Make an Archenemy for your RPG Setting!

Let's make a setting together, part 2!

Hello warlock gang! Last week we walked together in the creation of my new setting (and game) Sanguis Sanctus. Today we will take a look at how to craft a fearsome and hateful Archenemy. Buckle up, because this is going to be fun!
For you, of course, not for your players and readers.

WHAT’S INSIDE THIS LETTER:

🩸Previously on Let’s Make a Setting Together
💀What is an Archenemy
👀Why use an Archenemy
📚Different types of Archenemies
🧛‍♂️How I made Vampires

PREVIOUSLY ON LET’S MAKE A SETTING TOGETHER

Last week we discussed how I came up with the Setting for Sanguis Sanctus, which is my next game, set in a grimdark fantasy version of 15th century, where Vampires have invaded our world.
Vampires, huh? I bet they have something to do with this article…
You can catch up on the previous article right here.

It would also mean a lot if you checked out my game’s pre-launch page on Kickstarter and gave it a follow. Thanks, fellow warlocks!

With that being said, let’s talk about Archenemies!

WHAT IS AN ARCHENEMY?

An Archenemy is not your bunch of goblin thieves or space pirates assaulting your ship. And it’s neither the Big Bad Evil Guy who plots to steal the crown or become emperor of the Solar system.
No, the Archenemy is an anathema. The Archenemy is a tremendous opposing force, that wants no alliance nor armistice, but simply desires to vanquish and crush everything and everyone in its path.
The Archenemy does not want compliance, it wants absolute obedience. That of course, when the Archenemy allows you to live.

The most obvious example I make when I talk about Archenemies, is probably the Orcs, Sauron, and Morgoth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. They are essentially adversary to creation, beings of a dark and adversarial power.
But of course, they are by far not the only (and classic) example, as we will see later in this article.

But before we dive that deep, you may ask yourselves: Do I need an Archenemy?

WHY USE AN ARCHENEMY

There are a lot of narrative benefits for your Setting to use an Archenemy.

Of course, not all stories need necessarily an Archenemy; if you are planning to work on a strictly political intrigue story, for example, an Archenemy may not be the best narrative device for your setting.

However, the Archenemy is a powerful tool for any setting, even political ones.
Here are some of the benefits it can provide:

TENSION

An Archenemy provides your setting with unparalleled tension. Whether its devastating, like the alien Combine invading the world in Half-Life, or it can be ominous and subtle like the White Walkers in A Song of Ice and Fire books. No matter what, the setting becomes instantly much more grim, and tense. Stakes are raised, and survival is never to be taken for granted.
In addition, an intelligent and calculative Archenemy makes the tension even higher, because it cannot simply be cornered and disposed.

THERE IS NO GREATER ENEMY

This particularly helps when you are making a Setting for an RPG. When the Archenemy is there, you know your readers and players have a corner stone set: there is no greater enemy than the Archenemy.
They may think twice when the morally grey character shows up, but when the Archenemy is present, they know exactly where to point their weapons.
Sure, there are a plethora of morally grey characters in stories like The Walking Dead, but all of them know zombies are their ultimate Archenemy.

This also opens the narrative doors for all sorts of crazy people, from worshipers of the Archenemy, to people using them as an advantage to further their own goals (you can find an ungodly amount of characters doing exactly this in the aforementioned The Walking Dead comic).

BECAUSE EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING GETS WORSE

Here is where the depth comes from. Using an Archenemy makes your setting immediate (which is exactly what we want), but analyzing the consequences of the existence of such Archenemy is what will turn a simple Setting into a rich and intriguing Setting.

First and foremost, everything will get worse. Communication, trade, simple social interactions, will become much more difficult after the Archenemy arrives, and as a result your societies will be immediately shaped by these problems.

And last but not certainly least: Everyone will get worse.
While adversities certainly bring some people together, it also makes some parts of society ruthless and opportunistic.
I was watching a documentary on 1980’s earthquake in Irpinia, Italy. The first scene described how many people came to help and bring food to those in need. Then, another scene described a woman, during the earthquake, that rushed out of her car in panic, and then shortly after some people got inside her car and stole it. During a literal earthquake.
This goes to show, while some societies band together to face the adversity, others exploit it to gain ruthless advantages.

In the case of your Setting, you can create factions and people, and then ask yourself: how did the Archenemy change them? You can also turn that grimdark knob to 11 and make everyone worse. Yay!

ARCHENEMY ARCHETYPES

With that being said, there are many types of Archenemies. I tried to distill them in 3 major archetypes, but please feel to pick and mix all kind of aspects of these archetypes; as a matter of fact, many of the examples I will provide actually do so!
The three archetypes of Archenemy are: The Alien Horde, The Anathema, and The Cult.

THE ALIEN HORDE

This is a pretty easy one: the Alien Horde (where “Alien” means not necessarily a creature from space, but a creature who is foreign to our current known world), is a group of creatures who’s only objective is crushing everyone but them. Oh, and sometimes, eat them too, in a way.
The most classic example is the Xenomorphs in the Alien franchise. Although built as some sort of weapon, these creatures went ballistic and started terrorizing humans all around the galaxy.
Another good is example is the Tyranids from Warhammer 40k, an ungodly amount of alien creatures who wish to eat and absorb all life in the galaxy, driven by a mysterious hive mind.
Another pop culture creature I would add to this group is the classic zombie. They are a horde, they are contagious, and they mindlessly eat every creature they find.

The main narrative advantages of the Alien Horde are that they are largely mindless, so literally no one is safe around them.

THE ANATHEMA

While the Alien Horde is mindlessly eating whatever it finds, these guys must have some twisted reason to hate you very very much, almost on a genetic level.
The Anathema is organized to hate. Its only goal is total defeat/enslavement/annihilation of its opponent.
As cited before, the Orcs of the Lord of the Rings are the Anathema to all other ancestries of Middle Earth, and as such make a classic example.
The Locusts in Gears of War are another good example, who wage an industrial war against humans because they view them as usurpers who took their own planet.
One of my biggest inspirations for the vampires in my game, were the forces of Hell in Trench Crusade, who make a perfect example of a complex Anathema: They do not hate humans, they simply despise everything God-related, and as such seek to either gather humans in their numbers, or enslave them.

A big narrative advantage of the Anathema is that they have intelligent plans, and thus become quite difficult to predict, which gives a good amount of despair to those facing them.

THE CULT

The Cult is acting on behalf of a higher being, something so terrifying or so grandiose that led a group of people to say “Actually you know what? Maybe I am going to side with the literal death of the world”.
Prime example of this of course, is every Ancient Lovecraftian monster in the Cthulhu mythos, written by H.P. Lovecraft and other authors. While the original author had… undoubtedly questionable views and motives , its literary legacy makes for a great example of an Archenemy who not only is an Anathema acting like an Alien, it also convinced many people to side with them and worship them.
Another good example are the Covenant from Halo, who basically worship a world-ending ring and managed to convince entire alien races to join their ranks.

Its main advantage is that literally everyone could be converted into worshiping a lovecraftian creature of magnificent terror, so you never actually know who you can trust and for how long in this type of Settings.

THE MIX MATCH

As I said previously, mixing and matching aspects from these three archetypes actually works pretty well.
And one big Archenemy who does this, heck, it is even CALLED the Archenemy by some characters in the universe is…
Chaos in Warhammer 40k.
It takes the Cult aspect in the Four Chaos Gods, the Alien Horde aspect in its many demons, and the Anathema aspect in its structured Chaos Space Marine legions.
And voilà! You can see why Humans in 40k call Chaos “the Archenemy”.

Of course, the narrative advantages of mixing and matching stuff is that you can take more advantages with a single Archenemy, and make it a strong narrative device for your Setting.

I kinda did the same with my own Vampires for Sanguis Sanctus, that I made by mixing mainly two archetypes.

HOW I MADE MY VAMPIRES🧛‍♂️

As I told you last week, Vampires were a fundamental pillar of Sanguis Sanctus right from the beginning. In the first concept (which you may remember, was for a comic!) I already imagined them as a world ending threat, so I was already considering them as the Archenemy.

With that being said, writing for a comic meant I had to build a “narrower” setting, because of the very limited amount of exposure time you get in that media. You usually need to be explanatory but not very complex.
In a TTRPG setting on the other hand, you have a very large amount of exposure time, but you don’t have to have a narrower approach. In a TTRPG setting, you can build many narrative hooks and build upon those points.

And so my setting’s Archenemy became broader. I decided to pick the Anathema archetype as a base, and introduce aspects here and there of the Alien Horde.
The Vampires in Sanguis Sanctus are intelligent beings coming from a dimension many in the world call “Hell”, but that can be better described as the Realm of Concepts; a dimension where ideas, sensations and emotions take form.
And in a moment of suffering and constant war, a beast craving bloodshed and agony became stronger: the Vampire.
So strong in fact, that they were able to pierce the veil between the worlds.
They are an Anathema because they not only seek to conquer and enslave, they are also the literal standard bearers of the concepts of suffering and bloodshed, becoming stronger each time these spread in our world.

While the Anathema already worked like this, I wanted to add a little bit of nuance by introducing sub-factions. The Vampires are led by the demonic overlords called Matriarchs, and while they all work for the common goals aforementioned, they occasionally bicker and fight between themselves. After all, they are empowered by conflict, all kinds of conflict!
Also, this serves as a good narrative device to provide all sorts of enemies; for example, the Ordo Spinosus uses all manner of thorns in their armament and believe them to be the epitome of bloodshed, while the Ordo Defunctio prefers to use some sort of necromancy to achieve its goals.

There’s a lot more I could be chatting about, but for the sake of not spoiling the entire book, I will stop here.
I shall see you in the next weeks, where we will discuss other setting-making parts!
Thanks for reading, folks!