Believable Villains

Light and Dark can be found in everyone. It can be fun to have a villain that is pure evil, with no redeeming qualities. In such cases the players don't have anything to feel guilty about when they defeat the villain. However, in mortals (and immortals if you take your cosmology cue from most polytheistic religions) Good and Evil can be found within everyone.

Your co-worker is an incompetent slacker at work, but he volunteers at a children's hospital. Your boss is a heartless fiend, reveling in firing subordinates . . . but she always gives money to the homeless on her way home. The paladin is a paragon of Justice . . . but he delights in tormenting those he views as "lesser". And the necromancer holding that village in thrall while he turns them into a monstrous army . . . he sends a portion of the life energy he drains to his ancestral home to be used to ensure healthy crops in a region where the water dried up. They don't know where the gifts come from or what their source of power is, but without them those in the village would die of hunger.

Giving your villains a soft spot, or even just a bit of Light in some form, will make them more believable and give the players a little more material to role-play with when they learn of it.

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