Nagash Turns Warhammer III Into a Corpse Economy
Yes. Nagash absolutely counts as proper playable-villain material.
And I don't mean because he's Nagash, a man whose general appearance suggests somebody dug up Death itself and then somehow made it more unpleasant.
The interesting bit is what his campaign actually lets you do.
You conquer the living world, turn its settlements into undead infrastructure, generate Necromantic Energy from your new corpse-based property portfolio, raise increasingly obscene armies and slowly build Nagash towards godhood.
That is already a much better villain fantasy than the usual approach, where the game tells you you're evil because your soldiers wear black and somebody occasionally says something about suffering.
Nagash doesn't just look evil.
His entire economy has gone evil.
If Nagash has ruined normal protagonists for you, Halloween: The Game takes the same question somewhere considerably more stabby: does actually playing Michael Myers feel like being Michael Myers, or just murder with licensed trousers?
Conquering a city is only the beginning
This is where I really like what Creative Assembly has done.
Take a settlement and you don't simply own another settlement.
Coastal settlements can become Pirate Coves. Inland settlements can become Burial Chambers or Mausoleums. Major settlements can become Necropolises, producing Necromantic Energy from the surrounding territory.
Which means every city you conquer immediately stops being somewhere people live and becomes something Nagash can use.
That's important.
Plenty of games let you play a villain while still making you interact with the world exactly like everybody else. You capture Town A, build Bakery B, eventually research Improved Wheat Management because apparently even Satan needs bread bonuses.
Nagash looks at the bakery and wonders how much Necromantic Energy Geoffrey would produce.
Geoffrey has been making bread there for thirty years.
Geoffrey is now infrastructure.
And because Necromantic Energy feeds construction, increases unit capacity and supports Gravecall recruitment, the idea keeps going. The more of the living world you consume, the more powerful your undead machine becomes.
You're not just conquering territory while coincidentally playing a necromancer.
You're conquering territory as a necromancer would.
That's the difference.
Prefer your undead nightmares considerably less organised? Fallout 76: The Slasher trades Nagash’s necromantic property empire for corpses, masks and an Appalachian murder investigation where nobody has thought to appoint a skeleton CFO.
Godhood apparently requires administration
Then there's the Black Pyramid and the Books of Nagash.
Your campaign keeps pushing Nagash towards more power. You recover his books, develop the Pyramid, expand the empire and gradually turn him from an already horrifying problem into the sort of person other horrifying problems probably discuss during meetings.
I love this because there is something wonderfully stupid about godhood being an infrastructure project.
We're talking about dark magic, undead armies and one of Warhammer's greatest villains trying to ascend beyond mortality.
And underneath all of it, somewhere, there must be paperwork.
Necromantic Energy output down three percent.
Gravecall recruitment above forecast.
Mausoleum Four requires additional corpses.
Nagash summons whoever prepared the report.
Mausoleum Four no longer requires additional corpses.
Problem solved.
But underneath the joke, that's exactly why the campaign works for me as villain design. Everything points in the same direction.
More land gives you more energy. More energy gives you more undead. The Books give Nagash more power. The Pyramid becomes part of that progression.
Nothing feels like a completely unrelated game system somebody stapled onto Nagash because strategy games are legally required to contain upgrade menus.
It's all feeding the same obsession.
Then Nagash starts acquiring other villains
The Mortarch side of the campaign is probably the bit that really sells this.
Nagash can bring several existing undead Legendary Lords under his control, and subjugating them transfers their armies and existing empires to you.
That's magnificent.
Normal strategy-game diplomacy involves alliances, treaties, trade agreements and occasionally staring at a number until somebody agrees to stop hating you.
Nagash's version is apparently:
Congratulations. I've acquired you.
Not your cooperation.
You.
Your armies too.
And your country.
This is less diplomacy and more hostile corporate consolidation conducted by a seven-foot necromancer.
It also makes sense mechanically because Nagash can draw units from the Vampire Counts, Tomb Kings and Vampire Coast. You're not simply building another undead faction. You're gradually assembling the undead faction.
That feels right.
You take territory.
You reshape it.
You generate Necromantic Energy.
You recover the Books.
You strengthen the Pyramid.
You acquire other undead powers.
After a while the world presumably stops looking like nations and starts looking like assets Nagash hasn't purchased yet.
There probably isn't an HR department.
There certainly won't be once he finds it.
If CRIMENET turning necromancy into corporate restructuring improved your evening, buy us a coffee on Ko-fi. We’ll spend it responsibly, which is already more fiscal restraint than Nagash has shown with the dead.
This is where most “play as the villain” games lose me
Being allowed to control an evil character is easy.
Games have done that forever.
Give somebody a skull helmet. Add red eyes. Make their special ability called Devour the Innocent. Job done.
But if I'm supposed to be playing a villain, I want the mechanics to start changing how I look at things.
Nagash gets there.
A city stops being a city.
It's Necromantic Energy.
Another undead empire stops being another faction.
It's something you're eventually going to absorb.
A magical artefact stops being treasure.
It's another rung on the ladder towards godhood.
And the living population?
Well.
They appear to have made the tactical mistake of still being alive.
That's much more interesting than a morality meter.
Nagash doesn't need one anyway. Imagine opening the character screen and seeing:
Morality: -97
Thanks, game.
I gathered that when I converted Prague into a corpse generator.
What matters is that the campaign starts making you think in the same horrible terms Nagash would.
That's what proper villain gameplay should do.
It shouldn't constantly tell you you're evil.
It should give you a perfectly functioning system where doing something appalling makes complete strategic sense, and then quietly watch what happens.
Nagash doesn't just let you play the bad guy.
He gives evil a logistics department.
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