Planar Comic: Darken

You realize Zim that you just described the Forgotten Realms, right?

Well, I'm having trouble just getting past the bizarre noses...

This is really a very well realized evil-aligned campaign. All the characters are evil (well, not entirely sure about the bear, but most of them are, that's for sure). All of them, however, have very distinct -- not to mention entertaining -- personalities, and they don't manage to kill each other off by the end of the first day's adventuring. They all have something that drives them, and -- importantly for any villain -- they all have some quality that makes them seem more humane (even Gort).

They are really much more interesting to read about than "RAR! ME EVIL VILLAIN! ME SMASH! ME KICK MY DOG!" I get really tired of those. A villain who pets and takes good care of his dog (hello, Riven) is much more interesting to read about than one who kicks his dog because he's supposed to be one-dimensionally evil.

No, he's pretty clearly Lawful Evil. His meek persona causes him to seem less cruel than he is. Incidentally, I've always thought that Lawful Evil was a better fit for Drow than Chaotic Evil. I mean, everyone always says they're chaotic but most of their actions are Lawful or Neutral, and their society is way too structured to be chaotic.

I think that's partly because you are used to an alignment system that sees being evil as bad and therefore encourages characters that really should be evil to be "neutral with evil tendencies." Honestly, about a third of the neutral characters I run into -- and half of the chaotic neutral characters, really should be evil.

Remember, at the beginning of the comic, the drow in question murdered the general and took his armor for no other reason than he was peeved. Had the general been actively pursuing him, it would have been a justifiable act for a neutral character, but as it was it was just killing for the sake of spite. So yeah, evil.

From what I've gathered, evil campaigns are really hard to run. Anyone who has played an evil character can tell you how hard it is to do properly, and anyone who has played in a game with an evil character can tell you straight away that it tends to cause problems. Take all that and multiply it by four and you have a notion of how much of a pain evil campaigns can be. At lower levels they can't do anything "evil" enough, and at higher levels, there is often precious little besides Deus Ex Machina to stop them from razing every village they walk through. And that's all assuming they don't turn on each other within two play sessions.

My personal experience with evil campaigns has been limited to a couple of one-off adventures, neither of which ended particularly well (one group lost interest, the other decided they wanted to be good after all). I would be happy to run a quick one here on Planewalker if enough people showed interest, however.

One thing I've found with evil characters is that they tend to see their alignments as an excuse to get into bloody feuds with other party members. Like in any game with really diverse alignments, the best way to negate this conflict is with mature players and very strict no PvP rules.