Evil PCs and Epic Gaming HELP!

[Lord Pendragon]

Also, you might want to consider that what's evil for one person isn't always evil for another. Evil doesn't have to be Evil if you know what I mean. Consider the following PCs and their scenario:

Boric the ex-paladin/blackguard, hates his former church, the Church of Light. They betrayed him, the ingrates, and they're going to pay for it. In his heart, he wants nothing more than to bathe the Halls of Light in blood.

Santus the Knife is a rogue/assassin who always finishes the job. Nobody is sacred to him...so long as the price is right. Five years ago, a strange man who smelled of brimstone offered him a job: assassinate the High Priest of Light. An impossible task, some might say. But Santus loves a challenge.

The Sower-of-Chaos is a tiefling cleric of the Death-Lord. Since the day she was born she has known her purpose: to destroy peace and security, and bring the cleansing fires of anarchy to all the world. She eventually realized that the single greatest source of lawfulness in the world, the Church of Light, must be destroyed.

The Church of Light is the greatest institution of religion the world has ever known. It is the embodiment of justice and truth...its justice and its truth. It is the embodiment of order, and will tolerate nothing that deviates from that perfect system. Recently, it's come into the possession of the Jewel of Souls. Soon...it will use this Jewel to scourge the world of all impure thoughts, all undesirable elements...so all the creatures of the earth (the worthy ones, anyway,) can live in peace and harmony for all time.

The idea here is that while the PCs are all evil in their hearts, their evil has put them into conflict with another evil (in this case, the tyrannical Church of Light.) Their quest to destroy the church will be a selfish one, but the others in the world, suffering under the Church, may see their quest for what it really is: epic.

It's all a matter of perspective. Let them play evil PCs, but evil PCs who're focusing that evil in an epic way.

This all hinges on two things: a) whether you're comfortable DMing evil at all, and b) whether your players are willing to play characters who, though evil, have purpose and epic adventures. If you aren't comfortable DMing evil (I know I'm not,) or your players just want to run around killing things, this won't work.

 

[Voadam]

paladin restrictions are a problem

Having a paladin PC can become very problematic in an evil party because of the roleplay niche and class restrictions of the character alignment and associations. In general the paladin can really restrict the parties diversity if played according to the restrictions. I have seen exceptions however.

I've run a longstanding campaign that started out allowing players to have any kind of character they wanted, race, class and alignment wise, this was originally 1e with UA and the party quickly turned evil with two CE wild elf assassins and two drow. Also, they are allowed in game to do anything they want. The world is there with plot events and opportunities going on but the party is free to decide halfway through an adventure to decide "Forget this! We're leaving this whole area." They do get swept up in events but there is always choices and those choices have varying consequences. We have had games where the party has decided "We are evil and it is time for bloodletting among the innocent in this isolated tiny village to vent our personal frustrations."

At one point I was running the falcon series in Greyhawk (a 2e module trilogy) that has as a premise a paladin of St. Cuthbert as a contact point to get the character's involved in the plot. He was described as always assuming the best in people and so that's how I played him. Normally the drow are feared and shunned whenever anybody sees them and it is always a social issue for them in my campaign so his friendliness took them off guard. They thought it was amusing and decided to put up a front of nonevil to see how long they could carry it off. They planned to use him as cannon fodder and then to eventually betray him, kill him and sell his expensive armor and sword when they got him alone. The more they adventured with him, the more he grew on them (he had zero arrogance, was a decent guy and an inspiring leader, brave and always leading by example). Every once in a while he would use his detect evil power and sensing it, draw his magic sword and shout out warnings for them to beware because evil was nearby. They got their weapons out and prepared to fight him then realized he was trying to protect them from whatever unknown evil was out there.

While the party was with him in the wilderness they came upon a band of marauding orcs and the paladin charged calling out "Cuthbert!!!!" The rest of the party looked at each other grinned drew their weapons and charged shouting "Cuthbert!!!" (except the cleric who shouted Xan Yae!). That night with him asleep out of his armor they had a talk in elven and decided they were not going to kill him because, (1) they could not use his human sized stuff or his aligned sword, and (2) they liked him and were having a ton of fun going on the paladin's quest and having him as an ally.

For the rest of their time in that part of the world they behaved themselves in front of the paladin and the church, helping out both in their goals and quests, and gained a powerful organization in Greyhawk as an ally.

I was expecting the paladin to be killed pretty early on and the module's quest to be abandoned but they went through the whole trilogy without any compulsion. It could have gone the other way fairly easily (which I would have been fine with).

The campaign has been very epic at times with a full evil party. Currently they are acting on advice from Baba Yaga that fulfilling the conditions of a prophecy will bring down the boundaries of Ravenloft where they have been trapped for some time. In the process they have come upon darklords who don't want that to happen, confronted an evil demigod (triggering the conversion in the campaign from 2e to 3e) and are currently seeking a darklord wizard king who does want to cause the conjunction.

In a campaign I played in I played the only good character in a party that was half neutral and half evil. I was always surrounded by powerful people who were sometimes incredibly hostile to my character. It was an intense balancing act of intrigue, bluff and manipulation to drive the party to do good things and not get killed in the process by the other PCs. However, common enemies and common mercenary goals kept us going a lot, most drow, for instance, don't care if you are good or evil, if you are not one of them and in their territory you are potential slave bait. Fighting someone who is trying to enslave you is just self preservation and cuts across alignment lines.

Evil is not generally monolithic and many evil powers hate each other (think Sauron and Saruman, Bane and Cyric, Vecna and Kas, Goblins and Orcs), and evil characters can be more mercenary than good ones leading to easy plot enticements. Don't expect them to jump in out of the goodness of their hearts but many standard adventuring motivations apply to evil characters.

 

[kengar]

A couple notes on the paladin-thing:

My understanding is that a paladin will never "knowingly" ally himself with those of evil alignment. Detect Evil does not detect that a person is of evil alignment (it will detect a cleric of an evil deity, though). Theoretically, that means he might not know that the rest of the group was evil. However, evil is as evil does; so if he sees them acting in an evil way, he will try to stop them.

If the evil PC's are clever, they might get away with a lot without him noticing it's them doing it, but eventually, he will probably catch on (perhaps his deity will send a "wake up call" vision). At that point, he either is going to be looking at losing his "paladinhood" or making at least a break with the party; if not out-and-out fighting them.

Food for thought, anyway.

 

[Victim]

A couple notes on the paladin-thing:

My understanding is that a paladin will never "knowingly" ally himself with those of evil alignment. Detect Evil does not detect that a person is of evil alignment (it will detect a cleric of an evil deity, though). Theoretically, that means he might not know that the rest of the group was evil. However, evil is as evil does; so if he sees them acting in an evil way, he will try to stop them.

If the evil PC's are clever, they might get away with a lot without him noticing it's them doing it, but eventually, he will probably catch on (perhaps his deity will send a "wake up call" vision). At that point, he either is going to be looking at losing his "paladinhood" or making at least a break with the party; if not out-and-out fighting them.

Food for thought, anyway.

Detect Evil does discern evil alignment. You might be thinking of the 2e version of the spell.