Wicked Moves
Happy Halloween everybody! I trust that you’re all enjoying your mandatory annual vampire / haunted house / actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf-themed adventures? Excellent! I can’t get enough of that mess myself.
We looked at some of the downsides of evil last week, but If you’re anything like me, the call of the macabre outweighs the negatives. Playing an evil character has the same charm for me as browsing the gross-out masks at one of those pop-up Halloween shops. Stepping into the shoes of a malevolent monster comes paired with an odd sense of freedom, and selecting your own special flavor of wickedness is an experience we don’t always get to enjoy.
In theory, you can always do whatever you want in an RPG. However, I can’t shake the feeling that some games expect me to be the good guy, especially when the back of the module keeps referring to me and my buddies as “the heroes.” When you take off your shining armor and put on the black leather though, all those implied inhibitions go out the window. Suddenly murdering the innocent palace guards is more than something I can do “in theory.” It’s positively expected, and no one’s going to frown and wonder whether we could have “just talked to them.” I’m a creature of darkness over here! My bloodlust will not be denied!
That expanded sense of freedom seeps between the lines of an evil campaign’s social contract, and so you wind up with a more diverse set of characters. The kinds of characters that ooze malice, wicked charm, and style. In short, it is straight up fun to be the bad guy. Twirling you mustache, sneering at your defeated enemies, and laughing maniacally in battle are all worthy pastimes. And if you’ve never tried it out, so is running an evil campaign.
Question of the day! What is the most fun you’ve had playing an evil character? Did you commit any notable outrages against common decency? Maybe you commissioned an especially swishy black cloak? Or did you make like Necromancer and recreate the Thriller dance with your undead minions? Let’s hear all about your best acts of depravity down in the comments!
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Some context first. At the time we were playing a houseruled version of AD&D, and one of our changes was that even an untrained person can attempt to do most non-magical abilities from other classes. We had modifications to the tables to map out how successful you could be. You wouldn’t be as good a thief as the actual thief class, ever, but you could maybe pick a pocket every now and again.
Now, at the time the party was acting as hired muscle for the captain of the local militia, a former paladin who Fell and eventually sold his soul. He wanted us to find a spy in his militia that was working for a group of paladins and eliminate him. Now, paladins being bad at subtlety, finding him was easy. But they decided they wanted to eliminate him with some flare. So our big two handed sword wielder went up to him claiming to have a message from the captain, and says he wants to roll to assassinate. At his level of training, and their level difference, he literally had a 1% chance to do this, on a natural 100. So, of course, the dice fall, and he gets the freaking triple 0s that represent 100 on two D10s.
He massacres this guy in the middle of his own barracks with a sword as big as he is after saying a badass one liner. Bonus points for having an actual bloody assassin in the party at the time. I had to end the session there, because nothing would top that for the day. Sometimes things are too cool to not work, and sometimes the universe is determined to make things work so well that they retroactively justify themselves.
Oh man… I bet the table absolutely exploded when that big 00-0 dropped.
What was the one liner?
Man, I cant even remember. This was a while ago. Something like “The Captain sends his regards” or something like that I think. And yes, the table absolutely exploded. I think that has to be the highlight of this particular group’s many years of playing together, and we have done an absolutely astonishing amount of nonsense over the years.
I appreciate your comic referencing Erfworld. More things should.
https://archives.erfworld.com/Book+1/140
Ironically my extra-heroic Lawful Good Devotion Paladin is my character who’s spent the most time laughing manically. He considers himself something of a Hannibal (Of A-Team, not cannibalism fame) or Captain Kirk figure, so he’ll drop a maniacal laugh when his plans come together.
Nothing quite like the look on the evil warlord’s face when you get all of his subordinates to turn on him through the power of reasoning and Ms. Adbar speeches, then get his own bodyguard to bisect him.
I hope you have the A-Team theme ready to go on your phone.
Am I the only one who read the header in Vincent Price’s voice.
I read everything in Vincent Price’s voice. Except for cookbooks. For those I switch over to Julia Child.
And why the exception? Vince Price wrote a cookbook, too. Use his voice there, too!
https://www.amazon.com/Treasury-Great-Recipes-50th-Anniversary/dp/1606600729
“Question of the day! What is the most fun you’ve had playing an evil character?”
The list of my evil deeds, long as the sorrow that i bring,
written with blood and tears, in parchment of pain and despair,
his shadow bring darkness and screams, my laughs echo through it.
So, after some poetry, the most fun thing i have made while playing an evil PC… um, i think that will be all the things i have done and all the things i am going to make. The echoes of my deeds still scream across the nightmares of my victims. In Golarion, in a quiet winter night, eliminate any sound and you will hear silence, eliminate the silence and you will hear that echoes, still haunting the world. Evil moments there are too many, like once playing an alchemist when my party was in some peace talk among some kingdom and a group of elves and my PC just put some venom in the soup and started the war again. The time my necromancer found an orphanage to get steady supplies of apprentices and raw material. One of the most funny where once, when my pc shaved the head of one of PCs of the group. Talking about humor and funny things, i was thinking to propose an evil campaign to my friends, i was thinking of a My Hero Academia/GTA style, mainly so i can shout “Lets kill the symbol of peace” or a Cultist Simulator like campaign, adding humor can be a good think, maybe with the CS one. Going to a handsome house and presenting one of the NPC to Poppy will be really funny 🙂
I’d love to build a cultist simulator, but I don’t have enough storage space for all the Kool-Aid.
Eh, what?!?!?! I didn’t understand that O_O
I mean Cultist Simulator like in this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/718670/Cultist_Simulator/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
Ah, as i am not from US, and i confound the bottoms, it’s good to have some explanation. Maybe i propose the CS campaign, but on a second through using a necromancer to do the Thriller dance is too tempting. The real problem is the build, to do the dance right you need like a +5 dex bonus.
I recalled another boss one of my PCs have once. In a game of Urban Shadows, i think, my friends and i we were playing different classes to prove the game, as the classes where handed by luck i get “The Tainted” a guy who has made some pact with some infernal force. I don’t like infernal things, my friends and their PCs can be very sure thet if a campaign involves infernal forces, LE, NE or CE alike, i will be very helpful and loyal to them. So in this game my character have a number of jobs to accomplish for his patron, collect souls, deliver messages, murder patron’s enemies, brokering contracts and all that stuff. The GM played the patron and a complete jerkass who not even bothered to try to feign that was at least concerned about my PC. Still my character grew fond of the job, to surprise of my GM who was planned for the time i tried to kill my PC boss. His surprise when i said i liked the job was only surpassed by his horror to have that plot thread complete removed and he really tried to make my character patron even more annoying, still i liked the job. I like the story and reminds me of Friday comic, such fond memories of a good day of work 🙂
My favorite evil guy was probably my psyhitic man child necromancer who saw his undead as his bestest friends, and was always looking forward to making new friends, alive or dead. That character and campaign of course didn’t last long though, as that was the alex jones campaign, which went down in 3 sessions after i led our party to one of the final boss rooms bypassing everything earlier by accident with arcane eye. In the end everyone but me and the barbarian ended up dead, with me leaving jn a tantrum after everyone else starting fighting one another with vitrolic sohere to show my anger then dimension door to escape, and the barbarian managing to climb and swim out of tthe cave in the aftermath.
I love that “making friends” gag. It’s worth a giggle every time. 🙂
Back in 3.5 D&D, I had a lot of fun with a Tiefling Warlock / Sorceress / Fiend of Possession. ( I think that was the build. I remember Fiend of Possession only required Evil Outsider Type and a certain Base Will Save modifier.) Unfortunately, the party kept deciding I was “too evil” for doing various things and kept killing my hosts. They thought they were killing my character, but they were actually killing my hosts. After a while, they started wondering why they were finding an evil plot in every city they went to. The party was neutral with evil leanings, and I was a demonic tiefling.
It reminded me of Dance-Fighting from Erfworld Comic
https://archives.erfworld.com/Book+1/140
I think I mentioned this character before.
He wasn’t designed as evil, more like anti-social…
And he was a Doc in Shadowrun (at the time I knew nothing of Dr. House and his like) – soon I began taking looting to new extremes, you know, all this second hand cyberware and those body parts fetch quite a good price on the black market.
Some, e.g. the hippie-witch, seemed to be put off by this
To this day, this is my favorite character I ever played, it is liberating, especially for a mild-mannered guy like me, to channel your inner bastard.
Another evil character I liked, was my PF Lord of Undead. In his backstory, he killed most of his co-workers, including, by accident, his only friend. So he raised her as his first minion and talked to her as if she was still alive.
He was very polite and helpful, so most quickly forgot the major E on the sheet – until he started calling in favours – “remember when I saved your hide? You owe me!“
Good times
I haven’t ever played an evil character before, but that is about to change. With the GM of my main campaign unavailable for a few months, I set up a small little campaign for the other players. Originally I was considering using some stuff from the Shadowfire setting, but as two players began plotting how to best abuse their characters’ legal authority to exploit ethnic minorities, I decided that it would be better to do something else. Instead, I created a hybrid of Judge Dredd, Suicide Squad and The Raid. The PCs have been tasked by the government with eliminating the crime lord who rules an out-of-control slum, by any means necessary. We have in the party a Lawful Evil Ratfolk Cabalist Vigilante based upon Lex Luthor’s style of “civilized evil”, a Neutral Evil Half-Orc intimidation Inquisitor who worships the god of pain and loves torture for its own sake, a True Neutral Tielfing Investigator who just wants to do science and one unfortunate Neutral Good Half-Elf Slayer whose job is to keep these guys pointed in the right direction. The players became concerned that they didn’t have a proper tank (most of them are pretty squishy), so I agreed to give them a GMPC Antipaladin of Rovagug. Specifically an Oradin build, so he functions as both a healer and a sponge. Given my general view of Antipaladins as so cartoonish that they are impossible to take seriously, he has become the physical embodiment of Edgelord, Takes-Himself-Too-Seriously Stupid Evil. It helps that Rovagug, the god even other Evil gods are afraid of, has a Deific Obedience of… smash 10 gp of pottery and then roll around in the shards. Yeah. So now Dethbladé Soulstyyl the Antipaladin (real name Carl) is going to be running around smashing pottery, shouting quotes from Rovagug’s Antipaladin Code (“All things must be destroyed, but the tools of destruction will be destroyed last!”) and suffering ludicrous amounts of HP damage.
On a different but Halloweeny note, I am starting my first, real, there’s-a-plot-and-everything campaign as a GM, and it’s full of mutants, undead, aberrations, drow and black blood. Also dinosaurs, because PC backstories have caused the ship they crash at the beginning of the campaign to be a ship engaged in “quasi-legal dinosaur shipping through international waters.” Because, let’s be honest, dinosaur smuggling is a very PC thing to do.
There is nothing I don’t love about that phrase.
How are you healing as an anti-paladin? Is there some touch-of-corruption trick I don’t know about to switch it over to healing?
That’s why we phrased it that way. Actually, we thought about it and released that, in D&D world, dinosaurs are fairly normal creatures. They don’t breath fire, they don’t talk, they don’t eat minds or turn you to stone or are made out of plant matter or jelly. They are just reptiles that get really big and/or have a lot of claws/teeth. So, while they aren’t found on most continents anymore, the public doesn’t treat them that different from other exotic animals like, say, pandas.
The Antipaladin’s Oracle Curse is Vampire, which causes negative energy to heal him and positive to hurt him. The Lich Curse does the same thing, but wasn’t as edgey. This doesn’t interfere with the Life mystery as much as you’d think it would.
Oh, I just realize that you might have been asking how the Antipaladin heals his party members, not just himself. The Life Mystery Oracle can get a Revelation called Life Link that lets it mark an ally or allies and heal them all by 5 hp per turn in exchange for the Oracle taking 5 damage instead. A Paladin or negative energy-healed Antipaladin can heal themselves as a swift action, allowing them to heal while also taking part in combat.
Additionally, this Antipaladin took the archetype Dread Vanguard, which gives up spells (fine by me – I want this build as simple as possible to play, since I’m the GM) in exchange for the power to create an aura of morale bonuses. At level 8 (the campaign is at level 9) it also grants Fast Healing 3 to all allies as well as the Antipaladin. So the party is effectively healing 8 hp per turn in the middle of combat with just one turn of set-up.
I think the time I have most enjoyed being straight up Evil with an E, was as a drow necromancer. I got to do all the fun necromancer things that I wanted, both flooding the map with a horde of weak skeletons, and trampling it with one huge undead monstrosity.
Twice I even got to essentially make small “encounters” similar to one that a more traditional adventure party might run into.
The first time we were in a cave and noticed that this gnome patrol was digging their way towards us, so we distributed my skeleton army around the room in a way very reminiscent to how one might find them after kicking in the proverbial door.
The other time after we had attacked and taken over a base, at which point I had switched to the huge undead monstrosity. I used magic to repair the hole in the wall where said monstrosity had smashed it way in, thus recreating one of my own pet-peeves, the monster that is far to big to get through any of the doors into the dungeon room it is in.
That was great fun.