An Evil Campaign

[molonel]

I played in an evil campaign for three years. A large part of that time, we played every weekend. My character moved from CN to LN, and then finally LE, and then beneath that to Vile. We incorporated Monte Cook's Book of Vile Darkness into the campaign around levels 10 to 12.

I have a few suggestions:

1. If the group does really heinous stuff, take it off-screen. At one point, we tortured a paladin of Heironius. This was before we incorporated the BoVD into the game. We did NOT describe exactly what we were doing. It was simply a set of heal checks opposed by the paladin's Will saves.
2. Discourage Chaotic Evil behavior. Encourage people toward Lawful Evil, which is the alignment of tyrants, or neutral evil, since they tend to be self-centered enough that they can be motivated to work with others. D&D is a team sport. The murder of other characters will happen in an evil campaign, but it should be a dramatic, cinematic event with planning and forethought. If people can't develop their characters because they are getting capped left and right, that frustrates game play.
3. Just as a paladin's alignment and code should not translate into Lawful Stupid, being evil doesn't mean you are a moron.

 

[sydbar]

Villians by Necessity by eve foreward is a great base idea for an evil campaign. A party consisting of a druid, a thief, an assassin, a maneating sorceress, a black knight and a centaur spying for good, go on a quest to open a gate to allow evil back into the world, since most evil beings are either dead or converted into good, and the victory of good has unbalanced the world, and they are the only ones that can save it. during the adventure they find out the centaur is working for good, and gets knocked of a cliff, and the knight pays the assassin to save the centaur, which causes the centaur to ask why they haven't killed each other, to which they reply that normally they would, but they value their lives and only by working together can thay live.

Its a great book if you can find it, i highly recommend it, especially if you want to run an evil campaign. Thats my opinion, and i'm sticking to it.



Spoiler

























The black knight is the paladin that helped defeat evil, but his brother was a thief, that was punished by being turned into a horse, which caused the paladin to realise that good was as bad as evil, and had to save the world from the new evil which was good.

 

[Jubilee]

I've only done an evil game once. It was a one shot that turned into two sessions and never really finished. Among other problems I won't go into, between sessions the GM started instructing me on how/why my character must attack/attempt to kill another character, and I can only assume doing otherwise with the other player. I have no idea if he was encouraging other behavior in the other players.

My advice: Don't do that. ;P And don't insult the player who provides a reasonable argument for her character not attacking another party member mid-mission (I admit I might be biased as to whether the argument was reasonable...).

Also, don't do an evil campaign with people who've never played together before. Ugg. Don't play an Evil! game with people you don't know (how did I get talked into that?)

/ali

 

[ThirdWizard]

Evil PCs can not only not want to kill each other, they can like each other and want to keep each other alive.

Crazy huh?

People need to stop looking at alignment as a prescriptive term and see it as a descriptive term. "You're evil, so you have no redeeming factors and would slit your mother's throat for a nickel," is how most people see it. This isn't a straitjacket. The characters can have backgrounds, characterizations, quirks, and even noble qualities. It's just that they fall into evil acts to solve problems. Perhaps they're too greedy, maybe they think the end justifies the means, perhaps they have no empathy for those that they don't know. And they consistantly commit evil acts (they arn't neutral after all).

But, the villian can be in love with someone, even die for them. Think in terms of real people, not the descriptions given in the PHB. An evil campaign needs these things, good roleplaying, realistic three dimensional chraracters, and moral failings, to really shine as its own entity. It plays out differently than your typical heroic fantasy game.

Don't even think of it as an evil campaign. Think of it as a D&D campaign where the PCs happen to be evil. Come up with why they are evil. What failings led them down that path? What are their past sins? Why are they a group? What are their goals? The typical weath and power don't usually work as well in this kind of environment. You have to go deeper than that. If their description of the character anywhere has "he's evil" in it, you're going down the wrong path.