I’m in the planning phase of a game I’m developing, and I’ve settled on a story involving a rogue mage or warlock placing a “Curse of Hunger” over a farming valley in a generic fantasy setting. You can guess what happens next.
However, I’m struggling to find the motivation for this villain. I don’t want them to be a simple creep wanting to be surrounded by fatties, and I don’t want it to be some shallow revenge ploy. So, what interesting motives could a feeder villain have?
Edit:
Thanks for the suggestions so far, but I suppose I should have told you lot what type of game this is. I’m planning on this being a sort of sim/management game. You will play as a guildmaster organizing adventurers and sending them on quests to help the people of the valley and find a way to end the curse.
The curse itself won’t cause actual starvation, people won’t die if they eat normal portions. But, the hunger the curse causes will affect your adventurers. Allowing them to overeat and gain weight will also cause issues.
One final aspect of the game world, if a person becomes obese from overeating, they are likely to be captured if they are not under guard. Rescue and guard quests will be a large part of the game loop. This will also be one way to lose the game. If you, as the guildmaster, become too overweight then you may be captured yourself.
that’s a tough one… you could go for a sort of dominating feeder type in this setting, one that take advantage of the curse to make the other submit to his will by making enchanted food that help allievate the curse for a time but clearly make them fatter as a result and perhaps the after reaching a certain size the curse is completed it no longer affects them but the people still hunger for his enchanted food and are forever stuck being that fat as it’s their default minamal weight level and the curse does not allow them to also lose weight (which can mean you can add a bit of lore fluff about how some people are more effected by the curse than others)
Another would be more on the lines of the protagonist villain clearly having a history of seeing that their own species doing more harm than good and sees this curse as an opportunity to make them lethargic and unable to do harmful things aside from stealing food or gold to keep their appetite in check.
their is also the chance that this villian could want to get fat themselves and goes about obtaining subjects for their research to study the curse and to alter it to their nefarious ends…
Perhaps the sorcerer has a childlike sense of morals and simply wanted people to make merry and feast all day long- an endless feast which forces the town to consume their winter reserves.
Or maybe it wasn’t a malignant act, but a misguided one instead. Our sorceror is actually an amateur who wanted to do good by the village, attempting to magically spare his community from famine, but unwittingly cursing the folk to become all-consuming ghouls. He’s desperately researching how to reverse the curse…
I suppose this farming valley supplies food to whatever land it is part of, by casting this “curse of hunger” they’ll be indirectly starving the rest of the country or wherever this takes place in, leaving it open to invasion or other means of take-over. This would be among the more “reasonable” motivations I think.
Perhaps the antagonist is too weak (physically/magically) to conquer the village by conventional means, so this is a way to weaken them so they can be controlled? Maybe with the help of some collaborators who are passed over by the curse in exchange for service?
P.S. Why this village? They could have something important that the antagonist wants, such as a valuable plant that only grows there, an underestimated relic, an intense localized elevation in the energy levels of the quantum mana field…
Yeah, that’s a point. There should be something special about this one particular area to get cursed, even if it isn’t immediantly obvious to the protagonists.
Maybe the mage requires a certain amount of body mass present to perform a ritual for some greater end. The valley doesn’t have enough people for the ritual to work - unless the people are big enough…
You could have there be an ancient ritual site in the valley that the mage needs as a way to explain why they can’t just go to a more populated area.
why not make a villain is possessed by a ghost that makes people fat because it was forgotten by everyone so it got made and she killed herself and because she had unfinished business as a ghost she found the wizard went into him so that way everyone would fear him so then the protagonist take out the wizard and the ghost is free and gets even more mad so she takes the staff of the wizard and turns every one even more bigger so then the protagonist go to stop her and win than confront her then she finally made friends and moves on into the after life. Ok I know this take away form the wizard part but hay I hope this might help.
Kind of an out there idea, but what if there is no motivation? What if the villain is seen by the players as some distant far off evil bad guy doing evil things, when in reality the bad guy doesn’t have any clue that their magic is doing that, or doesn’t even remotely care?
Okay, so basically it’s like a Three’s Company episode. Wizard Steve’s mean girl crush said she’d go out with him if he flattened the village, but he misheard it as “fatten.” Every time he tries to show off what he accomplished, she’s unimpressed but the misunderstanding isn’t cleared up and he thinks his crush wants them even fatter.
If the curse is something that slowly affects everyone then perhaps create the guild to be some sort of main bastion against the threat, however certain upgrades or aspects that you choose for the guildhall could influence how fast your members gain weight, how willing they are to beat the curse, or some other potential boon or debuff that will affect the gameplay in the short and long run.
Considering the villain is trying to capture obese people, then perhaps they are trying to control the valley for some purpose (whether you go serious and say the world could be at risk or be comical and have it where they’re trying to build a fatty exotic resort of sorts). Since the villain hasn’t been decided yet they’re plenty of options to go for (like a Nebutori, a creature seeking power by fattening people before taking them away to make them even fatter to increase its influence).
Thanks for all the replies everyone! They’ve given me a lot of ideas to think on, and I think I have a plot written out that works for my game. But, I’m going to keep it to myself for the moment, because spoilers.
Please feel free to continue the discussion, though! This thread will hopefully be useful to other people writing up their own game plots.
the villain could be working for an evil god and try to make people commit sins. why you would only go for gluttony and not more sins (or the most severe) I don’t know.
Perhaps there is something valuable in their flesh that the abductees are being exploited for.
Perhaps the realms supplied by the valley are the true target.
Perhaps the villain’s motivations are beyond the ken of the people within the setting; some grand and profane bargain struck with powers beyond reckoning or fuelled by a madness that defies such conventions as reason and purpose.
Plot possibility :
The wizard made a pact with a greatest threat, like a demon or outsider and must make people in the valley fat for serve as food for this creature or god or whatever.
Maybe he realized that when people get fatter, they get more mana that is normally useless because of their weight, but by draining their magic, he can get all of the extra mana without repercussions to him, at the expense of leaving the people he drained in a frail, withered state because of the lack of nutrients.
Well, one motivation I’ve often seen well used is a lack of motivation; that is, someone who causes disasters of one sort or another because they’re ignorant of the consequences, or simply don’t care. So the villain could be persuing their own goals (extraplanar exploration, item echantment, whatever), except that a side effect of all this is that people start gaining weight. And no matter what its doing to other people, the villain won’t stop because he thinks his (or her) goal is more important than stopping the side effects.
Alternatively, the goal could be fatness for the sake of fatness. Not necessarily a very complex motivation, but those sorts of driven, almost obessed villains have been a staple of high fantasy since forever for a reason. Make him a modern day Sauron, who wishes to cover the earth with fatty flesh because it is his will and none may oppose him.