Now, this is a Saturday D & D post, but for the record, recurring villains are a lot more than just a part of a story-telling game. Toxic people who have it in for you occur in real life almost as often as they do in fantasy story-telling with villains who are often orcs.
But unlike insurance adjusters, city pool inspectors, and bank representatives, the villains in a D & D game are severely challenged to survive a single adventure. Yes, the player characters are constantly on the lookout to slay the dungeon master’s recurring villains so they can’t recur without being raised from the dead. No matter how much you hate that unfair insurance guy, you are not allowed to slay him with a sword.
Mallora is not a sexy female villain… more like vile.
Mallora was a lucky witch woman. She was one of three agents of Karnak, the Vampire Kingdom, who were trying to thwart the player characters as they sought lost technology in the wastelands of Cyre. She was a second level sorceress at the time, capable of only a couple of basic-level necromantic spells. She was a part of the evil organization known as the Emerald Claw, a sort of religious cult built around worshiping the undead, and had an evil dwarf fighter and an evil archer to help her trap and kill the heroes, along with about six animated skeletons who, at second level, are one-chop minions that go down in the first round of battle usually.
The green haired witch successfully trapped the heroes in the mists of Cyre and the dwarf and the archer were taking their toll when Gandy rolled a twenty and not only nailed the archer in the eye with a crossbow bolt, but made the archer’s shot go awry and hit the dwarf in the back of his bald head, shortly after Fate had knocked his helmet off. So Mallora cast another concealing fog spell and ran like a little green rat directly away. She survived to haunt them another day.
This she did as a member of Brother Garrow’s Emerald Claw crew in the next adventure where the heroes had to track down a friendly agent of Breland who had been turned into a vampire. She was eighth level at that point, just like the adventurers themselves, and a much more dangerous adversary. She didn’t prevent the characters from capturing the rogue vampire, and she did some damage, but managed to slink off unharmed once again.
She would enter the player characters’ lives one more time in the jungles of Xendrick as the mini-campaign was reaching its climax. She and Brother Garrow pursued the heroes through the jungle to the giant ruins where the monster construct Xulo would finally be brought to powerful and evil life in a necromantic ritual. Brother Garrow definitely met his end in a spectacular fashion, being sucked into another dimension through a keyhole trap set by giant mages a millennia before. It was gruesome.
Garrow before his transformation into a toothpaste-like substance
Mallora was aboard the Emerald Claw’s flying skiff as it chased the airship the heroes were themselves aboard. A well-placed fireball by Druealia the Wizardess took the skiff down to crash into the jungle below with a fiery explosion that should’ve killed all aboard, including Mallora. But is she actually dead this time? They didn’t see her die. So only the dungeon master knows for sure. After all, what good is a recurring villain if they don’t recur?
Ditty Bytcha who prefers to be called Fate is my number one son’s original character. He is a fighter wearing magic armor who loves to make things as an artificer (one who builds devices with magic). He eventually wants to cut his own arms off and replace them with mechanical ones. He is also quick to leap into the fray and is fairly deadly with his chosen weapons. He once made a crossbow that had explosive power enough to blast apart a ship and kill everyone on board, including the people he was trying to save. He is also a good leader and is always ready with a joke that can even make the Dungeon Master laugh.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Iron Fist
Comic books are not real life. They are better than real life. They allow you to go forward in your own story with the myth of the super power to bolster your courage. You can face your daily devils and demons secure in the knowledge that, while no one is perfect, we can all at least imagine holding firm to an ideal in spite of the trials we face… being true to a power and a goodness beyond ourselves… being a hero.
I have followed Iron Fist’s adventures since the 1970’s. It is true that I haven’t been as devoted to him and his heroics as I have been to Spiderman and the Avengers. But I love the idea of a good guy in white standing up to the bad guys in black and beating the poop out of them with a good heart and a bare fist, not resorting to guns and bombs and gratuitous killings. Danny Rand, the Iron Fist, has always been such a character to me. Noble because he does not intentionally kill the enemy, like Batman, Superman, Captain America and so many other favorite super heroes.
I admit it, this love-gush of a post is only happening because I finished binge-watching the new Iron Fist series on Netflix. I depend on Netflix now to deliver to me effortlessly what I used to endlessly hunt and scrabble for in the way of idea fuel and motivational electricity. And even though I am a notoriously uncritical critic, I have to say, it was not as heart-thumpingly good as either Daredevil or Luke Cage. But it brought an old friend to life in a way that I never before believed could happen. And I love the way it fit this puzzle piece into the overall jigsaw of the Marvel superhero stories on Netflix. It used characters like the ER nurse Claire and the villainous Madam Gao to connect plotlines in Daredevil and Luke Cage, and the evil but helpful lawyer character from Jessica Jones. Will I watch it again? Definitely. Will I need to draw Iron Fist for myself? Probably. But this is a hard experience to either explain or recapture. Television using comic book heroes, sometimes, at its best, makes life better than it really is.
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Tagged as binge watching, comic book heroes, Iron Fist, Netflix, television