Villain A Day (Assembled): Count Malocchio
Well, no sooner do I announce I'm starting than I miss a day. So I suck...but I missed it to go gaming, which is really the reason we do all of this.
I warn you now that I'm not going to be posting on the weekend or on Monday, because it's a long weekend here in Ontario.
With that out of the way, let's get on to Count Malocchio.
Count Malocchio
Here's what we know about the Count. The official bio says:
Count Bernino Malocchio is the thirteenth of an infamous line. His predecessors were part of the cutthroat politics of the medieval Italian city-states, and his grandfather was a fascist collaborator and Axis agent, who used the powers of the talisman known as the Evil Eye. The eleventh Count Malocchio met his end in a rockslide in the Alps, but his infamy did not perish with him. Bernino sought out his grandfather’s final resting place, daring the treacherous peaks and valleys of the Alps. There he unearthed the Evil Eye and claimed its power for his own. Sacrificing a childhood mentor to seal a blood pact, he unlocked even greater power than previous possessors of the Eye imagined. It was not long thereafter that the twelfth Count Malocchio suffered a fatal "accident" and his son assumed the mantle of leadership.
Text quoted with the permission of Steve Kenson and Ad Infinitum Games, and is not intended to challenge the copyright.
Every comic book needs a schemer, and the ICONSverse has two: Count Malocchio and Ultra-Mind. (Not that the others can't scheme, but these two are clearly string-pullers.) The Count's appearance means that he can appear fine at a cocktail party or a diplomatic function (while Ultra-Mind's appearance means that when he shows up, there's going to be a fight). Count Malocchio is someone you introduce early but keep in combat reserve until late in the adventure(s).
He seems an urbane gentleman, a bit of the Old School (where Old School means Macchiavelian). It's easy to introduce him... The Count’s family has a home in San Montis, but also homes in Switzerland, London, New York, and Sao Paolo.
Also, you want to keep using him, so setting up the Count to go to jail seems a waste. No; let’s give him a diplomatic out. He's not the leader of his country, but knows the leader and (in the manner of nobility) is a distant relation. The real reason that the Count is not the ruler of his country is that he doesn't want to be the ruler. Rulers are held to a different standard, even the rulers of micronations.
Count Malocchio is a man who wants power. At one point, he thought that money was power, but what he has discovered is that he wants to exercise power personally. He doesn’t want to rule the world, just control it.
Yes, he has the organization, and yes, he will hire people who have specific talents. But in the end, he prefers to hear the lamentations of his victims in person. (In fact, you should fill out the Count’s retinue with a number of unpleasant and superpowered individuals.)
This trait keeps him personally involved. When a major deal closes, the Count is in the city. (He doesn’t trust cell phones for his shady deals.) When the knife is pushed in, the Count is there to twist it. If there’s a way to rub salt in the wound, the Count does it. He was always like this, even before he had the Eye.
Although he might use the Eye in private or in his "special" researches, he tries not to use it in public. He is, however, rarely without it.
Count Malocchio should be a presence in the lives of the heroes. He is present at art gallery openings (a previous Count Malocchio was quite involved in the theft of artworks during WWII), at diplomatic functions, at ceremonies providing awards to the player characters.
From a game point of view, the Count can be behind anything, even if you didn't intend him to be. (Reward the players with a Determination point.) It might be interesting if the Count were one of the investors in their super-team...
San Montis, By The Almanac
The country of San Montis is tiny: a smidge less than 38 square miles, or almost a hundred square kilometers. San Montis does not have the tourist trade that San Marino has. It has a tiny tail sticking out of the Alps, so it’s not entirely in the mountains: there is a tiny bit of arable land. And, like Liechtenstein, San Montis is ruled by a prince, Prince Baldassare, a distant cousin of the Count's.
For the most part, San Montis follows the lead of Italy (as it did during WWII), but Prince Baldassare has contradicted the Italians on occasion, claiming that he only wants what is best for his people.
Prince Baldassare has appointed Count Malocchio his emissary for business deals. He is unofficially aware of some of the Count’s other activities, and allows them, so long as his country gets a kickback.
San Montis has no extradition treaties with other countries, except the Vatican City. And that treaty has not been exercised for hundreds of years.)
Story ideas
- A residential building important to the PCs or to a loved one of the PCs is sold, and will soon be razed to build a new museum. Count Malocchio is one of the investors, here from San Montis to look at the site. He hopes that the investment will bring new money to this area, and through tax dollars and revenue, to San Montis. In fact, he has arranged for all the residents of the building to be moved to a new building, at minimal expense to them. The building is the modern equivalent of H. H. Holmes' "murder palace" and soon, people begin to take sick, or even to disappear. Count Malocchio makes regular visits, clucking concern and offering aid for their well-being. Will the PCs discover what is going on before one of their friends is abducted? Even if he is caught, Count Malocchio cannot be directly related to the problems; he claims that it was unfortunate that the building super turned out to be a psychopath. Unfortunately, the man committed suicide before he could be questioned….
- Having aroused the interest of the player characters, Count Malocchio becomes aware of them as well, and begins to test their mettle, even while offering gifts to anyone they are publicly associated with (to at worst curry favour with their associates and at best steal their loved ones away). He begins to engineer a series of accidents which require the intervention of the PCs. He’s on hand for some of them (he likes to watch), but works through intermediaries, and has iron-clad alibis in most or all cases. The PCs will find and stop the intermediaries, and even totally unprovable information that the Count is behind it.
- There is a series of robberies in the area which have two things in common: first, the victims were blinded, so they couldn’t see anything; and second, the items stolen were recovered artwork that had been taken by the Nazis during World War II andlater returned to their rightful owners. The crimes are the work of Count Malocchio himself: the artworks were stolen during the war by his family, and he regards them as his. PCs might be able to track this down; there are other returned artworks in the area (perhaps as the bank where they are stored, awaiting identification and return, or at a museum), but only ones with a connection to the Malocchio family. This crime is the PCs’ best bet to get the Count with ill-gotten gains.
- The Count returns. It turns out that San Morino is an extraction site for a valuable mineral resource, probably from a meteorite millennia ago. In order to be diplomatic with their government, our government has dropped charges and convictions against the Count, and he is back in the country. (The threat of losing this resource can forgive all manner of crimes by the Count; it can be used again and again.) Now the Count is out for revenge. He plans to take over a local criminal organization and crush the PCs. He will sully their reputations, steal their loved ones, reveal their secrets, and once they are destroyed, reveal himself to them. Part of his plan involves alibis; most of the damage is to be done by destroying their reputations.
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