Pathfinder 1E ACTUAL Evil Campaign

[gdmcbride]

Greetings,

My name is Gary McBride. I wrote "Way of the Wicked", Pathfinder' only evil adventure path.

In Book Two of "Way of the Wicked" -- "Call Forth Darkness" -- we present simple rules for running your own criminal organization that can include things like drug running, pimping and police corruption. These rules are all presented as a variation of the leadership feat. The rules are largely abstract and certainly do not dwell upon the details of addiction and the sex trade.

Personally, I consider drug-peddling and pimping to be rather small time villainy. Throughout "Way of the Wicked" we focus much more on nation-level wickedness.

Spoiler

In Book One, you smuggle weapons, infiltrate a castle and engineer a war that will cost the lives of thousands.

In Book Two, you defend your own dungeon from do-gooders and summon a powerful pestilence spirit into our world. From that spirit you acquire a disease that will shatter a nation.

In Book Three, you raid the most sacred spot in the kingdom and wipe out the inhabitants of that valley, breaking a good faith and slaughtering their angelic allies.

In Book Four, you execute a daring raid to assassinate the king of a good nation with the help of a monster of legend.

In Book Five, you slay your own master and seize control of the evil organization you've been working your way up through the ranks.

In Book Six, you become tyrant overlords of the nation you've been tormenting. We include many options for wicked acts you can do as the tyrant lord of your nation -- including build a coliseum and bringing blood sports to the once noble nation, legalizing prostitution and corrupting a formerly virtuous faith.

In short, "Way of the Wicked" has lots of evil. It's tastefully handled in a PG-13 sort of way however. And its all written with an eye towards one goal -- this isn't evil just for evil's sakes. This is about having a chance to have fun being the bad guy. Instead of playing the same old scoundrel with a heart of gold, "Way of the Wicked" is campaign about being the dark lord.

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"An apex of the art of adventure-crafting" -- Endzeitgeist, Paizo.com

Hope that helps,
Gary McBride
Fire Mountain Games
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[Nytmare]

You're probably looking for the F.A.T.A.L. sub-forum.

 

[Friend of the Dork]

Are you looking for inspiration or actual rules for certain situations that only arises in evil campaigns?

I've ran a couple of evil campaigns in my time, so I might help with the former or some of the latter, but I don't think everything requires rules.

I don't use anything from BoVD, and frankly i didn't care for it much.

Right now im running an "evil" campaign for non-evil PCs - which is something different.

 

[gamerprinter]

Way of the Yakuza by Rite Publishing offers rules for designing a yakuza gang/thieves guild which work like community stat blocks. The emphasis is on organized crime venues like prostitution, illegal gambling, smuggling, and extortion more than simple theft. While the rules focus on Japanese style crime organizations, it isn't a great leap to adjust for any other crime organization.

Assassin's Amulet by Roleplayingtips.com offers many different views of an assassin's guild, including hundreds of plot hooks, a magic device/map/assassin's secret hidey-hole. It also includes a treatise on poisons.

I'm somewhat biased, as I developed the product on top (and own the IP), and helped write and create cartography for the second publication above (and am one of it's publisher members). The yakuza book is definitely designed for use with Pathfinder, while the assassin book is both 3x and Pathfinder.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

It sounds like to me that as the GM you need to come up with your own house-rules if you can't find exactly what you are looking for pre-published. Put your own tables together, talk to your group to gather ideas, and run with it.

I will probably be running an evil campaign in the next year or so as we wrap up the game I'm a player in and the current GM takes a break to be a player.

When I run this game nothing will be 'off limits' as far as what the players can and cannot do. I ran a one-shot that everyone enjoyed tremendously for evil characters and basically the way I did it was that the whole world was ran by evil overlords/kings/tyrants/wizards except for a couple of bastions of good left in the world. So they are doing evil vs evil for the most part and will occasionally run into good NPCs that will try to take them down as they are adventuring out in the wider world. Anyhow, the way I did the one-shot was that they were all members of a guild and had a bunch of "jobs" to do and could pick them in any order in which they pleased and were able to keep some spoils and get paid at the same time. Their wealth, reputations, and items grew with each new job they completed. They recovered a magical item for their guild leader from a small band of kobolds and a green dragon wyrmling out of town in a cave complex, they stole a very valuable gem from a jeweler who had a big bad minotaur as security, and they assassinated and made an example out of a rival guild leader (they actually burned down and killed the whole guild when the leader was in a tavern as a distraction), the guild leader they tortured, cut into pieces, and then posted his head on a pike.

I think they almost had too much fun being evil...

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm lacking in DRUGS (real drugs that destroy lives and make ordinary people do disgusting things in back alleys just to get a fix, not the neat sounding drugs that act like potions with side effects in the BVD), PROSTITUTION (actually found thieves guild rules on running a dancing hall....a dancing hall??) CORRUPTION (turning that LG hero into one of your lackies).

Useful Answers:
For drugs, what you really need then are rules on addiction. I believe the BoVD has those rules, but if not you might want to adopt the disease rules.

For prostitution, what you really need are rules on running a business. I believe Cityscape has rules for that.

For corruption, what you really need are rules on conversion. I'm positive there's rules for this somewhere in d20 land, though I thought the BoVD had these, too.

Further Discussion:
You'll find that these things are necessarily "interestingly evil" in and of themselves, though. Ask anyone who runs a dispensiary or a bunny ranch about their "evil" and you'll likely get an earful about how the true evil is caused by making these things illegal, thus making them subject to laws that exist outside of society -- namely, the laws of misanthropy and cruelty that exist whenever we dehumanize each other.

So it's not the sex and the drugs that are "eeeeeeeeeevil." It's the way people are turned into less-than-people for doing these things. Power dynamics and shame and regret and fear and authority and escapism...

So if you really want an interestingly evil game, what you're going to maybe want rules for, is how you break people. What does it take for the powerful to abuse the powerless? What does it take for ignorance to turn to hatred? What does it take to make someone so hopeless and desperate that a moral compass is a luxury rather than a necessity?

That's much more about the NPC and adventure design than it is about the rules, though. It's not "hur hur dwarf harlots are cheaper than halflings derpy derp" or "lol Will save or you'll debase yourself for enough GP to buy some pipeweed lolololol" or "Nat 20 means ur my loyal peon!!11!!1!!!"

To start out, I'd suggest reading some old tragedies from the Greeks or Shakespeare. Get a handle on what evil is. Get a grip on what makes Iago a truly horrible character, or why Lady Macbeth is "actually" an evil person. And then understand that these are characters your PC's in an "evil campaign" will WANT TO BE LIKE.

They're going to need counterpoints -- Big Bold Good Guys (BBGGs!) to break in interesting and creative ways. Challenges put in front of them to help them cause the slide. They're going to need to want to cause disaster -- and to understand why they want that.

If you want rules on running a drug ring or a brothel or whatever, that's peanuts. If you want "actual" evil, you should be more interested in what motivates people, and why they might be motivated to do horrible things to each other.

 

[gamerprinter]

Personally I don't find running an evil campaign any different than any other themed campaign - some role reversals is all. The OP was asking for source material, so that's what my first post here is for. But by rules dynamics there is no need for a different tactic between a good or evil based campaign - its all the same.

 

[Starfox]

There are no guidelines for running a drug trade in a city for example. There are tables and modifiers and all kinds of goodies for stuff like extortion, black mail and pick pocketing, but nothing on drugs. Same goes for prostitution. The party wants to get people addicted to drugs, turn them into prostitutes as well as sell the drug surplus that they make.

Doesn't sound like adventuring activities. Evil adventuring activities are crime wars and evading/killing the cops. Running a business, good or evil, does not sound like DnD material.

 

[gamerprinter]

The Way of the Yakuza gang building rules can be found on d20pfsrd.com. Although the drug trade and prostititution are definitely part of the yakuza niche, there are no tables for the drug trade per se, nor the buying and selling of the crime trade items. It merely defines and gives limitations to various gang organizations, determining who their boss is, what the major crime activity is, how much profit can be earned, etc.

Agreed, however, that running a business, nefarious or otherwise isn't really something D&D/PF does well, nor should it be.

The yakuza book does include how most victims become prostitutes, the victims fathers, brothers and husbands tend to gain drug debts, gambling debts that aren't paid for, so the yakuza takes it in flesh (women for prostitution as payment, or a means to pay off the debt eventually.)

Creating an addictive drug shouldn't be much of a problem. Name some drug substance, give it an effect (euphoria, etc.), create a high DC on initial use to avoid addiction, if failed have a daily Save rolled to see if the user can avoid using the drug that day, otherwise give them negative modifiers on specific stats (Wis, Con, whatever) until they use their drug, then include modifiers to normal stats, that equal under the influence. No matter what the cost of a 'dose', if an addiction warrants it, they obtain it and the gang turns a profit.

 

[ObjectivePerspective]

Doesn't sound like adventuring activities. Evil adventuring activities are crime wars and evading/killing the cops. Running a business, good or evil, does not sound like DnD material.

I think you really hit the nail on the head. Lately the game has become more like D&D farmville than adventure in high fantasy. Although the Perform skill does give rolls and profits and if you do that regularly you are "running a business". Business doesn't sound like D&D material, but it is supported in some places. I've already put together some house rules. At least now I know that there isn't any hard rules written anywhere. Curiosity satisfied.