Did you ever run that Evil campaign? How did it go?

Did you ever run that Evil campaign? How did it go?

Twice.
Went well.
Some characters died.

Story time?

yes
bad
city burned down while we fled the country, GM was obviously angered that we had messed up his campaign, but instead just pushed us the the next plot instead

and after fleeing the next town, with one of our teammembers hanging, we proceeded and ruined the next plotline aswell, in the middle of a session.

so the dm, now cought completely off-guard, quickly hammered together a plot to keep us going, we fucked it up and locked us into a plan that would "take anywhere from months to years to come into fruition", at that time the GM gave up.

I ran a few. First one was when i was a teenager. We randomly murdered civillians and were super evil and it went horrible. We quit because it was boring and disturbing.

Next one were two evil characters in ravenloft. Again murderhobo's. Lasted one session in where twe players fought, one died and it ended because it was stupid.

A little later in life we played a game in where i was a city guard and the other player the thieves guild leader. Went on for a while untill I discovered his secret and killed him. Campaign ended there.

Last one was one in where I dm'ed a group of dark elves and let only one player make a female cleric of two levels higher. I discussed it with the players and explained that not listening to her is paramount to a death scentence. We played for two years until the necromancer tried to assasinate the cleric, was swarmed by the party and died. He made a new character wich was also female and a munchkin and the dynamic was gone, party disbanded.

If you want to have a party of evil characters, make one more powerfull than the others, give them outward pressure to stick together and play with people who are not in any way murderhobo's but play for roleplaying and atmosphere.

I have had two different groups express a desire to run an evil campaign. Both died after one or two sessions.

One of them had a guy who loved being the secret evil character in the main campaign play as a secret good guy in the evil campaign. It was needlessly shoehorned in and just added a lot of him going off to do stuff solo from the rest of the group like warn people in a town we were about to raze to the ground or return to heal some of the wounded. He got called out on it, the party killed him, and the group fell apart.

The other one had a problem of five kinds of evil with no unifying goal to overshadow individual evil ambitions. Basically no one could agree what they wanted to accomplish and the GM was bad at finding a guiding "quest" for evil folk even though there are dozens of ways to force unlikely allies together.

It just takes a different approach that both players and GMs seem to have trouble grappling with.

One of my longest running campaigns, and best, was an evil campaign. Unfortunately life and scheduling killed it pretty hardcore.

We do now. We're Slaaneshi cultists in Nuln. Goes really well because it is a well prepared investigation meets eldritch horror campaign, and the players are very immersive and really do their best for everyone to have fun.

did a spider clan campaign once

went pretty well, all the players with their own twisted interpretations of honor
(but the one guy who played his Chuda as a murderscientist)

9 out of 10 times, an evil campaign is basically Neutral Edgy, not really evil. We tried sometimes, it never work, because it is usually murderhobo or just "I am secretely evil and clever".
However, we do have one player that roll pretty much only Face characters (his social skills "bleed" into real life, or maybe they "bleed" into the game, we're not sure, he is that cool), that we forbid of playing Yuan-ti because he invariably turn the entire campaign horrifyingly evil so fast that it is ridiculous, even if it wasn't evil in the first place.
It only happens when he is an Yuan-ti, however. Even in evil campaigns he is "mildly evil", not "balls to the wall Sith Lord". But when he rolls an Yuan-ti, shit gets real. Even if his Yuan-ti is good aligned, he devolves fast to evil like it was his birthright (then again, Yuan-ti, so yeah, it kinda is).
He seduces, lie and manipulate NPCs of all kind, start cults, sacrife pregnant women, make temporary horrifying deals with devils to attain resources or power, indulce alchemical-fueled rampages. He once staged a coup by manipulating the rest of the party (US, he played US) to do it for him, while at the same time tricked the paladin into killing lawful good NPCs making him fall; then, using his social skills he convinced the Paladin that the devil he had summoned would make him "free of all boundaries, by turning him into justice incarnate".
Have you ever saw a Paladin falling and becoming a Blackguard during the game? Not because player agency of the Paladin's player or the DM interference, but because another player shitted everywhere to make it possible? I have, and it was awful, just awful.
It's a "I take the white knight hostage, catter for his health and well being for forty years, and then release him to his wife, who is now married with another man, having children and grandchildren of her own" evil.
And it only happens when he is Yuan-ti. There is something about snakes that makes this guy flips!

It was an ultra high fantasy evil campaign (in D&D terms, epic level) where we formed a cabal of omnicidal madmen in an alliance to bring the end of all life.
Kooky and fun when we all got into it. It started with super powered evil characters demolishing cities and starting terrible wars, and ended when the players died in the final battle against the god of life who was overtuned and basically killed one of them each turn. The DM fluffed the epilogue as weakening the god of life sufficiently for the god of death to make his move and achieve an ultimate victory.

mmmmh

Kinda yes, kinda no. I don't actually use alignment but the players' morality is extremely dodgy anyway. So every campaign, I guess

jesus christ

exactly. you can also play tyranny to see how and why fucked up people stick together. the average players simply don't see the risk in their behavior murders each other thou.

Never ran one, but I played in one.
Went pretty well until a near TPK left me as the only survivor (turns out that rushing into a room with 4 Mind Flayers is a bad idea when one of them almost handed you your ass an hour ago BUT WHO COULD HAVE FUCKING GUESSED THAT, MR. "I DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE GROUP?") and the other players rolled up only neutral characters, leaving me as the only evil one in the bunch. Long story short they made it clear that they were ready to turn on me in a heartbeat so I ran away, summoned my dark god, and killed everybody.

I ran Warhammer fantasy roleplay campaign that went evil fast. The campaign started off good, the party saved a woman and her girl from a witch hunter because the witch hunter said she had a deformity that was the mark of chaos. (she did)

Anyway, that put them against the law, and then warpstone hunting straight up corrupted them. The wood elf life mage turned into a twisted Dryad of death, the hunter was afflicted with lycanthropy, tamed a cave bear as his mount (which later was infected with nurgles rot), and the warrior that was kinda shady to begin with ended up implanting warpstone in his body and later became a chaos warrior.

We started a new group in the same world/timeline, this time they are actually good, and I plan on having their old characters be the "end bosses" but I have no idea how they will defeat them.

I ran one that has lasted quite a while. I didn't intend it as an evil campaign but my players are edgelords / randumbs and so it turned out that way. In the end though it ended up being one of my favorite campaigns because of the rollercoaster disaster of a plot.

The characters were:
>a psionics guy who did shapeshifting and summoning, was really into dinosaurs
>a sharpshooter / swashbuckler type with kleptomania and psychopathic urges
>(later on) a priest of war, a few other non-evil characters that ended up dying or leaving the group, finally replaced by a bandit who wanted to rack up as much notoriety as possible
>(much later) they met a witch who lived alone in the woods, who decided to travel with the party because she was bored. She was deluded in a similar way to the psionics guy, in that she didn't see non-plants as worth caring about, so she felt no guilt blowing them to pieces with her alchemical/botany fire magic.

The result was a weird campaign.
>quest to cure father of disease
>followed by characters fighting gnoll settlement
>followed by characters stealing airship from gnoll settlement after a wild wagon chase up the mountain
>followed by characters agreeing to help an anarchist overthrow the government in return for a better airship from the scrapyards he had control of
>followed by them killing him when he turned out to be a bigger dick than the original government
>followed by them going to investigate the "ancient evil" storyline, and one of them drinking a transformation potion for no good reason and dying
>followed by them waging war on orcs and gnolls back home, then waging war on the kingdom
>followed by psionics guy going back to his hometown with a dinosaur army and slaughtering half of them because they had killed his pet dinosaur when he was young
>followed by them going north to escape the entire nation's fleet after them, only to run into a former party member (PC turned NPC) who had been contracted to kill them
It's a great campaign.

Badly. They were supposed to be a gang of monsters partially running this dungeon full of a rare type of magical crystal, gathering minions, feeding off the crystal emanations, fighting adventurers, that kind of thing.

It was almost immediately derailed by one player's abject stupidity, being unable to grasp that he failed an intimidate roll and another monster in this pit was asking for a bribe to allow him onto the NPC's territory. Every attempt to actually work out a monster hierarchy wasn't met so much with failure as it was of blank incomprehension. And then when they were attacked by adventurers or troops, they wondered why the (mostly semi-hostile) NPC monsters wouldn't make themselves disposable minions.

Fuck those guys, I'd love to play that.

...

We did the first, serve your dark lord, but it sometime ended up a bit railroading.

I ran a campaign that basically had the characters work as expies of Arthas and his lackeys throughout the WC3 storyline.

Basically one character was predestined for some special role and everyone else was their servant, but still retained their own will and autonomy, it's just that their ultimate goal was to deliver the not!Arthas to their destiny.

As usual, after 3 sessions one of the players suddenly declared their move to another country and we abandoned a really promising campaign right as the party began their grand plan to efficiently rally peasants from multiple villages into ancient magitek factory affectionally dubbed the Skeleton Transformer

We weren't evil, per se, we were just assholes.

>tricked the paladin into killing lawful good NPCs making him fall
Please tell me you're not the DM, because that's bullshit and not how falling works.