u/everythingisgonea

Basically, the party is seeking several ancient artifacts, each of which is connected to a heroic trait (perseverance, caution, etc.) and each of the villains have these artifacts, but they demonstrate twisted versions of these traits, for example perseverance becomes stubbornness, caution becomes fear, and so on.

The problem is that I’ve been planning the villains before the artifacts, and then twisting their traits into good things. But I’ve hit a roadblock with the latest one. He gets visions of the future, and seeing how bleak and miserable they all are, he embraces hopelessness and decides that if everyone’s going to die anyway, he might as well put on a show for their demise.

No matter how hard I think, I just can’t come up with a way to twist this nihilistic hopelessness into a positive trait, so I was hoping maybe someone here would be able to help

I have been preparing to finally write my passion project book that’s been stuck in my head for years, but I’m not sure if the story should be one really long novel, or split between sequels and whatnot. So I thought I’d ask, at what point does the story become too long to be one book?