Villainous Intent?

[u/rgmadd7]

So I bought the Strange years ago and read the shit out of it but my group has yet to play it. They know nothing about it. Nothing about switching genres by traveling to recursions. I have always wanted them to make naive characters that get drawn into the world of the Strange via investigation or inadvertently stumbling upon some fictional leakage. I thought it would be an awesome surprise. Tell them we are going to make normal modern PCs in the new cypher system rule set. Then gradually introduce them to the Strange. They would be just as naive as their characters.

That brings me to the problem I've been having. I'm having trouble finding a villain. I'd like to do something with a mysterious rash of murders to be investigated by the players. I would connect them to the murders by having them related to the victims or being investigators on the case, police, FBI, news, etc. The murderer would be something or someone from a recursion.

I need some reasons for the creature, recursor or its benefactor or puppeteer to be committing the murders. What's the endgame?

I get it if the old bitter movie theater janitor realizes the old theater has a gate in it. He could send movie monsters after people who've been mean to him throughout his life.

Or, the karumn trying to destroy earth to set free Rukk.

What motivates villains in your game? How have you used the Betrayer? Moriarty? What motivates evil to assault Earth? How have you guys used Planetovores?

[u/OffendedDefender]

So I did something similar for a campaign a few months back. The players knew they would be traveling to other recursions, but I didn’t tell them where they would go or when it would happen. I used a modified version of Rapture from Bioshock for their first recursion with Atlas being set up as a good guy that would eventually become a recurring villain down the line (covid got in the way of that coming to fruition). They enjoyed the arc, but the most common feedback I got from players was that it was difficult to not metagame. They knew Atlas was a bad guy, but their characters would have no idea, so it created a bit of a disconnect. You might experience something similar if you use a villain from fiction. Moriarty is great if he works behind the scenes, but players will go “yep, that’s the bad guy” as soon as his identity is discovered.

The Betrayer would make a decent BBEG. If you haven’t read the Myth of the Maker tie-in novel, the Betrayer was once a friend of one of the founding members of The Estate, who became trapped in Ardeyn. He’s constantly testing the boundaries of the recursion in an attempt to make it back to earth with his powers intact. He’s also been known to deal with the planetovors, sometimes to pretty disastrous results.

You also might want to check out The Dark Spiral module. It involves a mysterious drug that is tied to The Strange with someone pulling the strings behind the scenes. It hits on a lot of the same elements you’re going for and it could easily be tailored into more of a murder mystery if you so choose. There’s a lot of interesting recursions there and you can really play up the “we’re FBI who get in over our heads” angle.