My first thought on reading about the Adventure Path was 'Hmm, an evil Adventure Path, I can skip that!'

This was destroyed by Megan immediately signing me up for a subscription - she wants me to run it, and she wants to play it... as soon as the Player's Guide is in the hands of the other players (most away to Pennsic, in the Battle for the Debatable Lands, at the moment) she is generating an evil dwarf Witch....

She... is disturbingly gleeful at the prospect....

Aaarrrggghhh!

The Auld Grump

I sympathize. One of our GMs in rotation is running an evil campaign, to which I said "no thanks." I'm just never happy in that kind of campaign. It makes me paranoid for my character, it makes me set up everyone else, it makes me focus on the parts of the game that I dislike. So, just no fun for me.

But I get that some people just love it. Most of the people I play with, for instance.

Blech.

Steve

I'm with you on this one, Steve.

I RPG for the co-op play - I like being relaxed and sharing around my friends, not having to keep an eye out for them taking advantage of or backstabbing me. Sadly, evil campaigns (or even just evil charcters) always end up creating too much destructive PvP for my liking.

It's probably a great campaign. But unless it's with a group that will play it cooperatively, I doubt I'd enjoy it myself.

Tried that 30 years ago.. didn't work then, doubt it would work well now.

Not really sure why people gravitate to this type of gaming style other than it's something you can do "virtually" and get a way with things you could not do in real life.

Playing FO3, I tried to be evil, I tried to get that negative Karma..... I'm just not wired that way.

My eldest lost a couple of friends because of trying to game like this (probably for the best). One of them just enjoyed F*(&ing over the party WAYYYYYY too much (this spilled over into "real life" as well). Granted that can happen in a normal "non-evil" campaign, but the group seemed more about infighting that actually playing an adventure.... even though the adventures were designed for the group, though evil, to work together to accomplish the accomplish the goal ( the whole adventure theme was overthrowing the King and replacing him with a dopleganger).

I'm pretty sure it also comes down to alignment and how well a DM/GM holds characters to those alignments. A party of all CE just doesn't sound like it would work.... while all LE would (or mix of NE/LE).

Keep us up to date on how this goes Grump. Maybe you have some magic as a GM or your group has a dynamic that works for this style of campaign.

Though, from what I gather, the main plot of this path is not Evil vs. Good it is Evil vs Even More Evil!

Megan has rolled up three different characters so far... one Dwarf, one Gnome, one Halfling... the Dwarf has metamorphosed into a Magus, while the others are witches - with the Halfing specializing in pretending to be a human child....

The Auld Grump - heroes are flammable?

I'm currently in three ongoing games that all have an evil - or at least, shades-of-grey antihero - bent to them, and they're working out swimmingly. I've been the sole (chaotic) good character in an otherwise evil campaign, and it worked out moderately well (the character didn't really fit in with most of the group, other than the Chaotic Evil thief that was running with them, but no one was actively antagonistic to anyone else).

Then again, I've also played with players who take the excuse of "I'm evil!" as an excuse to try and bully and boss around the rest of the group (and had a rather spectacular explosion when my Chaotic Good scout finally said, "Enough," and attacked her after she attacked an NPC he was negotiating with out of the blue - and drew his weapon on her).

Really, it comes down to the group. If the players are mature, and can handle taking the dark path without devolving to doing things, "for the Evulz," you can have a game that goes into some very dark and mature content that your standard Hero adventures won't (and frankly shouldn't) get into. If not, then it's the sort of thing that can cost friendships and destroy long-running campaigns.

Granted, the most evil I tend to go is a Chaotic Neutral who tends to turn a blind eye to active evil going on around him (until it affects him, then he's hellbent for leather to take down those responsible).

We played an evil campaign a while back but it was an epic fail. The GM didn't properly motivate the party to work together and as evil characters are known to do it, we quickly made alliances with 1 or more other members of the party and there was lots of infighting. Nothing about the campaign motivated the party to put aside our differences to want to work together.

Plus, I also prefer the co-op play in the majority of games.

I once played a maliciously evil elven thief in a mostly good group... I snuck off frequently to create mayhem by way of notes to the DM. Town wells mysteriously poisoned, livestock slaughtered, missing children... the DM frequently just used my secret actions as adventure hooks and a lot of innocent people and/or animals faced justice for my handiwork...

In the Dark Sun campaign I was running in the early 90s, each player had four characters on their "character tree." Usually people would play their characters of similar alignment in the same party, but one night we had the most good character of the entire range of characters, and the most evil in the same group. Because we were a character personality-driven ROLEplaying group, it was inevitable that these two would clash. Violently. When that moment came, I stopped the game for an.open discussion of character vs. character combat; the whole group agreed that it was better to allow characters to kill one another for roleplaying reasons than to arbitrarily disallow such action. We then hammered out an experience point formula for what characters were worth.

In the end, the two levelled a few buildings in Nibenay before being subdued by the rest of the party (roleplaying at its finest!) and then the whole group had to work together to escape the justice of Nibenay's templars.

Actually, I thought the whole idea around "Hell's Rebels" was that you would become the heroes of the rebellion trying to free Kintargo from Chelaxian rule. So, you'll be playing (mostly) good characters in it.

But then there is going to be another AP right after this one that...somehow....let's you play the evil Chelaxians trying to undo what was accomplished in the previous AP. Or something. It's not real clear what you're going to be doing in that one, but Paizo has clearly stated that you'll be playing the bad guys in Cheliax.

At least, that's what they announced last year at Paizo Con. I didn't go this year, but my friends that went tell me there hasn't been a change to that plan.

I'm currently in a Skull and Shackles game where most of the party is evil. I'm playing a Bones Oracle who fancies herself "The Lich Queen of the Fever Sea." Only 1 PC is actually good aligned. And he thinks that my character is NOT the most evil one of the group. So, yeah, it totally works there. And you're kinda funneled into a plot line around becoming famous pirates in your own right, so it seems to work. (Then again, all of us in the group are the type that cooperates with the group to accomplish things. I wouldn't want to try this AP with some of the folks I gamed with in college, I must admit)

I'll admit that I have yet to read Hell's Rebels, but I thought that you were meant to be champions of the revolution. The big bad guy seems to be an Inquisitor of Asmodeus from what little I've read.

Very true. Neutral alignments can include a lot of stereotypical "evil" types of strategies and actions. And there's probably no reason you couldn't have actual evil PCs trying to overthrow an authority that they don't agree with.

Heck, my Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign feels a little like that. Their motto is, "We aren't the heroes Korvosa wants. We're the heroes Korvosa deserves."

Yes I just checked again, Hells Rebels is NOT an evil campaign.

Me, I've done 2 evil campaigns, 1 fell apart due to party infighting (and left a bad taste in everyone's mouth) and the second was just Ehhh....

Honestly I don't see much story wise that can be done with an evil campaign that can't be done with a good campaign except for Rape and Torture, and those aren't my thing.

I had started in a campaign of the Way of the Wicked AP by Fire Mountain Games a few months ago. It's made for the whole party to play evil (ideally Lawful Evil) characters seeking to take a LG kingdom apart. You start out in prison with 3 days before your death sentence is to be carried out. One of your starting traits must be from the campaign traits and it specifies the crime you committed. And you committed it. No "I was framed" or "a one armed man did it" stuff. You are given a chance to escape during the first session, but you must fight your way out.

I only played in a couple of sessions 'cuz the GM didn't seem to know the Pathfinder rules very well and he would just make up stuff on the fly all the time. He also complained about any of us speaking about game mechanics like Armor Class while playing, for some reason. So, my friend and I bowed out 'cuz we were pretty sure we wouldn't enjoy it.

The part we played, though, seemed like it was well written to force the party to work together and directed them fairly well towards a common goal. Again, though, I don't think it would work the best with an immature group.

My own experience with evil campaigns leans toward the Chaotic Stupid variety....

I've played evil characters, including one that was the most effective member of a Good aligned party. (They differed on Means, not Ends.)

But I greatly prefer to be one of the good guys.

The Auld Grump

*Snerk*

The Evil Hell's rebels campaign has somehow become a Neutral Skull & Shackles game.... And Megan's halfling witch has somehow morphed into a half-orc barbarian*....

Which means I am gonna have to build a Maiden....

* The somehow involves an image of a - not a mystery, but it was a surprise.

The Auld Grump - this is the first time that she has shown interest in a character more than four feet tall....