How does one run a campaign of evil PCs? Can you even get them to cooperate?

You can do fucking evil things to all non-player NPC, nobody will care. Backstabbing the party will piss other people off and ruin the game.

An easy way is to have a strong force which gives them direction.

Mercenaries working for gold
subordanant to a greater being (King, God, one of the players)
Goblins that don't want chief to rip thier heads off.

Evil doesn't mean always in it for themselves and even when it is you can make clear paths of selfinterest that coinside with team work.

Play Shadowrun

This is how

My campaign is in a grimdark setting and the party has essentially spiraled into evil through a Cohen brothers-style chain of escalations. First a tavern argument turns into a dead thug, then the dead thug turns into a debt to the crime boss, then the debt to the crime boss turns into a dead militia captain and his family as well as a random civilian, and it's sort of carrying on that trend from there.

disturbinglly acurate

Well from what I found during a rather epic campaign of Black Crusade is to have bigger threats always pressing down on the party, reinforcing the idea of banding together with your buddies who you've been through literal hell with in order to achieve your goals.

Most of the time, they want the same thing, Heck in my game a literal fist-fight broke out between my Sorcerer and my friends Night Lord marine in a literal warzone they were infiltrating, they didn't kill or seriously maim each other either because both had the restraint to not escalate things [as they could very well kill one another and compromise the mission].

Cohesion equals success and heck even evil people can be bros or buddies, who else you gonna go out drinking with?

Think of it like this, remember the times you had to stop in-party fighting?
Now you dont have to.

I'm honestly trying to decide if Jack was made by a fucked up furry, Jack Chick's split personality, or as a major troll to all furries.

The one I was in, the party were the mid-level henchmen of an evil overlord-type that sent them on errands and missions against the "good guys." there was nothing stopping us from dicking each other over really but at the same time the quest givers we interacted with were all much more powerful miniboss-type minions and failure would not be tolerated. So there was always a self-interest-driven reason to cooperate.

>not making sure the other players are okay with the backstabbing before playing
It's not that hard.

why would an evil campain have so much backstabing each other when crooked deals and blackmail is much more fun?

Suicide Squad, or the Undersiders

What a magnificent bastard.

Now, a nice clean assassination is evil I can get behind.

I just had an year-long evil campaign that I was in end just last month. It works well if you can come up with reasons for everyone to work together. Unfortunately for you, the GM can only do so much to cultivate cooperation. If some dickbag in the party makes an assassin that will backstab his "comrades" at the drop of a hat, you're going to have a really short campaign.
If you've got competent roleplayers, though, it's actually pretty easy for the law breaking dickheads to realize that they've all got problems, and that there's safety in numbers.
As long as everyone remains useful to everyone else and accepts that they can't face the world alone, it all works out great.
And if some douchebag wizard voids his contract for the sake of a laugh, feel free to gain immortality and sacrifice the plane to an ancient knowledge devouring being. All that fancy schooling sure did save you from my warlock wrath, huh Geth?

> How does one run a campaign of evil PCs? Can you even get them to cooperate?

>Lawful Evil
Respect rank. Have a clear leader, give him a title of nobility / military rank and a middle/long term objective.

E.G.: Stop / Start a war, Set-up a church into LawGood city, find and eliminate the rightful heir of a kingdom so that the second in line gets the throne and PCs noble titles.

> Chaotic Evil
Pit PCs against each other in a pretend battle. Then make sure the leader is optimized. Then give him an extra level. Then gear him out. Then give them foes they like to hate.

Give promises of fat loot and increased personal powers that they'll compete to get.

E.G.: Pompous LG PCs that make their life hard remotely. Like through written orders they find on bounty hunters. Demon Overlord who bully them around because there's an hint of a promise for power. Vampire overlord who gives sips of the power of the curse in order to get his agenda fulfilled.

It's not that hard for a quality group.

Pleb. The only real problem when playing evil characters is that some people aren't comfortable going down the rabbit hole.

It might be your group(s).

that last line has me on full fucking tilt
If that ever happened to me, I think I'd have an aneurysm

In my experience, most campaigns are run with evil PCs.

Short-sighted selfishness tempered by camaraderie and the fact that the PCs hate everyone else more than they hate each other, and they love gold and XP to the point of extracting it, forcibly, from all the kingdoms and assorted wild animals that oppose them, or even mildly inconvenience them.

It's funny because he literally just did what serial killers do.

Usually when making evil campaigns I make it so they're part of a cult. That way they have some unifying factor that can mediate/bully cooperation.

Currently playing in one, been going for over a year now. The main reason we don't backstab each other is because we realized early on we all work together perfectly as a team, and have a common enemy/goal.

That said we still are monstrous dicks, with a dick stab Rogue, ratfolk necromancer turned Lich with undead in tow, an antipaladin who the lich turned into a frost fallen undead (totally consensual he swears) and a samurai who's probably the only one who's still not totally evil(probably).

the hilarious part is we're the ones who are supposed to save the universe from collapsing in on itself.

For Lawful Evil, you also want to see how mercenary they are to their approach. They know when a sinking ship is fast approaching is when a) They aren't being given enough say in matters or being blown off one times too many, b) Knows that there is friction between them and the closest source of authority and c) They get struck by a nasty setback that has them leaving the party with enough loot and leaving their main "voice of reason" for dead before embarking on the next ship out of the continent.

Chaotic Evil would respect strength before anything else, martial or magic. They don't take well to the mooches but will respect any form of harsh punishment.

Absolute savage

>people thinking this kind of edgy senseless evil is somehow compelling or cool

What you are attracted to is the sense of freedom that pure Id brings, but the behaviors of these individuals are self destructive and self defeating. A better villain embraces Will To Power without being completely removed of good sense, right or wrong, and the other things that make them human. It is thus all the more meaningful when they, knowing what is right and wrong, choose to do what is inhuman anyway.

Sociopaths and Psychopaths are just broken animals to be put down, nothing interesting there.

You fucking moron, we appreciate it because he was playing with a bunch of assholes who did fucked-up shit IC because muh evulz, and he decided to just play a regular serial killer because he's not shit at evil campaigns. But in the process he totally shifted the campaign focus, to the point where him committing an immoral act LEAGUES below what the other party members did probably got his character lynched by the others. It's not that the evil being indiscriminate and senseless that's the interesting thing here, but the execution and effect on the rest of the party.

I seem to have touched a nerve

You may be taking that a bit too personally

playing a serial killer straight the whole time or evil on a meta gaming scale?

the world may never know.

He's talking like a teenage philosopher, which grinds my gears.

It's a solid story with an interesting ending that has a good payoff for the time invested reading. Analysing something completely irrelevant to what makes it a good story with that kind of phrasing is an annoying thing to do.

It's a great story, but I still wonder: what would the group do after what that guy did?

No one would run a game like that so can't really say.

This is 100% accurate in my experience.
End my suffering.

>How does one run a campaign of evil PCs? Can you even get them to cooperate?
Have the PCs be the lieutenants of a powerful NPC king/warlord/super-villain.

That sort of arrangement will give some structure to the campaign, forcing the PCs to cooperate either to complete the missions their master assigns to them or to conspire to overthrow him and take power themselves.

How do I run a campaign where every character but one is a total asshole, and the one that isn't is the nicest paladin ever?

I'm doing that right now, actually. Just give them someone evil who is even more of an asshole to fight.

evil people cooperate all the time in the real world throughout history
your first problem, however, is that you are thinking in terms of 'alignments', which you must scrap entirely

They're evil villains working on behalf of the lich lord instead of good heroes working on behalf of the good wizard.

That's pretty much all you have to do. It's like playing as the evil faction in a videogame instead of the good one - it's really a crunch and slight flavor change.

One word - Sabbat.

Have them work under a powerful lord or king.
Be a band of mercenaries doing all kind of dirty job.
The idea is for them to have a common goal.

AEG8501 - Evil

>evil = stupid
Chaotic goods keep slandering us and ruining our reputation

I ran a very successful Mutants and Masterminds campaign where the players were a team of supervillains. You would be amazed at how cohesive a group can become when they know that Ultradude could swoop in and punch your head clean off if you don't plan your shit.

It's easy. Most PC's end up evil anyway unless they have something intense holding them back, like being a Paladin.

I find two ways.

>1. Make the end results of their actions end up with overall good results. They may be thoroughly bad people and do bad things in small steps but overall it is good for the world. They may start a riot, set fire to a city and personally kill thousands just by being a bunch of evil fuckwits, but in the end when they achieve their goal they have prevented a massive war that would have seen millions dead and more suffering. They pursued this goal because it was also the most rewarding course of action from even a purely selfish standpoint

>2. Don't pull punches in describing the sad and more importantly miserable situation their evil actions cause. When they need to go kill someone, they have a family. The family is unable to defend themselves but they cry and sob and the children try to sacrifice themselves instead. Do it right and the players themselves will get squeamish in a situation their characters wouldn't.

I've run two campaigns for my group recently. The first one followed the first standard, where the characters ended up evil over time but continually saved the day just because that's where the benefit was.
The current one they went in proclaiming it would be an evil campaign and for that I played up the evilness of their actions to the extent that they at times became hesitant and their characters have begun to turn over a new leaf and try to make themselves better people and productive members of society.

>playing with alignments

Don't do this. People are all selfish. They do good and evil for the same reasons - because it triggers their internal reward mechanisms.

* You're not a bunch of cunts