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 wouldn'twanted 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?
