Can I have some examples of successful evil characters?


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While it's not Patfinder, I am currently in a 3.5e game(that ports some PF rules such as the PF skill system and some combat stuff from PF) in which the entire party is evil. We have been -experimented- on by a truely insane mad scientist, some of us by our own accord while others where prisoners of their respective states that where sold to said scientist almost as slaves. Anyway, we where loosed onto the world and now the game has become something of a free-roaming adventure where the scientist studies the "upgrades" she gave us as we put them to use for our own, sinister ends. Note that we are total strangers who have been thrust together and basically throw out into the wild. All of us are some form of evil. All of us have got along great, and are working like a true team, for two reasons. The first is, honestly, we had no other choice. After the lab we where thrown out into total wilderness with virtually no resources, and thus for most of us our only choices was "work with these strangers" or "starve to death alone in the blasted ruins of what once was a town." For a bunch of selfish SOB concerned with their own survival, the choice was obvious. Luckily, one party member was trained in survival, and another(my character) was an artificer with enough crafting skills to build the basic tools we needed and a cart, the latter of which was used to haul the obscene amount of gold and loot we found in the abandon town for when we eventually reached civilization.

Anyway, "basic survival" was the initial reason these evil, selfish strangers came together, but after the initial "we won't survive out here on our own" realization something happened...these characters actually gained other reasons to work together...or at least my character and our party swordsage(who was also the survival trained one) did. Both of them are from fairly....influential...families, that the DM ruled where based out of the same continent, the swordsage being Lawful Evil and from a family that can best be described as the Lanisters from GOT meets the Italian Mafia, and my character being from a noble clan that became heavily involved in invention/magitech/industry and is essentially the fantasy equivalent of Feudal Japanese nobility meets Zaibatsu family meets the Rockefellers/Rothschilds/Robber-barons of the Industrial revolution.

Our characters came together very easily because each sensed the potential for great...use...in the other. Both are what you could call "business minded" and both see things in terms of "use value" though the swordsage has far more "honor" about them then my character.(Think of the difference between a typical, family-first mobster and your textbook corrupt 1%er/corporate sleazeball, here.) Both of them during smalltalk found out about the other's families, and both have proven to be undoubtedly useful to the other in the field...and as a result have come to see the other as having extremely high "use value"...enough, in their minds, to actively make significant sacrifices to keep the other alive and well.

"Use value" I find is a great way for a totally selfish character, like my Hengeyoaki artificer Haruka, to actively get involved with and work with other party members, even non-evil ones. You risk your neck for your party-mates not because of friendship or altruism but because the party's other members are highly valuable tools that, when working in your favor, can allow you to accomplish and gain far more then you ever could on your own. A totally selfish evil character may not view the party fighter as a friend, but rather instead sees them as their "sword"....and the party rogue not as a brother/sister, but as a "source of income" and perhaps a "mask" as well if they have bleh-low cha/poor social skills. The party cleric/divine caster is "life insurance" while the party arcane caster is "everything else insurance." All these tools are necessary to survival as an adventurer, and as a result, you want to care for your tools and care for them well, as unlike an actual sword, or mask, or insurance policy, these tools, if not cared for properly, can turn on you...violently.

If you don't care for these tools, you WILL die as a result, whether by monsters your tools leave you at the mercy of, or by those very tools themselves. It pays to take good care of your tools....and this is a view I find can make a NE or heck even CE PC who is 100% selfish and out for #1 work in a party thats mostly good or neutral.

In case your wondering about our party for the 3.5e game, it is a LE human(?) unarmed swordsage, a NE Hengeyoaki artificer(me), a CE human rogue and a human Dread Necromancer who I believe is LE but due to the way they've been RPed so far could possibly be LN rather then feats that boost their own combat skills. The swordsage and myself are the most heavily RPed characters of the group, with the latter two being very silent in our first session, hardly speaking outside of combat. However, from the little they have RPed the dread necromancer is very much -trying- to protect/help the rest of the party, currently for reasons unknown beyond basic survival...and is being RPed almost as a neutral or even good-aligned character other then their penchant for dark magic... and the rogue, as fitting with their chaotic evil alignment, is following us around for what the sheer entertainment value of it/because he finds the rest of the party fascinating...and of course basic survival.

However, in the defense of our party, we have not had much -downtime- yet in the game seeing as we where literally thrown into wilderness(I.E. hostile territory) and basically told "have fun!" so up til now our only concerns have been A) survive and B) make it to civilization...with very little time for talking and chatting the other party members up. Well, now both of those are no longer concerns, and our next session will be almost all RP in the first town. Thus, hopefully with our help, the other two players will start to flesh out their characters more. I am very excited to see how all four develop and grow as characters in this crazy evil adventure, and look forward to the other two players getting to know their characters better now that we actually have ample opportunity for real role play with "survival mode" being over...at least for now.


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one of the better motivations that have worked for me has been much like Greed from Full Metal Alchemist -- "Those are MY people, and you are NOT taking them away from me."

That and ambivalence towards others existence. I mean yeah I could do something horrible and end everyone, but really it simply isn't worth the time and effort -- to put another way, "You literally are not worth the cost of the bullet it would take to end you."


Lawful Evil at its best

I found this while going through the messageboards, a textbook example of Lawful Evil caring deeply for something, while doing unthinkable things in order to protect it. They have a code, but cross it and you won't like seeing what's on the other side.

Grand Lodge

Ah, I remember that thread.

Grand Lodge

Oh, by the way, I no longer play with the player whose PC I killed, on a regular basis.

He did do a single session in my Kingmaker game, to play "Hassad, the uncomfortably grating racial stereotype", but luckily, no more than that.


When you put the line back as far as you can, and repeatedly point to where it is, and they still decide to cross it, well...... they pretty much deserve everything they get.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I have a chaotic evil wizard whose chaotic nature actually gets in the way of his evil nature. He was always attempting to be malicious and inflict suffering because of spite but his chaotic nature frequently distracted him from this with momentary obsessions and preoccupations and from time to time seemingly out of character attachments to other people.

Edit: So basically instead of the classic Chaotic-Evil combining and interact to magnify each other into the most unruly and vile sort of Evil, he happened to be both Chaotic and Evil, and the former got in the way of his execution of the latter.

Sczarni

I've told this story on the boards before, but in a Kingmaker campaign, I once played a LE Inquisitor of Abadar who worked out well.

During character creation, we all got to talking and decided that Kingmaker would be a good opportunity for an all-evil campaign. After all, the whole theme is that you turn several hundred acres of neutral territory into its own dominion, so "building an evil empire" seemed like the perfect cohesive goal for a band of evil adventurers. So, we ended up with an evil druid, a violent barbarian, an amoral rogue, and me.

First session rolls around, and the GM surprises us. One, another mutual friend of ours is joining the game. Two, both he and the GM missed the "evil empire" memo, and he rolled a paladin. Oops!

So, now we have a party of a paladin and four evil characters. We had all gotten kind of excited about our Dominion of Evil plan, but we also all liked this guy and were happy to have him joining the game, and didn't want to kick him out or force him to re-roll. So, we gave it a go.

The barbarian died after two sessions, the druid died after three more, and the rogue just quietly erased the "E" on his sheet and replaced it with an "N". I managed to play my character's personality, and be a solid combat contributor thanks in part to spells with the [evil] descriptor, without creating party conflict or making the paladin fall.

I did this by embracing the "cities and civilization" aspect of Abadar, and basically conflating civilization with morality. I approached the wild, untamed Stolen Lands and the bandits, backwoods hermits, and fey who inhabited it the way a paladin would react to Hell and its denizens. The ones who appeared to be of some use to a proper city, I would offer citizenship to, in the same tone of voice a paladin uses to demand surrender. I also got quite a bit of mileage out of the "interrogation" themed Inquisitor spells-- including using Confess on a creature that had been gagged just to make it suffer before the paladin butted in to play "good cop".

Eventually the GM took me aside and told me that I was playing very Lawful and hardass, but wasn't really doing anything "evil" (besides my bigotry against rural folk, the aforementioned hardline interrogation, and occasionally demanding that certain swaths of forest be burned down), and so asked me to change my alignment to LN. He agreed to let me keep casting spells with the [evil] descriptor, and strongly suggested that it was this or make the paladin fall, so I relented.

Shadow Lodge

I seem to have made up a few evil characters lately. I always try to figure out why they're evil, what they want, and how they'll maintain relationships.

In the Emerald Spire, I'm a LE syrinx arcanist; the rest of her research team having been killed, she was forced to ally with nearby Flightless because they were so much better at violence.

Nobody cared when her human disguise eventually failed, so long as she can keep casting buff spells on them. The rest of the group is "CN" and falling, playing practical jokes on Hellknights as practice for their plan to murder all of them in the fort. They mainly seem interested in the Spire for salvage, but I keep pressing them further on.

She's evil because she's snooty and racist, having written of the Flightless as "violent, gullible, sex-crazed, god-fearing bullies". She agrees with the group that enslaving one's own species is morally backward, but bought an enslaved human at an auction to prevent other humans from doing it. She is currently the only one who refuses to make him Head Trap Detector.

The Gunslinger loves filling her head and notebook with nonsense, the cleric has given up all theological debate, and the investigator stole one of her feathers while she'd been downed. We have very good group cohesion, but we've joked that, sooner or later, we're all going to convert to Rovagug. (She's staunchly a-religious, though, which winded up causing an avoidable genocide, and her temporary death that she refuses to acknowledge, just because she wanted to prove to a small population that their religion was wrong)

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