Dm Tip: Playing the Villain/ Guidelines for "Evil" Campaigns
I've never liked the idea of running an evil game, despite how often I've had people in my inbox asking how I'd go about it. I'm all about that zero-to-hero heroic fantasy not only because I'm a goodie twoshoes IRL but because the narrative-gameplay premise that d&d is built around falls apart if the party is a bunch of killhappy murder hobos. Not only would I get bored narrating such a game and indulging the sort of players who demands the freedom to kill and torture at will (I've had those before and they don't get invited back to my table), but the whole conceit of a party falls through when the obviously villainous player characters face their first real decision point and attempt to kill eachother because cooperation is a thing that goodguys do.
Then I realized I was going about it all wrong.
The problem was I had started out playing d&d with assholes, those "murder and torture" clowns who wanted to play grand-theft-auto in the worlds I'd created and ignore the story in favour of seeing how much unchallenged chaos they could create. They set my expectations for what an evil campaign was, and I spent the rest of my time developing as a dungeonmaster thinking " I Don't want any part of that"
But what would an evil campaign look like for my playgroup of emotionally healthy friends who understand character nuance? What would I need to change about the fundamental conceit of d&d adventures to refocus the game on the badguys while still following a similar enough narrative-gameplay premise to a hero game? How do we make that sort of game relatable? What sort of power/play fantasy can we indulge in without going off the deepend?
TLDR: In an evil campaign your players aren't playing the villains, they're the MINIONS, they're mooks, henchmen, goons, lackeys. They're the disposable underlings of uncaring overseers who have nothing but ill intent towards them and the world at large.
Where as in a hero game the party is given the freedom to challenge and overthrow corrupt systems, in an evil game the party is suck as part of that corrupt system, forced to bend and compromise and sacrifice in order to survive. The fantasy is one of escaping that corrupt system, of biding your time just long enough to find an opening, find the right leverage, then tossing a molitov behind you on the way out.
Fundamentally it's the fantasy of escaping a shitty job by bringing the whole company down and punching your asshole boss in the face for good measure.
Below the cut I'm going to get into more nuance about how to build these kinds of narratives, also feel free to check out my evil party tag for campaigns and adventures that fit with the theme.
Designing a campaign made to be played from the perspective of the badguys requires you to take a different angle on quest and narrative design. It’s not so simple as swapping out the traditionally good team for the traditionally bad team and vis versa, having your party cut through a dungeon filled with against angel worshiping holyfolk in place of demon worshipping cultists etc.
Instead, the primary villain of the first arc of the campaign should be your party’s boss. Not their direct overseer mind you, more CEO compared to the middle managers your party will be dealing with for the first leg of their journey. We should know a bit about that boss villain’s goals and a few hints at their motivation, enough for the party to understand that their actions are directly contributing to that inevitable doom.
“Gee, everyone knows lord Heldred swore revenge after being banished from the king’s council for dabbling in dark magic. I don’t know WHY he has us searching for these buried ancient tablets, but I bet it’s not good”
Next, you need a manager, someone who’s a part of the evil organization that the party directly interfaces with. The manager should have something over the party, whether it be threats of force, blackmail, economic dependency… anything that keeps the antiheroes on the manager’s leash. Whether you make your manager an obvious asshole or manipulative charmer, its important to maintain this power imbalance: The party arn’t going to be rewarded when the boss-villain’s plan goes off, the manager is, but the manager’s usefulness to the boss-villain is contingent on the work they’re getting the party to do. This tension puts us on a collison course to our first big narrative beat: do the party get tired of the manager’s abuse and run away? Do they kill the manager and get the attention of the upper ranks of the villainous organization? Do they work really hard at their jobs despite the obvious warning signs and outlive their usefulness? Do they upstage their manager and end up getting promoted, becoming rivals for the boss-villain’s favor?
Building this tension up and then seeing how it breaks makes for a great first arc, as it lets your party determine among themselves when enough is enough, and set their goals for what bettering the situation looks like.
As for designing those adventures, you’ll doubtlessly realize that since the party arn’t playing heroes you’ll need to change how the setup, conflict, and payoff work. They’re still protagonists, we want them to succeed after all, but we want to hammer home that they’re doing bad things without expecting them to jump directly to warcrimes.
Up to no good: The basic building block of any evil campaign, our party need to do something skullduggerous without alerting the authorities. This of course is going to be easier said than done, especially when the task spins out of control or proves far more daunting than first expected. The best the party can hope for is to make a distraction and then escape in the chaos, but it will very likely end with them being pursued in some manner (bounties, hunters, vengeful npcs and the like). Use this setup early in a campaign so you have an external force gunning for your party during the remainder of their adventures.
Dog eat dog: It’s sort of cheating to excuse your party’s villainous actions by having them go up against another villain who happens to be worse than they are. The trick is that we’re not going after this secondary group of outlaws because they’re bad, we’re doing it because they’ve either got something the boss wants, or they’re edging in on the boss’s turf. This sort of plotline sees the party disrupting or taking advantage of a rival’s operation, then taking over that operation and risking becoming just as villainous as that rival happened to be. This can also be combined with an “Up to no good” plot where both groups of miscreants need to step carefully without alerting an outside threat.
The lesser evil: This kind of plot sees your party sent out to deal with an antagonistic force that’s a threat not only to the boss’s plans but to everyone in general. In doing so they might end up fighting alongside some heroes, or accidentally doing good in the long run. This not only gives your party a taste of heroism, but gives them something in their back pocket that could be used to challenge the boss-villain in the future.
The double cross: In order to get what they want, the party need to “play along” with a traditional heroic narrative long enough to get their goal and then ditch. You have them play along specifically so they can get a taste of what life would be like if they weren't bastards, as well as to make friends with the NPCs inevitably going to betray. This is to make it hurt when you have the manager yank the leash and force the party to decide between finishing the job , or risk striking out on their own and playing hero in the short term while having just made a long term enemy. This is sort of plot is best used an adventure or two into the campaign, as the party will have already committed some villainous deeds that one good act can’t blot out.
Next, lets talk about the sort of scenarios you should be looking to avoid when writing an evil campaign:
Around the time I started playing d&d there was this trend of obtusely binary morality systems in videogames which claimed to offer choice but really only existed to let the player chose between the power fantasy of being traditionally virtuous or the power fantasy of being an edgy rebel. Early examples included:
Do you want to steal food from disaster victims? in Infamous
Do you as a space cop assault a reporter who’s being kind of annoying to you? in Mass Effect
Do you blow up an entire town of innocent people for the lols? in Fallout (no seriously check out hbomberguy’s teardowm on fallout 3’s morality system and how critics at the time ate it up)
I think these games, along with the generational backwash of 90s “edge” and 00s “grit” coloured a lot of people's expectations ( including mine) about what a "villain as protagonist" sort of narrative might look like. They're childish exaggerations, devoid of substance, made even worse by how blithely their narratives treat them.
Burn down an inn full of people is not a good quest objective for an evil party, because it forces the characters to reach cartoonish levels of villainy which dissociates them from their players. Force all the villagers into the inn so we can lock them inside and do our job uninterrupted lets the party be bad, but in a way that the players can see the reason behind it and stay synced up with their characters. The latter option also provides a great setup for when the party's actually monstrous overseer sets the inn on fire to get rid of any witnesses after the job is done. Now the party (and their players) are faced with a moral quandary, will they let themselves be accessories to a massacre or risk incurring their manager's wrath? Rather than jumping face first into cackling cruelty, these sorts of quandaries have them dance along the knife's edge between grim practicality and dangerous uncertainly; It brings the player and character closer together.
Finally, lets talk about ending the villain arc:
I don't think you can play a whole evil campaign. Both because the escalation required is narratively unsustainable, but also because the most interesting aspect of playing badguys is the breaking point. Just like heroes inevitably having doubts about whether or not they're doing the right thing, there's only so long that a group of antiheroes can go along KNOWING they're doing the wrong thing before they put their feet down and say "I'm out". I think you plan a evil campaign up until a specific "there's no coming back from this" storybeat, IE letting the Inn burn... whether or not the party allows it to happen, it's the lowest point the narrative will allow them to reach before they either fight back or allow themselves to be subsumed. If they rebel, you play out the rest of the arc dismantling the machine they helped to build, taking joy in its righteous destruction. If they keep going along, show them what they get for being cogs: inevitably betrayed, sacrificed, or used as canon fodder when the real heroes step in to do their jobs for them.
"how did your all evil/villain/monster-party-in-ravenloft oneshot went? was it edgy af? were you all super serious and gretty?"
"well..."
(under the cut some context)
1. The fallen Prince, a fey turned vampire that has a thing with an in-setting character, an other vampire called Lady Kassandra who first called him to the mission and with who the Prince is kind of obsessed so kept asking every npc appearing if they were her.
2. some demons needed human blood to fortify a portal they opened unauthorized in Darkon, the domain of our superior and magnificent Lord Azalin, but were not thrown off by the fact that half of our party was undead and bloodless.
2a. Our Skelly Bard William Turnise Fender III who meets a frendly flaming skull and wants to befriend him
3. Dampyr Blood Cleric Zeljiko is just tired of the silly flaming skull and is contemplating becoming 1 with the lava
4. our Ghost friend, actually un the process of becoming 1 with the lava
5. Ghost (later revealed Oswald) is not amused about William’s choice in titling him “my joyful etheral squirt of winter breeze”
6. This talks for itself, our poor Gargoyle/ reinassance statue barbarian who knows no better (also bcs the wizard casted tiem stop so he was acting agaisnt us while none of us knew.) (correction, ghost was actually stealthy possessign him so he was not affected by the spell and kept making the wizard hurt himself to break concentration)
7. Zeljiko and the Fallen Prince have a different view on what it means to be prepared against demons.
I’ve been wondering what it would be like to play a d&d game, here you play one of these four: Melkor, Mairon, Gothmog and THuringwethil, you and your party of four are in a generic d&d fantasy land, and are attempting to conquer the land, while avoiding defeat at the hero’s parties hands.
Whether it's due to superstition or a distaste for a toilsome and muddy trade, folk tend to pay little attention to gravediggers. This makes for an awfully convenient cover for your travelling troupe of tombrobbers as they tour around the realm's backroads filling their pockets with mementos purloined from the dead.
Planning adventures for "evil" campaigns can be tough, but sometimes you and your players just want an excuse to get your hands dirty. What better opportunity to get DEEP down in the dirt than to hand out shovels and have them start out as a group of travelling undertakers/thieves?
Setup: A handful of crews have run the bonecart scam over the past several generations, tempering their skullduggerous actions with a bit of honest gravemaking. This dichotomy is no better represented in the current heads of the operation: Dour and hardworking Heliana, who minds the cart's reigns and keeps the crew on track, and the knavish academic Benjamin Eelpot who loves delving into things that should best stay buried. These two have taken the party on for a series of jobs that will likely require a cold heart and a strong stomach, stealing from both the living and the dead and hoping not to get caught in the meantime.
Adventure Hooks:
The party's first outing on the bonecart should be a meat-and-potatoes sort of job, used to set the tone of the campaign, which happens to sound like "Someone old and rich and lonely has died, leaving their house haunted and their valuables unguarded".
While being stewards of the dead is a great cover, it sometimes attracts the wrong sort of attention, such as when a nobleman offers the party a great reward to investigate an abandoned necropolis and the source of the terrifying dreams that haunt him. Gold is gold though, and surely this couldn't have too many long reaching complications for them.
Irony of ironies, Shortly after one of their scores the party is setupon by a group of bandits disguised as dead men, who manage to make off with a good portion of their illgotten gain. There's no way to recover their goods through official channels, so they'll have to do it themselves.
Throughout their early adventures the party will need to avoid the attention of the heavy handed sheriff hired by the local nobility to quietly and brutally dispose of criminals like themselves.
You get a lot of weird jobs being a gravedigger, but "limo service" is not usually one of them. Still, money is money, and when a bloodsoaked countess offers to pay the bonecart well to defend and transport her coffin across the lands so she can attend a gathering of the great and the ghoulish who are they to say no?
Heliana will eventually approach the party once they've gotten enough shared time , experience, and nightmarish close calls under their belts. She's got some personal matters to attend to, which involve a list of names belonging to an old secret society and a series of graves across the countryside that may contain clues to the locations of some great treasure. Its a bolder job then the crew usually pulls, and will draw unwanted attention, but they can rely on eachother to pull through, right?
For decades the gang of highwaymen known as the Gallerwood Outlaws were famed and feared for equal measure, melting out of the forest to rob merchants, nobles, even mages, before vanishing back into the trees. Even after their awful deaths at the hand of a bountyhunter some years ago folk still sing of their deeds, and of the secret hideaway in which they stored their ill gotten gains.
Adventure Hooks:
Folk have been saying that the ghosts of the Gallerwood outlaws have been stalking the roads near where their bodies were hanged, still looking for one last haul. The party are tasked with investigating rumours after a fearful carter was set upon by these spectres, losing something precious in the process. This provides the excellent framing for a first adventure as each member of the party can be invested in retrieving something different out of the carter's cargo giving them a reason to work in the same direction.
As they investigate, the party will discover that these ghosts are infact local toughs who have dressed up and painted themselves phosphorescent cave lichen in order to shake down passers by. After giving them a thrashing and a Scooby-Doo unmasking, the party can retrieve the stolen goods and return to the inn for celebratory drinking. In the dead of night one of the party awakens to a shadowy figure looming at the foot of their bed, spectral face illuminated by the ghoul-light that flickers in the bowl of their pipe. Evidently the story of the party's antics has spread, and it appears one of the real ghosts of the Gallerwood wants a word.
Frauds and phantoms aside, entirely possible for the party to stumble across the dungeon while exploring the surrounding swampland, only realizing it served as a bandit hideout after stumbling into the remnants of their camp.
Setup: The ghost introduces himself as the late Cullen Carver, once founding and now final member of the Gallerwood outlaws. Cullen has an offer for the party, and is willing to guide them to the cache kept by his fellow bandits if they will perform for him a last request. As Cullen explains it, neither he nor the other outlaw spirits will be able to rest so long as there is no end to their tale, and there can be no end so long as the mystery of their hidden treasure remains unsolved in the common imagination.
Cullen is in high spirits despite being dead, so the party should expect some gallows humour as the hanged man leads them through the swamp's hazards, eventually arriving at the outlaw's secret base: The Tithing House, a long abandoned temple of Erathis concealed within the depths of the wilderness that's become infested with all sorts of mire creatures since the thieves met their end.
Challenges & Complications:
The Outlaws kept their treasure in the temple's crypts, and to access these the part are going to need to venture through the gauntlet of dark chambers and traps the bandits set up to keep eachother's hands out of the cookie jar. Cullen can help with some of these, but the whole point of the traps was to keep his fellow thieves honest. The only other way into the vault is through a heavily reinforced door, the key to which is currently in the possession of the bountyhunter who hung the Gallerwoods from trees in the firstplace.
While the party has the pick of spoils, Cullen points out a particular chest kept apart from the rest and calls upon them to fulfill their end of the bargain. This chest was Cullen's nestegg, put aside from numerous heists and robberies to be delivered to his wife and children in the event of his death. With no surviving highwaymen to carry out the promise Cullen's REAL unfinished business comes to light. The party can keep their word, or they can snipe the treasure for themselves, earning the spectre's undying enmity and curse to boot.
To get out of the the Tithing House the party will need to face off with a demon of avarice.. but not in the traditional form of bossfight. He'll approach just as they're leaving the dungeon, taking the form of a plump old man with a grandfatherly smile who wears the spotless robes of an Erathian friar despite the flooded cemetery in which they stand. He is all calm words and politeness, congratulating them on making off with such a fine haul and urging them to never mind that silly old ghost and his wishes, banishing Cullen beneath a nearby grave so that they can talk cordially. The Smiling Friar explains that he had a deal with the highwaymen; feeding off the greed of their crimes in exchange for concealing their hideaway and passage through the forest. There's no reason the party couldn't renew the deal, become the new band of legendary thieves, save that they'll have to forsake their ghostly guide and his last act of charity. Should they turn him down the Smiling Friar will call up the dead of the cemetery to slaughter them, clearing the way for the next band of ambitious treasurehunters.
