I was chatting with one of my gaming buddies today, and he began wondering if our DM had ever run a “dark” or “evil” campaign. He mentioned that he’s always been kind of fond of the notion of fighting evil with evil in other media, and has occasionally been tempted to let one of his heroic characters go berserk. (He’s got a strong “Butt-Kicker” streak in him.)

This got me to wondering: Have any of you participated in a campaign where the PCs were evil, and how well did it work? My initial thoughts were that it’d be much more difficult to do well, because

1) Such a campaign would invite immaturity (there are very few people I would consider running with in such a campaign, and I could very well offend them in the course of it)

2) One common (possibly crucial) element to storytelling is that the protagonist be changed by his/her actions, and a character who is “evil” most likely has already gone through a lot of big life-changing situations, meaning there’s not much further s/he can go.

Are there any other difficulties I haven’t thought of? Any unexpected payoffs? Maybe it’s good for the occasional once-off but nothing prolonged?

I’ve never participated in an evil game, but I’ve considered it. In particular, I’ve always wanted to run a dark side Star Wars campaign, which only got worse when they released the Dark Side Sourcebook (and it’ll come back around when The Force Unleashed comes out). Here are some of the things that crossed my mind the last time I worked on the idea:

There are many roleplayers who use evil PCs as an excuse to act out against the other characters, but hopefully you can see them coming. ; )

I think that “evil” campaigns would best be designed as short, finite affairs, so there’s an immediate goal that is demonstrably easier for the PCs to achieve as a group. If the campaign’s a success, you build a second arc, and so on.

If there are several evil factions or groups for PCs to belong to, conflict will likely result if they belong to different factions. Of course, a single patron is no guarantee – the PCs may compete and conspire to become her favorite minion, or to replace her themselves. If the players won’t budge, a common cause might help with party unity issues.

And I’ve thought about the character development issue as well. The Dark Side Sourcebook suggests ending the campaign by either 1) redeeming the characters, or 2) letting them go out in a blaze of glory. The latter, though you don’t particularly see it in Star Wars, was mandatory for gangster films & the like in the days of Hollywood’s Production Code, and usually seems to make for a memorable finale.

I, too, wonder if anyone’s ever pulled this off successfully.

Let me just preface my reply with the disclaimer: IMO evil campaigns are the best campaigns and I’ve run some degree of a “dark” campaign since I let go of my 2e books :)

I thought the reference to the Dark Side Sourcebook DarthKryzsztof mentioned was good. Another good one is the Book of Vile Darkness which also has a whole chapter on running evil games. Most the ones I’ve run fall into the Lawful Evil/Anti-hero games. For example current game involves an exiled Drow assassin that sold his soul for a second chance at life, and a demon-haunted alcoholic ex-mercenary who was recently betrayed by a close friend.

On Player Actions: FemmeLegion’s concern about “childish” or “mindless” evil was a fair concern. It’s always important to quickly demonstrate to those players that while they are on the side of evil, there is still a very powerful (overwhelming if necessary) force of good that wants to smite them to back to the infernal plane they crawled from. It’s important to have players who respect the DM and are willing to roleplay more mature themes – murder, assassin, enslavement, torture, lying, stealing, debauchery etc. It’s also important to have players who fear the DM and know he/she won’t tolerate tomfoolery.

On Party Unity: This is actually a really tricky one. The only advice I can offer is: make them hate something more than each other. Set them all up for a crime. Have them driven from their dungeons by a rising tide of the forces of good. Make the loose something that is dear to them, in their twisted world of worth (like a shiny sword or their favorite human-flesh bound spell book). DarthKyzsztof’s suggestion of the dueling factions also works really well, because you end up having “evil” players who are fighting “evil” but by any means necessary. On this note: motivation is also equally tricky from goal to goal. What keeps them all together? Power, wealth, fear? Cause it ain’t gonna be general goodness :)

Good luck!

I’ve only ran an evil campaign once. It was a ton of work, not only did I have an npc to lead them but I had a group of good npc’s that were going after them to try and clean up and set right all their handiwork. It was set for them to go up against the group of good npc’s but between the friendly fire and eventual character assassinations at the hands of other party members the game eventually fizzled with a lot of angry players looking to go back to a normal game. Having party unity is a really hard thing for my group, even when we are playing good characters, when they were all evil it was atrocious. As long as you have a really strong motivator you shouldn’t have too many problems.

I ran a ‘low road’ campaign, a group of adventurers hired on by the Boromar clan, in Eberron, dirty deeds leading down fairly heroic adventures. In many cases, these turn into a bit more of a smash-and-grab campaign, but, with a little work, you can use the party’s actions against them, giving them pause when they might think burning a place to the ground would be a good idea.

We did a placeholder campaign at one time – it was supposed to be a hak and slash DnD for good old times sake!

So, for fun, and inspired by the Linear Guild, we decided to be evil. I think our plan was to kill all humans, as I was the leader of the pack, and was a human that loathed my own species! We started in media res, were we had kidnapped a princess for ransom -

what went really well:

• Solid structure
  • relations made before the game starts
  • Absolute good, deep seethed reasons why we traveled together. There was love and brotherly bonds, and an oath to a god that bound us together.
  • outer enemy! If we did not have each other, we would have nothing, and the good guys would own us
  • One Person being the leader, as a focal point
  • having the leader be tied to an organization with bigger plans

You could say that we also swore a meta-game oath, to keep the narrative going – so no “I stab him in the back, and feed him to the dragon” – maybe our characters felt like it, but the players would find a believable explanation why not.

I must say that the one month campaign did have a humorous feel to it, but it was so good, that we decided that our next campaign after this will be a long running evil fantasy campaign!

...Idless

Several years ago, myself and some other mature gamers (all 25+) played an Evil campaign. Mind you, virtually all of us were LE, with maybe 2 NE in the party. A CE party would eat itself.

Having a Blackguard (Dark Paladin Type) in the group actually helped keep things a little more centered, and it was very interesting seeing the different types of “evil” evidenced in the group. Probably more types of “evil” than you see “good” in a standard group. The Blackguard was on a mission, whereas some of the others were the bloodthirsty kill everything evil. However, in order to not alert every local authority for 100 miles, we had to keep things cleaned up so as to not get posses chasing our evil butts. My own character was a Kobold Sorceror-Rogue type, who did the sniveling “wonderful idea Master” stuff to the Blackguard and rubbed his hands in a ball a lot while plotting.

In the end, I think we had a lot of fun, but the DM certainly had to handle things differently. Consider that in most campaigns, the players may “know” who they need to kill, but need to manufacture a pretense to do so, thus leading to side adventures and such. In an “evil” campaign, no such pretense is needed. If the PCs even sniff that the good guys have what they need, it can become a carnage fest.

Finally, let me point out, that you can play an “evil” campaign without ugly disgustingness that goes beyond PG-13 and will offend some players. Make sure you are truly in a fantasy world though, with very few, if any, mirrored concepts from the real world. If you are playing in Kurtz’s Deryni world as evil, and you go around desecrating churches and describing in detail what you do, some who might view the church there as a mirrored image of the real world Catholic church might take serious offense. Also, evil doesn’t always mean butchery and rape. Brigandadge can be done just fine without acting like the Mongol hordes (apologies to any Mongols reading this).

Anyways, like I said, we had fun, but we were more mature, and all had good character concepts, with goals or ethics.

our group ran a evil campaign with great success. we started off as a party of humanoids who were elite soilders for an evil kingdom. We were still friends, still worked together as a team, but we were evil. The story took us into becoming undead, not just any undead, but the death knights from krynn (magic crowns and all), and made us either go against dragon to get them back.

it was a cool and fun game, we broke all sort of rules, were super evil, we were all basically krugen’s from highlander.

all of us are adults, and everything stayed at the gaming table. we were pretty damn dark and actuly explored the history of human evilness if you will.

i say give it a go, but the dm should make the story in such a fashion where the party members work together.

just because your evil doesn’t mean your stupid or unfriendly.

Absolutely true. Even Evil has friends.

I am very lucky to have such a great group of gamers in real life, and we played a long-lived evil D&D campaign (I actually got to play in it!). Our group remained united without any force above us, such as a higher organization or common religion. We were united because most of the characters were genuinely friends.

The LE Duergar, CE Drow, LE Aasimar, and CE Half-Orc were united by a mutual respect for one another’s talents and a recognition that it would always be easier for them to achieve together than separately. They would discuss their goals as a group to determine their next course of action, and if ever an impasse was reached, the Aasimar acted as leader and made the final decision.