I'm sick of saving the world. Let's conquer it.

[Bad Paper]

I've been trying to put together an adventure that hinges more on Law v Chaos than Good v Evil, and playable by any alignment [neither Law nor Chaos is the "correct" way to play it]. It's hard!

 

[Kaodi]

I thought Elminster and Drizzt had already been statted?

Pffft. Forgotten Realms is a waste of time. I'm an Eberron Man. Besides, I when I said that, I had the notion in the head of making it a homebrewed world where you were in a Golden Age, and your job is to end it, hehehe...

 

[kaomera]

Pffft. Forgotten Realms is a waste of time. I'm an Eberron Man. Besides, I when I said that, I had the notion in the head of making it a homebrewed world where you were in a Golden Age, and your job is to end it, hehehe...

So, wait, are you claiming that you don't want to / don't want to watch your players kill E and/or D???

 

[Angel Tarragon]

What you need is AEG's Evil and Book of Vile Darkness.

 

[00Machado]

Well, first of all, conquering the world... OK, go! IMHO, there's your adventure. Good PCs need some bad dude to do something nasty so they can go and stop them. If you want to play Evil it's going to be much more up to you. So pick up a setting book and set about undermining, corrupting, or killing every single NPC therein.

This is well stated, IMHO.

As I see it, option one is to make your characters players in the dog eat dog world of villainy/the underworld, or something like that. It would be much like the traditional adventure structure in that there are goals that your side has, or more likely, goals of someone else that you want to oppose, although the narrative, even plot may have a darker edge to it. You adversaries may be bad guys like you, worse guys, or the good guys. In opposing them, you distrupt their plans, maybe even destroy them, but you don't conquer the world. To run this style of adventure, you just need to have goals to oppose. "Conquering the world" isn't going to be the result of disrupting someone else's goal. It's going to be your goal. One that you need to push, which leads to option 2.

Option 2 is the we want to play Palpatine approach. We want to go out of our way to plot against someone, or everyone. When we're done, we will rule everything (incidentally, I think Palpatine's vendetta against the Jedi makes the story more interesting than if they are purely an obstacle he must eliminate on his path to conquest, that he otherwise wouldn't care about). We want to explore to see which new groups we can stumble across to take wealth and power from and/or use to our advantage somehow. We want to stay hidden, and plot and scheme. Success in this style of "adventure" is going to me more about avoiding discovery, avoiding combat (or killing all witnesses), and keeping tabs on how your plans are effecting your enemy. This group may introduce greater powers that you can ally with and that you then have to watch your back against (or deliver on promises to) - fiend lords, ancient undead, and whatnot. In either case, the game ends when you've conquered the world. I think the suggestion to pick up a setting book and try to undermine everyone in it and/or turn them against each other is a good way to approach this. You can start small, and serve one person's agenda to build skills and contacts, in which case, the game morphs into a combination of type 1 and type 2. This would need to be okay with you as a player though, that the game sometimes focuses on you executing someone else's agenda, and will later shift to one where each session focuses fully on your own agenda (assuming you make it that far). Or you can start big, and assume you're ready to do it all on your own from the beginning.

In thinking about this, I decided there's also an option 3. War. Start with a big enough army, and you're ready to launch your big invasion, or almost so. The camp[aign will be largely about one side winning, and the other losing. If you win, you're top dog. And if not, game over.

 

[00Machado]

I'm confused. Do you want to play villians or do you want to conquor the world? Becaue there is no reason a Paladin, kindly old wizard, or rogue with heart of gold cannot conquor the wolrd. A game of villians and a game that conquors the world can be similiar but they can also be very different.

How would you appraoch the above playing style goals in terms of setting up antagonists, obstacles, opposition or neutral parties, and so on, if the game was designed to be for the good guys trying to take over the world?

At a conceptual level I can kind of get that it may be possible.

I'm not seeing a practical way to set up a campaign for good guys who want to conquer the world though.

 

[Raloc]

This is well stated, IMHO.

As I see it, option one is to make your characters players in the dog eat dog world of villainy/the underworld, or something like that. It would be much like the traditional adventure structure in that there are goals that your side has, or more likely, goals of someone else that you want to oppose, although the narrative, even plot may have a darker edge to it. You adversaries may be bad guys like you, worse guys, or the good guys. In opposing them, you distrupt their plans, maybe even destroy them, but you don't conquer the world. To run this style of adventure, you just need to have goals to oppose. "Conquering the world" isn't going to be the result of disrupting someone else's goal. It's going to be your goal. One that you need to push, which leads to option 2.

Option 2 is the we want to play Palpatine approach. We want to go out of our way to plot against someone, or everyone. When we're done, we will rule everything (incidentally, I think Palpatine's vendetta against the Jedi makes the story more interesting than if they are purely an obstacle he must eliminate on his path to conquest, that he otherwise wouldn't care about). We want to explore to see which new groups we can stumble across to take wealth and power from and/or use to our advantage somehow. We want to stay hidden, and plot and scheme. Success in this style of "adventure" is going to me more about avoiding discovery, avoiding combat (or killing all witnesses), and keeping tabs on how your plans are effecting your enemy. This group may introduce greater powers that you can ally with and that you then have to watch your back against (or deliver on promises to) - fiend lords, ancient undead, and whatnot. In either case, the game ends when you've conquered the world. I think the suggestion to pick up a setting book and try to undermine everyone in it and/or turn them against each other is a good way to approach this. You can start small, and serve one person's agenda to build skills and contacts, in which case, the game morphs into a combination of type 1 and type 2. This would need to be okay with you as a player though, that the game sometimes focuses on you executing someone else's agenda, and will later shift to one where each session focuses fully on your own agenda (assuming you make it that far). Or you can start big, and assume you're ready to do it all on your own from the beginning.

In thinking about this, I decided there's also an option 3. War. Start with a big enough army, and you're ready to launch your big invasion, or almost so. The camp[aign will be largely about one side winning, and the other losing. If you win, you're top dog. And if not, game over.

A combination of the three sounds about what my campaign is. At first it's 1 with a slight mix of 2, then later it might become about the PCs controlling armies to accomplish their goals (which will partially involve saving the world, if only so that it's not messed up for them to rule XD). So far though, the evil campaign has worked wonderfully.

 

[Dykstrav]

I'm not seeing a practical way to set up a campaign for good guys who want to conquer the world though.

I can see a relatively way to deal with this in a good game; the Balkanized continent. No major state has ever become dominant, and every nation is a small city-state with its own language, religion, currency, culture, and noble families. Throw in invaders from across the sea (or another plane, whatever) and the characters must suddenly unite every nation under a single banner. If they fight individually, they'll be conquered one by one. Not even strong allegiances will do as everyone thinks they should be in charge: the army needs a single, strong leader. Even when the homeland is successfully defended, the war cannot truly end until the enemy capital is captured and the nobles in power executed or imprisoned. Think of the Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes, for example.

I'm currently playing in a Forgotten Realms campaign where everyone is evil, and it's largely the same thing as a 'good' game. We still fight monsters (and sometimes innocent villagers), delve dungeons, and receive quests from temple leaders and nobles. Except for the deities the characters worship, it'd be difficult to distinguish it from a heroic game strictly from the play itself.

I once ran a villainous game which the players really enjoyed, but this game involved blatant acts of EVIL. Not "we kill good critters instead of evil critters" evil. The sorcerer concentrated a plot to corrupt the lone paladin in town by slowly torturing her betrothed once they became engaged (this if after they thwarted his plan to drive them apart by framing the boyfriend for cheating on her). They cut off a half celestial's hands, stopped the bleeding with the Heal skill, and let her go. Routinely captured and tortured travelers in pretty graphic ways. I had to draw some lines pretty quickly (especially once the evil druid wanted to start kidnapping children and sacrificing them to Moloch). I was really looking for a more political game than a gory stomp through an abbatoir splattered with blood and guts; so that campaign came to an end.

I still use material from Book of Vile Darkness and entertain the idea of a villainous campaign. Unfortunately, I think that alot of players want to play gore hounds instead of developing characters...

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Apparently, you missed Vault of the Drow. Oh the evil fun that can be had there ...

 

[Celebrim]

Tyler: I don't believe you saved the world the first time before you got tired of it.

I don't think you'd find it hard to do a superficially 'evil' campaign. Pick a module that you like. Invert it.