Bad Boys

Question: What fun and memorable villains have your Bands encountered and overcome?

Oh, man, let's journey through the halls of NPCs!

The two perennial favorites, both dripping Epic Charisma and oozing charming villainy, are Jay Ortiz (a Scion of Tezcatlipoca) and Kane Taoka (a Scion of Amaterasu). Kane's one of White Wolf's started antagonists, but he's gone through quite a barrel of transformations in our games, starting with his marriage to Alison Margaritas, continuing on through Geoff Matheson and his band foiling his plan to raise Atlantis, and continuing on until the present day, when Geoff's band has realized that they have no idea where he is or what he's up to and they should really check before something blows up in their faces. In contrast to the one band's relative successes against Kane, various bands have historically fared poorly with Jay; he killed the entire complement of Jolie-Pitt children, fucked up Sora's band's business in Japan when he was visiting, and is currently in a sort of cold war of dislike with Geoff, who can't do anything to him with Sangria apt to interfere.

Of course, both of them also help PCs sometimes; Jay acts as mentor to Geoff's daughter (what he doesn't know won't hurt him, right?) and Kane has been known to help various Scions when it suits his purpose. Darn these shades-of-grey villains!

The Spring King, king of one of the fairy courts, was one of our more terrifying villains, having raped Kettila, stalked the band across the country and then tortured Aurora to within an inch of her life. Luckily for everyone's peace of mind, he was vaporized by Aten when Aurora used Deus Ex Machina to call for help, but his spectre lingers on; everyone in the band has an extraordinarily itchy trigger finger for all fairies of his particular species, and more than once Illusion has been used to summon up his image and make people run screaming off into the trees.

The most hilarious villains are usually other Scions; there's a lot of fun to be had for a player in besting someone on his level and then waving it in their face as much as possible. Geoff was at odds with Victor Fingers, a Scion of Ares, for years after the latter challenged him and Sangria to a contest of athletics and was roundly beaten by a pregnant woman; they've only recently made up, after they came out even in a god-level contest of their war skills. Amleth, a mad Scion of Vidar who has been roaming the deep dark Norse forest for centuries and is haunted by the ghost of his mad father, ran into Aurora once and tried to kill her after he realized she could see the ghost, too and must be a witch; she retaliated by using Fate Prison to tie his father to the spot, preventing them from being able to leave (but oh, man, he is going to be so angry with her if he ever sees her again).

Now that they're gods, things are getting scary; PCs are starting to choose Titan Avatars as their enemies, which is a whole new ballgame. Sowiljr wants to go after Aten, Terminus recently gave the Fates the finger, Folkwardr plans to fight Surtr in person and Eztli has once again decided that this town ain't big enough for two bat-gods and Itzpapalotl has got to go. Those are villains that will be terribly difficult to overcome more than temporarily, but they've always set their sights high, these kids.

Also: Bladvaettr, a svartalfar with delusions of inclusion in Muspelheim, was meant to be a big bad villain with his plot to let the fire-realm open a door beneath Centralia, but he turned into a sad sympathy story. He was smitten with Kettila as soon as he saw her, begged her to marry him (to which she agreed to keep him distracted while Woody was cover-opping around underground), and then ended up getting murdered by the entire band on his wedding night when she led him into an ambush. RIP, Bladvaettr. Your life could have gone better.