How do I run an Evil Campaign without letting it become CRAAAAAWWLIN IN YOUR SKIIIIIN levels of edgy...

How do I run an Evil Campaign without letting it become CRAAAAAWWLIN IN YOUR SKIIIIIN levels of edgy? Is the whole thing supposed to be edgy or cringey, wacky and just for fun?

Have mature players

This.

Or, if the players are up for it, go the opposite direction. Have them be cartoony super villains for fun.

In a more serious evil campaign, have a session zero to really flesh out these evil characters and give them all a reason for wanting to work together, and screen everyone to make sure they're not being cringey.

You serve something evil. The Tyrant, an evil god, or you're all monster races. You spread evil and misery wherever you go, but you are in total control of yourselves. The system of power that has made you what you are is evil, but you can move within the confines of your system. You can ensure a innocent young girl you capture is not put into sexual slavery, but instead given another role such as a preistess or let to live a relatively normal life in a conquered land. You can decide to smash and destroy the idols of your enemies, or treat them with respect while dismantling them, burying them in silent tribute to those Gods. They will hate you for destroying their religious alters, but if Gods know anything it would be respect.

>Have them be cartoony super villains for fun.
This. They're not supervillains, they're INTREPID MEN OF SCIENCE UNBOUND BY PETTY MORALITY. They don't murder people, they FIRE THE DOOOOOM LAAAASER!!!! Everyone acts as campy and hammy as possible until Superior Man shows up with his death protection pills and his death ray re-limiter and foils their plot and tosses them into a cardboard prison while smugly quipping with his worryingly sexualized Boy Wonder. The PCs naturally plot to escape and murder that smug sonofabitch, and the campaign flows from there.

Well first of all you gotta talk to the players, if you dont wanna do just a colour swap of heroes/bbeg you're probably gonna end up with a much more player driven campaign.

So Sit down, talk to them and see if they are up for the idea and if they are: Talk some more, why are the party together, whats their plan and goal? And I cannot stress this enough: Why are they cooperating? Is there a leader calling the shots while the others are the lieutenants or if they are an alliance of equals who vote over shit (with all the politicing, bribery and blackmail that entails, good fun) etc etc

Then once you have the basics laid out before you, do what every gm does and wing it from there while pretending you planned out everything from the get-go

Well first of all, don't be villains for the sake of being villains or be an asshole for the sake of being an immoral asshole, those are almost always terrible characters. Have your players think up of actual reasons for doing the terrible shit that they do. Having a sadistic or psychopathic character is fine, even fun, but try to get the players to be more than just villains. The best villainous characters always have at least a little grey to their character.

Are the players going to control 1 character each or entire organizations that are backing up a main evil character.

>have a session zero to really flesh out these evil characters and give them all a reason for wanting to work together
We're gonna be looking for pieces of Vecna a la Steel Ball Run and we still don't know if we're reviving him or not.

>Have your players think up of actual reasons for doing the terrible shit that they do
Will take this into consideration. I hate evil for evil's sake.

1 character each

Let them be professional evil.
They can serve an evil organization or an empire.

Just have them remove political opponents and freethinkers. Evil deed - good reason.

Go over the top.
>MEANWHILE, IN HALL OF DOOM

>CRAAAAAWWLIN IN YOUR SKIIIIIN
No, no, no.
You want the YOU FAGGOT, YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT IT ALL ALONE edgy, or maybe ANOTHER DISTURBING CREATION FROM THE MIND OF ONE SICK ANIMAL kind.
If your players are real good you can let them in on the COLOR CODED BLASPHEMY or maybe even HE HAD A LOT TO SAY, HE HAD A LOTTA NOTHING TO SAY edge, but only if they prove worthy.

>How do I run an Evil Campaign without letting it become CRAAAAAWWLIN IN YOUR SKIIIIIN levels of edgy?

Ask the players what the want to accomplish.

People (at least from my perspective) do evil things because they want something, they want to protect something, they want to otherwise accomplish a goal, but aren't afraid to do so at the expense of others or are otherwise willing to take it perhaps a "little too far".

Evil campaigns typically fall apart because PC's want to be evil for the sake of being "evil" and that sort of thing has no lasting substance. They can be 'fun', but they'll never be GREAT.

This is a good time, right here.

Running a survival style game. They dwell in a tribe of marginalized monsters, dangerously close to highly settled and patrolled lands. A sizable party of adventurers has recently shown up in town, there to take up a still active bounty on (insert party's monster race here) heads. Your tribe has devolved to near stone-age level from years of lost battles, and most of the skilled warriors and laborers abandoned your part of the tribe some time ago. The chief is a coward, but a paranoid and careful coward who bribed all those with the clout and skill to challenge him to instead defend him.
What do you do?

An important concept is 'setting the norms'.

I have difficulty articulating what I REALLY want to say here, but
"When everyone is vampires, NO ONE is vampires."
You may be able to engineer a very dark story by keeping EVERYONE involved as human possible, where the drama will come all the more human.

Do you mean, like, everyone is trying to be a sympathetic villain, and since everyone is comparing themselves to each other, everyone comes of as not so bad compared to the rest of the bunch?

By not trying to justify evil practices. You can't justify some things, so just fucking do it and even have people acknowledge that their actions are inexcusable

Make it metal as fuck.

They're a legion of black necromancers who worship demons and fight monsters that look like Cthulhu fucked a topographic map of Afghanistan, and they do it by raising the dead to ride legions of damned souls into battle.

You can even do this in a serious setting if you handwave enough. Look at 40k: Basically any campaign in that setting would be an evil campaign anywhere else. But it's metal as fuck so it doesn't come off as edgy.

Evil campaign implies everyone in the group is looking for number one but the old saying goes is divided we fall. So your party of criminals, bandits, mages practicing forbidden arts and damned cults where only through the suffering others do you prosper.

Working around that you want a setting where everyone has a personal agenda that they have to fulfill and some are in conflict with another member's agenda and make it clear failure means death or imprisonment. So you got these conflict of ideals as they are tasked with asserting a tyrant's authority on defiant rebels, deciding if a traitor should be hung or be pressed into service or to rape a woman to boost the morale of the ones with worldly desires or to offer her virgin soul to the dark gods in a manner that you cant even fuck the corpse.

If you want to run it straight, you have to make sure your players make proper evil characters. Basically, they need to have evil ambitions, but no major justifications or motives behind these ambitions.

The Sith from Star Wars are a good example of this. They seek power, ostensibly for freedom, but they get less and less free the more power they get. Their emotions get more and more stunted, they have to be wary of more and more betrayal, and they end up with fewer and fewer interpersonal relationships.
But, they make great villains.

If they have more defined motivations, you will find that they will naturally become less evil and more good/neutral. This isn't necesarily a bad thing, as an a-moral character is just about as good as an i-moral character in an evil campaign, but it presents more complications for you, the GM.
Basically, your players will end up being unable to do shit like kill innocent kids (among other things) without feeling bad. You need to make sure that your evil charactes spend most of their time opposing other evil characters.

Actually, now that I think about it, make all of your antagonists evil, regardless of the characters. It helps ease the players in.

Just don't make the mistakes of making all their enemies even more evil (nothing ruins an evil campaign faster than being forced to fight off the even more evil hordes of some ancient demon unless the end goal is to bind the demon to the fighters sword as a relic of power)

Well that is thw point of an evil campaign is to make sure you are willing to kill a child for trying to escape a slave caravan to enforce the ideal that the rest are expendable

Exactly. And you need those slaves to work the mines so you can support your hobgoblin army and defeat the Witch King of Amun'shazav. Which is why you need to make extra sure your players are willing to do that.

Be saturday morning cartoon villains of the 1980's like Skeletor. Be Moustache Twirling Evil or alternatively be Hector con Carne. Or be Aku?

>40k
>Doesn't come off as edgy.

Was self-awareness your dump stat?