Exchange of Realities

This one goes out to all the masterminds, from the weak but canny delegators to the hefty powers who do most of their work by proxy.

A hefty part of our work is intimidation—being able to strike fear into our foes’ hearts just by hinting that we might be involved in a certain incident. It puts the protagonists off guard, turns generic farmers into jelly, and ensures that fellow Hands of Darkness would rather be with us than against us. Now, some of us have that presence innately, or are good at looking fearsome; they can just walk into a room, and everyone in it starts backing away slowly or outright panicking. But others of us have trouble with that. Either we’re singularly unassuming, or there’s just no way to really get across our true natures or power through appearance without looking like we’re trying too hard.

And there’s nothing quite like being laughed at to ruin any chance at intimidation.

The answer to this is simple: don’t let them see you. This doesn’t mean you have to be perpetually invisible, and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to skulk around and hide every time they’re facing in your general direction. But what it does mean is that when they do see you, you want to make it hard to tell what exactly you look like. Perhaps you’re using the standard cloaking shadows to hide specific details of your appearance, or backlit so brightly that they can’t even look at you without going blind. Maybe you’re the silhouette in the distance, or the voice from behind something solid. Or you might be constantly possessing people, so they’ve fought you but never seen what you really look like. In short, you’re nebulous.

Do feel free to play with their other senses, though. Cultivate a distinctive and unsettling voice—maybe it’s booming, maybe it’s two pitches at once, perhaps it’s one of those creepy calm ones that makes people wonder just what you’re hiding behind it. Be preceded by a scent—even the smell of Thin Mints can be pretty intimidating if the first time you made your presence known was right after a troop of Girl Scouts vanished. Have some sort of tangible distance-aura—maybe an unusual temperature, a presence or absence of ambient magic, a thickening of the air, things like that. Ill omens announcing your presence can be fun—but you’ll want to be able to turn them off, or you’ll never be able to just sit down and buy a drink again.

And then make sure you have plenty of chances to make your presence known without actually being seen. This exposes them to you without letting them see you; it gives you an unknown quantity factor that’s really good for intimidation purposes, hints at what you yourself might be capable of, and most importantly lets them start constructing their own images of what you might be. Nothing you can put together is going to come near to equaling whatever it is they’re imagining you as when they try to fall asleep in their little inns or tents or what have you.

Of course, the catch to this is that if you do show yourself, and you don’t meet their expectations, it’s probably going to end badly. So be careful, and try to stay recurring so they don’t actually have to meet you face to face.

So remember: if there’s any doubt that you can do imposing on its own, be heard and not seen. It’ll do half your work for you.