After developing many more characters with the same thought process I showed you in the last post, I started thinking about villains. I started thinking, “Who in Lura is strong enough to actually be a threat?”

(ahead is a brainstorm’s worth of minor spoilers)

Well, perhaps a strange cult could be bothersome. Maybe a corrupt religion? Nah… Those are so cliché! How about organized religions that AREN’T completely corrupt for once. That’d be something….

I had thieves guilds. The thing about thieves guilds is there are strict codes of conduct to follow. Not meeting those codes can mean death if the offense is serious enough.

There’s a thieves guild I drew up where defectors could escape to and join for protection to avoid capture and death at the hands of their previous guilds. So they are a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” ;). That would work well, except the guild wouldn’t likely be very big. Escape from the long-arm of Lurian law isn’t easy. And I don’t want a corny “here come more generic henchmen to dispatch” story where everybody is virtually faceless except for the main baddy.

Moving on, we’ve got the king of Aydomar. He’s got more control over the world than any mortal should ever have. What if he were to do something nobody expected? That could work… But taking down the king of the mightiest empire in the world isn’t good enough. And the CORRUPT KING thing has been done. So done. Sooo many times.

Time for the “What if…” game.

What if there’s some kind of deal between that king and the leader of the largest thieves’ guild in the world? What if that deal was revealed to the extremely superstitious public at an inopportune time? What if there was already a group of revolutionaries ready to usurp the throne at the first whisper of corruption in power that could destroy the integrity of the years of harmony? Would the rest of the city fall into mass hysteria, worried another day of discord was at hand?
Hmmm…

Enter Cirellio’s guild leader, Lord Gazic.
What if Gazic had an excellent reason for wanting Cirellio dead? The entire gates system would work against him, that’s what! And he’d certainly have reason to leave his guild and side with the mystics. That reason could easily be: he knows the truth.
But merely killing a guild leader and a king in cahoots? Still not good enough.

So I played around with an idea: What if the Meiallin herself (the most powerful mystic in the world) was corrupt? Perhaps she discovers something in the fourth ring that drives her mad?

But no.
I didn’t want a cheesy driven-insane-therefore-does-evil type character.
That’s a cop-out to me. Besides, that didn’t feel right for the Meiallin. She was in protest to this idea. She is a sweet girl, Asyria.
 
Wouldn’t it be better if she was manipulated into doing evil? But how does someone manipulate the most powerful mystic in the world? Especially a user of seven rays that can, herself, manipulate her aura to make people do and feel as she wants…?
Advisers? Nah.
Manipulation from her mother? Nah.
Blackmail? Nah. 
A demon? Yessss.

I wanted to give the five rings system yet another use; use it as a vehicle for introducing demons to the world. Four distinct demons representative of the first four rings, because no demon can use the  pure energies of the fifth ring. What if there was a bastardization of nature that allowed them to come to the third ring (physical plane) temporarily? A window of opportunity. Perhaps their motivation is to keep that window open forever.

So what if those demons were to seek out the Meiallin … who happens to be a user of seven rays … to use for their own means to prevent their return to the underworld … as the missing fifth of their group? What complexities would arise?

What if they have their own complexities and rivalries between each other? What if what they are doing can be rationalized? What if their very existence causes pain and death, but it’s not their fault? Do they not have a right to live? A right to try to survive? How are they any worse than the main character? Maybe they’re not.

What if there was a cycle where these demons kept coming back to Lura every couple thousand years? What if this was a cycle that could be broken?

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