Times where the hero creates their own villain in Tabletop Games.
- An actual game mechanic in Beast: The Primordial. The player characters are fear-devouring monsters from the darkest depths of the collective unconscious, but they still tend to be better human beings than the so-called "Heroes" that their feedings occasionally produce.
- In Halt Evil Doer!, the Practically Joker Blood Wing has his origin when Black Wing I, at his most vengeful, left the killer of his family in a burning house to die ... and he didn't. Like movie-Joker, the character was already a villain, just not a super-villain.
- Pathfinder: The brine dragon Rezlarabren spent most of her childhood being hounded by Ulfen warriors who saw her as a threat and wanted to neutralize her early before she could grow into a powerful sea monster and endanger their ships and ports. They were right, in a sense, since Rezlarabren did grow to become their enemy — because the decades spent trying to avoid being killed by people she'd never done anything to ended up fostering in her a deep sense of paranoia and a lifelong hatred of the Ulfen.
- A part of the background for Warhammer 40,000 is that the Horus Heresy ultimate erupted because the Emperor consistently mistreated a number of his Primarchs, eventually driving them to rebel against him, which in turn dragged others into joining them. This invocation of Cry for the Devil helps fuel the Black-and-Gray Morality of the setting.
- Lorgar of the Word Bearers, the Arch-Priest of Chaos who was instrumental in turning the others to Chaos, only did so because the Emperor ordered the destruction of a civilization that Lorgar felt was his crowning achievement, and then publicly humiliated the devoted and loyal Legion in front of their Ultramarines, calling them the one Legion he was disappointed with and proclaiming every achievement of Lorgar's life was a failure. Making matters worse, he had said nothing about his disapproval of Lorgar's methods for over a century beforehand.
- Angron of the World Eaters was a mentally damaged berserker, whom the Emperor forcibly abducted from the ranks of his fellow rebel slaves — the only friends and family he had ever known — and forced to watch die from safety in orbit when Angron refused to voluntarily abandon them. In the Horus Heresy novels, Angron at one point comments he would have turned against the Emperor sooner if his mind had been stabler.
- Magnus of the Thousand Sons only turned to Tzeentch for salvation when his attempts to warn the Emperor of Horus' corruption and rebellion lead to the Emperor refusing to head Magnus, instead dubbing him the traitor, and sending the Space Wolves — who hate and despise the Thousand Sons to begin with — to destroy Magnus, his Legion and his whole world.
- Actually, the Emperor only wanted to arrest Magnus to have him brought to Terra, however, on the way to Prospero, Horus gave Leman Russ new orders; the Emperor had changed his mind and wanted Prospero and the Thousand Sons destroyed. That said, sending the Legion that hated the Thousand Sons the most to apprehend them in the first place probably wasn't going to end very well either way, and was likely the very reason Horus gave the order: He knew Russ wouldn't question the order to kill Magnus if he thought it came from the Emperor.
- It's also implied that Magnus had been in Tzeentch's thrall well before the Emperor found him, and made a further pact with the Chaos God to save his Legion from a mutation curse that probably existed because Magnus was in Tzeentch's thrall. Magnus didn't realize how deep he'd gone until Tzeentch chose to collect during the Battle of Prospero.
- Lion El'Jonson's choice to exile Luther, his long-time brother in arms and closest friend, to Caliban during the Heresy admittedly, for a momentary lapse where he considered letting the Lion die for his own glory had a lot to do with Luther's fall to Chaos. Same goes for every other Dark Angel stationed there.
- It's rarely focused on, as the games and media prefer to focus on the major alien factions who are largely Always Chaotic Evil (and even they are given short shrift, with more attention given to the Imperium vs. Chaos), but lore does establish that minor alien races are hostile to humanity because humanity has an established doctrine of genociding aliens, justified by a religion that combines admonishments to seek vengeance for evils done to humanity by hostile aliens with blanket assertations of human supremacy and a creed that humanity is destined to master the galaxy by exterminating all rivals.
- Moving things away from the Imperium, there's the Eldar. The Eldar Empire's decadence combined with their race's naturally powerful psyker abilities made the Warp start to manifest a being that reflected their hedonism. The Eldar who realized this was happening reacted in different ways. Some of them decided to get as far away from the rest of the Empire as possible to avoid the backlash after their attempts to get the rest of the Empire to stop being irresponsible hedonistic idiots went nowhere. Others threw themselves even deeper into bloody hedonism since creating a new god of pleasure appealed to them. And that's how Slaanesh was born. The new Chaos God repaid the Eldar by slaughtering their pantheon, slaughtering most of their race, and eating their souls after death. The factions of the surviving Eldar are defined by the different ways they try to prevent Slaanesh from finishing the job.
