Making the Setting: The Villains of the Piece (Part Three)

When setting up a meta-narrative, there's care that needs to be done upfront well before a reader sees your first release. The mastermind's chief lieutenants must, at first look, appear to be wholly independent and autonomous actors pursuing their own agenda of villainy. Only those taking a galactic perspective at how these schemes' effects interact, and at first that's not your reader; for all intents and purposes, those first few releases are stand-alone works with--at most--themes and motifs shared across them.

Your mastermind sorts aren't that varied. They split between Threat Without and Threat Within, or Warlord vs. Courtier. The rest is all shading on those differences, accounting for specifics of individual villain and their environment, and the better ones can mask one as the other as necessity dictates.

So let's talk masterminds.

Our first Warlord is a charismatic Genghis Khan type, originally from one of the barbarian worlds outside civilized space. He's a giant of a man, and may well be a Nephalim descendent: Red Eyes the Pirate King. He leads a star-faring horde that preys upon civilian shipping throughout the rimward arm of the galactic west, including brazen raids and invasions of worlds believed too tough for such a man to crack. His brilliance comes from his deceptive demeanor, hiding a keen intellect capable of warfighting on a scope and scale that many think to be only for a formal navy.

The catch is that he does run a formal navy. It's not one that civilized space recognizes, but it is formal nonetheless. Most of the core crew comes from Red Eyes' homeworld and related colonies, where severe population pressures push the majority of young men into a berth on a ship in Red's fleet. They seek wealth and women, as they are denied both at home; rampant polygyny means that high-status men take most of the desirable womenfolk for themselves.

Red's reason to bend the knee to his mysterious master, a terrifying figure he knows only as "The Master", is due to the promise by The Master to swing wide the gates into civilized space and allow him and his men all the wealth and women they can carry off- and let them lay waste to all that resist their will.

Our first Courtier is a struggling idealist, leader of a reform movement within the Court of Stars that calls itself "The Speakers for the Obliged" and style themselves advocates for the common man throughout the galaxy. He is young, popular, and charismatic- but as the younger son of a Baron, Lord Gallford has no serious political capital and no prospects for gaining so legitimately.

He bent the knee due to promises of reform of the galactic structure to better ensure that the nobility acts in service to the commonfolk on their lands, and his master now poisons him towards greater acts of covert defiance using honeyed words well-curated to distort the lord's perception of history. "1917 was not a mistake, but a warning" is now a catchprhase of his- as is his increasing willingness to use disposable minions in deniable ways to remove opposition.

You can see how important the key villains are even if they don't appear front-and-center in the narrative at-hand. Their presence will be felt, and must be felt to have the desired effect upon the reader. But villains need henchmen and minions, and more on that next week.