Jul 19 2009
The Generic Villain on Dealing With Death
Title says it all. And no, I don’t mean the deaths of your minions, or of your enemies, or your lieutenants, or even that thing with the big eyes and bigger fangs you keep around to scratch behind the earholes and feed your enemies to . I mean your own death. Dying, dealing with it, and making it something other than an ending.
We’ve already talked about not-quite-dying, but that’s not always going to work; sometimes the only thing you can do is cross over. So what you’re going to want to do is find ways of working around that.
In places where resurrection is possible, arranging a resurrection is a logical way to die and keep on coming. You just kit out a subordinate with the appropriate magics, make sure he’s loyal enough that he actually brings you back rather than taking your place. (I personally recommend using someone who doesn’t like leadership roles; extra incentive to make sure you return.) You might be slightly weakened in the process, but you know what you’re going to have on your return.
If you don’t think any of your subordinates can be trusted to serve as your lifeline, you may want to look upwards instead of downwards for help. Granted, gods are dangerous to deal with in their own right, doubly so if you’re having to appeal to eldritch abominations rather than your bog-standard comprehensible pantheon-inhabiting deities. Read the contracts carefully, be really cautious how you exploit them, good luck!
Some places just don’t allow coming back from the dead all the way, of course. On the other hand, many of them allow undeath, just not re-life. It’s an interesting trade-off. You have trouble with the sunlight, healing magics often make you burn, you look like, well, a corpse, and at least someone is bound to exist for the sole purpose of making creatures like you miserable—but on the plus side, you often get nifty powers, lose a bunch of the physical limitations of your normal form, and have serious badass factor. Extra credit if you pulled yourself back through sheer willpower alone; that’s always good for some respect, and respect means Dramatic Necessity might take a liking to you. Just avoid zombification; it never ends well.
And if your world does reincarnation, consider abusing that. No, I don’t mean those spells that bring you back as a badger, I mean wheel-of-life, soul-in-another-body reincarnation. If you can find some sort of way to keep your personality and your memories intact going from one to the next, you can just displace whatever part of your new self isn’t you and start in from there—or, if you want to lie low for a while, even cohabit with and maybe subvert the new guy. Throws your average protagonist for a loop, particularly when they’ve gotten to like your host before becoming aware of your presence.
Death doesn’t have to be the end of your villainy, and even if you don’t expect it to happen to you, you may as well plan for it. Isn’t it usually said that the contingency you actually do something about will never come up?
