The Butcher, The Baker and the Candlestick Maker: A Trio of Pulp-Era Supervillains

On a facebook group, a user was talking about a trio of supervillains for a superhero rpg campaign called 'The Inheritors' set in the 1930's. The villains are 'The Butcher, The Baker and The Candlestick Maker'. He knows what he has planned, but he was interested to see how other commenters would make use of that basic concept.

I was pretty proud of what my brane ended up coming up with, so rather than let it just fall into the ether, I thought I'd cut and paste it here... besides, it's not like I don't have a history of returning to old, unused concepts years or even decades later.

The Butcher, The Baker and the Candlestick-Maker

        All three started out as common criminals - The Butcher was a mob enforcer who was renowned for his ability to make people disappear, The Baker was a chemist whose kitchen was capable of mixing up all sorts of clever and sinister concoctions from bootleg hooch to pep pills to explosives, and the Candlestick Maker was an arsonist and demolitions guy who could torch a tenement for the insurance money or rig a car-starter to take out a talkative witness.

        Each one was dangerous in their own right, but when all three men found themselves in the same cell in Blackstone State Pen, the jailers had no idea of the sort of monster they'd just created.

        The Butcher is the muscle of the group. He's an immense, super-strong brute with an near-supernatural immunity to pain. He wields cleavers, meathooks and heavy mallets as weapons. Over the years, the Baker has performed treatments on him which have made him increasingly animalistic with long tusks, stiff, bristle-like hair and a heightened sense of smell. He has an unusual affinity with his pigs and has been known to use them as attack beasts or hunting hounds.

        The Baker is the brains of the outfit. He's a superhuman intellect with a gift for creating complex and deadly devices and substances with seemingly mundane objects and materials. He affects the look of a cook and considers his various laboratories and workshops as 'his kitchen' where he 'cooks'. His skills run the gamut of building gadgets and weapons, cooking up weird chemicals and transforming test subjects into all sorts of horrific forms.

        The Candlestick Maker is the wild card. He was already dangerously psychotic, but during an early scheme he was believed killed when his body was entombed within a vat of molten wax. Before he could die, his body ended up in the hands of The Baker who was able to restore him to life at a considerable cost. While entombed, his body took on some features of the wax, making his face and body eerily malleable. Always tall, pale and slender, he is now a pallid, waxy nightmare figure, equally at home wielding a custom flamethrower or using his weird form to infiltrate supposedly secure locations to plant infernal devices.

Bonus Features:

Before I could leave the thread well enough alone, three additional twists arose, so here we go.

1. Supernatural Foes 

    The three villains are diabolists, demons or some flavour of heretical ne'er-do-well who have taken their inspiration from the Catholic Mass. I didn't include this because it felt a little too gruesome for the audience, but I know what you sickos are like. They'd have an overall similar tone to the Pulp versions,with some added flavour from 60's and 70's Italian giallo films, nunsploitation and gruesome horror, with a touch of later stuff like Clive Barker, Se7en and New French Extremity.

• The Butcher is inspired by the ritual consumption of the Blood and Body of Christ.
• The Baker is inspired by the votive wafers of the Host and his ovens reflect images of Hellfire.
• The Candlestick-Maker is inspired by the Ritual Use of Candles, plus Witch-Burning.

2. Whimsical.

    And now, as they say, for something completely different. Let's go with something more at home in Ben Edlund's 'The Tick' or the 1960's 'Batman' series.

• The Butcher's animalistic style is more reminiscent of Captain Planet's Horace Greedly than a Resident Evil Game. His cleaver is more used for cutting ropes than people. His mallet is more of a 'bonk on head' type weapon and his hook is more like a vaudeville hook for yanking people offstage. He has a single wild boar pet called 'Fluffy' or 'Sweetums' which he treats like a beloved lapdog, putting bows in its hair and giving it expensive treats and diamond-studded collars.
  He uses meat-based gadgets like flung pork'chops' which hit like karate-chops, pig knuckles instead of brass knuckles, or wrapping people up in sausage-links which he wields like a lariat.
  Henchman could be called 'Brisket', 'Sirloin' or 'Hamhock'.
  Traps include pit and the pendulum-style blades, deadly rotisseries, or being lowered into a vat of boiling gravy.
  
  
• The Baker is more of a moustache-twirling Dick Dastardly type. He almost exclusively uses gadgets including rapidly expanding dough, slippery butter spray, exploding dinner rolls, croissant-shaped boomerangs, fencing with a baguette, pinning heroes' arms to their side with life-preserver sized doughnuts, blinding them with thrown pies, tortillas or crepes that stick to an enemy and wrap them up like a blanket or cookies which act as throwing stars.
  He has two massive golems as muscle - Doughboy (a sticky mass of bread dough) and Butterball (a slippery mass of butter).  
  Henchman could be called 'Pumpernickel', 'Sourdough' or 'Rye'.
  Traps include oversized ovens, sinking into a quicksand-like pit of sticky dough or trapped inside a massive bowl with a slowly-descending eggbeater. 
  
  
• The Candlestick-Maker is the only really superhuman one. He's made out of malleable wax with a bunsen burner-like apparatus on the top of his head. He can use this as a weapon, but is also capable of throwing clumps of sticky wax to entrap, blind or slow heroes. His body is naturally resistant to damage and hard to get hold of. He carries an array of appropriate weapons including Roman Candles, Candlesticks he can uses as a club or a fencing foil, 'bombs' which explode in masses of rapidly-hardening wax. Like his pulp version, he can shape his face to disguise himself, but can't stand too close to heat without giving himself away. He's more of a wacky, mocking villain, compared to the Butcher's Bully and the Baker's Schemer.
  Henchmen could include 'Flicker', 'Waxy' and 'Gleam', though he's just as likely to set up in a Wax Museum with robotic henchmen shaped like Al Capone, John Wilkes-Booth and Jack the Ripper.
  Traps include the old 'candle slowly burning through a rope' bit, the old 'when the candle burns down' bit, or being lowered into a vat of bubbling wax.

3. Misheard Lyrics - 'The Interiors'

        One poster misread the original post and instead of 'The Inheritors', though the post was about a group called 'The Interiors'. So here's a completely different trio of villains. These are also more in the 60's Batman/Tick vibe.

• The Wallflower is the team's stealth specialist. He can flatten himself out and blend in, chameleon-like with a wall and can move across two-dimensional space. He's capable of diving 'into' one wall and out another. He doesn't talk, but is an accomplished mime. He also carries calling cards which he seemingly pulls out of nowhere and can have anything typed on them that Wallflower would like to say. 
• The Carpet-Bagger carries a carpet-bag which seems capable of dispensing a seemingly endless array of carpet-based weapons and equipment including 'Throw' rugs, Flying Carpets, shuriken-like doilies, flypaper-like sticky rugs, or rugs which act as quicksand pits, or pretty much anything he can imagine. He has an exaggerated Southern accent and is something of a blustering fool and loud-mouthed blowhard. 
• Duke Decor (who always pronounces his name with a French accent 'Duc D'ecor' and corrects anyone who mispronounces it) is a pompous, aristocratic type and is the leader of The Interiors. He considers himself a criminal mastermind and gentleman thief. He carries a 'magic wand'-style baton and uses it to animate furniture. This can range from turning a footstool into a mobile stand he can 'ride' on as it scuttles around on its legs, transforming couches or wardrobes into lumbering shapes that can battle or distract his enemies, using curtains to sweep him upward or even animating the figures on a tapestry so that they can emerge and fight on his behalf (though they are still made of the same material).

So there you go. Can't say fairer than that.