Villain: Yves The Envenomed, Assassin Of The Zicivaic Swarm

Hello! I have an interesting villain idea, but I'm struggling with how to integrate them as a recurring character. They are a Changeling Swarmkeeper who made a deal with a devil in their youth, and have regretted it ever since. They now carry out their patron's will with ruthless, but dispassionate efficiency - even seeming reluctant at times. The players can attempt to kill this slippery foe who so easily vanishes in a crowd, but they could also try to help find a way to break their contract...

Villain: Yves the Envenomed, Assassin of the Zicivaic Swarm

“Grisly deaths are to be expected when mages are involved, but all the same I can’t help but pity the old geezer. All the power of the cosmos at his hands, names of gods upon his lips: and some freak decides the best way to off him would be “Eaten from the Inside out” “

-Darvu Karn, lead investigator for the magocratic tribunal, persuing the death of Igirius the imaginator, a murdered archmage.

Adventure Hooks

A serial killer is on the loose, one who favors flesh eating insects as a murder weapon and always seems to target powerful scholars or arcanists. Years will pass between the killings, but invariably a body or three will be found devoured by innumerable tiny mouths, the premises stripped clean of evidence as well as any scrap of paper. After one of her colleagues is found in such a state, the party is hired by archmage Orisa hearthweaver to find the assailant and ensure she’s not the next one to feed the swarm.

Whether recovering antiques from a dungeon or heisting them from the manor houses of the well to do, the party comes across an ornate lockbox sealed with arcane means that seems almost unnaturally enticing. The box contains no treasure, merely a desiccated hand, crudely severed, home to a number of small unidentifiable insects. If any magic is used near the open box ( including in the opening of it) the beetlelike things begin to multiply at an alarming rate, seeking to devour the caster in question. The only other thing contained by this deadly trap is a symbol: a diamond like shape composed of crude, inward spiraling scratch marks, seemingly etched into the interior box by the hand itself.

A friend of the party’s caster and former fellow apprentice writes to them with some concerns: after acquiring an innocuous book they seem to be followed everywhere by a hooded figure that seems nothing to do but stare, twitch, and scratch. Driven by anxiety, they’ve decided to flee their home and attempt to evade this stalker, and hopes the hero may be able to lend any sort of aid they can. When the party finally catches up to them, the friend is on the verge of being attacked by a figure who’s wounds drip black ichor and skin crawls with innumerable vermin. The assailant flees, but will most assuredly will be back unless the party does something.

Setup: Less an actual assassin than the implement of a sinister, alien intelligence, the man who sometimes knows himself as Yves is perhaps one of the most dangerous and selective killers at large today. Working his day to day life as a simple criminal and hired blade, Yves is every so often overwhelmed by a sickness he calls “The Itch”, a demonic compulsion that turns his blood into viscous poison and grants him supernatural insights and abilities that make him into a perfect living weapon for the killing of mages.

Yves has no control over when The Itch strikes, or who it targets, for those are chosen by his patron: the devil-swarm Zicivaic. This devil is at once a vast horde of bettlelike creatures sharing a vauge intelligence, the vast floating hive-islands they occupy in their particular hell dimension, and the mummified body of the original Zicivaic entombed at the center of the largest and oldest hive.

The devil-swarm has only three wants: isolation, propagation, and knowledge. All of these are fed by targeting mages, whether they be ones who learn a means of contacting or summoning Zicivaic, or merely those who accumulate a sizeable enough library to make a meal for the lore-eating legion. When such a target is found, Zicivaic sends Yves ( or another of those it has inflicted with its curse) to slay the mage and feed their arcane libraries to the swarm, the innumerable tomes pulped down to make more hive, the magic contained within spreading throughout the swarm.

Background: Yves first came into contact with the devil-swarm when he was a boy, apprenticed to a two-bit sorcerer who’s only real talent was passing off the scraps and scribblings of more obscure mages as her own. One day his tutor bought a book of Arcanum from a group of traveling adventurers, who had liberated it from the lair of a nameless cult they’d recently slaughtered. The youth was inflicted by Zicivaic’s curse in a botched summoning ritual, one that saw his tutor devoured and Yves left a confused and traumatized wreck.

Since then the envenomed assassin has made his way in the world, forced to adapt to his frequent “illnesses” that come over him like a debilitating fever and leave him with only hazy recollections of the time or deeds he performs while under its sway.

Far away in some rank and buzzing hell, the original Zicivaic exists in a similar wretched state, body all but wasted away as it forms the core of an archipeligo of fear and disgust and hunger. Zicivaic was once a scholar among devil kind, one summoned by petitioners for polite discourses on the nature of philosophy and the arts. His pretentions and genteel nature angered a rival fiend, who conspired to slip a cursed tome into their possession, one that would burden the scholar with a literal hunger for knowledge. Compelled, Zicivaic ate the tome, then their apprentices, then their library, then sent shards of their being out to seek more. Reduced to little more than hunger and the need to know more, the newly formed devil-swarm now operates primarily on instinct, displaying flashes of infernal cunning as the ghost of the original Zicivaic’s original personality stirs from its devouring torpor.

For the asker: Hey friend, sorry about the delay, the holidays have been wild and my inbox has suffered for it.

One of my key pieces of advice when designing content is to make sure that you don’t mix too many different “influences” into a project, as keeping things trim will ensure you can fit a story element into different setups until you find something that really works.

In this instance you’ve got:

A Changeling: faceswapping doppleganger heritage, mistaken identities, identity crisis

Swarm Imagery: notes of pestilence or famine, mindless consumption, disgust,

Bargins with devils: damnation, souls, elements of contracts and all that religiously fun stuff.

I hope you don’t mind, but I decided to focus in on the devil-swarm aspects, as I think it makes for a unique antagonistic force compared to your usual, silvertongued, pitchfork and hellfire type devil. Likewise, I think Yves will be an interesting mystery to pick apart as his killings, as his motivations are more “occult” than “homicidal”, forcing a party to look further in their investigation than your usual conspiracies or crimes of passion.

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The classic betrayer

This is where everyone subtly knows that this guy's going to turn the other way.

The betrayer puts on a show for our heroes - kind, compassionate and supporting at first.

it just so happens that the villainthinks the heros are the bad guys.

make them actually likable.emotionally ruin the hero upon betrayal.

The remorseful traitor

whether he had bad intentions from the start or was deceived by others, the betrayer regrets his choices.

when he realizes his mistakes, it's too late to stop the evil, which introduces guilt.

throw the guilt and shame on the character.

even the protagonist can be a traitor! will others forgive him?

The Double Agent

this type of traitor will keep the readers wondering whether this guy is truly on your side.

keep your readers guessing. is that an evil smirk or a genuine smile? does he really love drinking, or is he just trying to get the hero drugged?

Snape in Harry Potter is a great example.

The guy can be good or bad - just keep balancing the two

Unrealiable narrators

these characters are not entirely betrayers, but horribly misinformed. they can make others appear like traitors - when in truth, they just have it wrong.

pit your narrow-minded narrator against his allies.

these characters are great for misunderstanding plots.

have your narrator do irreversible damage to the hero. would they forgive him?