What's the evilest group you can play as in a campaign? A party consisting entirely of slavers? What about mercenaries who rape, loot, and murder innocent people? The fantasy equivalent of the Dirlewagner brigade? How far can you go?

I had player characters kill and eat a nice normal, randomly selected family in a Heroes Unlimited once.  The same player always wanted his character to steal babies from car seats and hit them with baseball bats.  I had another player who always had some mad scheme or another and at one time, with a friend wanted to rape a village girl to start a new race of communists (no really).  Needless to say I had to ban them from my store.

Why do you ask?

My worst player would kill and loot any NPC who had a bit of gear with slightly better stats.

Right or wrong, the well being of NPC's were never a good enough motive to act.  Profit and power, now that was worth killing for.

There's really no upper limit. You might as well be asking "what's the most evil thing an individual could conceivably do?"

Perhaps a more interesting question is "what is the most evil party you could run and still get a functional campaign out of?".

An idea I've always liked is to take a big, popular fantasy setting, have my players roll up a very high level party of all the most evil factions and creatures in the setting, and then tell them their mission is to absolutely ruin the  whole setting. There'd be a twisted fun in taking a revered setting like the Old World or Faerun and wrecking it for giggles. I figure you set the players right up against the biggest goodie factions in the setting and that, along with a pre-set goal, would be enough to keep them working together and their minds on something other than ground-level murderhobo-ing.

A party of all members of a doomsday cult or a criminal gang would be easy. A slaver party would work as well, but I doubt you'd get a whole group of players to agree to do it. 

I think the key for any of these ideas would just be to get the players to agree in advance to the premise that they're all onboard with the group goal, and maybe set up a premise where some kind of in-group loyalty is assumed.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on October 19, 2024, 07:36:10 PMWhat's the evilest group you can play as in a campaign? A party consisting entirely of slavers? What about mercenaries who rape, loot, and murder innocent people? The fantasy equivalent of the Dirlewagner brigade? How far can you go?

Ugh. What an awful topic.
Once you're even vaguely aware of how terrible humans can go in real life, you realize there is no bottom. Some vile mother***** will find a way to dig deeper.

I don't think it's awful. Like anything worth doing it should be contextual. And yeah, playing an evil party for long term play will require actual players that are mature.

I've run Drow campaigns many times (wrote an Underdark book for it with Mike Mearls) and yeah - it's evil PC's often fighting against more evil shit.

But let's not mince things - the PC's were *evil*. I pull zero punches in my Underdark campaigns. If we're playing a Drow campaign the city-politics is terrifying and fierce. Slavery? pfft. That's the least of your worries. Demon worship is normal. Theocratic/Mageocracies where power rules over all, racism is the rule of the day, and practically any/all other cultures are generally to be predated upon is normal.

A party of Evil characters isn't by itself an issue. The real question is relative to the setting.

Players can re-enact the Christian-Newsome murders on the scale of a village or town if they like. I'd probably tap out because it just doesn't appeal to me.

In the past, we had the game Poison'd where beheading a victim and then raping the corpse's esophagus was applauded as "good gaming". The level of evil can get pretty evil if you want to go full blown shock jock about it.

When I do evil in game as a player or GM, there has to always be a logical reason for it beyond the perpetrator is a bad guy, crazy, or following cultural norms. I admit, usually it is to use terror as a tool, but a tool to achieve what end?

Depends on the setting.   In modern to future times, statistically it would be socialists/communists by sheer kill count (whether their own people or those they're seeking to conquer).  They have the added benefit of appearing to be by their words of a vastly different alignment to their actual actions and their easily predictable consequences.   For a fantasy setting to historical setting, it's hard to think of a greater terror to common folk and royalty than something akin to the Mongolian khanate hordes sweeping out from the steppes.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on October 19, 2024, 07:36:10 PMWhat's the evilest group you can play as in a campaign? A party consisting entirely of slavers? What about mercenaries who rape, loot, and murder innocent people? The fantasy equivalent of the Dirlewagner brigade? How far can you go?

I have no idea.

My default playstyle is set to "the paragon" and about the nastiest I can pull off is "knight in sour armor." (ie. cynical paragon).

I tried playing Anarchist (Palladium equivalent of Chaotic Neutral) once... the GM changed me to Scrupulous (Palladium Chaotic Good) after the second session because while I could pull off "I'll do what I want when I want" all I did when I wanted was to help a group of persecuted prisoners (whose crime was poverty) and strike down evildoers (the nobles who set up that system) without bothering with the judge or jury.

I don't do well with evil party members in general, but the absolute worst evil PCs in my experience are the ones who think they're being good guys as they commit atrocities... like "superhero" who took all those they suspected of being criminals back to their secret base where she (female player) locked them up and tortured them (invariably men and invariably using electricity to the genitals) over days or weeks until they believed they'd repented or executed them if they would not... or the guy who used his telepathy to mind control criminals into being his personal army to fight other criminals with.

There is no limit or vile enough bottom evil can go, so knock yourself out. I only play Hârn and my older campaigns hade some really twisted PCs and NPCs in them.

Quote from: RNGm on October 20, 2024, 07:29:39 AMFor a fantasy setting to historical setting, it's hard to think of a greater terror to common folk and royalty than something akin to the Mongolian khanate hordes sweeping out from the steppes.

It can work for space opera too. The Clans in the Battletech universe went with this angle.

Quote from: HappyDaze on October 20, 2024, 12:08:39 PM

Quote from: RNGm on October 20, 2024, 07:29:39 AMFor a fantasy setting to historical setting, it's hard to think of a greater terror to common folk and royalty than something akin to the Mongolian khanate hordes sweeping out from the steppes.

It can work for space opera too. The Clans in the Battletech universe went with this angle.

I'm only very casually familiar with BT lore (I was more of a Heavy Gear guy back in the day) but I do agree that it would also work well for a space opera/scifi setting which I hadn't considered in my post.

I would say any vampire game. I mean modern vampires lustfully slaughter their food.

Quote from: Ruprecht on October 20, 2024, 06:18:56 PMI would say any vampire game. I mean modern vampires lustfully slaughter their food.

My players insist (and I don't agree with them) that some of my best campaigns were my Dark Age Sabbat games. They were wtf-brutal. They were very fun, dark, but *I* personally don't think they were my best stuff I've run. In terms of WoD campaigns, they disagree.

But yeah, again, with the right group and a firm GM hand, you absolutely can do "Evil campaigns". But the players should know what they're in for. Just like when I run supers campaigns and players want to be villains... Don't be surprised when Mjolnir suddenly cracks you upside the skull if you get big enough britches.

I played a necromancer in an evil D&D campaign once. After the rest of the party murdered a small village, I turned them all into zombies and had them rape each other. Eventually my PC became a lich and I just went around touching people and either killing them or freezing them in place, watching them slowly rot away.

I mean, depravity has no real limits when alcohol is involved.