What are the essential features of a successful evil campaign?

Question

Until this point, I have demanded that my players not build characters with evil alignments, as I am familiar with how to design campaigns and adventures around "good" or "redemption" themes. However, my players are both interested in and drawn to playing darker themes and characters. I would like to try my hand at an evil campaign but really have no idea where to start. So my question is this, what are the essential features of a successful "evil" campaign?

I'm interested in both mechanics to accurately reflect the downside of being evil (playing a 3.5 or PFR system) and general advice/features to consider. If you could provide concrete examples from reference material (movies or books), that would also be appreciated.

As a corollary, is there a way to prevent the evil campaign from becoming so distasteful (horrific, misogynistic, etc) that I can't bear to continue to it?

Answer 1

I've run a variety of tones of campaigns over time and some could be considered "evil"; in fact currently I'm running a three-year long Pathfinder campaign where the PCs are pirates - not all of them are technically evilly aligned, but murder, torture, rape, slavery, etc. have all come up in the game. Here's how you make it work.

Decide on Limits, Within Limits

Some people, when they say "evil campaign," just mean "I want to kill lippy villagers like they're orcs," not that they want to really delve into the darker aspects of human nature. Establish an agreement on tone/content with your players up front - you are not required to run (and the players aren't required to participate) in anything they feel like is over their boundaries. I've been known to have players vote on approximate levels of sex, violence, etc. in a game ahead of time, and where they want it to "fade to black."

However, a lot of that will be emergent. In my current pirate campaign, no one really thought about torture until they caught an assassin who was trying to kill the crime-boss they were aligned with. The PC halfling rogue decided he'd torture her extensively to find out who sent her. This definitely put off the other PCs - but not enough that they stopped him. Boundary established (well, lack of one).

Not every "evil" person is 100% evil and on board with everything "evil," though. The ship took two elven women prisoner and one was claimed as a slave by a vicious half-orc pirate. The PC captain didn't really like that but felt somewhat constrained by the expectations of the crew (mutiny is always a threat if the crew doesn't think they're getting their due) so he allowed it. The PCs and that half-orc were having dinner in the captain's cabin, and the halfing from the anecdote above suddenly stabbed the half-orc to death on the dinner table (he's an assassin now - successful death attack). He explained to the shocked command staff that he wouldn't have any slaves on board or associate with slavers. Boundary established.

If you have real characters really roleplaying and thinking through their motivations, you'll still have limits, whether it's "no women, no kids" or the Mafioso that are patriotic and still want neighborhoods to be "family places." Try to depict other "evil" people as complex in that way as well so that they will understand that evil isn't just a race to maximum depravity. With that halfling, torture of captives is OK but slavery and rape is a killin' offense. There's no "Evil Checklist" you have to adhere to and say every crime ever considered is OK - in fact most evil people really are just into one and consider the others to be as bad as other folks do.

However - people make too much of setting boundaries for their games sometimes. If you came up to me and asked me "Do you want to see some chick saw her cheeks off?" I'd say "No! What are you talking about?" But I just went to see the movie Evil Dead, where that exact thing happened as part of the overall horror movie experience. "Boundary pushing" can be good and desirable and allowed based on initial buyin to the general campaign premise. Sure, there's a very slight majority of people so traumatized by something that if it comes up in game it's going to truly trip them out, and there you have outs just like any other kind of media - "press stop," say "I can't deal with this" - but most gaming groups don't really need to do more than establish the general MPAA-rating (e.g. "Hey guys I'm active in my church and I don't really want to go past PG-13 with this game") and then mess around in that area. Other questions here about "oh how do I double check with my players some specific thing is OK before doing it" is overthinking it IMO. If you go see Evil Dead, you'd better expect that if you have a fear of/complex about anything, there's a nonzero chance it's going to come up in lurid color. All the buyin we required for the pirates game was "people can be evil if they want, and expect HBO Original Series level depravity, the pirate world is not a gentle one."

But What's It Really About?

"Evil" is not really a campaign concept (well, not one that passes muster past the 9th grade level). You need a campaign concept and one that will generally keep the PCs acting together instead of being at each others' throats (unless you're looking for a more short, PvP campaign, which is legitimate and there's plenty of short form indie games that facilitate that). If you are more going for "longer D&D campaign," which I'm reading between the lines of your question that you are, it needs to have as much goal as any other campaign. Smart PCs know they need other mighty people to achieve their goals.

Heck most "normal" campaign setups work as well or better with evil groups - just because you're evil, you don't really want where you live and work taken over by zombies or whatever, that interferes with your cashflow. Often times players want to "play evil" because they feel like the GM has been using "goodness" to manipulate them into being passive and they want to be proactive and smart in confronting threats. Squinting too hard at many campaign concepts passed off as "good" reveals them to be a sequence of home invasion, murder, and robbery anyway.

The main trap you're trying to avoid is the PCs just self destructing by going nuts on each other and everyone in the world in general - at least, if they'd be unhappy with being hunted down and slain a couple sessions in.

Actions Have Consequences

Review How do I get my PCs to not be a bunch of murderous cretins? - there are a lot of reasons people don't perform unrestrained evil deeds all the time, from "I don't want to" to "I will get in trouble for it." Sometimes my players complain that the pirate-friendly port city they frequent is "too lawful" just because they can't get away with any heinous crime or breach of the peace they can come up with - but all societies need some kind of stability and will crack down on those affecting that too much. On the other hand, they have become used to not going out into the city alone; traveling in groups is mandatory to not be victimized themselves.

Many evil societies are like this - see how lawful Drow society looks from the outside. Our pirate PCs have to fear their pirates mutinying, the law/navy hunting them down, the bigger pirates in port deciding they're too big for their britches or have so much loot that they're a tempting target in turn. Criminals "hide out" for a reason - they are not free to operate within larger society, and therefore end up having less freedom than good people (something good to play up as the GM). The law, higher level "good" adventurers, etc. are always looking to wipe you out with a clear conscience.

A mechanical option here is keeping track of "infamy points" - I have my own homebrew system I use, but there's a lot of extant reputation-tracking mechanics in the world. People have heard of the big bad people and will react like people do - avoid, confront, narc them out, victimize them, etc. Remember that many victims of crime are doing something bad themselves - criminals, or at least the dishonest, make the best marks for cons and crimes because they have little legal recourse. The pirate PCs can't go just anywhere as their infamy becomes known; honest ports reject them, and other evil folks are generally not the best allies because they like to turn on you when you blink.

Why Do It?

There's a couple reasons to run an evil campaign and the measure of success is different per type.

1. I want to freak out and kill everyone! Not a real mature campaign and you should probably decline. Tell them "go play Call of Duty and teabag noobs if that's what you want." There is no meaningful success metric here.
2. I want freedom! As I mentioned before, much of the time people want an 'evil campaign' it's because they feel constrained/manipulated by their GM and/or other players based on an overly restrictive interpretation of alignment. In that case I'd run an evil campaign once, use it to demonstrate that criminals generally enjoy effectively less freedom than good folks per the above reasons, and then take the hint and run 'good campaigns' with more meaningful character choices and letting the PCs be proactive and diverse in their belief. Success is measured by whether you and they learn that from the game.
3. I want to explore the darker side of human nature! This is why I run evil games. I actually have stronger beliefs on goodness than most folks in real life. I like confronting people with the consequences and ramifications of their actions in games to make them think. Is trading off part of your soul or good name or humanity worth it for that goal? How about long after you've achieved the goal? Success here is fuzzier, since games that actually uptake more roleplaying have less clearcut "win conditions" in general. But it's successful if it's enjoyable and if it causes people to grapple with moral questions.

Answer 2

Evil can be just as "Heroic" as good!

Disclaimer: my experience is primarily drawn from RPG systems where alignment has no mechanical impact on the game or powers.

Starting out with some movie reference material... Obi-Wan: "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."

Characters are already pretty evil anyways:

I'd argue that the underlying difference between good and evil is self-interest rather than interest in "the greater good." Ironically, D&D traditionally treats heroes as self-interested: they do quests for the gold, treasure, fame, experience points, whatever. Many quests crumble under the prospect of saving a village only to turn around and shine when a reward is mentioned. The evil campaign simply makes this self-interest more explicit.

Many combat-focused RPGs have the characters doing pretty evil things on a regular basis: killing, looting, torturing (intimidating), engaging in racial stereotyping and genocide, persecuting religious beliefs, destroying works of art and science (idols, evil wizard machines, etc.), and so forth. They do these things because someone who they think is good told them it would be good to do these things. Surely though, from the perspective of goblins and red dragons alike, "good" heroes are vile and evil things!

Campaign Structure can easily be mirrored:

Many of the fundamental aspects of a typical Fantasy campaign, especially in D&D and similar systems, can be easily reversed from a good campaign to an evil campaign. Instead of helping a town of humans overthrow orc raiders, the characters could help a band of orcs subjugate a town of humans. Instead of venturing into a castle of an evil lich to recover a treasure and give it back to the king, they venture into the castle of a king to steal treasure for an evil lich. Instead of aiding Bahamut to overthrow Tiamat, the characters could aid Tiamat to overthrow Bahamut.

Note that many of the tropes of quest-building in D&D-style games still apply to evil campaigns. If the players want to do something evil, say overthrow a kingdom, they may need help. A wicked dragon might be willing to aid the players in destroying the king's armies in return for their services: returning to the dragon a valuable piece of treasure stolen by a self-righteous knight. The players must infiltrate the knight's keep and return the treasure to the dragon, then together they sack the kingdom.

This is exactly a "normal" campaign (go into dungeon, kill enemies, obtain item) simply re-flavored for evil motivations.

World settings are still functionally familiar:

Instead of a thriving happy town full of merchants, the characters venture into a cut-throat pirate haven full of merchants. Instead of pleading to a holy cleric for a resurrection ritual, they bargain with a wicked necromancer. Everything that the game needs to provide the players is generally available in both good and evil varieties.

There are plenty of bastions of evil civilization. The whole Drow society and city of Menzoberranzan is arguably kinda evil. D&D 2nd edition went to great lengths to describe Lawful Evil societies of Devils with strict hierarchies and orderly armies who then go out and do lots of evil stuff. Societies of evil vampires are often portrayed as lasting for eons, feeding off hapless humans (Blade?). There are plenty of ways to socially integrate evil characters into a vibrant world.

Behavioral limitations still apply:

Many of the things that limit players from acting "evil" in a good campaign, such as randomly murdering or raping or whatever other "criminal" acts still apply to an evil campaign: in all cases, it's a matter of enforcement. A bigger, badder orc will keep players in line the same way a sheriff would.

Ultimately though, this comes down to how you build the setting and how powerful you portray the characters in contrast to the world around them. Some campaigns are generally "safe" and "peaceful" with small moments of conflict. A similar evil campaign would lift a lot of limits on unruly behavior. However, just as a good campaign can be built in a hostile environment where players have to watch their every step, an evil campaign could be built in a largely "good and civilized" environment where law enforcement hounds their every step.

And, when in doubt, you can always have a good god send down an angel to thoroughly smite misbehaving characters ;)

Answer 3

There is an established technique for avoiding "too" distasteful things when playing a dark game: building lines and veils into your social contract. Then you can all agree on the stuff to fade-to-black with (veils), and what stuff just will never appear in this story (lines).

When you have lines and veils, you can push hard into nasty territory because you have the confidence that it won't ever go too far. When you get to a veiled thing the scene cuts or the action is glossed over, and everybody knows it happened but you don't have to play it out in detail – just like how sex scenes are usually handled in PG-13 movies, where they go into the bedroom, and then it cuts to the next morning.

Lines are harder; they're stuff that just isn't in the game. Ever see a movie with lots of gory battle scenes, but the story never includes, say, torture? That's a line—blood, guts, and gruesome injuries are inside the line, but torture is beyond it. The idea is that themes and events can be equally awful, but that doesn't prevent anyone from deciding that the given piece of entertainment just won't ever include certain ones. To do a line properly, you don't even hint at the possibility that it could happen – the existence of the act is entirely not part of the game and story. This gives players the ability to relax and push their boundaries with other things, with the confidence that they won't ever even have to think about stuff past the hard lines.

With lines and veils you can have a slightly awkward discussion before the campaign, but the payoff is being able to safely explore and play with the disturbing and depraved themes that you all feel able to confront in your own and each other's performances.

Answer 4

There are a lot of different types of "Evil Campaign" out there, so let's find a type that suits your needs. It's more of a spectrum than a list of types, but I'm going to run you through some pretty staple, commonly done flavors of Evil Campaign. Feel free to settle between 'genres' or on something not even mentioned in this list, though I've done my best to be relatively exhaustive/generic.

Gritty/Realistic Evil The idea here is that you're all playing characters who would be the nemeses in a 'good' campaign. Not necessarily top bad, but certainly that lieutenant that is giving the players so much hassle. Characters in this campaign are typically very evil, but in a way that actually makes a lot of sense. The antihero or tragic villain archetypes are quite common. In a gritty campaign, the players will do terrible things, and people will hate them for it. Unless the players are very careful in how they go about being evil, they're liable to get lynched or imprisoned for life. very common in simulationist games.

Dramatic Evil These campaigns focus heavily on the narrative, and are more appropriate toward systems that support such decisions openly, though there are plenty of great ones that have been done in D&D. The idea is that it's sort of like Gritty Evil, but with an emphasis on building interesting character and story arcs, rather than focusing on simulating what it might be like to be that person in that situation. If a Gritty campaign is The Wire, a Dramatic campaign is probably Breaking Bad.

Deconstructionist This one I'd never really seen or heard of until BESW ran it for us, but it was terrific enough that I feel it's worth mentioning here. A deconstructionist campaign allows the players to play the villains of the main campaign, working toward their Evil Objective and crying in horror or disgust as a rag-tag but suprisingly effective group of 'PCs' (actually NPCs) work to ruin everything they ever worked for. Deconstructionist games can be very serious (see above) or significantly less so (see below).

Skeletor A Skeletor campaign is cartoonishly evil. Players will kick the dog and kill the quest NPCs. There will be many skulls for the skull throne, and plenty of milk for the Khorneflakes. These campaigns are very light-hearted in nature, but that doesn't mean they're bad. Often the players' escapades will be so thoroughly random, impossible to predict or outright heinous that the remainder of the campaign will be like watching the final moments of your civilization in Dwarf Fortress. This sounds like exactly the type of campaign you wish to avoid, but as some groups will undoubtably fall in love with this kind of campaign, I shall leave it here for completion's sake. Keep in mind that this type of game is very Beer & Pretzels, and can thus be divisive if everyone doesn't know what they're getting right off the bat. PCs in this type of campaign are less like characters from a serious drama, and more akin to cartoon villains (such as the namesake, Skeletor).

Once you've nailed down what type of game you want to play, I think that the tone and mechanics will be much easier to figure out as you go.

Answer 5

I've participated in a successful evil campaign. I've also participated in one less successful one. These tips are what I've learned from them.

1. Talk over with the players the limits and boundaries. Evil characters don't have any, but people do, and you don't want one of your players to go over yours or each others.
2. Make it very plain in the beginning that if any player has any reservations about a plotline (in terms of lines crossed), it will be pulled.
3. The characters need something that will bind them together, even more so than good characters.
4. Define with the players the rules of PvP and how it will be handled. It will come up, and you have to be ok with it.
5. Define the methods of communication, i.e. can the players keep player knowledge out of their characters' hands? If not, you're going to have to use notes or somesuch.
6. Define the limits of plotlines, i.e. how much can you handle? Even more in the case of evil characters, you will have diverging goals and plotlines, and will have to run more than one in most cases. How much can you handle?
7. Make sure to set down that things that happen in the game are character based, and if it gets to that boundary, plotlines will be pulled/reined in.

So onto the campaigns, and how they dealt with each point (or didn't).

The first campaign was a MERP campaign, set it the time of the fellowship. It didn't start out an evil campaign, but ended up one after the paladin donned a help of opposing alignment. It was more organic, and less planned. It worked out well for a time, with the evil/neutral characters opposing the fellowship and the two characters that stayed on the side of good. It didn't end that way, as limits were not set and PvP not defined. So when one of the characters possessed another and made him murder another, things carried over into real life. And the way that the death was handled was pretty horrific. This could have been avoided if things had been less fluid and dynamic, and the group had discussed things before the plot went there, and had the GM been willing to put more control over the situation.

The second was a planescape campaign. The characters were given a concrete goal, i.e. they had been an epic evil council, and were cursed to be split into shards of their power, and their recovery of said power linked to each others' rise. The GM set down the limits of the campaign in terms of topics, and also said that we could head there... but at any point, the scene could (and would) fade to black if things were becoming too much for anyone. We skirted the edges of some truly horrific things- but never actually reached the location. There was plotting and scheming against each other, but the shared goal kept it in line, as did the GM's talent for taking things out of first person and putting them into character language whenever the story became too intense, i.e. what does X do instead of what do you do. The GM was very practiced at his craft of telling the story also, and creating boundaries that didn't seem like such to direct us back together in a way that didn't obviously restrict our choices.

In the end, a lot of it is going to depend on communication, knowing your players, having a reason behind your campaign (other than just I'm evil, raargh), and being able to have a soft touch and the ability to tell a story, while having the will to impose limits when necessary, and fading to black on some of the more unsavory tones.

Answer 6

The other responses are great, but I'd like to succinctly point out the most important aspect that an evil campaign must have:

The characters must be willing to work together.

Sure the evildoers can be planning to backstab each other or may be committing evil acts that the others may not be happy about, but for the time being, they must be willing to work together. Any breaches of this must be few and far between, otherwise the campaign is going to quickly fall apart.

One example of this in action is Savage Worlds' Necessary Evil plot point setting. The players are supervillains, but they are united by the fact that the big bad evil aliens have taken over the world (and they hate all supers). The vilains may be plotting their own world domination and intend to betray the other PCs (this is encouraged!), but for the moment the only way to stop the aliens is to work together.

Answer 7

A successful evil campaign has two things in common with any other successful campaign: motivation and cooperation. Heroic games are full of tropes that encourage players to stick together and stick to the mission. Much of that translates surprisingly well to evil characters, with some thought, plus you can draw inspiration from games like Shadowrun which feature less savory protagonists.

Black, white, and shades of gray

First, consider the different degrees of morality: heroic and villainous, moral and immoral. Current fantasy RPGs tend to focus on the major players, the heroes and villains. These folks go out of their way to make the world a better place, even if only for themselves. Heroes right wrongs and fight injustice, even at great cost to themselves. Villains have grand schemes, and they don't care much who gets hurt.

There's a space in between, the shades of gray. On the light side, moral people treat other people fairly and avoid hurting innocent folk, but they don't stick their necks out like heroes do – unless you give them a good reason. D&D calls these people “Neutral,” and Gary Gygax's campaigns and stories were full of them. They didn't save the world because they're heroes. They saved it because that's where they live and keep all their stuff.

On the darker side, immoral people lack some of the compunctions of decent folk. They might not set out to hurt the innocent, but when push comes to shove, they will cheat, steal, and possibly kill to get what they want. D&D lumps these people into “Evil” with the black-hearted villains, but they're evil in a petty way. Your typical Shadowrunner is this kind of dark-gray evil.

Gray versus black

When you consider an evil campaign, think about whether you want to focus on evil deeds or merely evil characters. In the latter case, your campaign needn't differ much from an old-school D&D campaign where the “good” guys are neutral-aligned, everyman heroes. Just set up a threat bad enough that any reasonable person would want to fight it, regardless of how they behave otherwise. This works great for mixed parties too, so long as the naughty and nice PCs can respect each other's boundaries. The Order of the Stick is a great example of a mixed-alignment campaign.

Gray versus gray

You don't even need a big villain to motivate evil PCs toward a common goal. Just make their enemies bad enough that they can easily rationalize bad behavior. They aren't hurting anyone innocent, not really. Lots of spy games, heists, capers, and black comedies fall into this space: grittier James Bond stuff, the Coen Brothers, Leverage, The Italian Job, Grosse Pointe Blank. This style isn't common in medieval fantasy games, but it's standard for cyberpunk and other dystopian games like Paranoia. These campaigns focus more on survival and personal gain than doing the right thing, but even evil people have a conscience – sometimes.

Black versus ... anybody

Enough of the gray stuff. This is what most people mean when they talk about evil campaigns. Bad people doing bad things to anyone who gets in their way. Evil empire versus scrappy rebels. Masterminds set on world domination. Robbers versus cops. Wise guys versus thugs. The antagonists might be innocent people or rivals, more likely both. These are the games where motivation and cooperation get tricky. It helps if you and your players are comfortable with sharing creative control over campaign goals. Even more important, the PCs should have strong bonds to encourage mutual support over infighting. A little internal conflict is part of the fun of an evil campaign, but it's the stuff that binds them together that makes for a successful campaign.

The D&D4 Dungeon Master's Guide 2 has some excellent guidelines for building relationships between characters. Essentially, each PC has at least one buddy and one foil in the party, somebody to rely on and somebody to compete with. You could also borrow the system of relationships and needs from Fiasco to bind the PCs together. These are helpful for any campaign, but they're especially important to strengthen a party of villains.

Don't be a jerk (to each other)

Even evil has standards. Even villains have have people they care about and protect.

Don't get jaded

In my experience, the biggest threat to a long-running evil campaign is not PvP. If the players can't play nicely with each other, the game will collapse sooner rather than later. Once they get a handle on evil cooperation, the main risk is that you'll simply grow tired of being petty and mean all the time. That sort of thing makes for a fun break from everyday life, but it does wear on you. Humor helps a lot to alleviate this, but take a break if you need it. Run a one-shot adventure from the heroes' point of view. Or wrap up the campaign with a blaze of evil glory.

Answer 8

The villains are the key in my opinion to a good "evil campaign" obviously as we're in a mirror darkly, also check out the Mirror Universe episodes from Star Trek as they're really good examples of taking heroic characters and making them evil, the villains will be obviously classic good types but with a negative spin as to give the players "yeah I'm evil but I'm still better than these guys" feel which can be really awesome.

Thus my list of villains for these campaign types:

• "Heroes" who are not honest with themselves/ are in it for the wrong things, the hero who is in it only for the gold maybe even staging monster attacks so he can repel them with ease or who chooses to power up "the Sword of the Light Goods" by killing 100 orc babies instead of orc warlords. They're as much in it for profit and pleasure as the PC's but at least the PC's are honest that they're evil.
• "Heroes" who put the cart before the horse, they're so devoted to fight evil for the people that they ignore they're causing the people more suffering than the evil. Think Arthas or particularly zealous Inquisitors I like to give the PC's a chance to skake them to their senses if the PC's take it.

• "Heroes" who represent a ingrained evil aspect of their culture which is not viewed as evil by that culture, have the local church of the good guy gods be misogynistic or downright treat women as property and defend their actions as "this has always been so, who are you to critique my religion" evil PC are the best to jump on this because they don't care for diplomacy etc or that this church is the main training ground for demon slaying paladins.

  Also try to give a "edge" to every class, for example magic users are more likely to be bargaining with dark beings and their spellcasting might rip the planar veil and unleash demons (spoiler this doesn't happen ever) monks didn't learn martial arts in X years, they're prodigies who learnt just Y years and when the only thing that was left was to lean "discipline" they took of.

Answer 9

I've run more than one evil campaign in D&D, mostly as a change of pace to the "traditionnal" campaigns.

The only time it remained enjoyable for any amount of time was in a very strict setting where a group of humanoïds (gobs, orcs, kobolds, ogres and trolls) have been united by a quatuor of evil deities and their clerics into a tyranical empire named the Conglomerate. What I love best about this settings is: 1 - it allows you to vent some steam in a "consequence free" make believe setting. 2 - it allows you to experiment with the possible outcomes of making the evil choice. 3 - it pits the "heroes" against the opposite of the usual ethical dilema. Because the Good choice is often the best choice and the Evil one the wrong one.

The reverse campaign also allows me to make the players their own worst ennemies where they are champions on both sides of the same conflict.