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In my campaign, the party is evil, so the PCs are the villains...
Last session they grotesquely sacrificed a paladin on the altar of their dark god.
One of them rather enjoys raping helpless women, then burning them to death and eating the remains (dragon fire adept // sorcerer). In fact, the entire party doesn't seem to mind cannibalism in at least some form. They all consider elf, particularly drow, to be tasty.
They've commited heinous murders and framed others for doing them...
At many points, they've taken enemies alive and unconcious to use as slaves, sex slaves, or toys to be tortured with for fun later on. My ninja's unarmed strike has proven most useful in that regard.
Nearly the entire party can animate the dead, which is a rather vile thing to do even if it's "ordinary" to most players.
That all said, none of us tries to do outrageously evil things just for the sake of some sort of "I'm the most evil EVAR!" contest, just what fits with the characters, so I really have no outlandish examples.
....The outlandish examples would be from a different game than D&D, that the DM made up, where the players all control monsters united against the plague of humanity, where he actually awards greater xp if you do particularly vile things or butcher an enemy in a creative and grisly fashion...
My gargoyle made a marionette out of a female victim, and liked to try and ventriloquist it with a voice when he played around with his meat puppet. That was fun.
My online gaming group, Torch of Spirit (Contains all information for the current game I'm co-DMing as well as lots of houserules I'm using or considering for the future. Feel free to check it out.)
The head villain tends to be downright evil, as in no moral compass. He does whatever it takes to make sure he is the top dog and that his minions jump when he barks. Killing women and children? Doesn't even give it a second thought. Now his lieutenants, on the other hand, can believe they are following him for all the right reasons because it furthers their goals too.
"I am he who rules the world, don't you know? One little piece at a time. I am the stuff of Riordan Parnell's most outrageous songs, and I am a confused memory for those whose lives I've entered and departed." -- Jarlaxle, Road of the Patriarch
Some villains are redeemable. For senate a former Paladin turned anti-Paladin (he was a former black Spanish slave who was freed by the wrong people for the wrong reasons and thereby mixed in with a bad crowd), who led several characters into ambush and killed one, later rented and was transformed. He was a former childhood friend of one of the player characters who later became his sworn, though secret enemy, who thereafter then repented.
I've also of course had the PCs seem the villains in the eyes of several others. After all to an antipaladin sometimes the Paladin is the evil one, the corrupt one, or the misguided one.
But between the Nemeses of the party, and other groups like the Bulgars, Vikings, Russians, Muslims, certain Christian sects at war with heretics or other sects, witches, demons, and so forth there have been some fairly evil acts.
Assassination
Murder of innocents and friends and family of the PCs.
Rape, kidnap and selling into slavery of the friends and family of the PCs.
Kidnap of the child of one of the PCs who is now being raised by enemies to despise and hate his own parents who the kid thinks are actually enemies of his own. His kidnappers are falsely telling him that he is their child.
A group of Viking raiders once butchered everyone in a PC's home village in revenge for being stopped at another invasion point. Then cut off all of the hands of their victims and nailed them to a giant totem they erected on the outskirts of the village after burning the village to the ground.
Bulgars who engaged in group crucifixion and torture and made drinking cups of NPC skulls, and one PC skull.
Burning alive of multiple helpless victims and children.
Long term torture and imprisonment.
Forced conversions which later led to torture and executions anyway.
Cannibalism.
Poisoning of wells and crops. Forcing people to eat diseased and rotted, putrefied animal remains.
War Atrocities.
A group of young girl children were all blinded and mutilated by some Goths infuriated at the fact that the Byzantines had never fed them or given them promised land for war services.
Land seizure, property theft, exile.
Framing the PCs for various crimes.
People being drawn and quartered, and executed by other various torturous means.
Stuff like that. The kind of thing that unfortunately is all too common throughout history and is still real common in certain parts of the world.
Another example, though this was just an exploration of the character as some jotted down response fiction to a friend's artwork. By no means a primary Evil in the campaign, but my boards namesake Shemeska who was a devoted thorn in my PCs side for about six years of a campaign. The fiction is written with the quirk of her being human in appearance (given the picture in question), but it's the actions and personality being illustrated that matter.
Middle-tier evils in my games are still loathsome, godless abominations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by me
“So as I said, whatever you might be told, avarice is a virtue.”
Shemeska smiled, and having made her point, she took a long, slow drag from her cigarette. She seemed pleased with herself, and honestly it fit, given that for the last thirty minutes she’d waxed poetic on the philosophy of greed, punctuated by more than a few tangents on her hair, her nails, and the peculiar shade of purple lipstick she wore that day.
Sitting opposite from her at the table with a tired, pained look upon his face sat a rather common looking man named Marcellus. In contrast to her polished, preened, and overwhelmingly high-class appearance, he dressed in simple, functional clothes, and the dust of his travels still dirtied his boots. Above it all, he seemed impatient and haggard, as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“Why?” He asked pleadingly. “Why are you doing this?”
She took a sip of white wine and regarded him with disdain. Another pregnant moment of silence on her part and she relaxed as an unbidden servant approached from one side and deftly wiped a single fallen drop of alcohol from her cleavage, acting with the reverence of an acolyte at a temple towards its most holy of reliquaries. For her part, she acted as if the man simply wasn’t there. He didn’t matter.
“Our farms were heavily in debt, and as I understand it, you purchased that debt three months ago.”
“That would be correct.” She stated.
“And since you have, you’ve called in on every late payment, even though the prior owner had allowed us time to collect what was owed. Hired thugs beat my uncle nearly to death when he protested them taking his horses and ransacking his house. My brother’s cattle died of disease within a week of being told he was past due on his own debt. The wells taste of salt and our crops are dying. You’re destroying our ability to pay you, and then making us suffer as a result of that. Why are you doing this to us?”
She answered with a resigned sigh, exhaling smoke in tiny little streamers between her teeth and little rivulets from her nostrils like a hungry dragon preparing for a meal. “You see, it’s unfortunate you had to break the mood and stop our delightful little banter. You could have at least prolonged the pause before the inevitable and allowed me to finish my soliloquy.”
Shemeska paused, and while it might have simply been his eyes suddenly adjusting to the contrast between the room’s illumination and the few candles burning at the table, but suddenly the chamber seemed altogether darker. With the shadows looming, for the first time since he’d been sitting there, Marcellus noticed that the woman’s eyes glowed a faint, luminous violet, and as she leaned closer, he became aware of the faint scent of brimstone, hitherto masked by a wash of perfume.
”Why am I doing this?” She asked. “Because I'm evil.”
A smug smile crossed her features as she watched the lines of confusion twist and form across the man's face.
“That's the key to understanding me you see. I'm evil. But when I say that word, understand that I don’t mean just the petty little malevolence of self-interest that you find in a greedy landowner or an unscrupulous businesswoman. Not the rationalized malignancy of a man delusional enough to think his own goals exist to further some postulative greater good; no, not at all. I am Evil. My fingers laid in a baptismal font set the water to boil. My shadow falling across a newborn sparks a fatal infection that claims a village. I haven't caused all your woes simply because I can, nor because it all makes sense in some Byzantine scheme of structured torment. No, I've done it all because I enjoy it Marcellus. You and your kindreds’ agony bring a smile to my lips and a bounce to my step. The worry that keeps you up at night and makes your wife cry herself to sleep at your side curls my toes like a lover’s tongue between my thighs… and the best I assure you is still to come.”
Marcellus had no response, and a numb shock slowly spread through his body as she leaned forward. Her dress sparkling and tight against her flesh, she pressed her breasts against the table in a display of sexuality at utter clashing odds to the malicious, predatory hunger in her eyes.
”I want you to beg little man. I want you to beg for me to make it end.” She explained, leaving her tongue perched on her lips like a serpent tasting the air. “And then I want to see your face when I tell you no and offer you your only release from it all.”
“What the f*ck?!” He exclaimed, honestly frightened of her.
And you’ll accept my terms, because while you took it upon yourself to come here to my parlor and dance your plaintive little dance upon these metaphorical little webs of mine, I've been playing reaper elsewhere.”
Something was wrong. Something was horribly wrong.
Shemeska motioned with the end of her cigarette, causing a bit of smoldering ash to fall to the table, neatly forming the outline of a tiny, mocking smile. Theatrics aside, the motion summoned one of her elegantly dressed attendants as some other subtle cue had earlier done. A slender man dressed in black and purple, he carried a small box, about the size of a ripe melon, neatly dressed and sealed with metallic string the color of his mistress’s hair.
"My gift to you Marcellus." She said, still leaning forwards. And still, despite the display, he didn't once glance at the cleavage, but only at the box.
His heart beat heavily in his chest as he looked at the gift box, “What is this?”
"Open it up Marcellus.” Shemeska prompted. “You're sure to recognize it."
"What is it?" He asked again, this time with a slight tremble in his voice.
"It's her head.” Shemeska replied with poisoned amusement. “Neatly severed and wrapped in fine tissue paper. It’s her head; your wife's that is."
Marcellus dropped the box like a hot iron, leaving it on the table as he got up from his chair, almost falling to the floor. His eyes bulged and his facial muscles twitched as Shemeska’s voice droned on with callous normality.
"I hear that with the proper divinations, the eyes of the dead hold the reflections of the last thing they saw before they gave up the ghost. Care to know just what she saw before they killed her? What manner of violatio..."
His weeping cut her off, and she paused to listen to the sound as he sat on his knees on the floor, leaving the box untouched upon the table. She allowed him several minutes of agony before she motioned and had him brought back to his seat. He slumped in his chair and only looked away from the box when she produced a slender, stoppered vial and delicately placed it on the table directly in front of him.
"That's my offer Marcellus.” She explained, tapping one painted and polished nail upon its wax seal. “That's your way out. You still have children you know.”
Broken, having lost half of his most treasured things in life, he had no other recourse. His death would spare his children, and with luck, his relatives would take them under their wing and flee their land, leaving their current hell behind. “Please, leave them alone. I accept your offer.”
Shortly thereafter the air was marked by a peculiar, acrid scent as the bottle’s seal was broken and Marcellus swallowed its contents in a single, tortured gulp. And as the poison coursed through his body with each beat of his dying heart, breaking down the connections between his nerves and sending his body into a frothing, flopping seizure, Shemeska stood over him, laughing with disdain. And in the moment just before his brain lost its capacity to comprehend, she opened the box and displayed for him its contents as he died.
Minutes later his body lay on the floor, twitching with residual muscular contractions for several more minutes as Shemeska returned to finishing her meal, interrupted as she had been by the man’s pleading intrusion. Eventually the corpse lay still and her servants stepped forward to carry it away, but one motioned to the box.
“What do you wish done with the box mistress? Shall we dispose of the head with the trash, or do you wish to have the fat rendered down for a candle along with whatever from the body we can?”
"The head?” She asked. “There is no head. The box was empty. There was never anything inside at all.”
She laughed, and even her servants felt a twinge of horror at her obvious pleasure, even as jaded as they were.
“At least there wasn’t a head in there before.” Shemeska quipped. “So find me his address, fetch me a blade and perhaps a nice decorative ribbon. But first take this wine away and fetch a sweet red, it suites the situation so much better.”
__________________ "I can just see the 4e adventure anthology "Tale from the Limited Staircase"." - Ken Marable
What's the worst thing a villain has done to defeat the PCs? Dirty tricks? Killed loved ones of the PCs?
Deep-frying the PC's son's hand, then eating it while the PC watched, helpless.
Proposing marriage.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Knightfall
Are all your NPC villains irredeemable?
Maybe.
__________________ "If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
-- Ernest Hemingway, "A Farewell to Arms" Burning Empires:Boldaq Keep on the Shadowfell
One of them rather enjoys raping helpless women, then burning them to death and eating the remains (dragon fire adept // sorcerer). In fact, the entire party doesn't seem to mind cannibalism in at least some form. They all consider elf, particularly drow, to be tasty.
...
That all said, none of us tries to do outrageously evil things just for the sake of some sort of "I'm the most evil EVAR!" contest, just what fits with the characters, so I really have no outlandish examples.
__________________ Psionics are too sci-fi, not like the traditional method of spell casting that has existed only in D&D, involves research, laboratory work, and formulas, and was cribbed directly from a series of science fiction novels. I mean, come on, calling forth the power to alter the world from your own center of will? That's not magical in the slightest! Not at all like my wizard's spell "Telepathy!"
Depends on the game, the inspiration of the moment and the particular players involved. Sometimes, my villains will be the classic D&D evil-doers with their undead and their James-Bond's-SPECTRE scheme to destroy the world, and yet others, they will be really the scummiest, most evil individuals you can imagine in real life, only in a game, doing things I can't detail here because Eric's Grandma is listening. Shades of grey, and "evil" which can be debated depending on one's point of view, is another variant of the "mature" approach in this regard.
I will pay attention to the people I'm playing with and will run with whatever I feel they will be comfortable with. If I am thinking of a mature approach to the theme of evil in the campaign, I am going to explicitly ask for player feedback before using that sort of thing in the game. If everyone's okay with it, I'll go for it. If not, there's still the classic D&D evil-doer. "Good" enough for me. See what I did here?
My online gaming group, Torch of Spirit (Contains all information for the current game I'm co-DMing as well as lots of houserules I'm using or considering for the future. Feel free to check it out.)
Y'know, for a guy whose online handle is "Hand of Evil," posting in a thread about evil villains, that post wasn't sufficiently evil.
Color me disappointed.
Okay...
I had one of the characters mother be the villian, she did not like the people he was hang with (killed them), wanted to have him married (kidnapped a princess for him to save).
Also had a villian use "arranged marriage" against a female player!
Then the Pied Piper; that when he played his flute children became little killing machines.
__________________ Signature:
All I need is minions and I would rule the world.
Olangru (Bar-lgura demon, savage tide) captured a cohort of the party, a goodie-goodie halfling priest. He taunted the party with his hands and feet while they were on their way to rescue him. They found an ebony chest with what looked like a porridge bowl set in the top. A golden spoon stuck out of the greyish slurry, and a hairy ashtray lay in the corner.
You can guess the rest. Not sure what'll happen next - we play on Wednesday and it's final confrontation time. So far they've got him in Deep Slumber on a stretcher carried by unseen servants.
Wait til Olangru telekinesises his drooling, squealing, handless, footless body into the fire pit ;-)
__________________ D&D, frankly, is the most fun when you get your ass handed to you but you still manage to find away to come out on top of the pile of corpses, looking like a typical Conan novel cover. - joachim
Kalarel has been an ongoing villain for me in my campaign. After KOTS, he came back after being tortured in all sorts of ways by Orcus after his failure.
I based him on a serial killer who liked to hack up young women. He does so overtly to twist the paths of the souls as they head to the Shadowfell for judgement but really he just does it because he likes it.
The part has been dealing with his murders CSI style since the first night we ran KOTS about a year ago.
I'm giving Kalarel all the personality types of a serial killer. He was badly abused as a street-kid before being taken and twisted by a more powerful priest of Orcus. He takes out his rage on young women. He has no real understanding of other people, he has no feelings for them, and finds it a great unjustice when the PCs come and screw with his plans.
When they finally confronted him, he couldn't understand at all why he was being hurt and how unfair it was.
A while back, I ran an Eye of Fear and Flame (BoVD), and did it for real, such that the creature was coercing people into raping and killing their neighbors. It also crushed the PCs in combat repeatedly and captured and tortured one. I think they enjoyed killing it.
I also ran a town mayor and secret diabolic disciple recently whose guilty pleasure on the side was burying random tomsfolk alive.
__________________ "All of this has happened before-but it doesn't have to happen again."
In my current campaign, the evil guys are a loose coalition of 5 evil gods led by the clerics of the Rotlord (god of disease).
In a plan to summon a major demon to free an even greater daemon (think Temple of Elemental Evil), the Cabal developed a magical disease that makes people berserk before they die.
To develop the disease, the Cabal tested it on remote villages until it worked correctly.
Then, they infected a major town which was located at a weak point between the planes during a major festival. They also coordinated an attack by hobgoblin to coincide with it.
All in all, they wiped out over 10 000 people, piled their corpses in the city square as an altar/pyramid and performed vile ceremonies over them to summon the daemon.
The PCs were in the city at the time but arrived too late to stop the ceremony and were only able to fight a rear-guard battle to safeguard the retreating refugees (what few were left).
Later, they had to go back seal the breach. Imagine what the town looked like after a few weeks of being overrun by various daemons and having 10 000 corpses all over the place. They were helped by an order of paladins that made a diversionary attack, permitting the PCs to sneak in and seal the breach, through the sewers no less (yum yum!).
I had a thought a few days ago. I can't remember why. I might have been watching a movie with a really nasty bad guy.
Anyway...
What I'm wondering is 'how Evil are your campaigns' villains?'
What's the worst thing a villain has done to defeat the PCs? Dirty tricks? Killed loved ones of the PCs?
What's the worst thing a villain has done just for the sake of being evil? Sacrificed innocents? Killed henchmen for fun?
Are all your NPC villains irredeemable? Or can the PCs save a villain from him/herself? What have the PCs done to redeem a villain? Did it work?
Cheers!
Knightfall
My scale is that my villains range from annoyances such as rival adventuring companies, mercs, or political enemies but have alignments that are not evil, so they are highly unlikely to play dirty, but will not hesitate to kill the PC's if they stand in the way of their goals for what they see as "good". The other scale are the total irredeemiable types however in my presentation I just give a general blanket statement about that they are evil beyond all measure but I won't go into specifics as to why. I try to run a PG game.
If the PC's have a particular attachment to some good NPCs or an NPC, I'm not above "hitting below the belt" with the PC's on making the villian off the NPC, or worse yet, turn the good NPC into some kind of monstrocity that the PC's will have to fight later.
Thanks for all the replies. A lot of great 'Evil" insights.
__________________ Robert Blezard I write; therefore, I am!
D&D v.3.5, d20 Modern, OSRIC, Pathfinder, True20... OGL Forever! Walk the Road
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I think it's good to have at least some really Eevil villains so the players can have the fun of brutally killing them, guilt free. The more evil the villains are the more morally reprehensible the PCs can be, while still remaining the good guys.
I like to have varying types of villains during a campaign. Ranging from the guy who can't figure out any other way to feed his kids, the anti-hero who feels the ends justify the means and is willing to kill baby-Hitler, and the hard-core evil-for-evil's sake type.
How graphic I go depends on the campaign's tone. In Dragonlance there were the super-evil types but they were portrayed more in 4-color comic book evil. Conversely, my EarthDawn/Roman Empire game is horribly dark since it's the time of the Vandals, Goths, and Huns, ignoring the bloody nature of several religions and the virtually feral evil spirits.
My villains often break pieces of chalk into smaller pieces when they find them so that people accidently scrape their fingernails on blackboards when trying to use them.
My villains often break pieces of chalk into smaller pieces when they find them so that people accidently scrape their fingernails on blackboards when trying to use them.
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