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Has anyone ever created an adventure where the PCs are aligned evil or chaotic evil and instead of rescuing people or helping people they basically pillage, invade, and destroy? Does it work well?

I think it comes up from time to time in every group - sometimes the DM plans it that way, sometimes the players hijack a nominally heroic setting and drive it into anti-hero or villain territory, to the frustration of the DM.

I rarely see anyone discuss an evil campaign in favorable terms:  DMs usually describe evil PCs in the hands of bad role-players as destructive and disruptive, and players in groups with mixed alignments usually describe evil PCs as bad team players. 

It's not unusual for me to hear about evil campaigns falling apart shortly after being launched as well, and it seems like at least a couple of the more successful uses I can think of were one-shot adventures or very short campaigns.




That said, there are groups who swear that it can work and be a very rewarding experience. 

And, the video game Dungeon Keeper, which puts the PC in charge of creating an evil dungeon and running its day-to-day operation, gathered a lot of fans for the way it stood fantasy RPG cliche's on their head in a setting loaded with dark humor.

I think that, just like heroic groups, villainous groups depend on having good teamwork, mutual trust.  A unifying goal or party mission statement, or a clear enemy that everyone can agree on, can only help keep the party working together and going in the right direction.



There are a few options if you choose to try this:

1. an anti-hero campaign with less-than-heroic characters pitted against even worse villains
2. one-shot adventures with evil characters as part of a larger heroic campaign, to explore an aspect of the larger campaign that the good characters wouldn't normally be able to see (a day in the life of low-ranking drudges of the evil orc horde that the heroes have been fighting against, for example)
3. a one-shot adventure or short campaign secretly being used to let the players create villains that their real, heroic characters will be fighting against later in what looks like a real campaign
4. a tongue-in-cheek exploration of fantasy cliche's from an evil point-of-view, in the style of the Dungeon Keeper video games, in which the monsters are working stiffs or thinly-veiled heroes being subjected to invasions from greedy heroes and their heavy-handed Lord of the Land (after all, the iconic dungeon crawl is at heart a story about a bunch of guys calling themselves "heroes" who kick in the door of some wizard's private residence to kill people and steal stuff)
5. a genuinely evil campaign where the players are free to just let their most distructive, antisocial, and evil imaginations run wild

Of these options, option 5 seems to bring out the worst in players for a while, before it starts losing the shock value and begins getting boring.  It might be better to secretly treat this choice more as a short campaign for "getting it out of their system" for players who've gotten bored with heroic campaigns and are acting out by vandalizing attempts at a heroic campaign, and only outwardly dress it up as a longer campaign than the players' attention spans would really be able to handle.  I've never heard of this option working for any serious length of time, and it seems like the sort of thing that would confirm Jack Chick's worst suspicions about the game.

I've never heard of option 4 actually being attempted in a pen-and-paper format, but I see no reason it couldn't work.  The other options are things I have heard of being attempted with varying degrees of success, but, as always, your mileage may vary.


If you do choose to try running evil-themed adventures and campaigns, please let us know how they turn out.  I would be interested in hearing about the experiences and impressions of groups who try it out, whether it works or not, just for my own curiosity.

I briefly ran an evil campaign and found it infinitely harder to prepare for and run than a standard "good" campaign. For starters, there aren't a whole lot of creature write-ups for things that are unaligned or good, so I had to stick with things like fey creatures since they are the closest to something the evil PCs would like to destroy. The heroic tier has a fair amount of such creatures, but from paragon on it's mostly "classic" baddies, and my group wanted to play at level 11 so I had difficultly there. I filled this gap by replacing a few creatures with hordes of minions who were defenseless townspeople and (would have encountered if they ever got to that point) town/castle defenses to fight them off, and using DMG 1 and 2's methods of bridging the level gap and enhancing lower-level to provide some sort of challenge.

To flavor the game as more than just a series of battles against good-aligned creatures, I made sure to emphasize the "white knight" attitude of their opponents, adding in obnoxious cliches for their to tout, as well as detailed descriptions of how the townspeople reacted to the attacks. I found that making them seem as innocent and helpless as possible really got the players into the game. For example, the PCs encountered two wood nymphs playing in the forest on their way to destroy the druid's grove and plant the demonic seed for the gnolls - I made the nymphs appear young and childlike (which was actually a mistake considering the....attitude...of two of the players), and as such they really felt like they were being evil as opposed to just neutral guys doing mercenary work.

I found it hard to put together something that wasn't the cliche "you're mercenaries/raiders/pirates who are hired to kill/steal/burn," although I did eventually create a storyline involving the PCs assisting a band of gnolls who were forced out of their conquered lands by elven settlers (which, in reality, is very much a reflavored good-vs-evil idea) and it worked for the time we played. Another idea I had for after the PCs complete the elven storyline was a "Most Evil of Them All" adventure, where they would fight other evil entities not because they wanted to be good, but because they wanted to be the "king of the evil mountain" and gain all the power that comes with such a title. An example of an idea I had was that the PCs would eventually be capitulated by devils who served not very far under Asmodeus's most powerful agents, and as such they would perform tasks for their devilish masters as needed while at the same time giving them a goal of eventually overthrowing/getting revenge against their masters and potentially gaining control of the devil armies themselves.

I hope some of this helps!