other possible motives that might drive your villain; the table is simply meant to help you start brainstorming ideas.
Make them Memorable
The best villains are deeply memorable. They should command fear, or respect, or contempt. Just by walking into a room, they become the focus of the scene. Think about your villain’s appearance. What about them is striking or commands attention? Perhaps it’s their imposing stature, a menacing voice, or a terrifying outfit. Maybe it’s a combination of all three.
Note that it is also possible to make memorable villains that are not physically menacing. A soft-spoken criminal mastermind can be a terrifying rival.
Like heroes, villains are not without virtue, nor are they perfectly self-aware. Consider what virtues and flaws your villains might have and how this will inform their actions.
In addition to considering how they present themselves, think about what kind of villain you are running. Below are some ideas for running a handful of villain archetypes that will contribute to making your villains memorable.
Chaotic Villains
While complex villains that believe themselves to be the true heroes are often very impactful villains, it can also be very rewarding to pit your heroes against a truly chaotic, unpredictable force of evil. Those who thrive on cruelty “just because” can be remarkably memorable.
Cruel Villains
Cruel villains are the ones we love to hate. Each time you think they’ve achieved the height of depravity, they commit another vile act against common decency. Cruel villains go beyond what is necessary just to twist the knife and make it hurt. When running a cruel villain, think about what actions will cause the most turmoil for the adventurers.
Note that it is extremely important to parse the difference between what will upset the adventurers in your story, and what will upset the players at your table. Be very mindful of yellow and red zones as you run a cruel villain, so that you can offend the players’ sensibilities without causing true emotional distress.
Fanatical Villains
Fanatical villains pursue a single goal with zealous fervor. Every action they take will intentionally bring them closer to their goal. They will not fight the heroes out of a grudge, but because it will help them achieve their mission. Fanatical villains can often appear deranged or insane as they become more and more consumed with their obsession around a particular goal, ideal, or outcome.
Influential Villains
Any villain can be influential, but some deal specifically in the impact they have on the world around them and the various ways that they can exert pressure on different aspects of their society. These villains are often politicians, guild masters, or criminal ringleaders. They might hide in plain sight or even make their agenda plainly known, but they will have so much public influence that the adventurers will find it impossible to touch them. Perhaps they fund the city watch or have bottlenecked political power so that new laws cannot be passed without their say, allowing them to pull strings without doing anything that could cause legal recompense.
Mastermind Villains
In many ways, mastermind villains are similar to influential villains. While influential villains shield themselves with political or economic power, mastermind villains are hard to compete with due to their sheer, overpowering intellect and capability to plan for any contingency.
Mastermind villains can be difficult to run because they will usually be significantly more intelligent than you, the MC, are in real life. To play a villain that is smarter than you, you can use a few tricks. Plan for specific plot twists that negatively impact your adventurers, but don’t plan when you will use them. Instead, spring them when they will give the adventurers the greatest setback.
Between sessions, you can consider what your adventurers did, and think about if the mastermind would have any way of learning this. If so, how might the mastermind change their plans? While the mastermind is clever enough to adapt to the adventurers in real time, you have the luxury of planning the next mastermind’s moves between sessions, which will usually give you a week or more to think about how to next outmaneuver your players.
If the mastermind has observed the adventurers in combat a few times (either directly or indirectly), then when it comes time to fight the adventurers, the mastermind will be intimately familiar with their capabilities and can come ready with minions, items, or spells that will specifically counter the heroes’ capabilities.
Finally, a trick that you can use sparingly is the monologue. If you want to make the heroes feel like they have been puppetmastered by the mastermind all along, then think back on your campaign as a whole, and think about the actions that the heroes have taken. How might those actions have benefitted the mastermind? How can you justify the mastermind secretly orchestrating that to happen? While the heroes acted of their own volition in previous sessions, you can secretly retcon these events so that they appear to have been the mastermind’s diabolical machinations all along.
Sympathetic Villains
You might want your villain to be sympathetic. Sympathetic villains can be difficult to run, because at the end of the day they will still usually be direct antagonists to the heroes.
A sympathetic villain might pursue their goal on behalf of someone else. This inherent selflessness, even if misguided, will usually make a villain a lot more relatable. Also consider qualities that your villain might have that are legitimately good qualities, such as lovingly taking care of pets, children, or an elderly family member.
To ensure that your villain will not end up siding with the heroes, you can also make them a fanatical villain, completely dedicated to pursuing a single goal that is diametrically opposed to the heroes’ desires.
Supporting Cast
While they do not take the spotlight the way your heroes and villains do, a robust supporting cast is essential in any campaign. Remember that NPCs (nonplayer characters) are not the protagonists of the story and should not be treated as such. Even so, a well-crafted NPC can contribute to the campaign in many ways.
Significant NPCs should usually be directly invested in, or impacted by, the actions of the heroes and/or the villains. They might have pertinent information that the heroes can benefit from learning, or they can provide the heroes with useful equipment of mundane or magical variety.
NPCs might be on their own quests - again, remember that they are not the center of the story - and this quest might bring them into repeated contact with the adventurers throughout the story.
Like villains, the best NPCs are particularly memorable. They might have a tragic backstory that tugs on the heartstrings of the heroes, or they could be a flamboyant and comedic character that lightens the mood. NPCs might also have mysterious backstories that prompt the heroes to dig more and see what they uncover, and of course some NPCs will be instigators or questgivers that approach the adventurers with specific jobs that need done.
At bare minimum, an NPC will need a name, a description, and a goal or motive that they are trying to fulfill. NPCs should also have a basic personality, including virtues and flaws. If you want, you can base an NPC’s personality on any number of characters from novels or TV to quickly come up with how an NPC might act in a given scenario. This bare-bones information will allow you to play an NPC authentically, even if you do not know their whole backstory or long-term desires.
You can also consider how the NPC fits into the world around them, especially if they are in a settled area. Are they prominent among the other folk of their town or city? Are they part of a guild, and if so are they loyal to their guild or more indifferent about it? How might their alliance help or hurt the heroes’ reputations?
Finally, does the NPC’s goals line up more with the goals of the heroes or villains? How will the NPC act accordingly?