jason maness's page

As a DM I have to say that if your DM is using powerful monster feats in a low to mid level stages of the campaign he's making a mistake. The stats as they are where created to give the player a challenge at their curent level. These additional power feats for monster where designed for DM's to employ as their there players characters get into the higher levels and creating challenging encounters for them gets more difficult with out being stagnate. Once a group reaches level 17 fighting dragons and extra large undead all the time gets boring, but coming up against a grillion (which they encountered way back at level 5) and not expecting it to be much of problem, they in for a supprize when it rips aparts one of their teammates, thus adding supprize and interest by being able to mix up the creatures which can do some real damage to the party. Spicy!

Personaly I don't think that Dungeon should print evil campaigns in there magazine, mostly because it is too accessable to minors. Younger kids are not experienced enough in the real world to be able to cope with the things that would be experienced in an evil campaign, Nuff said.
Out side of the magazine however, I would like to see some web enhancements for sorce information about running an evil campaign both for the players and the DM's. Web enhancements would also be a good tool for publishing evil campaigns, and additonal information that may be used to convert magazine publication. For the most part the "Book of Vile Darkness" gives DM's just about every thing they will need to run an evil campaign, of course some expounding would nice to see, in the suggested form of web enhancements of course.

Last year while I was in Iraq I ran dual sided campaign. It started off as a good aligned campaign with the adventurers set on a mission to thwart an evil cults attempt at resurecting a set of anceint evil deities. The group i was DMing consisted of eight players. Some of the players where having personal problems with eachother and I was having problems keeping the game interesting with such a powerful group. Later on some of the players characters starting doing questionalble things along the gaming sessions, so I came up with a way to deal with my problems, I split up the group. The players who were running their characters as evil turned to be agents for the cult who had infiltrated the group. I took them and gathered a couple of people who had to play in the beging and started running them as main atagonist of the good group. This evil group had its own agenda of furthing the resurection of the evil deities, and thwarting the advancements of the good group. In the end everyone had a good time, and the most memorable points of the game where when the two groups ended up in the same place at the same time, this allowed for me to just sit back and enjoy the a truely free form of roll playing as these two groups faught it out. To say it plainly running an evil campaign was great fun for me as well as those who played the evil characters.