The Anti-PCs

I'm still working on these guys, but when I first came up with them, they started getting... really nasty. As iconics, they turned into, after a few iterations, the anti-PCs. A group of PC like characters, except they're psychopathic villains, con men, murderers, rapists, daemonologists, and human sacrificers. But they pose as a group of adventurers not unlike a group of PCs.

Anyway, I'm not done with getting their iterations correct visually, but this is a good start. I'll keep giving better versions of them slowly over the next few days. I started with them as Hero Quest character models, but this is a step up.

Averell Geoffson primarily sees himself as a burgler and a thief, but he's not  above a little robbery and murder if its profitable. Originally born in Garenport, under a different name, he fled the city when it got too hot for him after murdering a minor noble during a robbery, and spent a few years in Timischburg and Simashki. Those places got a little dicey for him too, and he eventually made his way back to the Hill Country, now with a new look and a new name.

Bahram Khanwar is from the far north, but came south with his sister as a specialist spadassassin to Simashki. There, he was responsible for the spadassinicide of at least half a dozen political figures as well as many more that he killed in provoked duels, until he felt that it was no longer safe to stay in Simashki. Luckily, this is when he met Averell, and taking his sister with him, the three fled even further south, to Timischburg and the Hill Country. 

Bahram's sister, Javaira, is a beautiful woman, but she's also a sociopath and a nymphomaniac. She uses her sexuality in cons, most often, but if she's not working an angle, she needs fulfillment somewhere else, and everyone in her group has been with her, including her own brother. Her favorite con is to work with her brother to target a politician or wealthy merchant by seducing him, and then using her in flagrante delicto situation as justification for her brother to challenge him to a duel... where he's murdered and then robbed. She's psychologically quite broken and needy, and her brother frequently says that she has the soul of a true succubus trapped in the body of a mortal.

Merra Kuzulush, on the other hand, does traffic with actual daemons, including succubi, and sometimes summons them and traps them and uses them as sex slaves until the summoning ends to satisfy Javaira when everyone else isn't in the mood. In reality, she participates nearly as often as Javaira, but she does not do it for pleasure, but rather she uses the sexual energy as part of her daemonic trafficking rituals. Her preferred method of crime is to summon some kind of daemon and send it to murder someone, after which she can loot their place at her leisure. In general, people think such victims are themselves daemonologists who flubbed some summoning and were gleefully killed for their trouble. Merra and the gang even pose as witch hunters, investigating the scene (i.e., robbing it) and "dealing with the daemon" in some way or other, which is usually a staged thing. Merra is an evil genius with these types of scams, and the group has achieved some fame in the right circles as daemon hunters, although—of course—Merra is the one who summoned the daemons in the first place.

Merra is also the someone lover of Audley Hardwicke, the personal nemesis for Dominic Clevenger.

Namzo is intimidating, violent and powerful, and serves as the muscle and bodyguard for the rest of the group. He's actually well educated and extremely articulate, and well-versed in the philosophies of the old Baal Hamazi culture (which is roundly condemned even by most of its own descendants today as a daemonic, insane society with built in instability that led to its inevitable implosion.) However, in public, he portrays a nearly monosyllabic grunt. He was chased out of the Gunaakt migrant caravan route for raping orcling women, and he did the same in some small towns on the Timischburg and Hill Country borderlands, before finally falling in with this group; he rarely does this anymore, since Merra and Javaira are so insatiable. In this way, they ironically are doing a service to society, by keeping a violent rapist from preying on women around him.

The Reaper doesn't have a name that anyone knows. Nobody even knows what nation he hails from; his looks are nondescript enough that he can pass for a Tarushan, a Timischer, a Hillman, and he can easily use accents from any of those places, as well as from Simashki and other places were ethnically ambiguous or mixed humans can hail from. Not really properly a member of the group, he's a hired hit man across the Three Realms+, and has worked with this group of psychos on several occasions, and has a cool professionally friendly relationship with them.

Wow, as I started writing these guys, they got worse and worse; much more so than I intended. I can't wait to see the more heroic guys—y'know, with the lich and succubus accomplices—take these guys down and give them what's coming to them.

Although when that happens, I imagine that The Reaper, at least, escapes justice, because he's more of a loner anyway.

Struggling a little bit with some of the AIs. Here's another pass at Namzo and The Reaper.

I'm having trouble getting slight changes to Merra and Javaira, because these strangely Puritan AI models think that showing a midriff is inappropriate, even though they already generated a belly-dancer outfit to begin with. So strange. It also thinks that making Namzo's scarf a slightly brighter tone and giving him a five o'clock shadow ran up against it's guardrails on sexualization of a minor. 

And people worry that AI is coming for their jobs. In any case, I finally got it to do sorta what I wanted for an slight improvement to Merra.

Anyway, Merra is also the sometime lover of Audley Hardwicke, who is a villain from an earlier post, and the two of them together is a way to foreshadow the anti-PC group. So here's him again, just in case you needed one more. Plus, I think Audley is a great villain in his own right.