Evil Campaign

Ok, i have a plan. pic unrelated
We are going to infilitrate the elven palace.
Then we're going to find the elven princess.
And then we're going to tell her that her ears are too fat and her pastries taste awful!
And then we run away while she's crying

...

In a modern superhero campaign I wanted to play a supervillain dentist. He was going to rob the city bank and treasury of all of their quartrrs so children would stop knocking their teeth out for tooth fairy money. He was also going to blow up the local coca cola bottling plant so that way children would stop rotting their teeth away, and drink a healthy beverage like water. He was also going to attempt to steal everyones old awful needing to be replaced tooth brushes with new dentist approved high quality ones... in (gasp!) awful fluorescent colors!!!

Best advice I can give you is sit down beforehand and tell your players exactly what you want to run. Make sure that shit is as clear as day and that they all want to play it.

Villain campaigns are one of the easiest game types to have every player wanting a different thing, and having Grimscythe The Edgelord alongside Bonator The Boneless is going to lead to at least one disappointed player.

I run one with my buddies in 5e.

Rules are
>you each select a group monsters whose challenge rating equals
>you must work together to take over/ destroy the world
>no leveling up, just acquire more henchmen/loot

Tons of fun, and easy for noobs to join in and out

Challenge rating of 10*

I'm hearing a horde of goblins is the answer

So, ineffectual saturday morning cartoon villainy, rather than actual villainy?

Honestly, if you want to play the bad guy, you're better off not 'playing'. DM. Run the game. Then you get to play the villain. Not just 'a' villain, THE villain. The one making the heroes react. The big bad guy, the threat to the world, the one who gets the huge armies and who discards game balance and even rules-as-written in favour of drama.

Hell, take Skeletor as an example. Big evil guy, minions. No players would agree to be mere minions, and it would break down in OOC bickering instead of IC plotting and scheming.
The Masters of the Universe are all equal. They have no rank, they have no authority over each other, and they debate things even as they happen. They're the PCs. They're the Good Guys. They play by the rules because they're Good.

Evil campaigns don't work because evil requires a grand vision. Hitler would not have been a threat if he was instead four guys constantly bickering and trying to one-up each other. He was one man with a grand vision, an ideology, and a war machine to back it up.

This. Saturday morning villains are petty and vain to a fucking fault. Over-the-top evil. Don't pluck the baby from it's mother's arms, kill it, and then rape it and the mother. That's just brutality. No, true evil is plucking the baby from it's mother's arms, stealing it's bottle, making it cry, handing it back to the mother, and then emptying the bottle over the mother's head and laughing in her face. Why is that more evil? Because you can do it again. Stalk her, do it every day for a month until she's a nervous quivering wreck and the baby is terrified of you. Then one day you just... Don't. You walk on by. You don't show up. Life returns to normal.

This works too. The plotting, scheming minions, the generals at each other's throats, the lackeys played off against each other so as not to gain too much individual power and threaten the villain.

Not a terrible choice. if it has a challenge rating of 0, I allowed them to take 16 a challenge rating. 160 baboons is a good start to any evil army and a player chose it as such

I have an idea for this.

The 'heroes' are the diminutive minion lieutenants of the kingdom's Dark Lord, a terrifying sorcerer who has essentially held the entire realm hostage for years while demanding tribute of food and resources every once in a while.

One day, they find that the Dark Lord has tripped on his cape down his ominous black obsidian staircase and broken his neck.
The minions, investigating the Dark Lord's secret inner sanctum, discover that the Dark Lord has all along been a relatively low level illusionist or magician who started off as a bid to scare people off of his land, before things got out of his control to the point of absurdity and he had no choice but to continue or risk annihilation.

Now they must take on the mantle of the Dark Lord, learning whatever they can from their predecessor's dusty novice tomes and outwitting curious adventurers, allied evil empires and the pious crusaders of the Empire.

Anybody ever ran with characters who essentially bluffed their way through increasingly complicated situations?

I've got a question, Mr King of the Sea! How's the wife and kids?

A few years after you stop tormenting the mother in question, she's out having a meal with her young child. The child doesn't recognise you, but the mother is overcome with fury at seeing you. The child doesn't understand. Nobody in the restaurant understands why this madwoman is ranting and raving and screaming. You call the police and have her hauled off and thrown into a cell to have her sanity questioned. And you walk away, leaving a small child doubting it's mother, and a woman questioning her own sanity.

> 160 magically-commanded baboons
Truly, a terrifying force to descend on a small town. Especially if they're undead, or breed more.

This tempts me to run a campaign with a necromancer as the villain. His undead army sweeps through towns and villages for no reason other than to steal the food for their living generals and to increase their numbers with the populace. The cities start to starve even before the force arrives at their walls and simply swarms over the top.
The heroes have to fight their way through armies of low-level skeletons, through to the honour guard of higher-level undead and large monster skeletons to fight the generals in an arena formed in the middle of the battle, the skeletons forming a mostly-silent audience and wall, as the battle continues around the fight.

Maybe the invading force occupies; undead livestock and skeletonised farmers working the land to produce food they don't need to support monsters and generals. Mines worked constantly by skeleton miners, ore hauled out by zombie pit ponies, and hauled along by undead horses to the forges.
A kingdom of the undead would be far more efficient than the living, and able to churn out anything faster than the living, at least on the short term.

For the long-term view, the undead can't replenish their numbers and need to either raid, or have a population kept around solely to breed more bodies for the undead, living in a virtual paradise aside from anyone over a certain age being taken to join the hordes.

A population kept in what is effectively paradise; every need met by the undead, every whim catered for, nothing to do but work on the arts and breed more children for the skeletons hordes. The living have no idea where the elders go, and even willingly walk out to the procession stations to graduate from their old life.
The easiest way to stem the tide of the undead is to slaughter a population of innocents who have no idea of the evils being wrought in their names, and smash the infrastructure keeping them alive.

An easy way to make your players focus on the main plot is to have the villain call them up every 5 minutes and call them all jerks. This is why a good GM always practices their Skeletor voice.

>>Henchmen Campaign
I have always wanted this.

Someone should make a cartoon villain RPG called, Moustache: the Twiddling

This.
The players are like Beastman, Evil-Lynn and Tri-clops and the GM controls the Skeletor-like evil, powerful but incredibly useless mastermind/overlord who blames all his failures on his henchmen and regularly blasts them with various energies and punishments.

Take some cues from The Monarch/venture brothers. The Monarch himself is interesting as a villain sort of character but the henchmen and how the world works by just kind of accepting this is a thing.

>The henchman report that they have placed at least 2 fish in the beds of every citizen
"Oh they're sleepin' with the fishes now, boss. We got 'em real good."

Better Angels by Greg Stolze is a good spin on this, and while its intended for Superhero play you could easily adapt it to Masters of the Universe style fantasy. You play as normal people who have had a demon grafted to their souls. The demon is very powerful and lives to cause mayhem, but can be placated by performing outlandish, attention grabbing and, most importantly, totally ineffective acts of Super-villainy. Your opponents could be people with Angels bound to them doing something very similar to you but for the 'other' side, or bad people who are taking full advantage of their new powers and are totally in synch with their new friends

The twist is that each player's demon side is played by another player at the table, and constantly pushes for more control. Giving into the demon makes you much more powerful, but also is far more likely to make sure the demon takes your soul.

In one con I was in the presenter on differnt types of campaign suggsted a game where the players are all henchmen of a powerful lich overlord, who'se gone completely senile over the millenias. You can't get rid of him since he's still an incredibly powerful sorcerer and would just resurrect after getting killed, so the PCs have to alternate between carrying out his evil plans, reminding him what said evil plan actually entailed (clever players could present their own plans to him as his own, effectively running the show form behind the scenes, at least until he has a moment of lucidy and notices he's being played), and doing inane things like trying to find the keys to lich's inner sanctum that he misplaced somewhere.

*Twirling

>Sir Bearington

I feel like what you just described has gotta be a book somewhere.

I've always wanted to play an Evil campaign as a tax collector, but that does kinda sound like its own sort of edge.