#villain within

[neilcaiman]

Villain Within GM's commentary:

The Furies

The Furies werent originally intended to appear more than once or twice in the campaign; instead their concepts were largely intended to just be average examples of supervillains in Delburn- during the events of the first session (elsewhere), The heavy-hitter Grindstone and the leader Nightmare would be killed in the conflict that would effectively mark the inciting incident of the main plotline of the campaign. However while everyone was making their character, Marsh's player told me that he wanted Marsh to have been raised by her aunt, a supervillain who ended up leaving Marsh to die on a mission. Inspiration struck and i made Marsh's aunt Grindstone- it was an elegant fit and ended up laying the foundation for some of my favourite NPCs of the campaign.

Nightmare

Nightmare is perhaps the least developed character whos getting a paragraph, because he only appeared once in the campaign, as a corpse. He has the ability to appear to every person as the creature they fear the most, with physical abilities to match, which i came up with after a little workshopping for 'powerful scary ability thats harder to beat as a team than alone'.

he was largely just a classic evil villain but he also got, like, one oddly interesting piece of charactarisation when i panicked and realised Marsh wouldnt have ever seen his face (because shed see a bigass wolf) so for her to recognise his corpse i made up off the cuff an anecdote about her walking in on him painting a self-portrait. and its like damn. sits down. yeah he would do that wouldnt he.

Also the plot twist of the cancelled halloween oneshot set in the 80s would have been that he used to be this superhero sidekick.

Tlaloc

The New Frontiers character/superpower concept that would go into Tlaloc was referred to as 'tactile homogenous bond property induction' (short, sweet, rolls off the tongue, ladies love it) with the ability to induce heat, coolness, rigidity, softness etc etc into any material upon touch and was a timid but determined student who would eventually end up being part of proto-link's hivemind.

she had no actual plot significance but i had a pretty sickass animatic planned of her taking on the vastly more skilled proto-evolution in a wizard duel tournament and getting him on the ropes before inevitably being beaten by his bullshit expertise. as a side note every time i say 'o fuck' im referencing the ending sequence of that animatic.

anyway i ended up keeping exactly none of her (imo great) characterisation (i might reuse it tbh) for a planned hero within villain campaign (not Villain Within), where her power would belong to Tlaloc, a suave gentlethem armoured cyborg supervillain with an Aztec theme weilding a macahuitl. I ended up not joining that campaign for scheduling reasons, so i reused the concept for Villain within.

As a subordinate supervillain, i ended up ditching the suaveness in favour of making Tlaloc and Overclock a dynamic duo of standard examples of the kinds of supervillains the setting produced. Tlaloc was a brazillian master thief who got kidnapped by a gang and fled to the US to escape, only to end up confined to a darth-vader style life support armour. (i would later reuse the armour concept for Treacle)

They were intended to be twice the strength of the party initially (so that them and Overclock combined would be the party's match) (matched set do not seperate). in terms of personality, i didnt really have a good feel for them, so i ended up just going for them being a person Marsh just doesnt know very well, but is broadly reliable as a coworker.

A ditched alternative to the joaquin kidnapping arc would have included the party having to go into their mind to escape some brainwashing thing but it was scrapped bc it was more than a little hamfisted.

Overclock

Overclock is one of the many, many characters that came from the same rp character concept. (this is the reason why Overclock's outfit has a wind-up knob on it, while ReWind-up's outfit has a clock on it) Like Tlaloc she was intended to be an average supervillain, having the ability to make things more or less efficient at will, letting her break machinary and grant temporary superspeed.

Inspired by (what else) Worm, i ended up making it so that she joined the Furies as a teenager, and has stayed in it to (young) adulthood. Now the secret sauce to Overclock's charactarisation was that she is, on most accounts, a pretty normal woman. She doesnt have a job or much friends outside of her supervillainy stuff, so she's chummy with her work bestie, Tlaloc, and tried to stay on good terms with her emo coworker Marsh. The sleight of hand lies in the superpower- Overclock speaks at twice normal speed (this was kind of a paint to play) and consequently comes across as enthusiastic and even a little excitable, despite the fact that her actual words and actions are like. relaxed and friendly at most.

A fun setpiece in the campaign involved Marsh getting boosted by Overclock's powers as part of a bank robbery. I kind of failed at making the party like Overclock, despite being imo one of the more personable characters in the campaign, and eventually when Igneous did his big 5D chess manouvre to take control of the city while revealing his identity to the party, she and Tlaloc were unfortunately sacrificed at the alter of narrative stakes and got blown up. Honestly shes like the one character in the campaign that im sad died. She hid Marsh's fuckup from Grindstone!! She was so chill! and for what???

Grindstone

Shes Big. Shes Bad. Shes a Boomer. Shes a horrible person and worse foster parent give it up for- Grindstone!! Proto-grindstone came from a pretty simple gripe that occured to me while concepting New Frontiers; the fact that everybody with superman powerset fights in exactly the same, boring way- fly up to someone and punch, maybe float up slightly higher and punch. maybe throw someone around a bit. God Forbid you kick!! Literally we are dealing with super strength and the ability to levitate and move your body on every axis here!!! Even on the ground, where the humble punch is the most efficient way of delivering a heavy blow to another person, there are a million billion different variations!!!

Proto-grindstone rejected the superman style of forward punching and instead was like a human spinning top- accelerating her body through any and every axis available, doing 720 degree backward kicks to deliver as much built-up momentum on each earthshattering impact as possible. the personality came easily from there- in Frontiers, people built their own superpower for a purpose; it was something that defined you. Proto-grindstone designed her power to be something that let her win as many fights as possible- a mathematically perfect brute.

She ended up being the sister to proto-ghostknight; like an azula+zuko situation, but older, and without Azula's untrustworthy+manipulative swag; Proto-ghostknight was timid because he was uncertain of his right to use his powers, while Proto-grindstone was a blunt object, completely sure of herself.

This characterisation was so perfect for a supervillain that it ended up being put almost verbatim into Villain Within, with only minor changes; Grindstone is in her late 40s, and usually makes a point to avoid going full butterfly knife most the time because its more convenient for her to kill people with more straightforward strikes.

Marsh's player established that Grindstone left March to die and i was like. say less king. and the rest of her personality developed from there. Grindstone is a person who can just straight up kill you. if youre talking to grindstone you are never more than half a second away from your head parting ways with your body. and grindstone is very much used to this!

Grindstone sees herself as being the sole reasonable person in a world gone mad (in typical boomer fashion), and both expects and deeply looks down upon the way people around her make accomodations for her to avoid getting mulched. She threatens people into giving her what she wants and decides afterwards if she was joking. She does not have a single self-reflective bone in her body.

After rolling ridiculously well on perception after the first main fight of the campaign, Marsh miraculously managed to steal a car and drive her way into interrupting the inciting incident of the campaign, and unintentionally caused her Aunt's (supposed) death as the latter attempted to save her from the collateral damage of the fight going on. Frankly this is one my favourite emotional beats in the entire campaign and im so glad it happened. the absolute devestation. it couldnt have gone better.

Anyway Grindstone lived bitch, kidnapped Marsh's roommate to get her attention (causing some lovely relationship drama that i still cannot believe ended as non-badly as it did) (genuinely Nina telling the cops about Marsh was on the cards) and came back to attempt to rekindle the furies and get Marsh back as one of the members.

I got to play Grindstone as the horrible horrible horrible person she is- implicitly threatening at all times, with zero respect for anyone who isnt her, and got to keep her as a near-constant threat in Marsh's life- something she cant beat in a fight, someone she cares about, and which she cant avoid. genuinely shes so perfect as something to show a different side of Marsh it was such a good idea of their player to play up that dynamic.

On the other side of the dynamic ofc was Grindstone- who after taking a massive loss and almost dying was dealing absolutely horribly, although it wasnt so much clear to the players, who instead got to, after the Igenous reveal, see her life going broadly downhill, with her organisation gone and Igneous sending teams to make sure she never got a moment's rest, even if he couldnt outright kill her. This gave me this great wounded predator of a character to play with- the players got to tiptoe around her, unpredictable as both a potential asset and a threat. She didnt show up in the final battle, for various reasons, which suited her character but honestly i am sad i never got to pit her against the party- i had to design her character sheet very in-depth so that she was beatable without compromising her established power level from previous appearences.

One of the more unintended results of Grindstone's characterisation is that she has. unintentionally somewhat effected my irl mannerisms. i play Grindstone by intentionally relaxing my body as much as possble and speaking with a honey-thick confidence, a wide smile and what i can only hope resembles a southern USamerican accent. Now. all of this, minus the accent, is the mannerism i put on when im trying to get friendly with someone i dont know, so once or twice i have tried to get someone to like me and accidently put on a slight accent. this is mortally embarrassing but i dont think anyone has noticed. so far.

[erinwantstowrite]

okay so alighterwood started playing twisted wonderland which not only reminded me that i have to finish my twst wonderland jurrassic ayuu fic but ALSO gave me brain rot for Tim Drake in twisted wonderland do you see the vision. im looking directly into your eyes oh so autistically do you see my vision. im communicating telepathically do you see what i'm saying here

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

hey guys it's silver vanrouge from the hit disney mobile game twisted wonderland

Comes in three variants: Blonde and Obsessive, Silver but Blonde, and Original who was originally blonde✨

[anistarrose]

to me, the most fascinating (and utterly unintentional) feature of TAZ Balance's narrative structure is the way that on the first listen, Tres Horny Boys are the audience surrogates because they, much like us, have no idea what the fuck is going on, but on all subsequent relistens, then Lucretia, and sometimes Barry, and arguably especially Lup in the umbrella become the new audience stand-ins, because just like us, they are, in fact, painfully aware of what the fuck is going on :)

[geniemillies]

we're going to pretend im not late for day 6 of @sjmvillainweek, sense of style. i needed to contribute bc..fashion is my passion 💁🏻‍♀️✨

but i didn't render or anything bc i would die 🫶 i gave up midway.. also clythia wasn't supposed to be here but she held me at sword point demanding i make the very first depiction of clythia ever (that i know of)

KoH really out here making all his commanders female. i see you feminist kiiing 🙂‍↕️

they're very much giving these emojis 👯‍♂️🧍‍♂️👫

[orenjineechan]

Yami Bakura being a chaotic cat person.

[rarepears]

Since this blog is clearly on a "what kind of weird system can we give Shen Jiu" kick, let me introduce you to this other Chinese webnovel system genre - I call it genre but you can also call it a fad because it was everywhere at one point - where a person would get a system that would assign them missions to spend XXX amount of money in XXX time.

Gifting the money and donating money obviously don't count as completing the mission. And it the money has to be spent for personal use, not on behalf a company or other people.

If Shen Jiu gotten that system upon joining Cang Qiong... well his reputation for being a rich scion would be signed, sealed and delivered. And he would be constantly lambasted for always spending money and shopping instead of focusing on his cultivation - and it's no wonder he has so many qi deviations tsk tsk.

But hey, Shen Jiu can buy all the world's most expensive cultivation tools and rare plants now without batting an eye. He just has to outbid that An Ding head disciple (that has the entire Cang Qiong budget at his disposal) at the auction.

The two become such big enemies that Shen Jiu doesn't even have the idea of buying all those rare demonic ingredients and material from Shang Qinghua later down the road when his missions become even more difficult to fulfill.

[jasonsbruce]

[muffinlance]

Read "Suki, Alone". Liked it in general. But can they please, please hire someone who knows both the show's actual events and how to follow through on a character arc? Because guys. Guys. That comic is not implying about Suki what they meant it to be implying, and all because of literally one line.

So like. From a writer's standpoint:

What they meant to do: show Suki as a community-oriented person who cares for her people, and believes in everyone succeeding together.

As opposed to (spoilers): the thief girl they set her up in contrast with, who's pretty upfront and consistent on primarily looking out for herself. She betrays Suki for one (1) corn chip to improve her own life at the prison, no surprise.

But the problem is: they give Suki an inspirational line to the effect of "we're all working together and we'll all break out together"

You know

The thing she does not do in the show

So if both the show and this comic are canon, then instead of setting up a compare/contrast with the thief girl, they've just set up a comparison. One were Suki is arguably worse, because she's been leading a significant number of prisoners on with her "we'll all fight and win our freedom together!" business, only to straight up cut them out of the escape loop and abandon them, whereas the thief is only leading Suki on in the sense that Suki keeps telling her what it's morally correct to think and confuses snide replies with agreement

My dudes. My fellow writers. You people actually being paid for this. There were so many ways to fix those awful implications against our girl's character, the simplest of which would be to not include that line. Or they could have, you know, made it canon compliant with what actually happens in the show, so that this comic doesn't set Suki up as a betrayer instead of a community builder. Like... just send all her good prison buddies off to other prisons in the wake of the warden finding out they're colluding. Have it timed to be right before the next new prisoners arrive, thus setting it immediately before the Boiling Rock episodes, so Suki didn't have anyone left in the prison she'd want to take with her on a breakout. For bonus points, include a page or two of her and her Kyoshi warriors opening up the cell of one of her prison friends post-war, thus implying she's tracking down and actually fulfilling her promises. Maybe even show her doing the same with thief girl, who was established as being imprisoned on false charges anyway, and also showing that Suki is A) the bigger person, and B) willing to acknowledge her own role in mistakes (because I cannot emphasize enough how much thief girl was not hiding her own priorities, and it was Suki who approached HER with all this, not the girl ever doing anything special to weasel her way in) (this would also open up an opportunity for paralleling Suki's earlier in-comic mistake of not listening to one of her friend's very valid thoughts and feeling, which lead to the girl leaving their island alone pre-canon; a "seeing people as they are, not what you want them to be" moment)

Anyway yeah enjoyable enough for a quick read but another one for the "this can't be canon or the characters are So Much Worse than they were in the actual show" pile

At least Aang didn't promise to murder anyone in this one

[neilcaiman]

Villain Within GM's Commentary:

The Major Minors

One of the first things that went into the creative pot of Villain Within was the choices system in the Mass Effect trilogy; if you choose to save zarnak from the turbo-moose in the first game instead of pursuing the sector's premier hygno-gem thief, in the third game, when the nydrongian conflict seems inevitable, zarnak will come out of nowhere to save the high cryptarch of Alpha Centuri! it makes for a very solid and measurable feeling of having your choices matter that really got me hooked, and which i really wanted to capture for my campaign. Another big influence on the campaign was the web serial Worm by wildbow, which really went big on giving a genuine-feeling portrait of teenagers risking their lives to fight supervillains in a world where teens risking their lives wasnt completely uncommon- and a world where they could very well die- the Brockton Bay Wards (apt viewers may also notice that Delburn is like. very similar to brockton bay in general). Armed with these two principles, an idea occured very naturally to me while cooking up the campaign- a teenage superhero team who might not survive.

Sunforce

Like most of the characters, Proto-sunforce was a major character in the New Frontiers story concept, a headstrong bruiser who was cocky but kind, and who would have been part of a team senior to the protagonists, including proto-evolution and proto-scrapmetal. She also would have had a tragic romance with proto-Biobrute, but ill describe that in more depth when i get to them. honestly the only thing i really kept between the two versions of the character was her powers; she can make luminous doubles of her torso and limbs that may overlap with both one another, but must overlap with the original, giving her superhuman durability, strength, speed and making her a nightmare to fight in melee. the Villain within version is basically Captain America if he was an 18 yr old with anxiety and a saviour complex- she frantically tries to de-escalate fights even while throwing punches and (in my opinion) manages to toe the line exactly between being hopelessly idealistic and dangerously competent- something which really took the party by surprise [ :) ]. I ended up also making her civilian identity a friend of Nina- the overworked med student roommate of Marsh, one of the PCs. This was largely because i wanted to make the world more interconnected, but also partly because it occured to me that they would get along well.

Ghost Knight

Ghost knight has maybe the funniest discrepancy between his New Frontiers and Villain Within charactarisation- Proto-ghost knight is this Soren/Zuko hybrid, determined to make up for the crimes of his family (and his ruthless azula-esque sister, proto-grindstone) and willing to tear his family legacy down to do what's right. By contrast, in Villain Within, Ghost Knight is basically a 2013 Sasuke kinnie with enough bravery and sickass superpowers to back it up. In a running theme with the major minors, the players didnt take him very seriously until he sliced their getaway vehicle in two with a single blow, and even then continued to make fun of him, albeit from a safer distance.

Techno-Boy

Techno-boy is quite the oddity in this campaign, because he wasnt developed out of a New frontiers character or even rp character- in the early stages of development, Villain within was going to be set in the same universe as Hero Within: Heroes Rising, and Techno-Boy was intended to be a returning character from that campaign; the little brother of the PC hero Soulcide, Asher Hue, who was often referred to in-game as 'The Boy' and demonstrated an affinity with gadgets. His initial charactersation was largely taken from Asher himself, with much of his hero design coming from Kid Win from Worm; a spider-man style quipping boy genius, with a list of personalised taunts that i prepared ahead of each session he appeared in. Completely unexpectedly, Techno-Boy had some pretty major character development- later on in the campaign, when after the Abomination Event left large parts of the city in ruins, he appeared helping Rewind-up 'Homeless Columbo Spiderman' fight off the party, and i suddenly found while reading his quips that he was like. genuinely mean-spirited with his taunts now, rather than just having fun? and yeah suddenly i found myself with a 15 year old who had become jaded and down in the face of a city getting worse every day, but who still tried to put on a brave face for the people who looked up to him. and i was like fuck. Anyway this sudden depth he developed made him the perfect candidate to be impersonated by the shapeshifter Nightlock when he tried to get information out of the (now defected) PC Velocity with an imitation of Techno-Boy's previously genuine cheer.

Miss Mist

Funnily enough, for the very last character to be put on the 'Major players of delburn' list on the discord, the character concept Miss Mist (Valentina, to the party) comes from is by far the oldest. The Endermaster was a minecraft OC i made when i was around 11 (before i even knew such a thing existed) to the song 'Skyfall'. he was an enderman/human hybrid with the ability to dissociate his body into 'enderparticles' with the ability to teleport objects they touched. He then proceeded to be my go-to RP character on the bungie.net forums (in hindsight it was very funny that I, an 11 year old, was taking offense at being accused of being 13) and was used as a side character in various later rps. When one of my players at the beginning of the campaign informed me his character Sandtrap (capable of dissociating his body into particles of sand) was a ruthless killer with two young children, I was immedately like. One Of Them Will Get The Endermaster Powers. And He Will Unknowingly Fight Them. The unlucky preteen ended up being Valentina, a 9 year old who the party would have ample time to get to know when comedic mishaps resulted in them babysitting the pair of children while they did supervillainous stuff without letting the kids know about it (so that Sandtrap would retain partial custody of his kids). This also provided a few nice moments including Marsh choosing to shield the kids from a malfunctioning robot with her human body (rather than expose her werewolf form) and Sandtrap getting the kids Mcdonalds. however disaster would strike when Sandtrap dropped out of the campaign! fortunately due to the party's previous involvement i managed to stick the kids to Nina (part of the Marsh Extended Universe) by having her become their babysitter while Sandtrap was off making Operation Desert Storm literal. this all ended up fitting together brilliantly in the end though! when the Abomination Event happened, it let me have the kids and Nina all in one place for the party to try and rescue from the abominations- The party fights off the abomination while Saviour tries to evacuate the building, and via their (honestly very impressive) efforts, almost everyone is saved! save for Valentina, who is nowhere to be found, leaving half the party to fruitlessly claw through the rubble to find her. (sorry marsh!) Then after that, the mysterious (mist-erious) monstrosity Mister appears and acts erratically all over the place, lashing out, unable to speak or commuicate at all until she corners Marsh in the midst of a heated battle (a happy coincidence was that her powers deal Sonic damage, which is Marsh's weakness) and they have a very melodramatic confrontation that ended up resolving with with tears all around. So it all worked out well in the end!

Bio-Brute

Frontiers' Proto-BioBrute, who is also proto-proto-Bookkeeper, was an ecology-themed magic scientist in doomed yuri romance with proto-Sunforce, and had the ability to assimilate the physical traits of animals into her own body for a short time, making her laboratory largely resemble a victorian zoo. Needless to say, hubris and angst and tragedy would have happened and she would have ended up an ever-mutating monstrosity ripe for 200,000 word fix-it aus on ao3. While the tragedy of her character never went anywhere, and much of her sci-fi horror monster material went into proto-bookkeeper and eventually bookkeeper himself, the powerset and mix of academic curiosity with eventual animalisticness found itself a new form in Bio-Brute, the Major Minors' ever-changing monstrosity. Now, it is just now occuring to me that the players never found about this, but a major defining character trait of Bio-Brute is that they are Six Year Old lab experiment; they appear to be an unintelligent bully of a hero, while their actions are actually those of a remarkably bright child with very impressive anger-management skills. Bio-brute's powers were also a hoot to play with; because they adapted to every foe they faced, i got to really play with designing a monster ideally suited for defeating the party. Unfortunately the players were very good at planning their escape from their employer Igneous, so i never ended up being able to use the setpiece i had prepared around them being ordered to hunt down Bio-Brute in their (believed) civilian identity, a burly delinquent very protective of his seemingly innocent younger sibling, who would have a very weak stomach for their brother putting himself on the line for their safety.

Endnote

it might not be clear from the way i detailed these characters in the post but i really did succeed on the mass-effect style 'choices matter' element of the Major Minors' whole deal; honestly im still impressed that none of them ended up dying; in their first appearence Bio-Brute was almost beheaded by Sandtrap and the party considered killing several members at various points, never actually getting around to it. Igneous's plan involved killing all of them, and it was only via some very clever scheming that the party got out from igneous's thumb before they had to go through with said plans. I had plans for if one member died, if all of them died, if all but one member died (my second favourite outcome) etc. and their survival did very much come back to effect the players later on in the campaign! Nina and Velocity both got rescued by Sunforce at one point, the Major Minor's contributions offscreen during the Abomination Event was a big part of the party getting to the big fight as quickly as they did, and if the players had been defeated in the final battle against igneous, The Major Minors would have been the ones to rescue them, at great personal cost, leading to a (sadly(?)) never-realised arc where igneous would hunt the party down personally.

[luck-of-the-drawings]

OOH YEAH BABY ITS THE SURGERY EPISODE BABY!!! ME AND THE HOMIES NEED SOME NEW FACES FOR OUR NEW PLAN, AND WHO BETTER TO GET THE JOB DONE THAN THE TWO MOST EVIL PEOPLE WE'VE EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF HAVING OUR LIVES VIOLATED BY? I MEAN IT WOULD BE FUNNY. IT WOULD BE FUNNY.

[the-silver-peahen-residence]

||Villain's charms for his officer||

~Reserved Rp with @within-the-resort ~

Villain Izuku sighed sitting in his chair to think of what he was going to do today. Their was a lot he could do but nothing really came to mind yet. Maybe find a new toy? Or maybe get back on his mission of being after the heroes. He didn't know but he'll figure something out while looking curious towards it.

Though, he was just minding his own business till something exciting happens. Or maybe he could check on his 'new target' from town and see how he was doing.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

need a hardened respectful fujo to sit down with james mcavoy and discuss cherik with him insteada this peanut gallery cause if i have to hear people laugh about a gay ship one more time i just might eat rocks

[ghostbeam]

Keigo who unconsciously allows his mask to slip around u one time, just forgets the whole guy next door, fastest hero shtick for just a second and you find it hilarious, refreshing even. So obviously he becomes completely obsessed with u over it.

[ask-squidbeaks-agents]

// And Vill4ins newest design!! I decided on adding a few extras to both her design and lore wise- Especially with that new "Code name" which is what she refers to herself within the AU (Admiral is a much higher rank than Captain so she outranks her brother) However outside the AU I will still just call her Vill4in or V4 Also the binary code in her eye isn't just random :) (oh yeah I kinda fuck up the code a little lol so its 01001000 01100101 01101100 01110000 00100000 01101101 01100101 )

[druidonity2]

What if I were mentally ill and void of the light's presence and hung out with Alleria Windrunner wouldn't that be really cool