User blog:Dragokar62/Evil Campaigns

Evil Campaigns

There are a lot of DM’s out there who won’t run a campaign where the players are the bad guys. They are the hardest types of campaigns to run, in my opinion, mostly because of the unpredictability of the players. When given a free playing field and no real rules about behavior, they turn into 5 year olds on a sugar high. They run around, killing everything and everyone in sight, and just like the junior psychopaths that they are, they blame someone else. This is the fun of playing outside of your comfort level, but as the DM, it’s your job to keep them on a tighter leash and this is what makes an evil campaign the hardest to run.

To break this down, we should start with the concept of running an evil campaign. Why do you want to run an evil campaign? What are you trying to accomplish with it? What boundaries do you need to set for the players to avoid them turning into murder hobos (and yes, I don’t like this term, but it’s common now). If they get out of control, how will you bring them back under control? These are questions you need to ask, because I promise you, the players will make you ask them. Being turned loose with no real rules and no real consequences gives them a feeling of power they don’t normally feel during a good campaign. I don’t blame them, but for the DM, it’s a headache.

So when you think about designing an evil campaign, think first about what it is you want them to do. What is the over-arc of your campaign going to be? Is it some goodie-goodie who is getting so big that evil just has to rise up or the world will never know what evil looks like? I like that one, actually. Without evil, there can be no good. No one would recognize it. But in the D&D world, good is supposed to triumph over evil, that’s what it was designed to represent. But sometimes, it’s ok to let evil win. Perhaps you want to remove your Lawful Good king with a Lawful Evil (or worse) king. You can use your evil players to help with this. Make sure you’re ok with a complete re-direction for your game world before you start, though. Once done, it’s done. You can change it later, with good characters, but for now, you’re stuck.

With evil characters at your disposal, there really isn’t much you can’t ask them to do. Rob banks, kill villagers, steal gold from nobles, all of those are right up their alley, but it’s best to avoid the other side of evil that isn’t so clean. Murder is fine, because they’re probably going to anyway, but I never allow them to take their evil ways beyond that. In an RPG, violence is a part of the landscape, but sexual violence is not and I won’t allow that. Otherwise, they aren’t limited to the evil acts they want to perform, as long as the consequences are known. Just because you can kill an NPC doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences. More on that soon.

The last evil campaign I ran, I wanted the monarchy to change hands and put the world into flux, so I allowed my players to create evil characters. To keep them in line, I put a Death Knight at the head of the organization who was paying them and allowed them to go on missions for this Death Knight. They became a part of this evil organization and they became major players in it. This was a risk, since players tend to role play evil as being out of control, with no consequences, but they did very well and I felt it was one of the best campaigns I’d run, thanks to them. I felt they understood the premise of the campaign and just what they were supposed to accomplish and they did this well. If you keep them interested in the end goal, they won’t become bored and become murder hobos. My opinion, anyway.

How do you keep the players on the rails? Well, you really don’t, but you do need to keep them on task, and that’s a very difficult thing to do. As the DM, you need to be the one to give them things to do. It’s highly doubtful they’ll just ask to randomly slaughter a village for no reason (but it could happen), so it’s up to you to give them the tasks they need to perform. What I did in the two evil campaigns I’ve run, I set up a variety of tasks that played to the players strengths. If it’s a rogue, use a stealthy task. Wizards like magical challenges. Fighters like to kill things. Clerics like to destroys things in the names of their gods (evil clerics do, anyway). I would give them three or four tasks to choose from and then let them decide which ones to do. It gave them free agency to act and this is key to keeping them interested. Railroad them and they might rebel (honestly, they probably will rebel).

The key thing to ask yourself, as the DM, when designing tasks and missions for them to perform is, why are they doing this? They are going to ask that same question when you give it to them, why am I doing this? It’s like a Hollywood actor asking, what is my motivation? They need to know this isn’t some mundane chore to perform to keep them busy, or again, they will rebel. Not everything they do should involve the end plot of your campaign, because then they will arrive at the end before you’re ready for them to be there, but find things along the way that they can do that will further your end game ideas. Chasing magical items, locating an artifact, spying on the good guys, extracting needed information from the enemy, kidnapping an important good guy for ransom, there are a lot of things you can use to keep them busy and keep their minds off of disrupting your game world.

The Big Stick Theory is the one most DM’s subscribe to when running an evil campaign. This theory is that you put an incredibly powerful entity at the head of this plot and hire the players to be the minions. If they get out of line, the Big Stick will kill them, thus ending their fun. This can work if your players understand this upfront, but they can resent it if you use the Big Stick to railroad them. I found that just talking with the players at the beginning of the campaign and explaining my ideas for it and just what I hoped they would accomplish worked wonders, but sometimes, you have to bring out the Big Stick if they get too crazy. One side note about this. If they players don’t care if their character dies, this theory won’t help you. They’ll continue to do what they want to do and just roll up a new character after the Big Stick kills the old one. Like I said, the best thing to do is talk with the players early and often and make sure you’re all on the same sheet of music.

The Common Thread theory is another way to keep them all moving in the right direction. In-fighting and party hatreds can arise, but the best way to keep that from happening is to give them that common thread. You could make them all siblings, this way they’re family. You could make the end game goal of the campaign hinge on every single one of them, and should one of them not make it, the goal cannot be achieved. It can be a prophecy or it could just be that personal to them, but it keeps them from going at each other. Now to use this, you need to make sure the players are fully on board with this idea. This will force them to have to play the same race to be siblings, or it will force them into a role of having to agree on how to deal with the end game goal, which most don’t. Talk to the players and get their input. You can even ask them the best way to avoid in-fighting in the party. They’ll tell you.

If you have an evil campaign in mind and want to give it a try, by all means, do that. The one thing I will caution you about is getting your hopes up that it will all work out. I’ve run two in my entire 37 year DM career and only one was completed. The first one was a disaster and only ran for 6 levels before I just closed it. And this is something you need to remember, if it’s going bad, don’t let it linger too long. Shut it down and try again later, but learn from the mistakes made. It’ll help you later on when you’re ready to try it again.

In closing, I’d like to say that running an evil campaign is one of the hardest types to run and you really have to be dedicated to the premise and end game goal or it won’t translate to the players. Don’t do it because you think it would be cool, do it because it’s something your game world could use or need. Go into it with your eyes open and understand that it’s a fifty-fifty shot that it’ll work out for you and your players and be open to the concept that it might fail. It’s ok if it fails, just be prepared for it. I hope this helps you with that, and as always, you can always come talk to me about it.