Evil Campaigns

[Jolly Giant]

My one suggestion - a Lawful Evil party can work but Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil won't (as a party.) For solo adventures Neutral or Chaotic Evil could be interesting...

Well, my current evil campaign have been going for over 6 years now; the PCs are around level 38, with 3 NE and 2 CE PCs, and everybody's having an absolute blast!

So far we've not had a single case of PC backstabbing PC! The trick that's worked for me is to make sure the party has plenty of powerful enemies and practically no allies; they really need each other to watch each others back... I don't think there's a single PC who'd even consider betraying the group; they can't risk making enemies of the only friends/allies they have...

My players age ranges from the late 20s to mid 30s, that's probably helped as well. I doubt the campaign could have run as smoothly with teenage players, for example...

 

[Hand of Evil]

First define evil in your game (I know I always say this) but let your players know what they have to do to be evil, just saying I am evil just does not cut it, the players have to deal with dark gods and demons, perform cold-blooded murder, enjoy torturing and such.

Also think what evil means, what are the results? Would a evil player ever see healing, where does he go when he dies?

 

[Kormydigar]

I'm toying around with running a short evil campaign for my players. That is, all the players will be running evil characters.

I have the Book of Vile Darkness and AEG's EVIL; I will heed the advice therein.

What I want though is 1st hand accounts of DMs who've run, or players who've participated in, an evil campaign.

Did it run smoothly? Were players uncomfortable will certain aspects of the game? How did you handle truly evil act like torture, rape, etc and how did that effect the group? Etc.

I plan on having the players run evil characters that will later on be villains in the campaign setting. It's an awesome idea I think I read in BOVD and I want to try it out.

So please let me know what happened in your evil campaigns so I know what to be ready for.

Thanks!

I am playing in an evil campaign right now. We are having one hell of a good time. Our Pc's are all lawful evil humanoids who are members of an army. Our NPC commander is a sadistic vile elf. The campaign began by having all our Pc's and several NPC's assembled by the army commander for inspection. It was announced that a special unit was being formed for an important mission. We were to decide who would be our leader the old fashioned way..........

Our hobgoblin ranger was the last standing and was elected leader by default.The missions we went on included kidnapping a gnome artificer, and finding out who or what was killing off our goblin lumberjacks. We found and eliminated the village of centaurs who were responsible. Our evil special mission force is currently engaged in an attempt to procure a decent quantity of mithril and some dwarven slaves to work it into pats for an airship. Along the way we are planning to frame a band of gnolls for this.We are having a great time in this campaign. One thing I have noticed. We are more likely to take live prisoners as an evil party than as a good one. The benefits of a well tortured sacrifice victim are hard to live without. Because we are all required to be lawful evil, and live in fear of our elven master should we fail in our tasks, we cooperate fairly well together. There are some differences in things such as treasure division. The leader gets first pick and a larger monetary share than anyone else.(At least on the "officially declared" finds ) We loot, rape, pillage and burn as humanoids are expected to do. No one has been offended or put off by any of this, no one in our group takes in game stuff very seriously. The player of our male hobgoblin ranger leader is a female, and she loots, pillages, and rapes with the rest of us. All around good clean evil fun.

 

[D.Reaver]

I have run two evil games. One of them was fun . The other ran into the dirt. Badly.

The successful was one was only two PC's and my NPC. They stayed together because it worked out for all of them. Both were CE. A 1/2Elf Fighter/Wild Mage, a Fighter/Cleric of Talos, and the NPC was a Human Necromantic Priestess( this was right after the Complete Guide to Necromancer's came out). The 1/2Elf wanted to gain as much power as he could, the Cleric wanted to kill everything he could, and the priestess wanted to bring them back as soldiers in their undead army. It was a lot of fun and we played them until 15th level. The big mistake was I moved into a much bigger apartment and had more room to play. So we invited others to join in, the game wasn't the same after that. It lasted maybe 2 months. I still use those three as NPC villains every once in a while.

I don't even want to mention the other one.

 

[Chimera]

Late 70's we played an evil campaign that centered on our group slowly building power and taking over a "bandit kingdoms" type of region into one larger Kingdom. All of our characters were essentially sworn to the service of the party's fighter, with my wizard as the "enforcer". Not so much EVIL evil as simply greedy and selfish.

About 10 years ago another group I played with took a stab at an evil campaign. One guy got a bit too into it and started actually describing his torture of peasants, which was a bit more than the rest of us were comfortable with. Saying you're torturing them = ok. Describing it in detail = NOT ok. A short while later he quit the game, saying we weren't letting him have any fun. Quite a mind twister considering the guy was an evangelical christian.

But the rest of us moved on and continued for perhaps another year. We started a war between two countries with existing tensions, "just for fun". We crossed the border and ambushed an army patrol, wiping it out. We mutilated the bodies that we left behind, but took several of them. Then we crossed back over and ambushed a patrol from the other nation, "planting" the bodies we took from the other side amid the carnage.

Then we happily took advantage of the ensuing chaos of war.

Ah yes. Copper pieces, slings and beggars. Quite a sport...

 

[Faerl'Elghinn]

I have a character who regularly performs human sacrifices, rapes and mutilates children irrespective of gender, eats human flesh (although now this has become expected of him, as he's a vampire), enjoys voyeurism of massive slaughters, and performs forceful sexual penetration on various other humanoids with sharp foreign objects. These actions play a minor part in the campaign, of course, but help to flesh out his decidedly twisted nature. I assure you that these types of acts are not reflections of my psyche, deranged individual though I may be.

The advantage of playing an evil campaign is that one can fully realize the ambitions of a character with an insatiable thirst for power. The downside, however, is that its practice would be perceived by many as morally unsound. I cannot give you a definitive answer to influence your decision, as morality is objectively a very personal issue. As for myself, I see no wrongdoing on my part in acting the part of a psychopath in a purely fantastic scenario.

 

[Wikid Klown]

It kinda sucks early in...doesn't really suck, I take that back, but it's more challenging. Bein evil they are troublemakers (hence evil), and trouble isn't always good for early level characters, especially if they get somethin big on them, as somebody's way to get rid of a problem before it gets too bad. Later on it's fun however, they can torch cities, take over towns, start a little empire, then go at eachothers throats for complete domination. In later levels (depending on how long you make the campaign), expect wars. Eventually if they take a city (and they probably will), they'll have other empires after them, or they'll be goin after for more land and crap. I've played in a few, and I'm currently running one.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Knowing my players, I kept our evil campaign under control by putting the PCs in the service of an evil lord in a society run by evil lords who were constantly jockeying for position against one another. This put them into a position of privilege compared to the nobodies and mooks who lived under the thumb of the lords...which meant that they were careful not to ruin their good situation. Also, the evil lord was a powerful telepath, which means that he could read the PCs minds...and had a bad habit of planting seeds of suspicion among them, convincing each PC that they were his favourite, setting them up with "important secret missions," etc. They had no idea how powerful he was, only that he could do the force choke trick on them if they talked back.

Wonderful fun as they routed out and destroyed the party of adventurers who were trying to thwart his evil plans.

 

[iblis]

One problem I have sometimes found while running, briefly observing, or playing in evil campaigns (and good ones, coincidentally) is the strong tendency toward neutrality, in some PCs.

A lot of the time, in other words, I feel that players would be more honest if they wrote 'N' in the alignment area of the character sheet, regardless of whether the campaign has been designated as evil, good, lawful, chaotic, or some combination of these.

I'm not sure whether that would be because most people are closest to 'N' or whether it's the easiest alignment to play, or some other reason.

Anyway, hopefully you will find that this trend does not apply to your group(s). And if it doesn't, then I'd say you're in for some fun and interesting roleplaying experiences.

Currently, the evil D&D campaign I'm running is going better than I had expected. Recently, after unintentionally liberating a city from another evil group's psionic and martial shackles (!) the character party let off steam with some nice calming torture and corruption. Since then, they've formed an unsteady alliance with a different evil group (this time with similar goals, it seems) who are publicly under a banner of goodness and all that. Now sacrifices and the planes have started to make their presence felt. I'm finding that it's the most fun campaign to run, at present.

IMHO, I think what an evil campaign requires is that each player throw him- or herself wholly into the character, while distancing from that player's own personality, priorities, beliefs etc. More than is usually the case in roleplaying, I mean.

<-SNIP->
About 10 years ago another group I played with took a stab at an evil campaign. One guy got a bit too into it and started actually describing his torture of peasants, which was a bit more than the rest of us were comfortable with. Saying you're torturing them = ok. Describing it in detail = NOT ok. A short while later he quit the game, saying we weren't letting him have any fun. Quite a mind twister considering the guy was an evangelical christian.
<-SNIP->

Par for the course, no?

...couldn't resist.

 

[Sieobahn]

I ran a single session evil campaign last year. I tried to set it up to encourage backstabbing and inter-character conflict, but didn't happen, they worked more or less together until the very end, when one of the players (who had planned ahead) struck and took out some of the other players. You can read the writeup I did on it here: http://www.evoker.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213

My players like the idea of player evil characters, but that is more so they can screw the other players over. I am running an Arcana Unearthed game now (there are no alignments), and the first two player deaths were as a result of inter character conflicts and a player thinking he could get away with anything.... he didn't!