"Evil campaigns"

FemmeLegion

FemmeLegion

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?

DarthKrzysztof

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.

redstar

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!

kresnik_alchemist

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.

Fivegears

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.

Idless

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":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/tirsdag will be a long running evil fantasy campaign!


...Idless

Lialos

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.

spidieman

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.

IceBob

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.

Mortag1981

Evil campaigns can be a load of fun if done right. I've had the fortune of playing with a group that did a lot of White Wolf gaming, so the leap into neutral and evil characters that worked together wasn't that difficult. In my opinion though, one of the greatest benefits of running a "dark" or "evil" game is to show the players that evil can be quite subjective. For example, a group of PCs that needs to bargain with an evil city and while there, the city gets attacked by a neighboring kingdom. The PCs become captured and treated as if they were a part of this entirely bloodthirsty evil culture. Eventually, the evil city retaliats and frees the PCs, leaving everyone wondering who was truly "evil".

As an aside though, in any evil game you need to make sure that people understand the difference between "chaotic" and "stupid". Even the most chaotic berserker doesn't just walk into a store and kill everyone so he can get cheap food. Well, unless he's part of an invading force that is, lol.

freyja3120

I ran an evil campaign, and found it to be a great success, and a lot of fun. It is very important that all of the players on the same page with what is acceptable, and what isn't. It should be specifically determined ahead of time what everyone is comfortable with, for instance, is hurting children okay? What about torture? That sort of thing needs to be agreed upon, and if one person is uncomfortable, don't do it. A little bit of metagaming this way is needed to keep smoothness.

For party cohesion, you have to work a little bit more to make sure everyone works together (unless they are friends from the beginning, of course.) In my campaign, they were all members of the same evil church, working toward the raising of an evil necromancer.

I agree with Mortag1981 about being "stupid evil", and I made sure that my players knew that. The evil in my world is outnumbered by the good, so anything that makes it obvious that you are evil might not be wise. If it happens often enough, some group of people of good alignment are going to traipse along, trying to kill you and save the world (sound familiar?). Now don't get me wrong, if you want to do that, feel free to structure your world so that works. My group enjoyed it better with the roleplaying emphasized. It was a completely different experience than usual, with them misdirecting their evil deeds onto others, and a lot of creativity ensuing.

zippomage

with the exception to simulationists who prefer to use an alignment to justify their actions instead of guiding them, I don't think you have to worry to badly about evil characters eating each other. Like pretty much every post thus far, I will point out that evil, even chaotic evil, isn't stupid. Often, evil has to be MORE clever because they are often, especially the more monstrous looking aspects of evil, killed on sight or on recognition. You *can't* just go around doing what you want because some do-gooding party of hippy adventurers is bound to come along with WAAAY more political and financial support and then you're done for.

Despite the focus on savage tribes of monstrous humanoids or goblinoids throwing their lives away against each other, the large majority of evil forces work against each other beneath the surface _politically_. I think that is something that should not just be stressed, but downright spelled out to any player thinking of taking part in an evil-oriented campaign. Even the chaotic neutral rogue/assassin/moron needs to realize that he _needs_ the party. He's just a leather-clad targetting dummy without some extra metal-clad meat to give him flanking and sneak attakc opportunities. No adventurer is an island, eventually, they'll all need help, and that more than anything else is going to influence their interactions: What can this character/monster/whatever do for me? Do I need him?

I'm currently in an evil campaign. There were three of us, but now only two. I am a more deception and intrigue sort of character, with my own cohort, while the other guy is a big half-dragon favored soul. Both of us worship evil deities, but different gods, and for radically different reasons, and in radically different ways. The half-dragon has so far been most pleased when being allowed to kill things in horrific ways. At one instance, I underestimated him, and realized afterwards while talking with the player that I had been used. _By the *combat machine*_! I think that illustrates how successfully a party of intelligently evil beings can work together, and still satisfy that inexplicable urge to work against each other (because they are evil). There are so many opportunities to be evil in a game as broadly extrapolated as D&D 3.5, you'd have to look pretty hard to find a reason that directly and unreasonably opposes any other evil. And in such a case, I would assume one or more of the individuals in the conflict had done it on purpose.

tsuba

I was actually in the concept stage of an evil campaign a couple of days ago, that I have been fleshing out. Now I'm a rather inexperienced GM, but I think I have a rather solid hook to my campaign. It's 4e, with the players starting out around level 4 or 5, simply because I envision each character somewhere in the beginning stages of an evil empire. The hook is that they get caught up in a coup to get rid of them, and get transported into a different plane. To make it back to their plane they have to meet certain requirements and work together to basically destroy the entire world in one year, or cease to exist. I'm not completely sure how it will work out, but I think with a little work it will turn out to be enjoyable, whether they follow the proper story or not.

Lunaticdesign

I've done several games where the characters were Evil. The basics of storytelling still works. Your players still have goals (most of them involve things like world domination), and their enemies are typically heroes.

It requires a good amount of creativity as well as maturity on the part of your players.

One thing I did that was fun was a mixed game. One of my players asked me if he could play an evil character. The results were amazing. He ended up having to rely on the group of good characters in order to hide his true nature. He had goals that were contrary to the party's and had to go about achieving them in very intelligent and crafty ways.

Kabniel

I have played in an evil campaign only once. It ended up having more elements of absurdity than anything else, but evil base nonetheless. (the bard performing a song so well there were audience members with exploding heads kind of absurdity)

When there was a focus, it was based around a 'worse evil'. The game worked because we all went in with the same expectations. I think this is what really makes the campaign style work. And that can be said for any campaign style. As many people have said above, putting in forethought and effort before the game really starts is key. There were one or two folks who played in the evil campaign I mentioned, but were not really looking for that. They were looking for the more "traditional" D&D experience of being good guys. As things progressed and got more evil/absurd, they left the game. Without the moral compass of those characters the other players delved even deeper in that direction.

It's all about knowing expectations beforehand and working with them in mind. Communication is key.

raohthekenoh

Evil campaigns work when the players are smart enough to work with one another, and design "evil" characters realistically. If the players are immature and just want to express sociopathic/psychopathic actions in a game, then it probably won't work out so well. Most D&D games I end up in run towards the line of "shades of gray" where most of the players don't want to play characters who are very good aligned, but also don't end up with characters who are very evil aligned either, which generally makes the most realistic as to how people actually act anyway.

gnunn

I agree with raohthekenoh that it is important to use smart character design choices when playing an evil campaign.

I participated as a player in one such campaign, which worked out very well. Our DM emphasized that we were evil, not Chaotic stupid. The key is that evil is not just about mindless killing. Certainly, some of us had killed in the past, but we had a common goal and solid motivation for our actions.

For example, I played a dwarf fighter with a bit of a Napoleon complex who had "accidentally" caved in a mine on his mine crew, because they were insubordinate.

We also had an evil cleric who masqueraded as a cleric of Lathander in an attempt to deceive others into actually worshipping his evil deity. Characters like these worked fantastically!

By contrast, the wild-dwarf barbarian "serial killer" who joined us mid-campaign died about 1/2 way through his first session after he lit his loincloth on fire, threw it at a gelatinous cube and then leapt blindly into the pitch black space from which the cube had just emerged. The DM had him land in a river, only to be pulled to his doom by a water dwelling monstrosity... No chaotic stupid.

I think the trick is to realize that evil characters usually have a reason for the evil acts they perform. They don't just flail mindlessly. Keeping this in mind can also help DMs design realistic opponents for good campaigns.

DarkMagus

Here is an interesting idea for any DM who is afraid of the consequesnces of running an "evil" campaign that I will throw out there for you to consider. Run your normal "good" campaign, giving the PC's their usual benevolent, personal, or just simple monetary motivation for the plot. However, when the end of said campaign is over, you can wrap things up with a final description scene (maybe with some good dramatic music) that quickly retells the story of the groups deeds, but from a different point of view, maybe from the POV of those they were working against, or even maybe a person or group they never met but whom their actions greatly affected in some strong negative way. If done carefully, you could depict their entire campaign, through the eyes of another, as the acts of an "evil" group. You would be obviously trying to show a paradigm of morality and ethics that is relative (or somewhat relative). By doing this you would be forgoing all of the possible negative outcomes of running an "evil" campaign that you are wary of, and you just may end up impressing the group with a surprise ending that gets them thinking more about your world as a more realistic world where there are other people who view their actions in very different light. However, you would also be foregoing all of the indulgences of an evil campaign, what makes it fun is that its different, which wouldnt be as fun because your players would be missing out, but if you think they are good enough role players than this method really wouldnt be for them anyway- unless you just wanted to surprise them. I hope someone finds the idea useful or gets an even better idea from this. :)

sonnycalzone

I have been playing D&D since 1979, and I am very much in favor of "evil adventuring". Heck, I even played a TIE fighter pilot in a Star Wars campaign once upon a time =)

There is nothing wrong with an evil D&D campaign, and anyone who might be offended by such role-playing really doesn't even belong at the gaming table. Open-mindedness is the one true path, my friends. Fear no art.

I have had the distinct pleasure of DM'ing more than a few evil adventures during my ongoing tenure as Long Island's most prolific 1e dungeonmaster. It gets out of hand only if the DM allows it to. Awarding XP to evil PC's who desecrate temples of worship, or rob graves et. al., for the sheer evil of it all, can become tiresome after a while, so it's up to the DM to keep things interesting.

Here's a fun list of six things I thought up just now, which any DM can use to spice up an evil adventure (be it a campaign, or a one-off shorty sortie):

1. Let the PC's suddenly find themselves in an unexpected position of political power.
2. Have one of the PC's somehow get blackmailed into betraying their party.
3. Let there be only one treasure item, instead of however many the PC party might have thought there were.
4. Trap the PC party in an impossible situation where the demise of at least one PC is imminent.
5. Capture the PC party and string them up in nooses from a gallows pole.
6. Capture the PC party and have them buried alive.

gnunn

bq. 4. Trap the PC party in an impossible situation where the demise of at least one PC is imminent.

The DM in the evil campaign I played in did just that. In the form of a puzzle dungeon that was the domain of a young mindflayer:

The mindflayer had been telepathically communicating with our wizard luring our group into the dungeon. We were all rendered unconscious and woke up trapped inside. Our wizard was the only one who was told by the mindflayer that the only key to the exit had been embedded in our cleric's chest. (They worshipped opposing evil deities, so the wizard was okay with the situation) When it came time to get out, we were forced to cut the key out of our cleric.

FemmeLegion

I never saw any of the "Saw" movies, but that sounds like something that would've happened in them.

See, I'd put the HEROIC party in that position. Evil is de rigeur for the DM! (muahahahaha)

gnunn

Yeah, our DM specifically referred to the young mindflayer as akin to the guy from Saw. Oh, she also totally took maximum advantage of our party's tendency to sleep with the tavern wenches in every village we entered. Early on in the campaign, we were killed and then resurrected and then sent back in time as outsiders by the daughter of an evil deity who placed us under a geis to complete a mission for her.

Well, we had slept our way across half the continent in a care-free fashion when we suddenly received a visit from an inevitable. Apparently, because we were now outsiders, our sexual exploits had begun to result in demonspawn being born to each of the wenches we had bedded creating a major disrutption in the space-time continuum. Our choices... ignore it, flee the inevitable and cause the untimely doom of the world, or go back and kill each of the wenches before they could give birth... good times! We were sort of like the evil version of the Scooby Doo gang.