Evil Campaigns

[Kae'Yoss]

I had some where everyone schemed against the rest, and that all included a couple of people who always play to win, use player knowledge and metagame to the worst.

Therefore, in my all-evil campaign, I enforced a working party that didn't do any backstabbing, both in-game and out-of-game. It worked well.

I recently played a Blackguard of Bane in an all-evil campaign. The DM obviously wasn't cut out to be a DM for an evil party, for whenever I went into any detail at all when entertaining guests in my torture chamber, he nearly fell of the chair in panic and then told me it wasn't necessary to explain all that. He probably expected all-evil to be just like a normal campaign, only that you work for the other guys.

So, if you do an all-evil campaign, be ready for them to commit some atrocities and outrages, or tell them that this is a not-evil evil campaign, like a good campaig, just the other way around.

And of course, you have to use different incentives to actually go on all these adventures you thought of. Doing the right thing won't do it, and even a just reward might be refused - as it is much more cost-effective to cut down that guy who wants to send them on the errand and take his stuff. After all, if he were stronger than the opposition he wants to pit you against, he wouldn't need you, right?

You can bait them with a lot of power gained, or you can have them forced into doing what you want. They're neonates in the Black Network, and better listen to the high priest of the Black Lord, or else.... This doesn't mean that they have absolutely no freedom, for they can always do stuff on the side, and might want to change organizations.

 

[Rikandur Azebol]

Evil Campaigns ... How sweet.

Well, I had played in one wery long campaign, during the 2 ed. Unfortunately except my C-E Wizard in the party was also P-N Wizard, who was better at everything. (Higer stats, more HP's etc.) Due to RL reasons rest of the party left ... And DM asked if we wnt to continue with our 5 lvl spellslingers. We agreed, and rewritten PC's history to give for our wizards reason for sticking together. And all was quiet and almost normal, My char killing mercilessly every opposition ... He loved necromantic version of fireball.

Liked to scare children, until they were crying loudly ... and taking all the sweets from them. Once a while, when Riki's friend was scheming ... how to do the job with the least effort and maximum gain, bored Riki simply blew all up and scavenged the remains. Until some demons get after us ... Sacking the temple of evil god wasn't the best idea. DM was shocked when we simply damaged foundations of the big pagoda, gone etheral and watch them fell ...

On 18 lvl we switched to 3 ed, and started wiping out of the planet's surface all signs of gods. It's annoying that You are ambushed regularly by demons, isn't ? Well, this was an epic sheme ... Backed up by powerful wizards. Until all hell break loose, and Riki landed alive in Abyss. After thousand of Years he returned, of course. I was alvays very lucky with my "Dominate Demon" spell.

Concluding, Rikandur never did all that vile stuff linked with rape, torture or something. He was killing without afterthought ... and was greedy bastard, ready to cause pain and suffering to get what he wanted. He burned several cities ... Helped to destroy mage and cleric's guilds/temples. Was leading great armies of undead ... And finally, demons from "local" Abyss fear him.

Is he evil enough ?

Play evil guys if You wish ... even sociopaths, but give fev guidelines.
1) Level of "evil" stuff players and DM can handle. Some people get sick from stuff written in the "BoVD". Others find it only ... good for kids. Personally I like detailed backgrounds for evil NPC's and find some prestige classes very funny.
2) Seriousness of all this stuff. Cartoon villains ? Gray morality ? Evil world ? Or something entirely else ...

Just like some posts earlier were indicating, make certain rules clear before the game and it should all be ... Good ?

 

[Rel]

I have run, and will be running again (twice in the next two weeks), one-shot games where the PC's are all Evil and Orcs to boot. These games have been tremendous fun with cartoonish versions of Evil as well as Good. They seem cathartic but I have no real interest in trying to stretch this silliness into a full length campaign.

I think that an Evil campaign can be done, and probably done well. But the only time our group really tried it, it turned out as a complete mess.

Contrary to what others have mentioned as a problem, we didn't suffer any significant inter-party conflict. We were fairly loyal to each other. But we were, as a group, greedy, impulsive and capricious.

The GM had this idea that we were the evil servants of a powerful noble who also was evil. The first night of the campaign, one of his experiments went awry and he was killed. This left us somewhat in charge of his realm but my PC secretly grabbed the taxes that were due the king and hid them away for my own use later. When the king's tax men showed up and demanded payment, we sent them away empty handed and they implied strongly that they would be back with heavy reinforcements to "remove us from power". So we abandoned the keep, and therefore the whole main premise of the campaign that the GM was planning to run. But, to his eventual woe, he decided to stick with whatever we decided to do.

So, we hared off to set ourselves up as bandits. We found a nice kingdom highway to raid and then found that a band of Gnomes had a nearby home that would make a good hideout for us. So we went in there and killed them. But before they all died, they somehow cursed the place. Soon, lots of giant mosquitos began to plague the area and that sort of marred the whole luxurious lifestyle of banditry that we had in mind so we abandoned yet another potential plotline and went to a major city.

At this large city, my character (a fledgling Vampire) found plenty to eat and was toying with the idea of trying to set us up as part of the local underworld. Sort of assassins/mercenaries for hire in the city. But before that plan could come to fruition, the Chaos Warrior of our group, summoned a little blob of raw Chaos and it predictably grew out of control until it devoured the entire city and sank into the earth, leaving a volcano in its wake. This was because he was once imprisoned as a Pit Fighter in this city for the sport of the nobles, which is as good a reason as any for destroying an entire major city when you're Evil. We fled the destruction on a ship and headed south to an island chain there.

As a last attempt at providing some structure to our wandering radius of rampant destruction, he set up a conflict between two opposing groups on the island we encountered. One side offered to hire us to be mercenaries. We killed the guys who approached us with the offer (we didn't want our presence revealed until we had a chance to scout the conflict ourselves). Then we went ahead and attacked a temple of the opposing side of the conflict ANYWAY, without payment, thus angering both sides against our group and effectively ending the campaign as we had utterly frustrated the GM's attempts to corral us into a plotline that he could plan for on a weekly basis.

The End.

 

[Ulrick]

Wow,

there's some really good stuff in this thread. Thanks for the responses.

Now I'm definitely going to run an evil campaign in the near future.

Basically, from what I've read, to run a successful evil campaign you have to have:
1. Mature players
2. Plenty of enemies so the PCs don't kill each other (that is, if you don't want the PCs to kill each other)
3. Detailed characters with driving motivations.

 

[Storminator]

It helps to have motivated players. Think about your typical adventurers. Waiting around to foil some evil plot. Well, that's not going to work. Your PCs should be out making evil plots all the time and the DM, unfortunately, has to do all the reacting.

As the DM, I would end each session by asking your players what they plan on doing next session, and let them know it's so you can actually plan a game. Do NOT, repeat, do NOT start your sessions by asking what they want to do today.

PS

 

[Kaji]

We are currently running a very evil campaign. Yes, there are some problems with the characters trying to kill each other. We're quite high level now (18 or 19th) and I spent LEVELS of adventuring time setting up schemes and protections so the rest of the party would not kill me. We eventually solved most of this problem with a variety of blood pacts and oaths (we're LE, not CE).

As for the "evil" parts, we are all adults. Some things are a lot easier to disaccociate then others. It's unlikey any of us know someone who's been tortured, but more likely that we are closer to an issue of sexual assault, that one stays pretty vague. As for the bllod, there's lots of that. My guy has a cabal of vampire slaves who kidnap people, give then diseases, and then make Liquid Pain out of it. Great racket, dozens of innocents die each weak for my personal (character) goals. Plus, We've been using the BoVD rules for sacrifice to fuel magic items creations. It's great fun, and one day I intend to retire all these dudesw and run them as vi;;ians in my own campaign. It might actually throw some fear into their jaded hearts, seeing how they know too well the havoc my high-level mage creates.

 

[Stormborn]

I think that of my group I am the only one who could really play an evil character for long. However, I love this thread, and hearing about eveyone's experiances. I am somewhat suprised though, I guess evil campaigns are more common that I had thought they were.
Basically this is just a BUMP with a "interesting stuff guys" thrown in.