EEEVIL!!!

[bigznak]

So I have been running Castle Whiterock from Goodman Games for D&D 3.5 since January of this year, and in this time, I have managed to kill 7 player characters.  Its a crazy hard dungeon crawl.  I am a DM that lets the dice fall where they may.  I don't pull punches on damage.  If a player decides to go off on their own, they probably will die.  On thursday, the players and I had a discussion about continuing the Castle Whiterock campaign or starting something new and fresh.  At this current time in the campaign, there were only TWO original players from the start.  The original story was getting lost due to the new influx of player characters.

So I put this to a vote on whether to keep playing Castle Whiterock or start fresh.  Of my six players, 2 voted to keep on, while 4 voted to start something new.

This brings me to my point, we as a group decided to start a whole campaign dedicated to EVIL!!!  I always had intentions to GM something like this but never thought it would happen.  I have decided to start the players at 3rd level (still in the 3.5 edition), and I am allowing some monster races as player races (ie. vampires, werewolves, mind flayers, minotaurs, trolls, ogres, etc...) So far my players are Super excited to play.  They are all delving into using the Book of Vile Darkness and are all trying to figure out what they want to play.  This is my cast of player characters so far:

Human afflicted with werewolf lycanthropy (level 3 monster class)

Drow Dragon Shaman (who revers red dragons)

Grey Elf Wizard (conjurer) (who wants to play an alienist and study the far realm)

1/2 Black Dragon 1/2 Orc Dread Necromancer (who wants to play a true necromancer from Libris Mortis)

Tiefling Hexblade

and one player who is completely undecided?

I have a lot of brainstorming ideas that I will like to use for the campaign(Orcus, Mephistopheles, drug smuggling, torture, and sacrifices are just some to start), but I would like to see what the fellow RPPR fan community have as any ideas on what to use in my total EEEVIL campaign.

Thanks guys.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Well first off I'd disallow the 1/2 Black Dragon 1/2 Orc Dread Necromancer dude, but that's just me.

I'd suggest a campaign that makes up of Elder Evils. It's one of the last suppliments for 3.5 and contains alot of cosmic level "enemies" who are beyond game stats. That gives you something bad to aim your players at since most of them want to flatted existance as we know it. Basically, a Mythos level horror is my recommendation as a villain for the game. It helps keep the players in perspective of their "evilness" within the cosmic spread.

If your going for a more humorous evil (which it doesn't sound like you are, given the BoVD reference) than you could have the PCs working against a stereotypically good nation and edge the idea of personal freedom insread of rules/security into the "evil" mindset.

[bigznak]

Thanks for the ideas.  I love Elder Evils.  That book has so many good storylines.  I started to think of a starter adventure to see if the players can work at all together.  I will see how this goes, it will be interesting to say the least.

[Maze]

Chaotic evil is funny but it doesn't work for any long term campaign. I'd go with the "evil" alignment out of the 4e player's handbook. Just getting what they want no matter if it harms people, but not going out of their way to kick babies. You better have a set goal, because there's only so many barmen to stab in the face when they give you a quest.

[clockworkjoe]

I'll have the goblin hulk uploaded today - it can be used as a base/town by selfish or evil adventurers. Instead of going with the heavy metal album cover brand of evil, you could go for the rakish I'm a selfish bastard who doesn't care what happens to people who are not me school of evil.

[Shallazar]

*sigh* my evil campaigns just sort of turn into kill fests.

Even when I stayed away from monstrous races for the PCs.

There was one player who was a good cleric, his reason for joining up with the evil PCs was to mitigate the harm they caused.

[Tissue]

I always run an evil game in an evil world.

[Murph]

The one evil game that I was ever in that worked was a pirate campaign.

We were a gaggle of true neutrals, neutral evils, and chaotic neutrals chaotic evils.  The game was 3.5 and it actually got to 20th level.  I think it was successful for the following reasons

1.  All the players had the same overall goal.  To commit piracy and get rich.  As the game moved forward, everyone started to get individual goals, but everyone always had the overall goal of sinking ships and getting paid.

2.  We picked one player to be the captain.  Decisions were made by consulting the group, but the Captain had the final word.  Mutiny just never was an option.  Which leads to the next point

3.  In character fighting was strongly discouraged.  The characters were friends from childhood, whom started a life of piracy out of necessity, but continued out of greed.  They were loyal to each other.

4.  The campaign didn't focus on the struggle of good verse evil.  If anything it was more the struggle of freedom verse authority.  We were evil people, stealing, and murdering across the countryside.  But we were always on the run from the law.  The authorities would do both good and evil to try and stop us.

5.  We did a variety of things.  There was ship to ship combat.  There were dungeon delves.  We built an island fortress and had it assaulted when out pirate cabal grew too large and the authorities noticed.  We pulled a museum  heist (by far my favorite adventure of the campaign).  It was a well rounded campaign that evil was a part of, but not the focus of.

[TigerStorm]

This is, of course, a general rule for all campaigns but is especially necessary for a successful evil campaign. Make sure the players know beforehand the tone of the campaign and setting so that they can plan appropriately. My old group ran an evil campaign and it was fun because that prep time helped in two very important ways.

The easiest thing for an evil campaign to turn into is an all out kill-fest which does get boring, eventually. If they have a specific goal in mind, they may make characters suitble for more than just slaughtering babies.

Make sure each character has a role to fill and a reason to need (or at least want) the other members in the party.

For example: My evil character fit a very important niche in the party. I had created a Vashar Bard who presented himself as a Cleric of Pelor (hurray for bardic cure spells to pull this off).  He would cause chaos by "converting followers to Pelor" and then sending them on divine missions with hidden evil undertones to give Pelor a bad name. This made it very easy, of course, for us to discount the actual cleric of Pelor who came to investigate one of our other party members.

Edit: Oh yah... and it wasn't until after he kept playing his role as "false prophet" that the other players got the joke of his name as "Robert Patson"