Tiered campaigns - running an evil organization out to take over the world!

My friend Stahnli presented me with an interesting idea for a campaign. Tell me what you think.

You have four players. Each player makes a 16th level character who wants to take over the world. These are the founding leaders of the Evil Organization.

The players also each make a 12th level lieutenant, an 8th level henchman, and a 3rd level mook. Therefore, each player has 4 characters, one at each level of the organization.

The GM presents the players with information about the world -- socio-political issues, geography, legends, etc. -- and the players come up with how they want to take over the world. Then, each week, the players tell the GM one thing they're going to send each of the four groups to do, and the GM makes an adventure around one of those things.

So, say you're starting off, and you want to do the following 4 things:

1. Recruit the help of a local tribe of werebeavers as your organization's faceless horde.

2. Attack a royal carriage that has money you need to fund your endeavors.

3. Plant a fake prophecy in the archives of three prominent churches, so that you can trick the churches into doing your bidding.

4. Cause a river to flow red with fruit juice, to clue the good guys into the prophecy you want them to be tricked by.

You send your lieutenants to do #1, your henchmen to do #2, and your mooks to do #4. Then you do #3 yourself. The GM decides which one would be most interesting to make an adventure around, and he runs the session based on that plot thread. He might occasionally toss in complications with others as well, but usually the session will only involve one group of PCs.

Of course the concept would evolve as it sees play, and there'd likely be a lot of problems we can't foresee now, but the fun of the idea is that you're not just evil people -- you're The Villains. You'll get to go up against good guys who think they're the focus of the story (which is normally the case in RPGs), but in this game you'll get to beat them down.

Sound fun?

Not a bad idea. I had a similar one, though arranged differently. My idea was to have your normal party of good heroes be your local D&D party. Then, using a forum online, find various non-local players to represent the evil mastermind bad guys or other leaders of the land.

The online game would be much as you described, present each player with the current world situation, progress reports on their plans, and options for actions they can take. These would be larger scale actions, most likely, like going to war with the neighboring kingdom, trying to kidnap princesses for ransom, etc. All of these would be resolved by DM fiat or simple dice rolls by DM.

The events of the online game would reflect the world events that the local players experience. So the locals experience a micro-scale game (scope=them). The online players experience a macro-scale game (scope=countries/organizations). The online players are effectively generating news and events for the local players to react to. In theory, more ideas will occur due to the extra online players (relieving the DM of some work).

Janx

I think that'd be just as fun with a group of do-gooders as evil guys. Regardless, I think the benefit of this approach is that it gives everyone the opportunity to feel as though they are directly affecting the development of the world.

Hmmm - I might have to try this.

That's a lot like an idea I had, except it was for d20 Modern and I envisiged the adventures being more tactical affairs rather than standard adventures (IE, the player controls a squad of his henchmen and minions). I got it after playing Evil Genius for a while.