[RPG] How to build an evil campaign

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I'm going to start DM'ing for the first time next week. When I got together with my group to figure out what type of game to play, when we got to alignment, I told them they either all needed to be good or neutral, or all evil or neutral, or else it wouldn't make sense for their party to stick together. I got a unanimous "evil". That's fine, but I've never played a DnD game where the PC's are evil, and I'm having trouble coming up with a campaign.

I want to sandbox this, because this campaign we're starting is just going to be for the next few weeks while one of our regular group is in Europe, then we'll go back to playing through the Tyranny of Dragons, where I'm a PC, not the DM. Because ToD is a pretty railroaded game, I wanted to give them something different with this and sandbox it. So to me, that means I should come up with several different options and let them decide as they go along.

This seems like it'll be a bit harder than a simple railroad. Anyway, I'm having trouble coming up with what first-level evil characters can actually do. They're too weak at the moment to take over a major town. And even if they took over a small village, eventually the local militia would show up.

The players haven't completely finished their characters, yet, but the motivations I've heard from them so far aren't very helpful at this stage — one of them just wants to murder people for fun, another wants to become a powerful necromancer lich and rule the world, and one is just going to be a mercenary (and the other two haven't told me yet what their motivations are).

I can put people around for them to murder, but it doesn't seem like much fun to just slaughter innocent civilians with no quest or anything. At level one, my death domain cleric (who styles himself a necromancer) won't be able to find any way of turning himself into a lich, and as a said before, taking over even a smaller town seems out of the question. I can't think of anything good for the mercenary yet.

I've been thinking about some evil rival to show up and decide to teach the PC's a lesson about who's the real bad guy in Khorvaire (it's an Eberron game, BTW) by beating them all unconscious and then they could fight him again later. Or I've been thinking that some good guy could show up while they're doing something evil and try to stop them.

I'm just not sure.

Have any of you DM'ed an evil campaign before? Do you have any advice?

Best Answer

I've played in and run evil campaigns of various sorts in both 3.5 and 4e (though not 5e, I think my learning will transfer), and run into a lot of problems: My Guy Syndrome comes up a lot, as does a tendency to default to a regular D&D storyline only with more stealing of spoons and kicking of puppies to remind ourselves we're evil. Sometimes an evil campaign instead descends into over-the-top motiveless violence until there's no story at all. There's a whole host of at-the-table and in-the-story issues, and I tried many different strategies to address them. Eventually I came up with a framing device which works well for us in avoiding these problems:

Provide the PCs with a Master to guide them toward orchestrated works of Evil.

Start the game with the PCs as underlings/minions/hirelings/apprentices/etc of a powerful evil NPC. The Master has a complicated Evil Plan and he tasks his minions to enact various parts as the Plan progresses: "Bring me the soul of a hound archon," "Raze the border keep," "Steal the Apocalypse Gem," "Help a spy infiltrate the paladin's ranks," and so forth, tailored to the PCs' abilities.

This provides the party a reason to work together despite having different agendas (and working together will hopefully bond them as friends so that they want to continue as a group) and establishes small achievable evil goals that accumulate into an Epic Evil Event.

All you need to do is ask the players to make sure their characters have a good reason to work for the Master: The serial killer likes having his rampages subsidised (and the Master protects him from the Law); the necromancer seeks to learn from the Master's experience and gain access to his libraries of forbidden lore; the mercenary's in it for the money and benefits.

Eventually the Apprentices will surpass their Master.

Expect the party to betray their Master at some point, hijacking his Evil Plot for their own gain: this is not only expected, but awesome. It's the Master's Evil Plot, not yours, and the story isn't about the Master--it's about his apprentices. Consider the Master to be training wheels for evil, setting an example which the party can then follow to surpass and overthrow their instructor as they level up.

This works because Evil Needs Goals.

As Ed describes so well and AgentPaper elaborates in the D&D context, evil needs concrete reasons motivating its actions. The Master provides goals and motives while the players find their feet in the new paradigm, channeling and guiding their exploration of what it means to be evil in ways compatible with the D&D paradigm without simply kicking puppies during a dungeoncrawl.

A word of warning: Alignment is tricky.

D&D has a history of the details and nature of alignment sparking major heartfelt arguments, because D&D alignments are not easily (or appropriately) matched to real-world philosophies and moralities; they're narrative simplifications to support the game's conceits and draw their power from storytelling conventions rather than from genuine moral complexity. Exactly what this means and how to deal with it are beyond the scope of this answer (and possibly this site, although there's a LOT of questions on the topic you can look at), but you should be aware it exists and be ready to talk with your players about what "Evil campaign" means to them so there aren't nasty surprises mid-game.