Cartoon Villainy
There they are in all their full-color glory, folks! The Evil Party have set out to perpetrate unspeakable acts of nefariousness, and first on their list is ruining Paladin’s night out.
This one comes courtesy of our latest Patreon poll, which asked readers to choose the Evil Party’s first evil mission. Choices were “Usurping the Throne” and “Talking at the Movie Theater.” I think it’s clear which one won. It was a landslide too, coming away with a full 70% of the vote. I have some theories on why that might be.
Running an evil game can sometimes be mistaken for running a grimdark game. You’ve got your tortured antiheroes and your black-leather-loving sociopaths. They serve dark masters and do dark deeds, and all of them are eager to throw out gritty one-liners about the futility of do-gooding: Only the strong deserve life! Your god cannot save you! I wasn’t hugged enough as a child! I don’t want to dog on the style too much, because those kinds of games can be rewarding in the right kind of group. There is another kind of evil though, and to my mind it has a major advantage over its grimdark rival. Cartoon villainy is straight up fun.
Back when we introduced Antipaladin we talked about sneering caricatures and kicked puppies. Today I’d like to defend those things, because I happen to think they’re funny. Just look at Darth Vader. Everyone remembers the badass theme music and the intimidating presence, but torturing Han was never my favorite Vader scene. This was. Those hapless imperials choking and mugging in the background are hilarious. We get the same effect with the “choke on your aspirations” line from Rogue One. The dude is scary, but he’s clearly enjoying his work. I think that’s instructive when it comes to evil PCs.
There’s obviously a vast continuum between Darth Vader and Dark Helmet. Choking vice admirals is a bit different than talking at the movies, which probably won’t be an actual plot outside of Toon. I’m not saying you should embrace cartoon villainy if you want to be a black-hearted bastard, but I would ask all you evil characters out there to pause to consider the merits of comic relief. If Joker, Jack Torrance, Freddy Krueger, and The Punisher can get away with a few laughs, chances are that you can too. You may even find yourself twirling your mustaches and laughing maniacally, and that mess is a time-honored tradition.
Question of the day then. Have you ever enjoyed a less-than-serious evil game? What about the flip side of the screen, with comic villains taking on the standard bunch of goody two-shoes PCs? Did the tone shift work, or did you find yourself pining for more serious forms of villainy? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I was running the We Be Goblins free adventure for a party of very apt players. (Hint: all players play chaotic evil goblins, who have to work together to retrieve some items for their tribe). It was fun to watch players cutthroating each other while still staying behind the line that would have turned the game into a PvP arena. Like when one of them won the boss’s magic ring during a “fair” game, and the other waited for them in the morning outside their door to knock them out and steal the ring, then pretending that nothing happened…
Paizo goblins are the poster children for comic evil. I mean, just look at these guys!
http://vidshomepage.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/9/8/8798003/1530780_orig.jpg
How is the third We Be Goblins, btw? I’ve only ever run the first two.
No clue, I have only ever run the first one…
I mentioned this before, but after alex jones the 6 int conspiracy theorist water genasi switched sides to the water cult, leading to our party’s destruction, we continued the elemental evil campaign under him. Not surprisingly, this wasnt the most serious of campaigns between alex’s idiocy and pride, my wizards insanity and and child like behavior, a overly serious might makes right barbarian named burk, and a rogue soon to be possesed by a dagger possessed partially by the enemy fire god. The dm also helped matters along by making it our first task to stop Burnie Cinders, who is exactly what the name suggests he was. After that the campaign was going to be a bit more serious, but due to the dm not taking into account the idea of a player actually scouting ahead with a spell, we accudently skipped right to a boss room we weren’t supposed to face for around 5 more levels. At this time, the fire dagger also fully possesed the rogue, making him attack the orb that connected the evil water cult god to the elemental plane. Our barbarian was also dominated by the boss we were supposed to face, a aboleth, who hated alex for trying to usurp his place, this meant that every character but mine was fighting each other, which meant the only thing sensible to him now was to throw a tamptrum, bombing everyone with vitrolic sphere before leaving with dimension door. After that everyone ended up killing each, criplling both the water and fire cults, with the earth cult somewhat weakened by our good elemental evil party’s actions, this left the weakest cult, elemental evil air, to win. It was pretty hilarious how it all went down.
I’ve never gone for the full-on comedy game (lol Burnie Cinders) because I find that absurd shenanigans happen no matter how serious you’re trying to be. My poor Call of Cthulhu game is the proof of that. :/
Sounds like a blast and a half on your part though. Did your dude survive and retire?
Yeah, he’s still out there somewhere, raising undead hordes to be his friends. Also our campaigns typically aren’t full on comedy’s, or at least aren’t planned to be such by the dm besides the occasional moment like Burnie Cinders or Hugh Man, the war born bar owner who appears in every pathfinder game, and insists that he’s human despite cooking all food in a oven in his chest. They just end up becoming such, like with your stuff, though ours might start out a bit closer then yours:).
I played a Rakdos cultist, who, instead of being NE or CE, was CN due to the fact that Rakdos had trained him as an ambassador so that he could send one of his own to help take down a Drow kingdom. He was just as likely to damage himself and his allies as he was to hurt his enemies. He never actually killed an innocent due to his training, but even a ‘well trained’ Rakdos cultist need to… release some energy. We were in a city of stone giants, and while the majority of the party was wandering around exploring, I was with the LG cleric. The DM made me roll a dice. Turns out, I hadn’t killed enough things within X amount of time, and was becoming a shaking gibbering mess. The cleric noticed this, and before I could start launching fireballs at potential allied stone giants, he told me to go outside and kill something. 5-10 minutes of slaughtering a giant bug and bathing in it’s guts later, I return grinning maniacally. Cleric splashed me with copious amounts of water to clean me. Didn’t matter, had fun. I’m no longer allowed to use characters like him. Lesson of the story? Don’t let me play murder-cult warlocks.
You know that part of “The Lion King” where Banzai the hyena is all like, “I gotta have a wildebeest!”
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9de69410-103e-454c-84a4-6df82ac63c37
Wait a minute, you were playing a Rakdos cultist, like the Ravnica’s guild? In a D&D setting? How is that?
You haven’t heard of these? Well then you’re going to love this link:
https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Plane_Shift
Actually, now that I’ve done a bit of Googling, I can’t seem to find one for Ravnica. Weird. Must be a homebrew?
Yeah i know Plane shift latest-Magic-plane, but the thing is there is no one about Ravnica.
Well here. Have a homebrew consolation prize: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/2sc1qu/my_friend_is_homebrewing_an_mtgpathfinder/
After that time i poisoned the king and his court and ruined the peace talks between elves and orks, i have been told to stay away of homebrews and alchemist classes.
Sorry im late to get respond. We weren’t using Plane Shift, our GM just reeeeeally likes Magic, so Ravnica is a continent, as well as Jund. Hence why I was able to play Rakdos.
Since AP is taller than Paladin, if he wanted to be really evil he could have sat in front of him. Witch could accomplish the same thing with her hair.
Nec could’ve had a Zombaby kicking his seat. Missed opportunities everywhere!
Also, I see AP looking past his phone and down Nec’s bustier.
Talking may be against the Paladin code, but getting an attendant isn’t.
I pity the popcorn jockey that has to ask the Evil Party to leave.
If they sass the attendant Pal is justified in smiting someone.
Is the rest of the anti-party elsewhere in the theater? If not the fight will be a little one-sided.
Well that’s a little insensitive, Gabriel. Oracle is blind. How the crap is she going to enjoy a night out at the illusio-plex?
Is she blind blind, or “Hollywood blind” like Daredevil, Toph, blind martial arts people etc.?
Barbarian is probably a terrible movie-going buddy considering she’s fond of screaming and would eat all your popcorn, but Sorcerer seems okay. Besides, maybe this illusio-plex is one of the fancy ones with a bar, so Barb and Oracle are getting krunk while Paladin watches a movie. That or they’re at the burrito joint across the street.
See clouded vision over here:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/oracle/oracle-curses/
For purposes of the comic however, she’s as blind as she needs to be to make the joke of the day work.
So she could watch if she sat in the front-row. She could see better in fact since Hin (I refuse to use the Twiceling’s slur) don’t naturally have Darkvision.
I suspect that Paladin specifically left the rest of the Anti-Party at home precisely because he feared they would do exactly what the Evil Party is doing now.
…As for Oracle, she strikes me as the type to really like audiobooks. Of course, around here, “audiobook” is just slang for “pay a Bard to read the book to you”, which is just slang for “threaten/dominate a Bard into reading the book to you.”
I mean, yeah, we COULD enchant the books to speak for themselves, but the material costs would be way more than the cost of Bard employment/enslavement.
I am all manner of amused by the thought of Oracle using planar binding as a text-to-speech spell.
“I am X’Doth’tol Xurnalith, feared most of all the bilious sub-pits of the lower Hells! What fool would try and bind me to service?”
“Here big stuff. Read this to me.”
“YOU DARE TO… Actually, I have been meaning to take another pass through the Harry Potters. Ahem: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much….”
An unskilled worker is 2SP/day. Most people in D&D worlds are literate. Even people with intelligence penalties are assumed literate. As such, reading for the blind is unskilled labor.
Plus she’s affiliated with the church (Which one) and I’m sure they have parishioners who do volunteer work for the church such as reading for her.
Re: the anti-party talking, everyone in this comic should be assumed to be Chaotic Neutral unless stated otherwise. So yes, they would have done exactly the same thing.
I’ve been planning a Hero System game for some time now where the party are C-List villains. You know the type, Calendar Man, Condiment King, Arms-Fall-Off Lad, and the like. They’d be the powered henchmen (and women! The guild is very progressive in who gets to be beat up for money) who get hired by the actual villains as they slowly build they powers and knowledge base before striking out on their own.
I’d have them fight other C-Tier villains and heroes (Catwoman, Speedy, etc.) for their usual fights and occasionally a B-Tier boss (Nightwing or Moon Knight level) then, very occasionally, have someone WAY outside their weight class show up (I have expys for Superman, Batman and The Punisher planned) and suddenly the game is way different. Like you can’t fight off Superman or hide from him, but you can trick him or distract him, you can’t trick Batman, but you can run and hide, and with enough damage and noise being made will call too much attention on The Punisher (notable for being my only planned Antihero in this mostly silver-age setting who will kill criminals).
Pun names and powers are obviously encouraged as well of quirky crimes and motives (Stealing the world’s supply of pennies for example so everyone will be forced to use a 2 cent coin with your face on it anyone?)
Ima need some names and descriptions for your PCs. That game sounds awesome.
Please make this team fight the Great Lakes Avengers. This needs to happen.
Honestly one of my favorite villains in fiction is Gru from Despicable Me because it shows how being evil doesn’t stop you from having good relationships with other people. I love the over-the-top goal he has of stealing the friggin’ moon.
Currently I’m in an evil campaign and my Drow Blight Druid has a similarly lofty goal – to blot out the sun, because it’s so annoyingly bright and he’d prefer the surface world to look like the Underdark. I really don’t expect it to happen, but hey, it’s a goal.
Any plans for sun-blotting? A big dome maybe? Nuclear winter? A boatload of permanent darkness spells?
Presumably a very, VERY large umbrella.
All good options! I was thinking about burning down forests or using volcanoes or something to create a permanent smokey sky.
But now I’m gonna have to do some research on how many permanent darkness spells we’d need to cast to cover the whole world.
Okay, assuming Pathfinder rules, you’d only have to cast Widened Deeper Darkness 45,560,000,000,000 times to cover the surface of an Earth-sized planet. Plus make those permanent.
Oh, I lied. Merely 11,200,000,000 times. Darn you math.
So using 11.2bn castings, each as a full-round action, that’s 778 days of continuous casting for one character. Of course, they’d run out of spell slots pretty quickly, and if they didn’t they’d quickly die of dehydration or go mad from lack of sleep.
So either you need to enslave all of the casters in the world with 6th-level spell slots and set them to work, or find some way to considerably increase the radius of deeper darkness beyond a standard widen spell…
Has Nec not fixed her mascara in the entire month and a half since Pal made her cry?
She decided that it looked edgier that way.
As any goth girl knows, make up is temporal, the sadness of a broken heart is eternal.
+250 XP to Schattensturm
I’ve run one evil campaign (+ a few evil Halloweens oneshots). The actual campaign had the PCs playing a group of Kobolds serving a dragon who had recently moved into their mountains. The dragon wanted to build a dungeon were they could leisurely watch adventurers struggle against traps and monsters for their amusement. As such, the party was tasked with actions which would help to build this dungeon (getting dwarves to do the stonework, collecting rare and dangerous monsters, etc.)
My favorite silly moment was when the group ended up complimenting a Medusa Oracle on her taste in furniture. Said furniture being petrified goblins and humans, often in prostrating positions as stools, chairs, or footrests. It ended up as a fairly long conversation which really helped the group get comfortable talking to her, especially after they become rather worried when they realized exactly what they were dealing with. (They had originally assumed that “The Stonemaker” was just some eccentric dwarf until they found that the statues around her lair were a bit too lifelike.)
She’s an interior petrificator.
Well, i like too much evil to be goofy about it, unless the goofyness helps my evil plans, so i rather play goofy good instead. Thing i almost never do in fact.
That said, i am really disapointed with the evil party. They go and ruin paladin’s night by talking in the iluso-plex? I expected sacrifices to dark gods, murder, arsons, chaos unleased upon the forces of good, instead they are breaking that minor rule. What is wrong whit evil party? They are psicos, anarchist, not even i would do something so despicable, evil and foul. Talking in cinema is just wrong, one needs to be a special kind of monster to do something like that. Seriusly you need to put some warning about what people are giong to view in this comic. This level of evilness is too much for some people, dont you think about the children? 🙂
As the good shepherd says…
… Mal, not even i watched firefly.
Yeah, i pass with that, my deepest apologies.
In the not to distant realm, of that worlds most favorite fantasy game.
There was a paladin, by the name of Anti.
He worked really hard making evil plans and plots.
The girls around him tho where just of a different lot.
To just simple torture they said was to be without class!
So they all went to crowded scryplex and mysterysciencetheatered it with sass!
(Lawful stupid. “Will – you – shut – up!”)
Evil roll-call:
Antipaladin
Witchy
Succubus
Necrooooooo!
I actually had a more evil than usual one-off on Wednesday because my GM was out. We were the good guys by most definitions, but I did some false-flag terrorism by impaling corpses with Goblin arrows, and our fighter killed a lot mind-controlled civilians.
Wait… Where the cartoon humor in that? Or is this one of those dwarf jokes? “Ye see laddy, it’s funny on account o’ the goblins bein’ dead!”
Well foistlee Dwahves have Noo Yawk accents,and I don’t knows wheres youse would gets any infahmation othahwize. (Well firstly, Dwarves have New York accents, and I don’t know where you would get any information otherwise.)
Secondly, the character I was playing was a Gnome.
I am not sure if it is really Evil, or more childish and annoying. Shadowrun Game. My Decker was very pissed of at at Knight Errant (The Police), because in an earlier Run some Rigger (Combat Robot Operator) Ass had the Gal to withstand his Hacking attempts Twice! (After that he made it but still, he thinks of himself as if he were the best Hacker in the World). Soe that he failed twice was a gigantic Strike against his overblown Ego.
So for Revenge he Broke into the Knight Errant Host, and installed Troll Porno Pop ups. So every Time anyone Tried to do something or communicate Pop up. Then he continued to reinstall these Pop ups for a week, just to annoy them.
Another Time wanted to go into a Club, but he didn’t want to wait in Line. So he hacked into another Club, so it would send out the Messege “GET YOUR FREE BEER HERE ONLY FOR A LIMITDE TIME” to the Commlinks (Handys) of all the Surounding People. That made the Line much shorter.
There is so much dickishness available to the shadowrun decker. The mage too of course, but the decker is an expert about it. Have you ever read the adventures of twoder.
Meant twodee
Yes i have read about Twodee, that was a funny Story. Go America-San XD. Yes a Decker can do sooo much more dickish Stuff, because he can control Information.
Now that you mention it, one Time i hacked into a School and got the Jainitor fired by planting Child Pornography, so that he would get fired and our Face could be hired as the new Jaintor. My dude is a Decker though not a Technomancer.
I start off every Starfinder game with a news bulletin. The news anchor is a smarmy jerk who hates the PCs, and they hate him right back. That’s why they saw it as a golden opportunity when they realized he always ends his reports with, “I’m Tip Flabels, and I’ve got the news.”
A bit of hacking later, a little bad dubbing from the party operative, and now
the stations has to deal with a virus that automatically alters its audio to say, “I’m Tip Flabels, and I’ve got the [clap].”
Hackers are ridiculous.
So why isn’t the Evil party shouting spoilers, and why is there no crying zombaby?
…Even Chaotic Evil has standards.
In the best campaign ever (which was a grand old evil game), one of the party members was an absolute master of the genre.
Several disaster refugees were leaving a room we were in, and I can still remember the necromancer’s perfect decision at that moment.
“I’d like to slap the kid on his way out”.
He had no real reason to do it, and it was actually counterproductive to our goals since they’d just hired that same necromancer to “resurrect” a family member, but it was a perfect puppy kicking moment, and the whole group thought it was hilarious.
Well it still got a laugh out of me years later. Well done that necromancer!
I’m currently playing an evil character in a Starfinder game, who I basically made to be as pointlessly evil as possible. Her current plan is to blow up Absalom Station for the laffs.
Until this moment, I hadn’t realized how desperately I need to play Blue Laser in a Starfinder game:
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v322/frensal/BL.jpg
A race of evil The Cheats makes perfect(ish) sense in Starfinder!
Yeah, I most often describe my character a prettier version of Cobra Commander. Cartoonish evil can be a blast.
The only campaign I’ve been able to play in this last month (it has been one of those months, sigh) is a sort of fledgling-gods mythic adventures-meets-homebrew mess (run by an author who uses us shamelessly to flesh out odd parts of his world’s history).
It has been running off-and-on for a couple years now, as he variously gets inspired and ditches the players while he writes another book, and gets stuck and goes back to DMing for us.
The party has been drifting rather evil, but fortunately we all decided early on that we were going to be part of the same pantheon, and alienated a rather more mighty god as a group, so enlightened self-interest has kept us remarkably cohesive so far. Since one of the players chose to be the god of (blood- &)lust, and I’m playing the goddess of chickens, it isn’t a terribly serious campaign.
The DM ended up having to create and throw several miscellaneous NPC proto-gods we could recruit into the pantheon just to keep us all mostly-alive… and it still didn’t entirely work. (The character who died insists that he didn’t die, he ascended! but admits that the food is better among the non-ascended and was quite happy to be resurrected when we finally managed that).
It’s been a LOT of fun.
We’re starting to go full on sim-game with it, though, with several shared spreadsheets full of lists of followers and tracking the miracles we’ve managed to pull off. So it’s kind of serious in the sheer amount of time and effort we’ve poured into it, but when one of the things you track is people you’ve “cursed” with chicken-pox and sent into enemy-cult territory (it’s totally in the Chicken domain! Plus what goddess wouldn’t want to be able to say “A Pox on you!” and make it stick?), which is statted up to be entirely non-lethal….
it’s funny how seriously we take the entirely silly.
But there are certainly moments of rather more serious villainy. Slipping into opposed cloisters and straight-up assassinating priests of neutral or good alignment comes to mind. I mean, yes, we saved a couple ships full of refugees and managed to create them shelter and sustenance, but we only did it after making them all pledge to worship us. Blackmail, really. And the sustenance will disappear if they stop worshiping us, so it’s ongoing blackmail.
You know how, in describing alignments, a common example is that most merchants are neutral evil? But merchants make up a substantial proportion of any town or city, and they’re invested in being functional (both personally and within a society), and they can be highly effective and seem almost benevolent when what they’re working hard on is supplying you with exactly the gear you wanted?
We’re a whole party of that kind of evil. Funny moments, serious moments, but on the whole oddly effective, in our own offbeat fashion.
(Our DM just wishes we would be effective to his purposes. We keep wandering away from that, and his attempts to drag us back into something approaching canon timeline keep almost killing us, since it’s not what we’re focused on. Poor guy.)
So like… What powers do you grant your followers? Do you have any chicken god literature I could look at? Maybe a recruiting pamphlet or two?
Featherfall is one of the first things anyone gets; then there’s a secret language whose written form is Chickenscratch. It’s super hard for non-followers to decipher.
Divination via alectomancy or haruspicy (chicken livers only) is done at a pretty hefty bonus.
And the holy grail of follower items is a wondrous item called a Wishbone….
Special additions to Summon Monster lists include harpies, basilisks, a cockatrice, and of course you can cast the exclusive version of the spell “Devolution” on a chicken to get a variety of avian dinosaur options depending on your level. Deinonychus is one of the most common choices.
Clerics can create “Cure Light Wounds” potions without the Brew Potion feat but it always comes out as chicken soup.
Holy Water is really eggnog (with nice high-quality nog, too. We actually spent game time negotiating a possible schism over brandy vs rum, and it was a bourbon proponent who eventually successfully arbitrated the dispute. Considering how often we had to ‘test the heresy’ everyone was quite tipsy at the end of it).
As for literature, I have a lot, actually. 😛 Starting with tales of the First Flock, each a different breed of chicken, who hatched from eggs they laid themselves (contemplation of this koan is considered a form of prayer), and the bitter feud between Vlad the Impecker and Cluck Norris (Cluck Norris has
a song; look up the Merry Wives of Windsor’s “The Cockerel Song”). The grand old dame of the First Flock, (don’t call her Mother Clucker) is Elizabeak. She acts as a sort of angellic/avatar/go-between and amulets of her image are routinely hung above favorite nesting spots to encourage recalcitrant layers.
Then there’s the tragicomedy of Maid Marihen, who was deboned, and miraculously lives on to bring laughter as a rubber chicken.
(Have you seen the feat “Recruits”? It counts as leadership. Then look at “Mythic Leadership”. The First Flock is my Cohort Recruit gang. I have stats for ALL OF THEM, but they never actually show up at any game night. Nope, instead they have adventures off-screen, as it were, and random stories filter back into the group as entertainment is needed.)
The high priest’s official title is The Melicamp (which only makes sense to Baldur’s Gate fans), and we’re still debating about the potential stats of creating a Curse of the WereChickens.
You are playing the game correctly. Carry on with your good right fun.