Evil Adventures: Support for BoVD and Champions of Ruin

[Ladislaus]

I read some D&D gamers' opinions on various message boards stating their opposition to seeing "evil" adventures printed in Dungeon magazine. However, as a D&D gamer who has been around since the original red, boxed Basic Set, I know it wouldn't offend my sensibilities to see an evil adventure in print. Heck, some of the more famous (and popular) stories involve the pursuit of evil as a major motivating force (e.g., Star Wars). Time-and-time again stories revolving around an evil--or at least, morally ambiguous--character have been successful.

That said, I do not advocate seeing anything tasteless or blatantly offensive pawned off as an "evil" adventure in print. (And I would strongly agree with the Paizo staff for filtering such material out.) However, an evil party-based story could be as complex and motivating as the best "good" adventure.

For those gaming groups that would like to avoid an evil adventure, the choice is easy. Simply exercise your free will and choose not to use the material. Many Dungeon magazine aficionados need to "pass" on an adventure for one reason or another, many times because simply playing through three adventures a month is not realistic. (As a DM of a group that meets once-a-week, I know there is no way that we could play through 3 adventures a month.)

Finally, if Paizo Publishing supports D&D as a product line (...and they do a good job at that...), then would it not be reasonable to think that supporting such products like the Book of Vile Darkness and the new, Champions of Ruin would also be appropriate? Perhaps, Paizo could limit "evil" adventures to 1 or 2 a year, but I think gamers wouldn't mind taking a walk on the "evil" side once and a while.

I would like to hear from the Paizo staff as well as my fellow gamers to see how they feel about this topic. Be well, and happy gaming!

[Callum Finlayson]

It's often easier to add a flavour to a dish than to take it out -- similarly it's generally easier to "taint" a normal adventure with BoVD material than it is to cleanse a BoVD adventure to suit a non-vile campaign.

That isn't to say that all adventures should be generic and middle of the road of course, but we already see a lot of specialisation in D&D both in rules and settings that limit the ready suitability of modules to most groups -- whether they are "psionic" adventures, or "Ebberon" adventures, or "vile" adventures it takes more work to make these into generic/core adventures than it would to take something generic/core and make it psionic/Ebberon/vile/whatever.

What is it that you envision an evil adventure adding? Are you looking for adventures where the PCs are evil, or one where the setting/theme is particularly "vile"? WotC got a bit of grief over BoVD, the Dragon supplement, and the Porphyry House Horror in Dungeon, and it's not really a case of choosing to ignore the material -- WotC's target demographics are noticeably different to those of TSR a decade ago, and I suspect WotC/Paizo would be very cautious about a non-trivial amount of evil material in Dungeon/Dragon.

Should they (WotC or Paizo) put out an "evil adventures" supplement of half a dozen scenarios for evil parties or with particularly vile premises? Perhaps, but I don't think the place for such adventures is in Dungeon, and I suspect that if they did publish such a supplement it wouldn't sell well enough.

[Yamo]

Actually support books like Champions of Ruin? Don't be ridiculous! WotC can publish game books about being evil, but adventure support for them would clearly RUIN TEH GAME!!! OH NOES!!!!

[Absinth]

I don't think that it would be a big afford to change existing adventures to suit an evil group of characters. The thing that would be different would be the motivation of the characters and not much else. Instead of saving the town just for the good in it a GM has to come up with more selfish reasons for the characters to take on the quest. They don't want to rescue the princess from the dragon because they think it's bad, they just do it to sacrifice her to their evil gods....;)
The goals are different but the adventures themselves could mostly stay the same.
Just look at the 'Whispering Cairn' f.e. . If i'd run it for a group of evil characters i wouldn't change that much. The fact that they won't be able to rely on the authorities when getting in trouble would be an interesting twist or encounters with classic good NPC's like paladins and such (okay, there aren't really good people in Diamond Lake).
I really can't imagine how such an adventure should be drastically different from the usual good vs. evil-stuff.

[Callum Finlayson]

To a great extent it would likely depend on the party's/DM's take on "what is 'evil' in this game", in particular for groups that don't (either conciously or subconciously) play alignment in the moral absolution terms the rulebooks employ. I'd suspect that any group role-playing in a moral environment other than it's natural one is likely to have plenty of digressions on moral philosophy/value theory.

It may come down to the evil characters motivation/philosophy, and certainly I've long held that an intelligent LE character is in general far less disruptive to a "normal" party than a CN one, and that a character who's evil actions are motivated by essentially selfish desires and immediate rewards attributable to those actions (selfish-evil thieves) is often much more manageable than one who believes in greater "virtues" associated with the commission of acts in the name of Evil (big-Evil clerics).

Remind your players, in their consideration of their character concepts, personalities & backgrounds, that evil dosn't mean sociopathic per se, any more than good necessarily means nice, lawfull fair, or chaotic random.

The bulk of adventures are relatively alignment-neutral (though notably the bulk of those that aren't are more good-friendly) and you just need to consider why a particular motive would work for your characters -- if you're trying to rescue a damsel in distress then there are any number of reasons why big-Evil characters would be involved and plenty more why selfish-evil ones would.

One thing I would be inclined to do with any evil characters, whether big-Evil or selfish-evil, is to try to avoid chaotic and low INT/WIS/CHA ones. The average high INT/WIS/CHA LE wizard is a *lot* for functional in any society (even an evil one) than a low INT/WIS/CHA barbarian/cleric of Erythnul!

[trellian]

I wouldn't mind seeing a one-shot evil adventure or even a campaign arc where the PCs goal is something sinister, and their foes are paladins, good clerics, maybe even good dragons and celestials.

[Marc Chin]

Putting a published adventure into an Evil campaign, you have to work the motivations of the Evil party into the plot, or they simply will have no interest in it.

- Save the town? Forget it.
- Prevent a villain from completing a horriffic ceremony? They'll join the bad guy.
- Find the cause of a mysterious malady on the land? Doesn't pay as much as robbery.

The material itself is certainly adjustable, but many times, the story hook isn't 'big' enough to motivate an Evil party into action - most times, you have to rely on the prospect of piles of gold, power, or magic items.

I think what some people would like to see are story lines specifically tailored for an Evil party, that would involve overcoming various Good-aligned NPCs and encounters and would involve the "bad guys winning" - or even losing but getting away with some other gain...

But considering the flak that Paizo/WoTC got over the BoVD and the 'Porphyry House Horror', I seriously doubt that the publishing of further content like that will ever happen.

One possible solution: Create a Dungeon spinoff magazine, strictly and clearly labelled as Adult content, with adult material...perhaps only two or three issues per year. Hell - stock it next to the girly magazines with a brown paper wrapper!

Hmmmm... I smell entrepreneurship......

M

[Callum Finlayson]

Marc Chin wrote:

Putting a published adventure into an Evil campaign, you have to work the motivations of the Evil party into the plot, or they simply will have no interest in it.

- Save the town? Forget it.
- Prevent a villain from completing a horriffic ceremony? They'll join the bad guy.
- Find the cause of a mysterious malady on the land? Doesn't pay as much as robbery.

Why wouldn't these be suitable motives for a party of evil adventurers? Whether they are evil for selfish reasons or evil for big-picture supernatural Evil reasons, there are going to be plenty of reasons why an evil party might strive to save the town/disrupt a horrific ceremony/cure a plague.

As before, "evil" even of the big-picture gods-of-evil variety dosn't necessarily mean Texas Chainsaw Massacre grade sociopaths.

From a purely self-motivated perspective greed and selfishness work for all three of the ideas you mention, and are perfectly valid motivations:

Save the town -- straight forward piles of cash, debt & gratitude for saving their wretched butts, enough goodwill to coverup a few indescretions.

Stop the ceremony -- either reward for stopping this particular baddy, or (for arguments sake) the ritual requires various valuable components that you'd much rather were in your pockets.

Mysterious malady -- reward (robbery pays better??? Than curing a kingdom of a plague? One that infected the king's only son? Where on earth are you planning on robbing?! :) ) or maybe you're infected & curing the rest of the country is just a side effect of stopping the magical malady that's affected you.

Other motives may be:
Save the town -- this is *my* town, I was born here, I grew up here, you're not having it. I may not particularly care about my next door neighbour losing the town he lives in, but fortunately for him it happens to be the town that I live in too. Or where my mum/girlfriend/favourite painter lives (just because you're evil it dosn't mean you hate everyone else, you just need a reason to like them more than the random mindless sheep who make up most of the populace)

Stop the ceremony -- "What!? the princess has been kidnapped and is to be sacrificed to Eryhtnul?! No! We must rescue her so that we may fulfil the prophecy in which she is sacrificed to Hextor!". Or perhaps rather than the villain in question binding a particular demon to his service you want to take over the ceremony and bind it to your own service. The necromancer plans to raise a legion of undead to march on Waterdeep? Not likely, those are *my* corpses and I need them for my assault on Silverymoon.

Mysterious malady -- A magical blight that somehow only afflicts the denizens of a particular kingdom, eh? If I could understand how it worked I might be able to modify it's effect and finally rid this land of those wretched elf-scum.

You're quite right that motivation is vital, and I'm not saying that there aren't a couple of problems, but there are just as many motives for evil folk as there are for good, they may just need a little playing with to get to work.

Marc Chin wrote:

One possible solution: Create a Dungeon spinoff magazine, strictly and clearly labelled as Adult content, with adult material...perhaps only two or three issues per year. Hell - stock it next to the girly magazines with a brown paper wrapper!

LOL! Good luck :)