Basing NPC villains on characters from other media

Comments in one of Grognardia James posts this week had me pondering my “rip-offs” of personalities for use in my own games. Having grown up as a comic freak, it was only natural that colorful villains would be an important part of many of my D&D games. Characters who gained arch-enemies would often get the rare treat of battling it out with bad guys in a tavern, back alley, temple, or city street instead of the usual forest or dungeon chamber.

I created a multitude of unique NPC’s, but for bad guys I would occasionally base them around other personalities from other media.

In the 80’s I based an entire group of baddies on an 80’s X-Men assassin group called “The Marauders.” The Marauders in the comic had attacked NYC’s sewer mutants, pretty much wiping them out. So my homage to this was “The Children of Trouble,” a group of powerful high level, magic-item wielding bad guys who were created by an evil rival kingdom in response to the good kingdom’s access to the services of the player character party and to generally be engines of chaos in foreign lands. There was a high level monk, assassin, gladiator, and cleric in the “Children,” and most memorably also a +5 iron spear-wielding ogre who wore gauntlets of giant strength. When the ogre fought characters in the crowded streets, his weapon would slay bystanders and knock bricks from buildings when it missed the players. The player party and the bad guy group had several memorable combat encounters over that campaign, including one on the city streets when The Children of Trouble were instructed to massacre elves that lived in the city.

One of my regular players, Alan, had read those X-Men comics and was fairly snarky about the fact that I had based something on it (even though, in fact, it was the idea of the group more than the characters that I used). But what the hell, the other players loved having combats that came off like something out of a comic book, rather than the usual sword and shield dungeon slug fests.

One of my favorite baddy groups, also of the 80s’ got based on the three villains from Superman 2. I turned general Zod and his two cronies into a small party of evil adventurer’s who were hired to steal a magical portrait, headquartering in a dungeon that the party had to go into to fight them. “Zod” was a high level thief, a kinky lady sorceress with a magical, mind-controlled length of rope that could attack, and a big dumb, mute fighter with a 18/00 strength. All had variations of black leather armor. The female, Desmadonna, actually managed to escape getting killed and showed up for many years from time to time. Eventually she even became queen (in a memorable early 90’s game) of a small, evil-controlled pleasure town known as the “Pleasure Dome” out in the desert. I still have the great, sexy figure I used for her, and hope to have her show up again some day soon.

This evil bad guy homage was actually very well received by the players, and they especially loved Desmadonna (maybe that was how she escaped alive).

I can’t think of any such homages from the later 90’s, or from my recent return to gaming, but you never know what I might have subconsciously done. I think it is just fine to base ideas on the ideas of others (The American Way?), as long as it makes for colorful, memorable characters and fun gaming, why the hell not?