Villains are people, too.

What is it that truly captures our hearts and minds when it comes to storytelling? Well, you have to have a great plot. You need to engage readers with interesting locations and colorful descriptions. You also need enough twists and turns to keep the readers on their proverbial toes. However, the bottom line most important and all encompassing aspect to a great story must be the characters.

Without interesting, fully realized and multi-dimensional characters, there is no need to write a story. Characters are the lifeblood and pulse of any good tale. Without them, no one will want to occupy their time with your creation.

Today, I want to focus on two of the characters whose pictures on our website have elicited a lot of interest. They are two of our main antagonists, Necromverde Lord Cartigas and his dark counterpart, the Necromancer Ronulen.

Each character is a huge antagonist of our main characters, of that we have made no secret. However, in writing an interesting and fully realized “bad guy,” you must give them more than just an evil outlook.

That is because it is easy to just say that they are bad because they do bad things. Killers who kill with impunity are very scary, but they can also be very shallow. To keep a reader’s interest throughout a story, the villains need to come from a real place. They need to feel like their motivations are real and brought about by an honest desire to affect their world. They may not have the same moral values or scruples as do the protagonists (or, hopefully, as do the readers), but they must have their own real and substantiated belief systems in place.

Lord Cartigas and Ronulen are powerful Necromancers. Any wizard who deals in death magic has an inherently evil sort of quality. That having been said, we have worked very hard to make these characters more than just “bad guys.” They are motivated by needs that, to them, are honest, real and dictated by what they feel is for the betterment of the world.

Heroes and villains, good and evil, and light and dark are not necessarily black and white. It is within the shades of grey with which we paint the individual characters that the interesting nuances then emerge.

We want our characters to illicit immediate visceral responses, but that can only be done if they come from a real place. We have worked diligently to create antagonists that are multi-dimensional and worthy of your time. We hope you love to hate them as much as we love to write them.

You will meet them all very soon!

Who are your favorite fictional villains?

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