Exchange of Realities

Read the title. ’nuff said.

So your world is particularly low on evil, and you need to take up the slack. It’s going to be difficult, particularly living long enough to be able to fill the role successfully. But here are some ways to make sure you live long enough to do the work of four or five Hands of Darkness.

Learn from your mistakes. If an attack was able to defeat you, cultivate an immunity to it and/or a way to strike back when they use it on you.

Have an ENOUGH! Attack. It creates a channel to the source of our power which will allow you to throw off the mob of protagonists attempting to reenact the death of Caesar on you, giving you time to either press the attack or run. It is recommended that you not use this more than once per battle, though, as our dark patrons get bored.

Prepare multiple explanations for your backstory. It’ll draw sympathy, or at least distract them long enough for you to make your exit. “Wait a minute, wasn’t your father a doctor the last time we talked to you?”

Don’t recur too regularly. This is very, very important. If you show up four times in a span of forty-eight hours, they’re going to get sick of you. This goes double if they’ve imprisoned you—particularly if you’re not fully healed yet. I mean, come on, if they’re going to leave you alone like that, at least take advantage of it! Moreover, be inventive about how you recur. If you do the same thing too regularly—either by having the same plan over and over, or the same one-liner as you’re blown away, you’re not going to be a recurring villain, you’re going to be a recurring joke. (And if they have an insulting nickname for you, do the universe a favor and get killed by one of your minions. Or snark back better.)

Speaking of snarkage, have good dialogue. If you’re interesting enough that you can keep their attention while fighting them and give as good as it gets when they make fun of you, they’re going to respect you more, and they might even go out of their way to make sure you recur. That or they’ll decide that you have enough narrative importance to be worth redeeming. Either way, you live longer and they let their guards down. What’s not to like?

Remember you’re going to recur. The heroes will heal, but if you steal things that are important to them (artifacts, relatives, so on and so forth), that’s going to still affect them the next time you see them, so remember to focus on those things. Bonus points if you turn the relatives and friends to your side.

Be careful who you kill! You can get away with parents if they’re still in the backstory stage, childhood friends can work, mentors are probably going to die anyway… Some people, though—bad idea. If you’re going to off the love interests, make sure there is a replacement waiting in the wings, even if you have to provide one yourself. (You’ve probably got a lieutenant who’s in love with the hero, after all.) Most important of all, NEVER KILL THE RIVAL, as the hero will operate on a variant of the Inverse Ninja Principle and gain power to fill the void. And never kill the hero’s main kernel of teammates, unless they do something dramatically stupid and are clearly asking for it. Ignoring these instructions will bring down Revenge, and thereby the end of the story. Moreover, the teammates will be replaced by more powerful individuals, quite possibly with fresher grudges.

Keep trying, and keep coming back!

Interested in seeing the Generic Villain again? Just look here.