The "Your Stories Should Have" series attempts to explore fundamental elements of storytelling, with a particular emphasis on how it fits into games (but not exclusively so).

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When I was in college, I had to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Honestly, I don't think I understood most of it, if not any of it, but there was one thing that stuck out to me. In the final pages of the novel, the narrator recounts the dying Kurtz's last words incorrectly to his fiancé. Instead of pointing out the true nature of Kurtz' demise, he provides her with a romanticized picture of a monster.

Blackwood's Magazine, where Heart of Darkness was originally published. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

For context, the novel is set in the Congo Free State (or, rather, a fictitious version of it), and Kurtz is a villainous figure who has created a sort of cult for himself. Mad, but powerful, he has begun to rule with an iron fist and has made himself out as a divine figure among the natives, who fear and worship him because of his extreme power.

This contrasts from what the outside world thinks of Kurtz: they believe that he has gone to Africa to spread the light of civilization, as he himself has proclaimed as his task. However, in practice Kurtz has fallen to corruption, perhaps of internal origin, and his original mission–fundamentally flawed in its preconceived notions of the world as civilized Europe versus uncivilized Africa–is lost with his corruption.

There has been criticism of Conrad's work, and several adaptations of it deconstruct and analyze the fundamental themes in different ways, but it raises some good points for any writer or storyteller.

As, predominantly, a game designer, I find myself frequently forced to deal with how I can appeal to a broad audience and still meet certain mechanical requirements to storytelling. It's important to remember that part of a fun of the game is having the ability to do what you want, and this means that the player has to be invested in the story. However, as someone who's also done a fair amount of writing, I recognize that it's equally important to create a compelling villain, and pure evil reads poorly.

Nuanced versus Overt Evil

To paraphrase something I once read (and can't remember the source of for the life of me): "Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking that they're going to do evil."

Of course, this is an over-generalization, and I don't think it necessarily matches reality, but it's a good point to make.

I've seen a lot of stories in which the villain is too evil. There's none of the nuance of Milton's Lucifer, who is cursed for his hubris but also dreams of great accomplishments. Instead, the villain is motivated purely by profit, or hatred, or existential despair.

That's not to say that these things make poor motives for villains, but they're not things that stem from a vacuum. A villain motivated only by profit really has no reason to be evil; they may profit off of things that cause great harm to others, but they don't have evil intent. The harm they cause to others is really just cosmic negligence, a side-effect of their rapacity. It's also not sensible for those villains to cause too much harm: bad PR will kill you just as quickly as a vengeful hero figure, and profits dry up when you kill the people you sell your products to. You need to have a good reason for why the villain deliberately hurts others, and why it matters.

I've read horrible drivel where a villain uses their power as the head of a corporation to execute a vast revenge plot for profit. It's one or the other: your villain uses the resources at their disposal to pursue evil, or they use the resources at their disposal to pursue profit. Think of Marvel's Kingpin: he justifies any action in pursuit of his agenda, but his agenda is power. He could be a good guy if he played by the rules and had a good goal, but his amoral approach to business and his sociopathic tendencies make him evil.

Compelling villains are often tragic, and the source of their evil is one of the parts of that tragedy. It's also worth noting that in the wake of the totalitarianism and extremism of the 20th century, telling stories of unrecognized evil seems more important than ever.

The strongest villains are those who can be mistaken for heroes when they're seen in the right light. This justifies a lot of storytelling tropes as well.

An Example

One of my favorite characters I've ever written is a villain who went by the name of Conrad Krieger. I was running a group for a roleplaying game called Degenesis, and Krieger was a Spitalian, a member of a militant order of doctors who banded together to fight the horrors of the apocalypse.

Krieger was a Spitalian of some status, and loosely based on Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Following a demotion for political reasons, he had disappeared behind enemy lines along with a detachment of men. The players were sent to check up on him and figure out what was going on.

It took them quite a while to figure out that Krieger had gone rogue; he sent them on increasingly dark missions while making an excuse that he just hadn't had the time to report in. At first, the players believed him to be what he made himself out to be: a beleaguered commander just trying to keep his outpost from falling to enemies.

However, clues began to flow in. Krieger's consort was a smuggler who peddled Burn, a semi-supernatural substance that also causes spiritual and physical corruption (and brief bursts of tremendous power). His missions that involved "diplomacy" became increasingly more complicated: the players were never given any tools to negotiate and the people they encountered had more experience with Krieger and distrusted them for being his emissaries.

Meanwhile, Krieger was all charm with the players. He never had a hard word for them, always had a way to spin things in his favor, always manipulated them into confrontation with his adversaries. Cracks began to show in the facade, but the players never had a good way of acting on them. One caught a glimpse of a stigmata, the tell-tale sign of Burn use, on Krieger's chest. Another talked to Krieger's consort, who in addition to being a smuggler was a mystic and had become obsessed with an image of a great abomination. The only character who had begun to see through his facade entirely was killed in a chance encounter with a rival faction (sectarian religious conflicts being a great cause for bloodshed).

In the end, Krieger won the conflict with the players' characters. His final act with them was to give them chemical weapons and set them against one of the primitive tribes opposing him (who were, admittedly, overtly evil in their own right), letting them complete one final bit of dirty work for him before he sent them back home.

Even though the rest of the story led the players away from Krieger's domain, they would plot plans to kill him or otherwise dismantle his power from afar for the rest of the campaign, largely fruitlessly. I would use him in another game of Degenesis to similar effect, and I have found the character to be a good model for other stories as well.

Krieger's nuance came in the form of his dual nature. While he was ostensibly seeking to purify and protect, he was actually destroying out of malicious hatred. As the game went on, I came up with plausible reasons for this (his wife had been a spy, and when this was uncovered it led to his demotion), but the important point was that he could justify his actions by pretending to be pursuing good and noble goals and chalk up the problems with his plans to flawed execution or the cruelty of reality.

The strength of this character laid in the fact that he was evil to the core, but had a facade over him. The nuanced evil made the struggle against Krieger even more personal to the players, and it led to social and political intrigue that went beyond a shallow plot-line like those that I had typically used in games.

Wrapping Up

A nuanced evil has a more compelling role in a story than an overt, raw evil. While it's not necessary to create sympathy for a character who is evil, it does help to develop their motivations if they have some non-evil agenda at their core.

Evil is too powerful a thing to leave out of a story (even a tragic story, where the villain confronting the hero may not be evil, will have at least an element of evil in the corruption that befalls the hero), but without some nuance it creates plot holes and shallow characterizations.