Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to episode 692 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a villains compendium. Producer Drew Marquardt has selected four segments from previous shows where we celebrate the bad guys. Drew, tell us what we’re going to hear today.

Drew Marquardt: Ooh, so we are going to start with episode 75 and get like a villains 101, how our bad guys operate in a story. Then we’re going to go to episode 590, which is anti-
villains, understanding your villain’s motivation with a dozen examples of famous villains and what makes them tick.

I will say here, when we talk about Annie Wilkes, John, you mentioned that you– you said something like, “I don’t know if she would have been a bad guy if she hadn’t found the car in the snow.” We later found out that, yes, it’s established that she murdered babies, I think, before that.

John: Yes, in her past life as a nurse.

Drew: Yes. We don’t need to do any follow-up on that.

John: Don’t write in again. Please don’t.

Drew: Then we’ll go to episode 465 about lackeys and henchmen and making sure that your evil organizations are believable. Then we’ll finish up with episode 257 with our seven tips for unforgettable villains.

John: Oh, Drew, these all sound great.

Drew: I’m excited.

John: Thank you for reaching back to the catalog, finding these segments and putting them together in a new form.

Drew: Yes, of course.

John: Then in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about monsters. Craig will be back here to talk about monsters.

Drew: Before we get into all that, we have a little bit of news because your new project was announced.

John: Yes, I’m very excited. I’m writing a new animated feature for LAIKA, the stop-motion folks who did Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. There are also folks there who I met who worked on Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie with me, so it feels like a big reunion. This new movie is directed by Pete Candleland, who is a animation genius. I’m so excited to be working on this.

Drew: I’m so excited to be able to finally talk about this [chuckles] because I’ve known about it for months. It’s a really exciting project.

John: Yes, it’s going to be great to write, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also really excited that this is the first animated movie I’ve written under a WGA contract. I have credit protections, pension and health, residuals, the whole thing, which is obviously a huge frustration with animation writing, that it’s not default covered by the WGA. LAIKA stepped up and made this a WGA deal.

Drew: You’ve been fighting for this for a long time.

John: I have. This is the fifth animated feature I’ve done, and none of those other ones, could I get WGA coverage on. I’m so excited to be writing this one under this coverage. Listen, I’m excited to be writing this movie, but it’s great to see companies stepping up and making WGA deals. It’s great that LAIKA did, and I hope other companies will follow their lead because there’s great animation writing that is not happening, I think, because many writers just won’t take this non-WGA deals.

Make WGA deals, and you’re going to get some great writers doing that. Animation writing is so valuable, so essential that it’s time that it’s treated like the hard work it is.

Drew: The doors open now.

John: Yes. Now let’s get started with our villains. Enjoy this compendium episode of our greatest villain segments.

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John: One of the things that came up in shows, and it’s also come up with this other project that I’ve been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain’s goal is. I thought that would be something we could dig into this week, because many properties are going to have some villain. There’s going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero, and our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story.

What happened in the discussion on this other project, they kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain’s story was, and what the villain’s motivation was. It became clear that eventually, they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. I want to talk through those dynamics as well.

Craig: Yes. Great.

John: Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are the big ones?

Craig: Immediately one’s mind goes to the broadest, most obvious black hat villains like Darth Vader and Buffalo Bill, people like that.

John: Especially if you say Buffalo Bill, it’s like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter.

Craig: No, Hannibal Lecter’s not a villain.

John: I think that’s an important distinction I want to get into that as well. When you think about villains, you need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly. I’ve seen them in the trailer, but do they have their own agenda that would be supported by a villain?

Craig: No, they don’t. That’s the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. To me, those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy, but she’s an interesting villain that you overcome and find your way to love. She’s the villain.

John: Yes, she’s the villain. She’s the antagonist.

Craig: Right, thematically, she’s the villain.

John: Yes. I think I want to make that distinction that almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure. You have a protagonist who’s generally your hero who’s the person who changes over the course of the movie. You’re going to have an antagonist who’s the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen. Sometimes, just based on the trailer, you can see there’s two people in the movie. They’re going to be those two people generally.

A villain is a different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world or bad for other people in the world. If we talk about general categories of what villains could be, there’s the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. You have your Voldemorts, your Darth Vaders, your General Zods. I’d say Hal from 2001 is that controlling villain, where it has this order that he wants to impose on things. If you don’t obey that, you’re going to suffer for it.

Craig: Right.

John: You have your revenge villains. You have Kahn, you have De Niro in Cape Fear. I’d argue the witch is basically– the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge.

Craig: She wants revenge. She also falls into the power hungry model also. Dual villain motivation.

John: She does. I think the power hungriness is something we put on the movie after the fact. If you actually looked at what she’s trying to do in the course of it, she doesn’t have this big plan for Oz that we see in the course of this movie.

Craig: Right. You’re right. No, basically, “You killed my sister and I’m going to get you. And your little dog too.

John: Your little dog too. Speaking of animal suffering, we have Glenn Close, who’s the great villain in Fatal Attraction, who wants revenge. it’s basically, “How dare you jilt me and this is what I’m going to do to show you.”

Craig: Yes.

John: Then there’s the simpler, just, this villain wants something and it’s trying to take something. You have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Craig: Right.

John: What I love about Hans Gruber is, Hans Gruber probably sees himself as, he’s Ocean’s 11. He probably sees himself as like, “We’re pulling off this amazing heist.” It would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way.

Craig: Right.

John: You have Salieri in Amadeus. Salieri is like, he has envy. He wants that thing that Mozart has. You have Gollum who wants the ring. Those are really such simple motivations.

Craig: Right.

John: The last villain I would classify as insatiability. These are the really scary ones who like, they’re just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. Unstoppable. Anton Chigurgh from No Country for Old Men. He scares me more than probably anything else I’ve seen on screen.

Craig: Yes. They embody the same thing that attracts us to zombies as a personality-less villain. That is inevitability. They basically represent time.

John: They represent time and death.

Craig: Mortality, exactly.

John: Yes. He will not be able to escape them. Freddy Krueger is that too. Michael Myers is he’s the zombie slasher person.

Craig: Freddy Krueger actually I think is really revenge.

John: Oh yes. That’s a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates– why he wants to kill all the people he’s going to kill, it’s a revenge by proxy. One of the challenges with screenwriting I’ve found is that you’re trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story and yet you also want to create a great villain, and that villain wants to control the story as well. Finding that sweet spot between the two is often really hard.

This project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie and like, here’s our group of heroes and this is what they’re trying to do and these are the obstacles along the way, and this is the villain, all the questions came back to the villain. The questions were natural, fair questions asked which I hadn’t done a good enough job explaining and describing was, what is the villain’s overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do?

Because we had just done the Raiders podcast, I kept coming back to like, well, in Raiders, what is the villain trying to do? Help me through that.

Craig: He’s trying to do the exact same thing that the hero’s trying to do, which is interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn’t what he should be doing. You can see that change occurs. This is how I tend to think of really good villains. What they want, it’s a good topic because I think there’s a very common screenwriting mistake and it’s understandable.

You have a character, you’re a protagonist and you have perhaps his flaw and you have the way he’s going to change. Then you think, “We need a villain.” You come up with an interesting villain. The problem is, the villain’s motivation and the villain’s, villainy, has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character, of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is main character is most afraid of or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself. If you don’t, if you don’t match these things together dramatically, then you just have a kooky villain in a story with your character.

John: Yes. The challenge to also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they’re after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is. Let’s go back to Raiders. You can say Belloq is the villain and Belloq wants the same thing that Indi wants, he wants the Ark of the Covenant. Belloq is actually an employee. He’s really working for the Nazis.

What I felt, this pitch, last week, people kept asking me for like– it was also a quest movie. You could think of it like Raiders in the sense that it’s a quest, you’re after this one thing. They kept pushing me for more information about like, “Basically, who are the Nazis and what is their agenda?” You can’t really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we know what the Nazis are and you can shorthand them for evil. You can’t literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. That wouldn’t make sense. It’s the wrong thing.

Craig: It would be bizarre.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: In that movie, they very smartly said, “We’re going to have a character who is obsessed with objects and needs to become more interested in humanity. Let’s make our villain just like him. Except that guy won’t change at all.” We watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain. That’s exciting. That’s smart. I have to say that there’s a trend towards this. You can find villains like this throughout film history. However, even in broader genres, like for instance, superhero films, or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting.

There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws, for instance, from the Spy Who Loved Me. There’s nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. They’re mustache twirling villains. When you, sometimes people look at This Note, this villain is too much of a mustache twirler, meaning he’s just evil because he’s evil, ‘ha, ha, ha’. If you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. The Riddler is a villain because he’s insane.

He’s so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he’s criminally insane. What’s happened is, for instance, take Skyfall– and whatever people’s beefs are with Skyfall, I think, honestly, one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it, in terms of reaching an audience, is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero was aging, and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job.

Along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away. All the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. Suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero’s life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. Then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person. They just take different paths to resolution.

Look at the Nolan movies, I think very notably have taken Batman villains out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically match them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear, and your villain is a master of fear.

John: Yes. Fear personified.

Craig: Yes. It’s a trend. It’s a trend to do it more and more. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Frankly, I think it makes for better stories.

John: What I would point out the challenge is, you can go too far. I think the second Batman movie in which we have the Joker, who is phenomenal and we love it, we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie, I became frustrated by villain soup. I didn’t feel like there was a great opportunity for a Batman story because we just basically follow the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It’s also dangerous because it raises the expectation that, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character. If that villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story. What it comes down to is, movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film. It can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie.

In many movies with a villain, the villain is really starting things. Even Jaws, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It’s not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist went and found the shark and tracked it down and it became the start of things. No, the shark happens first. Where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we’re pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain’s motivation is.

It’s good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen, you’re probably going to be taking time away from your hero, and your hero should be the most interesting person on screen.

Craig: Yes. I just don’t know enough about TV to– I watch TV, but I don’t watch it the way that I watch movies. I don’t think about it the way I think about movies. Certainly, if you have a very oppositional show where it really is about one person versus another, they both, ultimately, will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. That’s why I think it’s pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter. When that season’s over, they’re gone because they’re dead

John: Yes. Did you watch Lost– you probably watched Lost.

Craig: I didn’t. My wife watched it, and I should say on behalf of our friend, Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously, I don’t know anything about it. [chuckles] I know that there’s an island and a smoke monster, and in the end, they were in a church.

John: The point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villain mythologies, is that while it became incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project, if you’d known what the villain’s whole deal was at the very start, it wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting, or, you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain’s motivation was that you would have been able to kickstart the hero’s story.

I guess I’m just making a pitch for there can be a good because for understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero’s story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced?

Craig: Yes. I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. Forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but hero-villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature, meaning this, the case where there’s a villain who is doing an evil thing and there is a hero who is trying to stop them, is basically religious in nature. It’s a morality play and good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. In fact, the satisfaction of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds.

We want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though, oftentimes, it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. There’s a religious nature to that struggle. There are also an atheistic type of stories, actually A-religious type of stories, because they’re not making a point about the existence of God, but rather they are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the existential nausea.

For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil is Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. Essentially, it was, again, that unquantifiable dread of mortality and death. That will color, if you’re trying to tell a story that is seeped in existential dread, don’t over-explain your villains, because the point is, there is no explanation. It’s absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself.

John: Yes. I think the root of all slasher films, Terminator is an extension, a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it’s that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. The zombie movies work in the same situation too. It’s not one zombie that you’re afraid of, it’s the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very dangerous place.

Craig: Yes. Zombies don’t have– zombies aren’t even evil. They’re like the shark, basically, they just eat. You can’t stop them. That’s why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don’t make it, heroes just don’t make it. You can’t beat zombies.

John: What I would say, though, is if you look at, regardless of which class class of villain you’re facing, you’re going to have to make some decisions about perspective and point of view. To what degree are we sticking with the hero’s point of view and that we’re learning about the villain through the hero, and to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn’t know from the villain’s point of view and from the villain’s perspective?

Making those decisions, it’s a very early part of the process, is how much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to what degree are we going to go see other stuff? In Die Hard, we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from [unintelligible 00:20:33] point of view, and we see what he’s really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero’s point of view for most of the time because it’s actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy’s trying to do.

If you have a villain who’s smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they’re trying to do. Ideally you’d love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist.
That’s often very challenging to do. In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain, Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie, he’s in jail, so he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she’s safe and it’s reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed.

When we talked about Raiders, Belloq and Indy had that conversation at the bar and he’s able to get out of this, but Belloq is at least able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you’re often better off.

Craig: Yes, you need some sense of rationality. It is discomforting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic. Even if your villain’s motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that is their motivation. The Joker, in the second Batman movie, they say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” and the Joker can express that, but okay, that’s a choice, you made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos, but you’ve articulated a goal.

If we don’t have that, then we’re just watching somebody blow stuff up willy-nilly and we start wondering why. You never want anyone to stop their engagement with the narrative. One of the great things about all those wonderful scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact, the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he’s doing. He is grounding that villain in some rational context.

John: Yes, which is spooky. What I would recommend all writers do is, if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain’s point of view. Because remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. If you’re making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company and protect herself. She sees herself as the good person here, she’s being forced into doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will.

Even the Queen Mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything she’s going to protect. When you see things from their perspective, you can often find some really great moments. Write and figure out what the story is from their point of view. Remember, you’re probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You’re going to tell it from our hero’s point of view and make sure that you’re going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. There’s going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won’t come until the climax that you want to have happen.

Craig: Yes, there’s a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is, in many ways, about figuring out the rational context for the villain. You’re trying to unearth a mystery, and that, in fact, if you figure out why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, you can stop them. Mama, which is out in theaters right now, I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a good horror movie. It’s very thoughtful and is very thematic. It’s about something. I thought they did a good job.
That movie’s a good case in point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. You build a mystery, and then the mystery is why is this bad person doing these bad things?

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John: Our main topic today, this all comes out of Chris Csont, who does The Interesting Newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and how villains come to be. When you laid them all out, side by side, I realized they’re really talking about character motivation overall, whether they’re heroes or villains. Often what we think about is like, “Oh, that’s the reason why they’re the villain.” You could just turn around and say, “Oh, that’s the reason why they became the hero.” It’s basically the reaction to the events that happened or what’s driving them.

I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then, in the lens of these articles, peel apart what are the choices that characters make that because us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling.

Craig: Great, I love this topic.

John: There’s an article by Daniel Efron here, we’ll put a link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. He’s an ethicist, he’s really talking about– we think that people will make a logical decision about the cost and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don’t. That’s not about the act itself, it’s really, they’re doing things or not doing things based on how they’re going to be perceived by others.

It’s that the spectator thing is a major factor. If they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. Cheating is not just about whether you can get away with it, it’s like how will you feel if you do this thing?

Craig: Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined, solely, by our deeds, the things we do. It doesn’t matter how you feel. If you do something bad, you are a bad doer. That is true, to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care why you killed that person, as long as it wasn’t self-defense. He made you nuts and you couldn’t handle it anymore and you killed him and you have perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn’t care. You killed him. You’re a murderer.

John: Yes. We’ve talked many times about character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero, if they even have a sense of a moral compass at all. We’re leaving out of this conversation this supernatural alien creatures. The degree to which we apply motivation to those characters in aliens, we see that it’s a mother against a mother, that makes sense. That tracks, we could understand that.

In most of these supernatural demonic things, there’s not really a moral choice there. They are actually just true villains. Even like the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up like what their past trauma was that’s made them this way.

Craig: Yes.

John: We don’t really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They’re not choosing to do these actions.

Craig: They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. Freddy Krueger was burnt by a Lynch mob. He made a choice, in his supernatural return, to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. He’s good. He doesn’t wake up going, “What should I do today?” He’s like, “Good, one more day to do the thing I decided to do that I will do every day.” There’s wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn’t there?

John: It is. In some ways, you can say that he is cursed. basically he’s living under the thing, like he can’t escape this. He can’t choose to get out of this. A curse is like the opposite of a wish. We always talk about like what are the characters I want, what are they actually going for? The curse is the mirror opposite of that. They are bound by fate to do this thing and they can’t get away from it. There’s a freedom in that.

Craig: There is, because, as a human, you’re really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There’s no questioning of self. Sharks kill. When I say shark, I mean the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, “I’m full, I’m not going to do that today.” You are a creature that is designed to kill and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person. Those characters often do feel like they become part of nature.

Zombies, whether they’re slow or fast, whether it’s a virus or it’s supernatural, they ultimately are will-less. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus, they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.

There’s a wonderful place for those kinds of things, but I think, ultimately, we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us. That they are dark mirrors that say, “Hey, you might feel these things, don’t end up like me.” They’re almost designed to be negative instructors, to make people identify with the villain. To make us understand why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, to make us think, “I actually have felt the same things, I’ve wanted to do the same things, but here’s what happens if I do,” because, typically, the villain will fail.

John: Let’s talk about some villains. I have a list of 20 villains here for us to go through, and let’s talk about what’s driving them and what’s interesting and what could be applied to other things. We’ll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. Of all the folks on this list, he’s maybe come closest to seem like the mustache-twisting villain because of that amazing performance, but his actual motivations are more calculating and he doesn’t seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel.

Craig: No, he’s a thief. He wants to steal money, as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he’s a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn’t mind killing a bunch of people to do it.

John: Yes. He gets indignant when somebody gets in his way and he will lash out when his plans are thwarted. We think of him as being– I think it was just because that performance was being grand and theatrical, but actually, he has a purpose and a focus. He also, I think, very brilliantly in the course of the structure of the movie, as we talked about, the false idea of what the actual motivation is great. It seems like they have some noble purpose beyond the money, and of course they don’t. It’s all just a ruse.

Craig: That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. For us growing up, that was a startling one, because we had become so trained to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. Terrorists are an easy one. They’re always taking hostages and they often, in bad movies, were taking hostages because they were associated with– like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, flaming dragons, some rebel group that was trying to, do a thing, the fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that’s what he was doing, then the big surprise was, “No, I’m simply a thief.” It was actually quite clever. Alan Rickman, I think, his performance in no small part, elevated what that character was, into something that felt a little bit more, wonderfully arch.

John: Yes. Let’s talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. You have Buffalo Bill, who’s the serial killer, who’s like, kidnapping people. Then you have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different serial killer. They’re two monsters, but with very different motivations. They’re very different villains in the course of the story. How do we place them and how do we think about what’s driving them?

Craig: Buffalo Bill, to me, because he’s portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He is no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he’s stopped. There’s nobody is going to have a sit down with Buffalo Bill and he’s going to be like, oh, we’re making a really good point and we’re going to stop killing all these people. He’s not going to do that.

John: No.

Craig: Hannibal Lecter, you get the sense, absolutely, has choices. What is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that’s so beautiful is the notion that he might be some avenging angel, that maybe, he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. What’s interesting about the story is they tease you with that. Then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse’s face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn’t do anything to him. He kills a guy in an ambulance.

He will kill indiscriminately to protect himself. As Jodie Foster, as Clarise, says at the end of the movie, he doesn’t think he’s going to come and kill her because it would be rude. We get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think, if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn’t want to kill us.

John: Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he’s cursed at that. He’s not made a single choice. He is who he is.

Craig: Yes. He’s bad to the bone.

John: Born into it. Yes. Yes. As opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she’s doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic– I don’t want to say narcissistic personality disorder. I wouldn’t want to diagnose her that specifically, but she has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated.

Craig: Yes. Why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done. She’s formidable. This is something that you’ll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it’s really hard to win against somebody like that. I think also there’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment there because she is occupying a place in society that typically isn’t in charge, isn’t the one that comes out on top. We get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win, to an extent. Yes. That’s always fascinating to me.

John: I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately, she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff and executing her plan. She has become trapped by someone that she shouldn’t have trusted and that has to break herself out. We see like, “You think you’ve caught me, but I’ve actually caught you,” it’s ingenious. Smartly done.

Craig: “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me.”

John: Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street.

Craig: Oh, bros.

John: Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. There’s more to it than that one speech, but essentially that whatever it takes is what’s worth doing. That is an American value that’s pushed to an extreme degree.

Craig: Which is the point. When you mentioned the Daniel Efron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that’s when they start doing bad things.

What Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to commit crimes. The license is through philosophy, that in fact, he’s helping people. If you think about it, really, I’m the hero.

Somebody naturally is like, you really convinced yourself of this. We always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that? Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don’t know. That is a great example of somebody articulating a value that we all have, ad absurdum, to force us to examine ourselves.

John: Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day, an amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power with inside a structure. Of course, that’s not his true source of power and wealth is all the way, he’s subverting all that and breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan Hawke’s character into what he’s doing.

Craig: Yes. An excellent film. I remember feeling, when I watched Denzel’s portrayal of Alonzo, he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy because it’s attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome; the idea that if you go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it’s exciting.

On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it. That in fact– he said, there’s no free lunch. That you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you’re brought low. It’s inevitable. You will come down to earth, gravity applies to you. It’s wonderful. It’s a great lesson, which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. This is such a great lesson. It’s like we’re all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.

John: We should put that on the shortlist for a future Deep Dive because its [crosstalk] turn of events [unintelligible 00:39:23] two more I want to go through, Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. I think he’s unique on this list because you pity him and yet he’s also a villain, he’s also dangerous. There are other examples of that. They’re usually like sidekick characters, but here he is in this centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need, yet he’s pathetic. It’s just such an interesting choice.

Craig: Yes. Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction and he will do bad things to feed his addiction, but where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he’s slinker and stinker, and you can see him arguing with himself.

That is so human. It’s just so wonderfully– we can identify, we feel bad for him because we know that inside, there’s somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time and then that was it. He’s essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness.

John: Yes, and I think that’s the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see, “Oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped.”

Craig: Yes.

John: I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote, but it’s arguing that essentially, Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He’s demonstrating all of the addicts, things that he’s going to keep trying to do the same thing even though it’s never going to work. It’s always going to blow up in his face, a different form of that thing. He’s always chasing that high, which is the Roadrunner. If he doesn’t get it, he won’t get it.

Craig: It’s rough, man. Yes, he needs a program.

John: He does need a program. 12 steps there. Finally, let’s talk about Annie Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. You look at the setup of her in that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be someone that, you know her, you understand her, she’s annoying, but she also probably bakes really well, and you get along fine with her. It’s that worry that you push somebody, given the chance, some of these people would go too far, and it would, Annie Wilkes you.

Craig: Yes, so that’s a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman is that in society, we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone, it becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly, women are very often the victims. Here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.

I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that held me back from love, loving misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. There was part of me that was like, but no one’s really like that. Now we have Twitter and we know that there are. Stephen King was right.

John: Yes, he’s out there.

Craig: Oh my God, she and he, there are many Annie and Andrew Wilkes’s out there who attach themselves, so strongly, to characters. When those characters– the whole thing, the whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book and she snaps. We have seen that a lot in popular culture. That form of love that has gone sour, that has curdled into obsession is something that’s very human.

The story of that villainy is you must get away from that person because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. That’s terrifying.

John: Yes, it’s fascinating to think of, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Is this the only bad thing that she’s done?

Craig: I would imagine that she’s probably done a few other things, but nothing like that.

John: Yes, this transgression would not have happened if not for fate putting him right there. If the book had come out and she’d read the book, she would have been upset and she would have been angry for weeks, but she probably wouldn’t have, stalked him down in his house and done a thing. The fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity.

Craig: Yes, the woman was definitely off to begin with. Anybody that says dirty birdie as a friend, you can imagine people are like, “Oh, here comes Annie, she’s gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this.”

John: All right, so let’s try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. As we’re talking about these villains, I think it’s important for us to stress that we’re looking at what’s motivating these iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn’t exist if you didn’t find a hero to put opposite them, if you didn’t find a context for which to see them in, because they can’t just float by themselves. You can’t have Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without Clarice Starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who’s letting us into their world.

I see so often people try to create like, oh, this iconic villain who has this grand motivation, terrific, who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? How are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this?

Craig: Yes, we need somebody to identify with. We don’t want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that’s when things get really interesting to me. Because there is a story where we just give up on the whole hero villain thing entirely, we ask ourselves in these situations, what would you do? When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that’s when their relationship with the material becomes a little more complex.

It doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like it messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well.

John: Yes, I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character was a great messy relationship with Black Panther, because they both had strong points. While we wanted Killmonger defeated, we also said like, “Yes, you know what, he was making some logical points there.”

Craig: Yes, he’s a good example of gone too far.

[music]

John: The inspiration behind this is this book I’m reading, it’s based on a blog by Keith Almon called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It is a book that is really intended for people playing the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not a general interest book for everyone out there. It’s an interest to me and to Craig.

Craig: Yes, it’s great. Great blog, I love that blog.

John: Why I thought that this could be generalized into a topic for discussion overall is one of the things I liked so much about Keith’s book is that he talks about the monsters that you’re fighting and how they would actually think and how they would strategize in combat. One of the points he really makes very clearly is that they have a self-preservation instinct. They’re going to do things to– they will fight, but then they will run away and they will flee when it makes sense for them to run away and flee, because they exist in this world, they’ve evolved to survive. That survival instinct is very important.

It got me thinking about movies I’ve seen. I re-watched Inception recently, which is great. It holds up really well. The third section of Inception, or the fourth or the fifth, however many levels deep we are in Inception, there’s a sequence which very much feels like a James Bond movie, where there’s this mountain-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:47:24] raid on–

John: -outlying sequence. In there are a bunch of just faceless lackeys who just keep getting killed and offed. It struck me like, wait, no one is acting– why are they doing what they’re doing? You can see this in a lot of movies, a lot of action movies, but also I think a lot of comedies them in, where the people who are not the hero, not the villain, but are working for the villain, do things that don’t actually make any sense.
They will fight to the death for no good reason. They don’t seem to exist in any normal universal world. I want to talk through this. I don’t necessarily have great suggestions for this, but I think we need to point it out and maybe nudge people to be thinking more fully about the choices they’re making with these henchmen characters.

Craig: That’s probably the best we can do, is just be aware of it, because it’s more than a trope, it is bizarre. Here’s a movie that did it fairly well and for a reason. In Die Hard, there are all sorts of lackeys. There are some lackeys that are front and forward, and then there’s some lackeys that are in the back. One of the things you understand from this whole thing is that this organization is a worker-owned business. They’re all going to split the money.

Sure, maybe Hans Gruber gets a little bit extra because he masterminded it, but they’re all splitting it. They’re all the heroes of this job. If John McClane gets away with his shenanigans, they’re not going to get their money. I understand why they fight. Then if someone’s brother happens to be killed, oh, now it’s personal. When it is not a worker-owned collective, but rather a standard boss and employees, it is odd that they seemingly fight as if they were trying to protect their own dad or something.

John: Yes, and so they’ll fight and fight, and then they’ll get thrown over the edge and give the villain scream as they fall, and they’ll move on. They’re basically just cannon fodder there to be shot at, to be taken down. You see this most obviously in Bond movies. The Spy Who Loved Me has the whole crew of that tanker at the end, the [unintelligible 00:49:34] Moonraker, Drax Industries has all these people who are doing these space shuttles.

Who are they? Why are they doing this? Are they zealots? Are they science zealots? You just don’t know. This is really very well parodied, of course, in The Simpsons. There’s a whole episode with Hank Scorpio, where he recruits Homer. You see why these people are working there, because he’s a really good boss, he’s really caring and considerate. I would just say, pay special attention to those minor characters, those guards, those watchmen, and really be thinking about, why are they doing what they’re doing? You may not be able to give dialogue or even a lot more time to those characters, but do think about what their motivations are.

Sometimes, if you do that, you can come upon some surprising choices, which is, like Iron Man 3, one of the henchmen just says, “Oh, no, I’m not being paid enough,” and just, walks away, or just runs. Those can be surprises that let the audience and the reader know that you’re really paying attention, and that could be great.

Craig: There’s a really funny parody of the henchman syndrome in Austin Powers. I want to say, is it in the first one? Yes, I think it’s the first one. Everybody remembers, I think most people remember the scene where Austin Powers is driving a steamroller very slowly at a henchman who doesn’t seem to be able to get out of the way, [laughs] and then he rolls him over. There’s a deleted scene, I think you can watch it on, I think it’s on YouTube, where they actually go to that henchman’s home, and you see his wife and child mourning the loss. [laughs] It’s like, he was a person.

It’s true, one of the things that that stuff does is both limit our interest, and also in, and the capacity, or the impact of death in a movie or a television show, and it also, I think, makes the world seem less real, and therefore, the stakes less important.

John: Yes, I agree.

Craig: Because, look, if everybody’s dying that easily, it’s the stormtrooper problem, right? Who’s afraid of stormtroopers anymore? If you make a Star Wars movie now, I think just your hero being actually killed by a rando stormtrooper in scene one would be amazing. That’s it. We got to go find a new hero because, yes, one of those randos, they can’t all miss all the time.

John: No. I think one of the good choices that Force Awakens made was to have one of the heroes be a stormtrooper, who takes off his helmet, and you’re always like, “Oh, there’s an actual person there.” John Boyega is an actual person.

Craig: The only one.

John: Yes. He’s special, but I think the point is that he’s not special. Actually, all those people you’ve seen die in all these movies were actually people as well. In The Mandalorian, in a later episode, there’s just a long conversation happening between two stormtroopers, and they’re just talking, and it’s recognized, oh, they are there for not just the plot reasons. They actually were doing something before the camera turned off.

Craig: Yes, so it’s the red versus blue, the halo. It’s like, generally speaking, when we do see henchmen talking to each other, they’re talking about henchmen stuff, so it’s purposefully pointless and banal, and then they die. They die.

John: They die.

[laughter]

Craig: They don’t go on. They do not live on. Yes, just be aware of it, I guess, right?

John: Yes, so the henchmen’s problem is really a variety of the redshirt problem, which we’ll also link to there. John Scalzi’s book, Redshirts, talks about, in the Star Trek series, the tourists, the people with the red uniforms who’ve been down to the alien planet are the first ones to die. There’s actually statistics about how often they die versus people in other color uniforms. I think we’re all a lot more mindful of that now with the good guys, and I think we see a lot less redshirting happening. You still see some of it. I just rewatched Aliens, and there’s a little bit of redshirting there, but not as bad as the classic.

I would just urge us to be thinking the same way on the villain side and always ask ourselves, is there a smarter choice we can make about those people who would otherwise just be faceless to death?

Craig: Yes, and that’s why the Bill Paxton character was so great in Aliens because it was an acknowledgement that not everybody is brave in a psychotic way. Some of those characters are nuts for engaging the way they do with this incredibly scary thing. They don’t seem to have fear. They don’t seem to be thinking ahead like, “I had plans for my life, investments, [laughs] a girlfriend, a boyfriend. I got things I want to do.” They’re just like, “Screw it. If I die, I die.” That’s crazy. That’s just a dangerous way of thinking. Bill Paxton was like, “No way, man.” I feel like he was the only person that was sane, and he was correct, they should have gotten the hell out of there.

John: Nuke it from space.

Craig: Yes, “Nuke it from orbit, man.” There’s nothing wrong with being afraid and rational, because that is, in fact, how people are. Look, a lot of it’s tonal, so some things are going to have henchmen. That’s just the way it is because the show or the movie is pushed a little bit. For instance, Snowpiercer, which I love, they’re henchmen. They don’t have faces. I don’t know what the arrangement is exactly. I assume they get a slightly better car maybe, but they’re going in there and people are getting shot, and they’re like, “Oh, okay, well, I guess it’s our turn to go in there and get into a shooting.” I would be terrified.

They never look scared. That’s also a movie about everybody on the planet living on a train that’s going around a frozen Earth and they’re eating bugs. It’s sci-fi, it’s different. If you’re talking about Breaking Bad, then you’re not going to see a ton of henchmen there because people live in the world where they can get scared.

John: In television, obviously, you have more time to build out universes and scenarios, so it’d be more likely you’d be able to understand. The supporting characters on Sopranos, you have a good sense of who they are, and so that’s all built out. In feature films, it’s tough because you cannot divide focus so much. In a Robert Altman movie, you really could see everyone’s point of view, but you’re not going to encounter that in a more traditional feature. That’s just not how it works. I guess I’m just asking you to be mindful of it.

If you’re writing in a pushed universe in science fiction or fantasy or an action movie, yes, some stuff is going to be a little bit more common, but I also see this in comedies, especially high-concept comedies, where everyone just seems to be there to service this plot, this high-concept plot. I don’t see a lot of attention being paid to like, “Wait, how would a real person in the real world respond to this and is there anything useful to be taken from that?” because people just accept the premise a little too easily.

Craig: Yes, it’s amusing. They’re like, “This job is so good, I need to die.” [laughter] It’s not that great if you’re dead.

John: No. Defend your own interests first. Everyone is selfish enough and wants to survive enough that they’re going to pull back and defend themselves when they need to, instead of just be thinking about that for your characters.

Craig: Yes, probably if you’re writing Guard 3 and Next Guard and Tall Guard, and yes, there’s trouble.

[music]

John: A lot of times in features and TV as well, you’ll see functional villains like, well, that villain got the job done, basically served as a good obstacle for your hero, kept the plot moving, but a week later, I couldn’t tell you anything about who that villain was. I wanted to look at in the movies that I love and the movies that had villains that I loved, what were some of those characteristics of those villains that I loved? I boil it down to seven things. Then Chris wrote a nice long blog post that talked through in more detail and gave more examples of what those villains were and how they functioned. I thought we’d take a few minutes to look at this list of unforgettable villains and how you can implement them.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. My first tip for unforgettable villains is something I’ve said a lot on the show, is that the best villains think that they’re the hero. They are the protagonists of their own stories, they have their own inner life. They have hopes, they have joys. They might seek revenge or power, but they believe they have a reason why they deserve it. They can reframe all of the events of the story where they are the good guy in the story.

Craig: Yes, nobody does bad things just because. Even when we have nihilistic villains, they’re trying to make a point. The Joker is trying to make a point. There’s always a purpose. Yes, of course, they think they’re the hero. They have, you know that thing where you look at somebody on TV maybe in the middle of a political season, and you think, “How is that guy so happy about all these terrible things he’s saying?” Because he believes, in part, that he’s the right one and that his purity is, in fact, why he’s the hero. Just as a character says, I won’t kill is being pure, Luke, at the end of Return of the Jedi, is being pure, “I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to kill you because I’m a good guy. That’s my purity.”

On the other side, the villains are heroes with the same purity towards their goal and other people are these wish-washy, mush-mouthy heroes in name only. They’re HYNOs.

John: Yes. I think it’s absolutely crucial that they are seeing all the events of the story from their own point of view, and they can defend the actions that they’re taking because they are heroes. Our favorite show, Game of Thrones, does that so well, where you see characters who are, on one hand, despicable, but on the other hand, are heroic because you see why they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Daenerys could completely be the villain in that story. It’s very easy to frame her as the villain in that story, and yet we don’t because of how we’ve been introduced to her.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Then look back to the very first episode. It’s maybe the last line of the first episode, I think. Jaime Lannister pushes Bran out the window, sends him, theoretically, to his death, although it turns out to just paralyze him. Then he turns back to his sister and he says, “The things we do for love.” He’s doing it because he’s protecting her because they’re in love. Now I go, “Okay. I don’t like you and I don’t like what you did, but I recognize a human motivation in you.” Now, some movies are really bad at shoving this in.

You’d ever get to the end of a movie where you’re like, “Why the hell was this guy doing all this bananas stuff?” Then as he’s being arrested, he goes, “Don’t you understand?” blah, blah, blah. [laughs]

John: Yes, it’s like, “It’s already done. It’s already over.”
Or that bit of explanation comes right before, “Before I kill you, let me tell you why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Craig: It’s like a weird position paper. It not felt. Whereas at the end of, speaking of Sorkin, A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, “You’ve weakened a country,” I believe he believes that.

John: 100%.

Craig: I believe that he instructed people to hurt other people because he’s doing the right thing. He’s pure and they’re not.

John: Let me get to my next point, which is unforgettable villains, they take things way too far. Whereas hopefully all villains see themselves as the hero, the ones who stick with you are the ones who just go just too far. Simple villains who just have simple aims like, “I’m going to rob this bank,” well, you’re not going to remember that one. The one who’s like, “I’m going to blow up the city block in order to get into this bank,” that’s the villain you remember. You have to look for ways in which you can take your villain and push them just too far so that they cross, they transgress something that no one is ever supposed to transgress.

The ones that really stick, the Hannibal Lecters, the Buffalo Bills, the Alan Rickman in Die Hard, they are just willing to go as far as they need to go in order to get the job done, and actually too far to get the job done.

Craig: Correct, and in their demonstration of their willingness to go to any length to achieve their goal, you realize that if they get away with it, this will not be the last time they do it. That this person actually needs to die because they are a virus that has been released into the world, and if we don’t stop them, they’re going to keep doing it forever until the world is consumed in their insanity. Then you have this desire in the audience for your hero to stop the villain. We rarely root for a hero to stop the villain because we want the hero to feel good. We rooted for it because that person has to go.

John: Absolutely. We don’t root for the hero as much if it’s a mild villain. It has to be the villain who is absolutely hell-bent on destruction. It doesn’t have to be destroying the world, but destruction of what is important to us as the audience.

Craig: Yes, it could be somebody who just wants to take your kid from you.

John: Yes, that’s a good time to leave.

Craig: Then you’re like, “Ugh,” and you just realize, “If you won’t stop, you’ll ruin the rest of my kid’s life, and you might do this to somebody else’s kid.” You just feel like you should be stopped in order to return the world to its proper state of being a just world. Which, as we know, realistically, it’s not.

John: Never going to happen.

Craig: No.

John: Third point about unforgettable villains is that they live at the edges of society. Sometimes they are literally out in the forest or they’re a creepy old monster in the cave, but sometimes they are at the edges of moral society. They place themselves outside the normal rules of law or the normal rules of acceptable behavior. Even if they are the insiders, even if they are the mayor of the town, they don’t function within the prescribed boundaries of what the mayor of the town can do. You always have to look at them. They perceive themselves as outsiders, even if they are already in positions of power.

Craig: They certainly perceive themselves to be special.

John: Yes.

Craig: There were a lot of people, speaking of the Soviet Union, in the ‘30s and ‘40s, a lot of people who were Soviet officials who did terrible things. Frequently, they were tools, or sometimes Stalin would go so far as to call them “useful idiots.”

Stalin was special. He considered himself special, and special people are different than people who do bad things. When you’re thinking about your villain, it may not be one of those movies where the villain actually has henchmen, per se, but special people do have their own versions of henchmen. People who believe them at all costs. The albino guy in The Da Vinci Code, he’s a villain kind of, but he’s not the villain. He’s a tool.

John: Even if the villain has prophets or a society around him, he perceives himself as being outside that society as well.

Craig: He can go ahead and bend the rules because, once again, he knows what’s better. He is different and above everybody else. That’s why we’re fascinated by a good one.

John: Also, because they hold up a mirror to the reader. That’s my fourth point, is that a good hero represents what the audience aspires to be, what we hope we could be. The unforgettable villain is the one who you fear you might be. It’s like all your darkest impulses, it’s like, “What if I actually did that terrible thing?” That’s that villain. It’s that person you worry deep down you really are.

Craig: Which goes to motivations, universally recognizable motivations, and this is something that comes up constantly when you’re talking about villains. The first thing people will ask is, what do they want? Just like a hero because they are the hero of the story, what do they want? What are they motivated by? What’s driving them to do these crazy things? It’s never, “Oh, it’s just random.” For instance, you can look at Buffalo Bill, the character in Silence of the Lambs, as really more of like an animal. We can talk about his motivations, and they do, but those motivations are foreign to all of us.

It’s a rare person who is sociopathic and also violent and also attempting to convince himself that he will be better if he’s transgender, which he’s really not. That’s not any of us, but Hannibal Lecter is. Hannibal Lecter has these things in him that we recognize in ourselves, and in fact, it’s very easy to fantasize that you are Hannibal Lecter. It’s sexy, it’s fascinating. A good villain is somebody that you guiltily imagine being. Who hasn’t imagined being Darth Vader? He’s the coolest.

John: Yes, you imagine having that kind of power. Either the power to manipulate, the power to literally control things with your mind. That’s a seductive thing, and I think that the best villains can tap into that part of the reader or the audience.

Also, I would say that the great villains, they let us know what they want. You hit on it earlier, it’s like, sometimes you’ll get to the end of a story, and then the villain will reveal what the plan was all along. That’s never satisfying. The really great villains that stick with you, you’re clear on what they’re going after from the start.

Even if it’s Jaws, you understand what is driving them, and you understand at every moment what their next aim is. They’re not just there to be an obstacle to the hero, they have their own agenda.

Craig: Yes. A good villain, a good movie villain, will sometimes hide what they’re after, and you have to figure it out or tease it out. For instance, you mentioned Seven. You don’t quite get what Kevin Spacey’s up to. In fact, it seems just random, so a bad villain. Random acts of senseless violence connected together by this interesting motif until the end when you realize, “Oh, there’s some larger purpose here.” They often tell us what they want because they have clarity. Good heroes don’t have clarity. The protagonist shouldn’t have too much clarity, otherwise, they’re boring as hell, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They should be conflicted inside about what’s right and what’s wrong. They make choices. Villains are not conflicted at all, so of course, they’re going to be able to say, “What do I want? I want this because of this. That’s it. I figured it out already. I don’t have any of your hand-wringing or sweating. I know what I’m going to do, and I know why, and I believe it’s correct. That’s it.”

John: They tell us what that is. They may not tell the hero what that is, often they will, but we, as the audience, know what they’re actually going for, and that’s really crucial.

Ultimately, whatever the villain is after, the hero is a crucial part of that plan. The great villains make it personal. We talked about Seven, you can’t get much more personal than what Kevin Spacey does to poor Brad Pitt’s wife in Seven. It starts as a story that could be about some random killings, but it dials down to something very personal. That’s why we are so drawn into how things end.

Craig: What’s interesting is that in the real world, this is another area where narrative drifts so far apart from the real world, in the real world, most villains are defined by people that do bad things and they’re repugnant. We like our movie villains to be charismatic. We love it. We like our movie villains to be seductive and interesting and charming. Part of that is watching them have a relationship with the hero. We want the villain to have a relationship with the hero. It can be a brutal relationship, but a fascinating relationship. The only way you could have a relationship is if the villain is interested in the hero.

Inevitably, they are. Sometimes it’s the villain’s interest in the hero that becomes their undoing. Again, you go to the archetype of Darth Vader and Luke. He wants to know his son, and so ultimately, that’s what undoes him.

John: You look at the Joker and Batman in Christopher Nolan’s version of it, it’s that the Joker could not exist without Batman, fundamentally. They are both looking at the same city, the same situation, and without each other, they both wouldn’t function, really. The Joker could create his chaos, he could try to bring about these acts of chaos to make everyone look at how they are and how the city functions, but without Batman, if he can’t corrupt Batman, it’s not worth it for him.

Craig: Right. Batman is the thing he pushes against, and The Killing Joke, which is maybe the greatest graphic novel of all time, is entirely about that relationship. There’s something at the heart of the Joker-Batman dynamic that’s probably at the heart of most hero-villain dynamics in movies, and that is that there is a lot of shared quality. That there’s a similarity. It’s why you hear this terrible line so many times, “You and I, we are not so different” because it’s true.

John: [laughs] Because it’s true. It doesn’t mean you should say it-

Craig: That’s right, don’t say it.

John: -but it is true. You can maybe find a way to visualize that or let your story say that for you, but just don’t say that.

Craig: Just don’t say it or have them make fun of it.

John: Yes. My final point was that flaws are features, and that in general, the villains that you remember, there’s something very distinctive about them, either physically or a vocal trait. There’s something that you can hang them on so you can remember what they’re like because of that one specific tick or look or thing that they do. Obviously, Craig is a big fan of hair and makeup and costuming, and I think all those things are crucial, but you have to look at, what is it about your villain that a person’s going to remember a month from now, a year from now? That they can picture them, they could hear their voice.
Hannibal Lecter is so effective because you can hear his voice. Buffalo Bill, we know what he looks like when he’s putting on that suit. Find those ways that you can distinguish your villain so that we can remember him a year from now.

Craig: It would be nice, I think, for screenwriters to always think about how their villain will first be perceived by the audience because you’re exactly right. This is part of what goes to the notion that the villain is the hero of their story, that the villain is a special person. What you’re signifying to the audience is, “This is a person who is more important than everybody else in the movie except our hero. Just as I made a big deal about the hero, I have to make a big deal about this person because they are special.” If you look at the first time you see Hannibal Lecter, his hair, let’s first start with the hair, it’s perfect.

It’s not great hair, he’s a balding man, but it’s perfectly combed back. Then he’s wearing his, I guess, his asylum outfit, crisp, clean, and he’s standing with the most incredible posture. His hands, the way his hands and his arms are, it’s as if he’s assembled himself into this perfected mannequin of a person and he does not blink. That’s great. Just from the start, you know we all get that little hair-raising feeling when somebody creepy comes by?

John: Yes.

Craig: Sometimes it’s the littlest thing like that.

John: Sometimes it’s a very big thing. Like Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies is one of my favorite arrivals of a villain in the story because she’s wearing this pink dress that she’s in for the whole movie. From the moment you see her, you know in a general sense what she is, but you just don’t know how far she’s going to push it. She seems like this busybody, but then you realize she’s actually a monster. She’s a monster in a pink housecoat, and she’s phenomenal. That’s a very distinctive choice of the schoolmarm taken way too far, and you see it from the very start. I could never see that costuming again without thinking of her. That’s a sign of a really good–

Craig: Yes, that’s an example of taking something that’s amusingly innocuous and not villainous. Like, “Oh, a sweet old lady who loves cats and collects plates and loves pink and green and pastel colors”, and saying, “That lady? Now she’s a sadist.” Ooh, that’s great. Just great. Then you get it. You walk into her office and you can smell that bad rose perfume. Terrific.

[music]

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew himself. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, and our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli. It’s his homage to Silence of the Lambs. Matthew is so talented.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. There’s a new one up with Christopher Nolan that’s just great that is writing process.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all your premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to give you on monsters. Drew, thanks for putting together this compendium.

Drew: Thank you, John.

[music]

John: All right, let’s move on to our main topic today, which is monsters.

Craig: Yes.

John: I thought about this because three of the projects I’m currently working on have monsters in them to some degree.

We’ve talked on the show a lot about antagonists and villains, but I don’t recall us ever really getting into monsters per se, which means we probably need to describe what we mean by monsters. In my head, I’m thinking basically non-human characters that, while they may have some intelligence, are not villains in the sense that they have classic motivations and who can interact with other characters around them the way that human characters can.

I was grouping them into three big buckets, but I’m curious before we get into that if you have a definition of monster that might be different than that.

Craig: Monster to me is either a non-human or an altered human, a human that has been changed into something that is non-human, that has both extraordinary ability compared to a human and also presents a danger to regular humans.

John: Yes, that feels fair. The kinds of monsters I’m talking about, I have three broad categories, and I think we can think of more than that, but there’s primal monsters, which I would say are things that resemble our animals, our beasts, but just taken to a bigger extreme. Your sharks, your bears, your wolves could be monsters. Any giant version of a normal animal. They tend to be predators. Werewolves in their werewolf form feel like that primal monster. The aliens in Alien feel like that kind of primal monster.

Craig: Dinosaurs.

John: Dinosaurs, absolutely. In D&D terms, we say that they are generally neutral. You can’t even really call them evil because they’re just doing what they do. Evil requires some kind of calculation that they don’t have.

Craig: Yes, they instinctive. Even the aliens in Alien, I suppose, we’ll get some angry letters from Alien fans, but those creatures do seem like they are driven by such a pure Darwinism that it is no longer a question of morality. They are simply following their instinct to dominate.

John: We have another category I would say are the man-made monsters. These are killer robots, Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, that monster famously does have some motivation beyond any Gollum-y creature. Some zombies I would say are man-made; it depends on what causes them to become those monsters. Craig, would you say that the creatures in The Last of Us, would you call them monsters?

Craig: They are altered humans, yes, but they’re monsters. There’s no question. Part of what we try and do is, when we can elicit some, at least if not sympathy, a reminder that they are not to blame. They’re sick and they are no longer in control of their bodies and they are no longer in control of what they do, but the fact is, no matter how hard we try and do that, they’re behaving monstrously. They’re monsters. More importantly, when you look at their provenance from the video game, they look like monsters, and we want them to, and there are more monsters coming.

John: Of course. I know. I’m excited to see more monsters.

Craig: More monsters.

John: The last bucket I would throw things into would be called the supernatural. There you have all the Lovecraftian creatures. There are other kinds of zombies that are, it’s not human-made that created them, they’re shambling mounds of things. There are mummies. At least, there are mummies who are not speaking mummies, like the classic stumble-forward mummies.

Craig: Ah, mummy.

John: Muuuu. You’ve got your gargoyles. You have some demons or devils, the ones that aren’t talking. I really think it comes down to, if they have the ability to use language that our characters can understand, I’m not throwing them in the monster bucket.

Craig: I would still like, to me, a vampire is a monster.

John: To me, it’s really a question, though, of agency. It’s so driven by its need to feed that it no longer has the ability to interact with the characters around it because a lot of vampires are talky and they are doing things. They can function much more like classic villains rather than monsters. As opposed to a werewolf, who we’re used to being just fully in beast mode.

Craig: That’s why vampires are so fascinating, I think, because they present as human, and they can absolutely have a conversation with you, all the good ones do. Not only do they have conversations with you, they seduce you and they romance you. Then they also give into this hunger that is feral and savage. They sometimes turn into bats or fog or a big swarm of rats, which is my favorite. They are certainly supernatural. They are nearly immortal. What I love about vampires is that they are a presentation of the monster within.

Jekyll and Hyde, well, Dr. Jekyll is a human, and Hyde is a monster, but they are the same person. That is fascinating because then it starts getting into the whole point of monsters, I think, which is a reflection of our worst selves.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think these characters that are on the boundaries between a villain who could choose to stop and a monster who could not choose to stop are sometimes the most fascinating antagonists we can put our characters up against. In some cases, we’re centering the story around them, so they are not the villain, they are actually the main character. Once upon a time, I worked on Dark Shadows, and of course, that has a vampire at its center who does monstrous things, but I think most people would not identify as being a monster.

Craig: Yes, and so they’re all different ones. It’s funny, when you look at the traditional Dracula, the Bram Stoker original Dracula, and when you look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, they’re both literate. In particular, Frankenstein’s monster in the novel, I think he speaks two languages. I think he speaks English and French. [chuckles] He’s remarkably literate and thoughtful. Dracula, the reason Dracula is so dangerous is because he’s so smart. He slowly and carefully manages to eat most of the people aboard a ship that’s crossing to England without anybody noticing because he’s really clever.

It’s funny how we kept that with Dracula. We said, “Okay, Dracula, you’re the ur-vampire, and all the vampires after you, most of them are going to follow this method of, ‘My darling, I want to suck your blood.’” Frankenstein, I don’t know, somebody read that novel and, “You know what? What if this monster doesn’t speak two languages? What if he speaks no languages, is 6’8”, and just groans a lot?” “That’s better. Let’s do that.”

John: Let’s do that. When we think about villains, we often talk about villain motivation. It’s worth thinking about monster motivation because there’s going to be some overlap, but I think a lot of cases, these monsters function more like animals, more like beasts, and you have to think about, what does an animal want? We talk about the four Fs, five Fs. The four Fs, those primal motivating factors: self-preservation, propagation, protection of an important asset, so they’re there to defend a thing, hunger or greed, classic, and revenge to a certain degree.

I always say that the Alien Queen in Aliens, in the end, she has a very specific focus and animus towards Ripley because of what Ripley did. It goes beyond just the need to propagate. She’s after her for a very specific reason.

Craig: That’s where it sometimes can get stupid. It doesn’t in that movie, but Jaws 3, I think, famously, “This time it’s personal,” no, it’s not. It’s a frickin’ shark. It doesn’t know you. [laughter] It’s just food. Obviously, the aliens in Aliens are quite clever. They are not merely savage and feral. You don’t expect that they’re sitting there doing math. They are the forerunners of the way we portrayed velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The idea of the smart monster, maybe not as smart as a human in their general sense, but very smart predatorially. That’s really interesting to see that, but when it starts getting personal with a dumb monster, it can get really silly.

John: Craig, what is your opinion on human monsters? I could think of like, so Jason Voorhees in a slasher film, is that a villain? Is that a monster? To what degree can we think of some of these human characters as monsters rather than classic villains?

Craig: I think they’re monsters. I think they’re monsters because they wear masks. Jason Voorhees wears a hockey mask, and Michael Myers in Halloween wears, I believe it’s a-

John: A Captain Kirk hat.

Craig: -a Captain Kirk mask, a William Shatner death mask, even though William Shatner is still alive. Those masks are what make them monsters. Their humanity is gone. When you look at how they move, and obviously, look, let’s just say it, Jason Voorhees was just a rip-off of Michael Myers. That’s pretty obvious. They are a large, shambling, seemingly feelingless, numb creature that has way more strength than a normal human ever would. They don’t really run. They don’t need to. They represent your own mortality. It’s coming. There’s nothing you can do. That is a nightmarish feeling. In their way, they are large zombies. They don’t speak. They just kill.

We don’t even really understand why they’re killing. Somebody eventually will explain it, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not like you can have a conversation with Jason Voorhees and say, “With some therapy, I think you’ll stop killing.” No, Jason will keep killing. I think of them as monsters for sure.

John: One of the projects I’m working on, I’m grappling with issues of what this monstrous character actually wants, what the endgame is, and I keep coming back to the Lovecraftian, there is no answer, there’s only the void. There’s that sense of sometimes the most terrifying thing is actually that there is no answer, that the universe is unfeeling and they just want to smash it and destroy it. It’s challenging because without a character who can actually say that, without a way to put that out there, that the monster themselves can’t communicate that.

As I’m outlining this, I’m recognizing that that’s going to be a thing that everyone needs to be able to expose to the audience in a way that the creature themselves can’t.

Craig: That is a challenge. It is certainly easy enough for the pursued characters to ruminate and speculate as to why this thing is doing what it wants to do, but that will just remain what it is, which is speculation. The whole point of speculation is we’ll never know. Yes, it is hard to figure out how to get that motivation across when it’s non-verbal and non-planning. In the case of aliens, you can just tell they’re predators, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They are doing what the apex predator’s supposed to do, win. They just want to win.

John: Of course, as we look at Predator, the question of whether you call that a monster or a villain, the motivation behind a Predator, what we learn very early on is they are trophy hunters. Literally, they are just too bad to some other creatures because that’s what they do. It’s not entirely clear whether it’s just rich people of that species doing that thing, or if it’s an important rite of passage. Are they on safari?

Craig: [laughs] You know what I love? The idea is like on Predator planet, they have social media, everybody has normal jobs. Like some people are accountants or whatever, some people work at the Predator McDonald’s, but jerk Predators [laughs] go to other planets to bag trophies. They then put a picture up of like, “Look at Jesse Ventura’s head.” Then other people online are like, “You’re sick. There’s something wrong with you. You feel the need to go to these places and kill these beautiful animals.”

John: For all we know, it’s like Donald Trump Jr.-

Craig: Exactly.

John: -is the equivalent of the food we’ve actually seen in these Predator movies. Someone who actually has a familiarity with the whole canon, and I’m not sure how established the canon really is, can maybe tell us what the true answer is here. My feeling has always been that this wasn’t a necessary cultural function, that they were doing this thing because they wanted to.

Craig: It was hunting. It was pointless hunting, and in that case, they really are villains. That’s like a mute villain because the Predator is very much calculating, thinking, planning, prioritizing. He doesn’t speak because he doesn’t speak our language, not because he doesn’t speak. If we understood the clicky bits, then we would know that he was saying stuff.

John: I’ll wrap this up with just it’s important sometimes to think about how we must seem to other creatures in our world right now. Think if you’re an ant or an ant colony and an eight-year-old boy comes along, that is a monster. It has no understanding of you, it has no feeling for you. That eight-year-old boy is just a T-Rex and you have to run from it. You’re not looking at that as a villain. That is truly, fully a monster. Sometimes reversing that can give you some insight into what it must feel like to be encountering these creatures.

Craig: There’s a certain godlike quality to them. When they are that much more powerful than we are, it’s a bit why superhero movies have escalated their own internal arms race to intergalactic proportions. Because it’s not enough for people to be beset by godlike monster humans. At some point, you need them to be fought with by good monster humans, and then it just goes from there. When you’re creating some grounded thing, you’re absolutely right. The notion that what’s pursuing, and Predator actually did this very well. It’s a good movie.

John: It’s a good movie, I agree. I realized Prey as well, the most recent [unintelligible 01:30:30].

Craig: Yes. You get the sense that the people in it are impressed. They start to realize that this guy is better than them in every way. The only way you’re going to beat it is if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger, AKA better than all of us. [laughter] It’s a pretty apt comparison.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 75 – Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 590 – Anti-Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 465 – The Lackeys Know What They’re Doing
• Scriptnotes Episode 257 – Flaws are Features
• Every Villain is a Hero
• Writing Better Bad Guys
• Screenwriting and the Problem of Evil
• Mama
• The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote by T.B.D.
• Why do good people do bad things? by Daniel Effron
• Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk by Catherine A. Sanderson
• The Monsters Know What They’re Doing blog and book
• Austin Powers deleted scene, “Henchman’s Wife”
• Redshirt
• 7 Tips for Creating Unforgettable Villains
• How Christopher Nolan writes a movie on our YouTube!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew Marquardt.
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 691 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Most weeks we discuss storytelling designed to entertain an audience watching something in a movie theater or at home on their couches, which are passive viewers, consumers, numbering in the hundreds, thousands, or millions. Craig, what if your goal is just to entertain a few friends around a table?

Craig: Well, in that case, I think we know exactly what we do.

John: Today on the show, we’ll discuss roleplaying games, their history, their narrative design. We’ll talk about Dungeons & Dragons, sure, but also a host of games that have pushed the form to new areas of collaborative storytelling and world-building. To help us do this, we welcome a man who literally wrote the book on it, Stu Horvath. Welcome, Stu.

Stu Horvath: Hello, thank you for having me on.

Craig: Hey, Stu.

John: All right, the book in question is Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground: A Guide To Tabletop Roleplaying Games. It’s out from MIT Press. It was a former One Cool Thing of mine. It is glorious. Congratulations on this book, Stu.

Stu: Thank you. It’s very large. Don’t drop it on your foot.

John: It is so, so heavy. It is a sizable tome, and it’s great. I want to talk to you about tabletop roleplaying games in general, the history of them, but also the evolution of the form, because Craig and I come at this mostly from playing D&D and a lot of video games. So much interesting stuff has happened in tabletop, and I just really want to talk about this and the similarities, the differences between the kinds of writing that Craig and I do and the kind of storytelling that’s happening in these games.

Stu: It used to be such a narrow thing that was very dice-driven, very simulation-driven, but now there’s just all kinds of storytelling that happen in roleplaying games. It’s almost impossible for me to figure out a place to start.

John: We’ll do our best, and so we’ll get into that, and then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to look at your appendix chapter, because you talk in this Appendix D about the concept of dungeons as narrative spaces, which seems like it should have always been there. It seems like this idea that’s fundamental to human psychology, but as you point out in this appendix, dungeons are actually a surprisingly recent literary thing, so I want to unpack that a bit.

Stu: Happily. My next book is about that, actually.

John: Oh, my gosh. A preview of an upcoming book.

Craig: All right, it’s going to focus on dungeons? I love that.

Stu: Yes.

John: Stu, talk to us about what it is you do, because this all came about because you are a collector, right?

Stu: Yes. Like a lot of folks who played Dungeons & Dragons when they were a kid, and other roleplaying games, I lost a lot of stuff, either to the attrition of borrowing and lending. I had a flood in my basement, which is a surprisingly common occurrence for folks. I eventually just started wanting those things back. In collecting them, I saw that there were more things out there that I had never heard of that were really exciting. To this day, eBay has become the bane of my wallet’s existence. I’m actually in the process of trying to sell some stuff off to make room for new stuff.

I accumulated all this cool stuff, and I just got really, really excited about it, so I started an Instagram feed, dedicated daily posts to roleplaying games and supplements, and things that affected the development of roleplaying games, or that I otherwise thought were interesting. Out of that daily writing process, it just very naturally turned into a book. There’s also a podcast that’s basically the same thing. You pick a roleplaying game and talk about it for 20, 30 minutes.

Craig: Which you apparently have over 300 different roleplaying games that you cover in your book, which is astonishing. Are you going to get to our- what are we at, John? 691?

John: [chuckles] 691.

Craig: I don’t know if you’re going to get to 691, but you’ll at least get to 300, which is amazing. I’m curious, given that you’ve been doing this for a while, I suppose it’s a good thing that as you create a book like this, the audience for RPGs seems to have exploded. How do you greet the increase in popularity? Are you excited? Are you a little worried that perhaps this special space is being invaded? Is it just an opportunity to sell a whole lot more books?

Stu: I like money, so selling books is a big benefit. No, I welcome everybody in. I think that it was always a hobby that was looking for its players. I think that the more people who come into it with different ideas, the more types of games and the more experiences that the games provide, and the more options everybody has to play more different games.

There’s so many new, fine-toothed experiences that are coming out of this indie scene right now that is just fed by people who come in through the big game, 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, and they filter out. It’s not a lot of people who filter out into the larger hobby, but the people who do come brimming with new ideas that they want to fiddle with and tinker with, and from that comes so many cool new things. That’s what I’m here for.

John: Going back to your collection, one thing that strikes me is that we talk about these things being lost to basement floods, but the whole reason that there is this collection that exists is there’s so much material. There’s a materiality to the history of roleplaying games. These were published and printed things from these tiny presses or sometimes bigger presses that existed that people could purchase in hobby shops and game stores or out of the back of Dragon Magazine. You have amassed this huge collection, but there are likely so many more things that don’t exist simply for lack of enough copies of them being out there in the world.

What your book does so well, it’s really charting the growth, the experience of how everything fed into the next thing. So many of these games were a pushback reaction against Dungeons & Dragons and reincorporation and then old-school roleplaying comes back in. It’s just a great history, but it’s all possible because there’s a record. It’s like we know so much about the ancient Egyptians because there were just so many tombs full of hieroglyphics that we could actually study these things versus other cultural innovations are lost to us because there’s not stuff around to document.

Stu: The beauty of the whole hobby is that it’s a tinkerer’s hobby. Immediately after Dungeons & Dragons came out, people were like, well, this is cool as a basic idea, but I could do it better. I could fix it. I could do things to it that are going to make this the best game.

Craig: I love nerds. They’re like, “Not bad. Can do better.”

Stu: Exactly. There was this really influential publication at APA, Amateur Press Association, which is basically a bunch of zines that was produced monthly, sent to a central editor who bound them together and then sent them out to everybody who paid for a subscription. Started almost immediately after D&D. Lee Gold has kept it in print up until April of this year, so 50 years-

John: Incredible.

Stu: -monthly. I think she missed two or three issues in that entire run. It’s insanity. It was a real testing ground for those kinds of ideas. If you look back, especially in the ‘90s, right before the internet made that stuff faster and digital and online, you can see a lot of game design just happening in those pages, and it’s all about people just sharing ideas and arguing about them. Gygax hated it too. He thought it was really cool initially, and then he was just like, oh, no, these people are bootlegging my stuff.

John: Could you give us a starting place? When do we need to start thinking about tabletop roleplaying games from your book? Spoiler, I know it’s Dungeons & Dragons, but can you talk us through the history? This is 1974 we’re beginning, and can you just talk to us about the transition from military simulation games to roleplaying games and what the innovation was that made D&D the starting place?

Stu: 1974 is when Dungeons & Dragons first comes out and is published. It is the first commercially available roleplaying game. Prior to that, there’s this big scene in the Midwest which is focused on military war games, reenacting existing battles like Waterloo or battles in the Civil War, World War II. That has a very long tradition that goes back to HG Wells, created a game called Little Wars which you played on the floor. Peter Cushing of horror movie fame was a big proponent of that game. There’s great videos of him painting his miniatures.

That goes even further back to the Prussian School of Wargaming which was actual teaching officers how to command on these sand tables with miniatures and terrain. There’s two things that happened. Lord of the Rings gets popular and fantasy figures in a military setting are something that people get interested in in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s which leads to Chainmail which was Gygax and some collaborators created this war game in which you had optional units that were fantasy, wizards and dragons and such.

John: We should say for our listeners who are not big D&D people, this is Gary Gygax who is acknowledged as the person who created what we think of as Dungeons and Dragons with many collaborators and there’s a complicated history there but it’s his name on those initial books.

Stu: It’s Gygax and Dave Arneson. The Dave Arneson part comes from Minneapolis I believe and he was playing, I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but the game is Bronstein. The idea was that there was this war game that was happening but there was also a village and people had actual specific characters that they were playing in the context of this war game. That idea of players controlling one singular character instead of a unit of characters or an entire army plus the advent of fantasy influence in the war game sphere collided into this storytelling game that grew out of the collaboration between Arneson and Gygax.

John: In your book, I’m looking at an image from the 1977 white box edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The title on the box is Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. Which is just such a mouthful, but that’s how they had to frame it. It wasn’t saying roleplaying game yet. It didn’t seem to have the full sense, or at least it wasn’t presenting itself as this is a thing that you play make-believe with your friends, but it quickly became that. What were the first moments where D&D broke out of just a very small Midwestern nerd culture to become a national thing?

Stu: I think it was almost immediate. I think that there were small pockets of interested war gamers all over the country who immediately glommed onto this thing that was new. You can see that Tunnels and Trolls comes out almost immediately after. I’m pretty sure he was based in Arizona. Pretty far. There was already a pretty big war gaming scene in San Francisco, the Bay Area, with Chaosium.

There’s this urban legend that Greg Stafford, who founded Chaosium, a friend of his ran into a guy who was at a print shop where D&D was being first made, and he got one of the very first copies. It’s hard to imagine in a world of snail mail only but I do think that it proliferated really rapidly. Immediately there were different games coming out to iterate on the basic idea of roleplaying.

John: Now, we don’t have audio or video in its initial play sessions. How closely do we think they resemble what we think about D&D today? Was it players controlling individual characters, going into imaginary dungeon-y rooms and fighting a monster then moving on to the next room? Was that always there from the start? How did that happen?

Stu: I think that it was. The idea of the dungeon, I think, was almost an accidental innovation for playtesting. It was just a situation that gave you infinite possibility, but only a very limited number of options at any given time because you only had so many routes out of a room. Gary Gygax playtested in Castle Greyhawk, which was his mega dungeon. Dave Arneson had Blackmoor, which was a little bit more like a campaign setting. He was very interested in reenacting some of his favorite fantasy stories that he had read and adapting them to play through, whereas Gygax is more interested in testing the cleverness of his players.

I think that in play, it’s a much different thing back then because you have all these folks who are really interested in simulating things like combat. There’s weapon speeds and lots of crunchy numbers, and there’s a ton of players. They’re all running potentially multiple characters at the same time. There’s something called a caller who is an intermediary between the players and the DM to help manage the size of the group. I think that the actual play loop is really still explore, fight, and loot, rinse and repeat.

Craig: There is certainly explore, fight, loot, but on top of that, there is our beloved RP, roleplay. I’m curious, looking at roleplaying games, one thing is very clear. By the time, say, it gets to John and to me when we’re in middle school, other than D&D we’re playing Top Secret and we’re playing these other games where it’s quite clear that the people who are making these games understand that RP is just as important, if not more important, than explore, fight, and loot. Believe me, we love rolling for initiative.

I wonder if, in Arneson’s way of I’d like to just give myself a chance to be a part of stories I’ve already read, or Gygax saying I’d like a chance to create my own dungeon with my own monsters, that the players, almost from the start, were saying, yes, but also, we’d like to write, because really, RP is writing. It’s improv. It’s creation of character. The interplay between the characters is some of the most fun. When you look at Critical Role, 98% of it at this point is RP. Where do you think the actual business of roleplaying games figures out and adapts to what the audience seems to be wanting? It takes a long, long time.

Stu: Interesting. I think that, broadly, the hobby struggles with codifying roleplaying with rules. I think that it’s always been there, but it’s been something that has been outside of the scope, especially in the early days, of the mechanics of the system. I’m running an old-school-style game that has lots of random tables right now. It’s cool. I’ve never ran a game like this before. I run very narrative-heavy stuff. Now, I’m just giving myself over to randomness. From that randomness is where the beauty is. It presents situations and combinations of things that you’d never would have expected.

They are exactly improv cues for the players who then give me material back, and it goes back and forth. There’s very little, in terms of rule structure, we’re playing old-school essentials, which is basic Dungeons & Dragons. There’s no structure mechanically in the game for that. We’re just making it up as we go along. I think that’s always been with the hobby until the ‘90s when you have the storyteller system and it starts building into more structure for narrative in games.

John: Stu, this feels like a good moment to talk about crunchiness of rules versus the airy-fairy, we’re all playing characters, it’s a narrative, and it’s very player driven. That tension feels like it’s always been there. Most of the new versions of the game have been trying to push in one direction or another direction. We have things that are very open-ended. I had Craig and our group play through Dungeon World, which was too open for them. Then we’ve also struggled over just– A D&D session can get lost in the– Craig, what was it this last week?

Whether a hold person could be defeated by lesser restoration. It’s one of the annoyances, but also one of the great joys of D&D is those esoteric rule decisions. Can you talk to us about– Looking through this book with 300 games, it feels like a lot of it has been each game figuring out its own balance between these are the rules and this is what’s open for discussion and interpretation.

Stu: It absolutely has been. There’s just such a gradient of options out there now. In the early 2000s, that’s when the indie storytelling scene really opened up. These are just very open, loose, improvisational games really tightly focused in terms of theme. They’re fantastic to read about. They always have very clever mechanics. Dread is a good example. They use a Jenga tower for their conflict resolution.

Craig: Oh, that’s genius.

Stu: Every time you do something, you have to pull a piece out. If the tower stands, you succeed. If the tower falls, it’s a horror game, so your character dies. That’s it. That’s the only real rule. Everything else is just almost small improvisational theater. I love reading that stuff. I can’t run it, and I have a really hard time playing it. The structure of the rules is the thing that sets me free. I need something to lean on, or I start to panic.

Craig: I’m just like you. The rules let both sides of your brain work together. Screenwriting is the rules medium of writing because we’re constantly dealing with these constraints. General format and the fact that whatever we write has to be able to be filmed and so on and so forth, it is a more narrowly crafted way of thinking and creating. I find that when there aren’t any rules– John and I played what was it called? The one we played with Kelly?

John: Fiasco. Episode 142.

Craig: There you go. It was so much fun that night, in part because Kelly’s hysterical, but I wouldn’t do it again because there’s no rules. I love the idea that you get to ping-pong back and forth between your right brain creativity, coming up with characters with flaws, how do they talk, what decisions would they make in certain circumstances with. Now we have rules. The other part of this is, what do I do in my next turn? I’ve got options. How can I maximize my impact here? Engaging both sides to me is really important. I love an RPG that gives me both.

John: Just because we recently put this out as a YouTube video, when Greta Gerwig was on the podcast, she was talking about how she grew up in the mumblecore movement, which was wildly underscripted. Basically, they’d have a description of what happens in the scene, but then you just have to improv throughout it. She was so frustrated because she felt like the text actually set you free. The text gave it a form and let you explore and go further.

Without that, you’re just floating in dead air. You don’t commit to things because there’s no text to come back to. It feels like rules are part of that. You’re coming into a game with a set of rules and opportunities to succeed or fail can be really important. Finding the right balance between, okay, looking at everything in a table versus now I’m going to go do this thing, I can do anything in the world, is the real struggle.

Stu: One of the things that really differentiates roleplaying games, especially from theater, I think, because like theater is right there, aside of the fact that you have the script, it’s almost roleplaying games, it’s the dice, I think. It’s that randomness. I don’t think it’s so much about rules crunch. I think it’s more about where you decide to have the randomness that makes it a roleplaying game that is the thing people are trying to position.

With Dread the randomness is literally just that tower. With it just all the way over there in the corner that one time I don’t have enough structure in the game to figure it out. Whereas these random tables, we have combat and it’s D&D but the real juice of it is when we hit something that has random tables where I get to roll, and it just creates these situations on the fly. That’s where I like it.

Craig: Sure, you get suspense, but you also get a constant opportunity to react, which is fun. In the end, the most important letter in RPG is G. We’re there to play a game. We’re there to have fun. The more we get a chance to react– The first games we play, the simple ones as children, they all have either dice or a spinner or cards. There’s always random chance. That’s part of what makes it a game.

Stu: I want to talk about some of the similarities between the experience of playing a roleplaying game and other things that film and TV writers do. I’ve often said that our weekly D&D game feels like, oh my god, this is the most expensive writer’s room that you can find, because you have a bunch of well-played writers who are all around a table working together to tell a story together.

Whoever’s DMing that session is the share runner but there’s a much more shared authority. They’re coming down with the final rulings on some things, but the experience of playing the game is everyone should be contributing, and everyone is coming into that room with a point of view and a character and a voice and a unique approach to the world. Craig, that writer’s room analogy holds for you?

Craig: It does. We have to expand it a little bit to include a rock star because we have Tom Morello that plays with us. It does. Everybody in there either is paid to tell stories or is paid to analyze stories. We all love the structure that comes with a good tale. I think also, for me, we all appreciate the fact that we don’t have to actually create a great story for anyone else. It’s for us. That means we don’t have to tie off loose ends. We don’t have to do setups and payoffs. We can be sloppy writers, and in being sloppy writers, the stupid crap we do, and one of the things about our groups, whether I’m DMing or I’m playing, is the utter futility of plans.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Stu, but when you’re playing and especially when you’re DMing, everybody loves a plan. We’re so familiar with the scene where people plan stuff and then they pull it off. Ocean’s 11, plan, execute, awesome. I don’t think one of our plans has ever worked. It is incredible. Sometimes they go so bad so fast. It’s hysterical. I love how not in control we are because when we’re writing, we have both the pleasure, but also the accountability of being completely in control.

John: I would say a similarity between the experience of writing for movies or television and playing this is there are still scenes. Each encounter is essentially a scene. It’s a moment, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, which is really what we’re looking for in scenes, but there’s a lack of structure overall. As Craig was saying, the payoffs don’t always come. There’s not a sense of where we necessarily are at in the journey.

A lot of times these campaigns end up being more like a soap opera that’s open-ended. There’s not one final thing you’re going to get to. Talk about the laughs around the table, we’re participants rather than the audience, or we are the audience ourselves, which makes things like Critical Role videos and stuff like that this weird middle ground, because are you a virtual player with them? Are you an audience? That dynamic is relatively recent and also new.

Stu: I’ve always felt that roleplaying game sessions are great in the play of them, and they make for really poor storytelling afterwards to somebody that has not played the game. You had to be there. Stuff like Critical Role has always let me scratch at my head because I don’t quite feel like I’m in the game like you said or an audience member or what. I’m not getting what I’m supposed to get out of it. I will say though just to Craig’s point about plans, my current game they’ll play an all week and then they’ll set off into the wilderness and they’ll hit a random encounter right outside of the settlement and that’ll be it. So much for the plan.

Craig: They never got to the plan. It’s interesting because we can talk about Critical Role for a second. For people who don’t know, Critical Role is an internet show. They have a cartoon. It’s an empire and it’s generally run by a man named Matt Mercer, who is the DM and general storyteller. Then he has a fairly stable theatrical troop that play characters. A lot of them are voice actors. Our own Ashley Johnson is one of them from our Last of Us universe.

You do follow along with them, and I think they have the benefit of a little bit of editing and preparation. There is something going on there behind the scenes that I think does help curate it a bit. When you’re playing pure RPG, it is not efficient. There are long stretches that, if anybody else were watching, would be falling asleep. There’s a lot of, okay, we’ve captured somebody. What do we do with them? Thirty minutes of back-and-forth argument, debate.

John: A war crime is being committed.

Craig: Yes, inevitably, the discussion ends when one character just murders the person. Then that gets discussed. It can be almost like watching a Congressional hearing. If you’re in the Congressional hearing, I suppose it’s probably fun. I think it is this weird, curated experience, and people are very connected to those characters, which I think is great. People who get it really, really love it. They are really into it, and I love that for them. To the extent that it might inspire people to play their own games, I think they will be shocked when they play their own games to go, oh, this isn’t anywhere near as consistently entertaining and crazy as Critical Role. This is actually more like a deposition. Hey, I love a deposition.

I’m curious from a writing point of view. Since some of roleplaying is pre-written, obviously each RPG creates a set of rules and a general structure of how to play and allows a game master to create whatever story they’d like. As was the case with D&D from the start and moving forward through most RPGs, they also write modules that they hand you and say, “Here’s a story you can guide players through.”

They will wander through in their own path, and you can customize, you can homebrew it, whatever you want, but here’s a story we’ve written. I’m curious, since you are such an impressive student of all these RPGs, you mentioned D&D 5E, the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons that came out a little over 10 years ago now, which absolutely changed everything and has not just the most popular version of D&D ever but it’s the most popular version of any RPG I think, tabletop RPG ever, why did that work so well and how much of it had to do with the writing of the early adventures?

Stu: That’s a very interesting question that’s probably going to get me into a lot of trouble.

Craig: Go for it.

Stu: I think that one of one of the things that 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons did poorly was their pre-packaged modules. For me, I don’t think there’s a legendary classic in the bunch. Partly because so many of them are very reflective of earlier material that’s been remixed. Almost all of them off the top of my head, like Tomb of Annihilation really goes back to Tomb of Horrors and so on.

I think that maybe those provided a controlled experience for people to experience these older things that they had heard about in a way that was new and had a lot of guidelines and help, support for the players and the people running them. I think it was a bright and easy enough system to pick up and at the right time, it came out of fourth edition that didn’t have the right amount of adaptation. People weren’t into that system. This felt similar but new. I think that the pandemic really juiced it. I think that it was really easy to adapt to online play at a time when online play was about to just become the only thing that you could do.

John: In fifth edition, and for folks who aren’t aware of it, that we’re talking about the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which reframed and reformatted a bunch of how the game worked and was wildly successful, and it became the baseline behind which a lot of other things are compared, I think I will say about the game as it’s run by Wizards of the Coast, there’s really good writing throughout.

If you look at the quality of the manuals and how things are laid out, the world building that’s around it is incredibly impressive. Where does world building begin in the history of RPGs? We talked about there’s Castle Greyhawk, there’s Ravenloft, [unintelligible 00:29:41]. Is Ravenloft the first of the cinematic universes within these roleplaying games?

Stu: I would say so. The module Ravenloft changes things. It really builds more of a narrative structure into the game outside of that looting mechanic gameplay loop. You’re there for a reason. You have a real villain for a change who has agency to work against you actively.

John: He’s not just waiting there at the end for you to fight him?

Stu: No, he shows up periodically and tests your strength and becomes a real pain in the butt. That was just never done. He was also a monster that combined aspects of the player character. He was also a very powerful spellcaster, which was surprising. Going after a vampire you knows certain things about vampires in the context of the game and all of a sudden, this guy’s throwing spells at you.

It was a paradigm shift. I think people look back before that and they want stuff like Castle Greyhawk and Greyhawk generally to be more cohesive and a more sensible world, but it really isn’t. Even though Ravenloft changes things, it really is the ’90s, ’89, ’90, when Forgotten Realms sort of starts to gather steam and Dark Sun comes out, and then these things start to become real worlds.

John: Yes, and also Ravenloft as a campaign, but also the books, which were very successful in themselves, is that one of the real innovations was that these roleplaying games then spun off a bunch of other merchandise. In your book, you talk about the Dungeons & Dragons wallets and other things you can collect. They spun off enough merchandise, and a lot of world-building which happens outside of the game. It was a virtuous cycle. It just all fed into each other.

Stu: Your Dragonlance.

John: Totally.

Stu: Dragonlance is something that they tried to make this big, epic narrative, but it didn’t really work as a roleplaying game. It was better as books. The novels are the things that people really honed in on.

John: Yes. Craig and I have played Fiasco, we’ve played a few other things along the way. I did a session with the Alien RPG, which I thought was fantastic. Do you have much more information about the innovations that have come from the indie space or other experiments we missed along the way? Help catch us up. What are the threads that we’re missing and what are the things we should be looking for now?

Stu: I think that if you’ve not played the original West End Star Wars game as movie people, that’s cinematic roleplaying. It takes the language of cinema and applies them directly to the mechanics of the game and it’s great.

John: Give us a sense of a thing that you’re doing in a play session of the original Star Wars game.

Stu: Oh, it encourages you to do smash cuts to pull out from the actual action. You have these asides where you read dialogue between other characters that aren’t there. This idea of the rules say, start in media res. It’s all just built around upping the ante and constantly referring back. The great thing about Star Wars is you have the text of the movies to tell you how to play the game. It’s just do that at your table, except with different characters in different situations. It comes together really well. It’s just six-sided dice. It’s a very simple system that’s so good.

Craig: I played that, John, with Ken White.

John: That’s great.

Craig: It is really fun, and the simplicity of the dice is fantastic.

John: With that thread, and again, the history of this, there’s a lot of licensed products that are coming through, and sometimes they’ve had more control or less control. The IP holders have had more or less control, but there’s also been this indie game movement, which I’m sure accelerated greatly with the rise of the internet and through the pandemic. Can you just talk us through that thread?

Stu: Yes, it was a direct reaction, I think, to the D20 D&D, and, starting in 2000 they universalized their system, the D20 system, and everybody started to make D20 versions of their other games. It was a really bad moment for the industry as a whole because it destabilized it, almost knocked a whole bunch of people out of business.

John: Tell me more about that. How did it destabilize?

Stu: Basically, everybody overbet on the enduring popularity of this system, which was too crunchy for most other play experiences. It just saturated the market, and then the market imploded. There was also some messing around on Wizards of the Coast part, where they changed the terms of the licenses, and they announced the 3.5 edition without telling anybody. There’s all this stuff that destabilized the market, made people not want to deal with it anymore, but everybody who was overcommitted to the idea of this system was caught out and went out of business.

John: Now, one of the things that’s always been a strength and a challenge for roleplaying games is that, especially at the start, you had to basically know somebody who knew how to play the game in order to play the game. You have to find out that the game exists in the first place and then go to a hobby store or a game store to buy something you could start with and then realize there’s also monthly magazines and other places you can find out more information. You needed somebody to play with.

I remember I was probably eight or nine, so I was really young, but you needed somebody or somebody’s older brother to teach you how the game actually worked because it’s not obvious and not intuitive. This was an era before there was YouTube, before there was the internet to be able to look things up. It’s probably both the reason for success, but also one of those limiting factors is that it spreads from person to person rather than mass worldwide all at once because to play it, you have to play with a group of people around you.

Stu: Yes, it was like an older sibling thing. If you were a younger kid, your older brother or sister could sit you down and go, “Okay, you’ve seen me play with my friends, let me pass it along.”

John: Yes, if Diego Rodriguez’s brother hadn’t played D&D, I probably would never have learned.

Stu: There you go. It really resists casualness in a lot of ways. It’s gotten better. I also think that it just resists a good elevator pitch. It’s really hard to explain to somebody who has zero context for it.

John: It’s like my friend Jason’s dad coming downstairs and asking, “Who’s winning?”

Craig: Well, nobody.

Stu: I think that in a very admirable way, the 2024 Player Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons really does try. They actually took time to start the book by saying, what is this? What actually happens in this? Then they give you an example of what some sample play would sound like. Is it a little bit canned? Is it a little bit corny? Sure. If I didn’t know anything and there was a time– The actual first rule book I ever picked up for an RPG was for Traveler.

This was back in, I don’t know, 1979 or something, 1980. I don’t know, way back then. It was just like, Traveler, here you go. Here we go. Here’s a bunch of tables. Here’s this, and I’m like, “What? What is it?” It takes time, and it feels like, in a way, they’ve grown up, Wizards has grown up enough to go, “Hey, a whole lot of people want to play this. Why don’t we take eight pages to talk to the people that know nothing?” It’s quite welcoming, I think.

Craig: The last 10 years has seen an explosion in starter boxes. The fifth edition had one in–

John: Lost Mines of Phandelver.

Craig: Yes, and it’s a huge success. That’s one of the best. If there is a solid gold campaign, I think that one’s great.

John: The fifth edition, that’s the one.

Stu: That’s the one.

Craig: I think it’s telling that it’s not one of the hardcovers. It’s in the starter set. Chaosium does great starter sets. The Alien game has a great starter set. The Chaosium ones are great because they almost always have a solo scenario for you to play, which allows you to get into the game and figure it out and see what it’s like without the onus of having to put together a group.

John: Can we touch briefly on solo RPGs, because that’s the thing I learned about from your book that I wasn’t aware were a thing out there. It’s the solitaire version of some of these games and it feels like there’s some real innovation in them.

Stu: It used to just be basically like the fighting fantasy games, game books, that thing, where it’s like a choose-your-own-adventure with light mechanics thrown in. Chaosium solo is going to really resemble that. In recent years, there’s just a whole bunch of different approaches that people have taken to solos. Black Oath Entertainment puts these games out that are where you’re simulating everything as you go and there’s all these rule mechanics. You’re not only like playing the game by yourself, and it’s a game that resembles something like Crunchy or like a D&D, but you’re also building the world as you go and creating these narrative touchstones. It’s really very interesting.

John: Yes, it goes back to one of the core mechanics of roleplaying games is play to learn, basically, play to explore. You’re building the world as you’re going through it. The Hex Crawler games were a lot of that, where the map is not filled out until you get there.

Stu: Then there’s games that are just journaling prompts, which have an underlying system to them. Thousand-Year-Old Vampire is just an amazing game in that regard, where you’re collecting memories, and you can only keep so many of them. As you go, the game is making you lose these memories. It’s a very emotional and sad game.

Craig: Isn’t that what’s going to happen to me just from living?

Stu: Yes. Just think of it as being 1,000 years old then. It’s horrible. Dementia, the RPG, I don’t know, that sounds terrible.

Craig: But also beautiful.

Stu: Yes, there’s a mechanic where you get a journal in the game and you can write stuff down, but there’s also mechanics in the game that take that journal away from you at once. Those memories are gone. It’s just like, oh my god.

Craig: Flood in the basement?

Stu: Yes, exactly.

John: There’s also a rise of GM-less games where everyone is just a player in it and you’re all doing the thing, which tends to emphasize the roleplaying it all. You have a little section on Honey Heist, which was a great example of the absolute most minimal game. There’s one page back and front and those are all the rules.

Craig: Honey Heist I’ve played and it is as ridiculous and as satisfying as the name promises. Just so folks know, you’re playing bears and you’re trying to steal the honey at the honey convention. There’s a table for random hats, so it’s just amazing. It’s all you need to go, and it’s great.

John: As we wrap up here, I want to talk just a bit about Lovecraft because so many of these games, especially in the horror space, use Lovecraft IP, I guess is the way to phrase it. I think you do a good job in the book of talking about Lovecraft himself is so problematic, and yet so many of these games are built upon these ideas that come out of that space. It’s a whole vibe that wouldn’t exist without him. Where do you see the current moment with these games and where are we headed?

Stu: I think that in the last 20 years in general, horror writers have explored the cosmic in ways that have left Lovecraft behind. I think that there’s different ways to approach it now that aren’t– Everybody uses the word ‘Lovecraftian’. If it has tentacles, it’s Lovecraftian. It’s not. Lovecraftian actually refers to the really peculiar racisms of one guy in Providence. I think collectively we’ve learned how to work with some of his ideas without always bringing him along. I think that’s good. I think it’s going to get better and better as we go.

John: I think it’s also an interesting example of by giving yourself away or basically not trying to bunker down and hold on all your stuff, your ideas get out there further. The people who like, no, use my characters, use these names, use whatever, allows that stuff to get out much wider. One of the reasons we recognize his name is because not just what he did, but the influence he had in a whole generation of other creators who took his ideas and ran with them.

Stu: That’s always been the case from the very beginning. He personally allowed it. It engendered this collaborative and free form expansion of his ideas. That has definitely grown beyond what he would have condoned.

John: To bring us all back to the start, obviously we don’t get Dungeons and Dragons without Tolkien. We probably don’t get the same version of Dungeons and Dragons without Tolkien there. Early on, Tolkien had said, “No, you cannot call these things hobbits. That’s my term.” That’s why we have halflings in it. It’s lessons there.

Craig: Didn’t really slow D&D down, did it?

John: D&D works just fine. Stu, because you played so many more of these games, if listeners are curious about trying out some of these things, what would you recommend as a first RPG for someone to try, a first tabletop RPG?

Stu: If you’re of a certain age, having grown up in the ’80, I think that Tales from the Loop is a fantastic game to try just because it has a lot of nostalgic and emotional touchstones that will juice your engagement with the game. It’s a fairly simple– It’s like Alien in terms of the basic system. It’s crunchy, but also pretty narrative. I think that’s a good one, but there’s also a gazillion simple games that you could play. Honey Heist, which is literally printed in my book, the full rules. You can grab that or Mork Borg or there’s so much stuff. Go to my website. Just look around.

John: That is a great idea. Let us do our one cool thing. Craig, what do you have for us this week?

Craig: Well, it’s more of a hope than a thing. Apple had their WDC 25, which is where they show off the stuff that’s intended for developers. Oh, I guess it’s WWDC, Worldwide Developer Conference, not just world. This is the upcoming technology that is going to power things. They show this to the developers. Developers then can incorporate it into the apps they’re building so that Apple can make money off of their genius. There’s a bunch of things in here that I’m like, okay, great. The thing that I zeroed in on is that they appear to be getting closer to what I think is going to be the really important shift in technology soon.

Obviously, AI is taking over the conversation, but AI is a mode. It exists to accomplish things. The thing that I think will make a real difference, and we’ve talked about this before, is translation, the elimination of the language barrier. It seems like they’re getting closer. They’re providing something called live translation where text messages will be automatically translated as they go. More importantly, spoken translation for calls in the phone app. That’s the one that made me sit forward. Now you can call somebody who does not speak the same language you do and have a conversation on the phone. If that works, okay.

John: Yes. Impressed. We’ve been on this trajectory for a while. It’s good it’s being introduced in a product. I think we often say this on the podcast, this is the worst it will ever be.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It may not be great out of the gate, but I think it will be transformational because I’ve definitely been in situations like Northern Greece and we’re going to a restaurant and, well, no one speaks English. They pull out their Google phone and you’re just talking back and forth and handing the phone back and forth as it translates, but it’s not the immediacy that you really want.

I would love to be able to be on a Zoom with somebody who doesn’t speak my language and have it really work. I think we’re getting closer to that day. I share your optimism. My one cool thing is a video by Sara Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright. They were performing She Used To Be Mine. I think it was at Lincoln Center or Kennedy Center. This is the song from Waitress that Sara Bareilles wrote the musical for and it’s her singing the song with Rufus Wainwright and it’s– Craig, you’ll love this. You love a good singer.

Craig: I do.

John: They are phenomenal together. I’ll put a link to the original video, but then also there’s a whole category of people reacting to it, including this Australian vocal coach who’s going through watching segments of it, then talking through how they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s always so great to see experts really help you understand why this thing is working so well and the techniques that they’re using. Two videos I’ll put in there, both about Sara Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright singing She Used To Be Mine.

Craig: Love it.

John: Stu, do you have something to share with our listeners?

Stu: I feel like mine’s not nearly as cutting edge, but I just finished watching Kolchak: The Night Stalker series. Have you seen it before?

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: Tell us about it. I know almost nothing. I recognize it as a name.

Stu: Oh, it’s so good. There’s a movie called The Night Stalker written by Richard Matheson with Darren McGavin as Kolchak, who’s this hard, shouty, awful reporter who finds out that there’s a vampire terrorizing Las Vegas. He kills the vampire there and he gets run out of town and goes to Seattle, which is the second movie, The Night Strangler, where there’s an alchemist who’s the Count de Saint Germain who’s killing women to steal their blood to keep his youth tonic. Kolchak kills him and then he gets a TV series called Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which is one hour creature of the week.

Totally inspires X-Files and basically anything else that has that creature of the week format really comes right out of Colchak. It’s just, it’s great. It’s ‘70s. It’s gritty, but also hokey. Darren McGavin’s performance is through the roof. He’s so endearing and obnoxious at the same time. It’s 20 episodes and I’m sad to see it go, but I finished watching it last night and it’s a fever dream of a show too.

John: I love it.

Stu: After a while, it just doesn’t make sense. He’s so quick to be willing to kill monsters. It’s great.

Craig: You know how you know a program was made before the tyranny of focus groups and overthink? Its title is Kolchak: The Night Stalker. That would not get off a piece of paper.

Stu: It back to the movie. I didn’t realize how huge the movie was. Millions and millions of people. It rivaled the Superbowl’s ratings. It was a TV movie. In 1971, it was just–

Craig: Just to put things in perspective. Back in 1971, everything rivaled the Superbowl.

Stu: True.

Craig: Three channels to watch. Yes. How many people watched the finale of MASH, which was the most watched thing on television I think of all time?

John: What, 70 million? Is that something?

Craig: It is 106 million viewers.

John: Good Lord. Jeez.

Craig: If we say percentage-wise of the population, if you adjusted that to our population today, it would be 152 million. You get a million people to watch something now, it’s like, meh, not bad.

John: I think Magnum PI’s finale has something ridiculous too like 70 million.

Craig: Yes, back in the day, there was only three channels. It wasn’t that hard.

John: Great stuff. Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Stu: Yes, it’s really great. Bring it back.

John: We love it. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes, including a Fiasco episode and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Dungeons. Oh, and, Stu Horvath, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Stu: This has been a blast. Thanks for having me.

John: Let’s remind people the book is called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. It is available everywhere, but where should people find you online?

Stu: You can find me at vintagerpg.com. There’s something like 2,500 entries, over 750,000 words and 2,000 pictures, all dedicated to roleplaying games for your edification and enjoyment.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I love it. Stu, thank you so much and stick around and we’ll talk to you in the bonus segment.

Stu: Right on.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so, Stu, I finished your giant book, and it’s huge. It’s a compendium. It’s so good. It’s the right size for a D&D book because it’s D&D manual size. There’s a specific size it should be. On page 409, you talk about, in appendix D, that dungeons are a recent concept. Can you give us a little of the history of dungeons as a literary space?

Stu: As I mentioned, this is the subject of my next book, which is supposed to come out this year, called Down Down Down.

Craig: What a great title. I love that.

Stu: That’s going to be out through Strange Attractor Press, not MIT. Everybody’s like, Dungeons & Dragons is the first roleplaying game, and that’s awesome. I’m like, yes, firsts are all good, and sure, it’s a new form, but I feel the game itself was inevitable. I think that the thing that makes Dungeons & Dragons special is the dungeon. I think that it brings this idea of this mythic, irrational space and puts people in it to explore it that we had scratched at, but never really realized fully until Dungeons & Dragons.

John: Actually, can I stop you for one second? Craig hasn’t read this chapter, so I’m curious what Craig’s instinct is. What’s the first thing you think about with dungeons in the sense of where this comes from as a human experience?

Craig: My suspicion, or I’m just reaching into my brain, and what I’m finding there is the Spanish Inquisition and their torture chambers. That feels dungeon-esque to me. I don’t know why I thought they were torturing people in the subfloor of a building, but I feel like they were.

John: Yes, we think about prisons being down below, which is great, and we have that sense. My first thing was, oh, well, ancient Egyptian tombs and that stuff. There were tomb robbers, and so that was a thing. There wasn’t a connected space where there were monsters who were living in it. That’s not a new thing. Sam, talk us through what you found.

Stu: Basically, everything that’s older than Dungeons & Dragons has a couple of the things that are recognizable as a dungeon, but not all of them. I think the earliest one is the Labyrinth of Crete, which is a maze space with a monster. There’s no treasures. There’s no real traps. There’s no real room for adventure either. Most people, except for Theseus, who went in there just got eaten by the minotaur. Then there’s other stuff. There’s oubliettes, which is a misunderstanding of medieval architecture.

There’s a lot of slander of the medieval world in the idea of the dungeon, where people think that the medievals were much more barbaric than they were. The idea of the oubliette is you throw somebody into a room that has the door in the ceiling, you close the door, and you forget about them. That’s not true. They were really like cellars. They were salt cellars and stuff.

Craig: That’s not as menacing, really.

John: it wouldn’t be good to be thrown down in there, but that’s not the purpose of the room.

Craig: It’s not the purpose of the room. You’re just getting salt. I think that’s fine.

John: We go back to Orpheus in the Underworld. We have that sense of a hero crosses into an underground place, an underworld place, but it’s not a dungeon. There’s not a treasure. It’s always that they have one specific quest that they’re trying to do, to kill this thing or bring back their true love.

Stu: The Underworld is expansive too.

John: It is.

Stu: It’s not a constricted space. Where does the first real dungeon show up? I think that the first real dungeon shows up in the Blackmoor book, which is 1975, I think, supplement 2. Even that doesn’t really feel like a dungeon. It takes a little while before we get the dungeon-ier dungeons, like Tomb of Horrors and stuff. That’s ’78. Then there’s also stuff in Dark Tower, which was put out by Judges Guild. Other people were playing with dungeons more. What about the Mines of Moria?

Craig: That feels very dungeon-y to me.

John: That’s 1954?

Stu: Yes. Closer, but again, there’s no traps, really.

Craig: It’s true.

Stu: Tolkien never really put obstacles in front of his characters. They just walk through and get chased out. There’s that one battle in the tomb, but for the most part, there’s something missing. That’s very close.

Craig: There’s a puzzle to get in, which is interesting, and it certainly does feel like you’re going down, down, down, although weirdly then they end up in the top of a mountain, which I never understood. It has a central monster, and it definitely has sections, but you’re absolutely right. It is a long slog with tons of spaces where nothing happens, and if Pip doesn’t accidentally fail his deck save and knock that thing down a well, they probably just walk out of there.

John: As we talk about dungeons in terms of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s a space in which the adventure takes place, which the story takes place, and so it doesn’t actually literally have to be you went into a mountain or you went underneath the city. It’s just this is the space. Using it as a general holding place for this is the setting for this series of adventures, and there’s going to be some sense of going from room to room and there being a place you’re trying to get to and resting spots. All that feels our bigger conception of what a dungeon is, even if it’s not literally a place underground.

Stu: Yes. I think that one of the things that disqualifies Moria is that it feels rational. There’s a sense of place and history and purpose to the architecture. It does get a little irrational when you hit that bridge.

Craig: Yes. It’s the worst bridge ever.

Stu: Worst bridge ever. Yes. That is, I think, Moria at its most dungeon-like, when you have this ridiculous bridge that the players have to cross to escape a giant monster. That’s a dungeon.

Craig: They’re getting shot at by little dinky NPCs with range weapons. That always felt like, okay, we went through this massive carved hall with these huge columns and then they just got to the most important part and went, eh, let’s just do a really skinny bridge.
[laughter]
Yes. Definitely. Definitely.

Stu: If Wonderland was more dangerous, I think that would maybe be a good example of a dungeon.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Stu: Gygax adapted Wonderland into a pair of adventures.

Craig: Oh, okay. I like that.

John: I remember reading through those modules and like all Gygax’s things, it felt like they were just designed to kill you.

Stu: Yes.

John: They felt completely unsurvivable.

Stu: You really did not have balanced encounters.

John: No. Oh, that’s great. We look forward to seeing the full book version of your conversation on dungeons because it is a clever thing, which I’d never considered until I read your appendix. Again, Stu, thank you so much for coming on this podcast. It was such a great conversation with you.

Stu: Thank you. This was so much fun. I was honored when I heard the book as a one cool thing and to be asked on was equally honoring.

Craig: Great convo, Stu. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.

Stu: Thanks for having me on. Bye.

Links:

• Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath
• VintageRPG.com by Stu Horvath
• D&D 5th Edition
• Amateur press association (APA)
• Little Wars by H.G. Wells
• Peter Cushing painting his minifigs
• Chainmail by Gary Gygax & Jeff Perren
• Chaosium
• Tunnels & Trolls
• Dread RPG
• Fiasco
• Scriptnotes episode 142: The Angeles Crest Fiasco
• Critical Role
• Alien: The Roleplaying Game
• Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game
• Traveller
• 2024 D&D Player’s Handbook
• Blackoath Entertainment
• Thousand Year Old Vampire
• Tales From the Loop RPG
• Honey Heist
• WWDC live translation
• She Used to Be Mine performance and vocal coach reaction
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.