Games Gone By: Villains

It's been many years since I ran the Great War game, but I still remember one of the chief antagonists: Georges Ernest Boulanger.

Based on a historical figure, Boulanger occupied a special place in the world of Interesting Times. We started from the presumption that his military accolades earned him political clout, eventually elevating him to the position of supreme authority in France. The real world Boulanger's philosophy, coupled with my need for a nefarious villain, transformed Boulanger into a prototype of the early fascists. Boulanger's popularity in the real world reached an apex at the end of the 19th century, and it didn't take a huge stretch to push him into the early 20th.

I loved using Boulanger as a bad guy. His policy of restitution and revenge was so Hitlerian that it made him impossible to pass up. It allowed me, in Interesting Times, to draw on the themes and imagery of a Nazi-occupied France decades prior to the occupation of that nation. Using his Revanche party as the villains of our Great War game also allowed me to drive home the point that the world of IT was not the world as we knew it. Once players understood that France was a fascist dictatorship everything else fell into place.

The final battle against Boulanger took place in the heart of Paris, hitting most of the traditional set pieces of that city. Of course, no battle would be complete without a high-stakes conflict that had at least one PC fighting atop the Eiffel Tower. Still, poor old Georges couldn't take on our WW1 characters all alone, so I spent some time drafting up some NPCs to throw their hats into the ring.