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Sometimes, it’s good to be bad. Dungeons & Dragons offers a great deal of freedom when designing a character and a story, allowing both players and Dungeon Masters to create numerous campaigns, each with its unique story shaped by their choices. One thing that not a lot of groups do, though, that can be fun, is a story focused on evil characters.
A party of villainous protagonists can be pretty interesting, so long as the whole party is on board with the moral and ethical dilemmas that will likely happen in this type of story. Still, that’s a conversation between you and your friends; we’re just here to brainstorm ideas for your campaign.
10 A Regular 'Save The World' Story
We're One Of The Idiots That Live Here, After All
Tiamat by Chris Rallis
Even bad people can do good things. While saving the world is a simple premise for many heroic campaigns, having the world rely on a group of villains is an interesting twist. They can either be forced to be good, Suicide Squad-style, or they’re saving the world to save themselves.
Either way, a story like this will portray these bad people as heroes in the public eye, which allows the players to exploit this position for their twisted goals. Imagine your player characters being ‘heroes’ like the ones from The Boys, and you get the idea.
9 Heist
Where Anything Goes
Keys from the Golden Vault cover, via Wizards of the Coast
Infiltrate a location, whether to steal something important or valuable or even assassinate an important person. Heists are also a somewhat familiar concept for a campaign (or one of the campaign’s arcs), but it can be very different with bad characters.
Heroes will likely try to avoid collateral damage when performing heists, but villains can intentionally cause it to benefit themselves, manipulating or eliminating innocent people as the heist progresses. Technically, it might even be easier for the players since they don’t need to hold back.
8 Agents Of An Evil Empire
Praise The Emperor
Asmodeus the Archfiend by Aleksi Briclot
Why not have the big evil emperor as a mere quest giver instead of the final boss, and your players’ mission is to do their bidding? They can start as low-ranking soldiers, just doing their job, but as threats to the empire emerge, they can deal with those issues and climb through the ranks.
From there, the story can go many ways depending on how you and your players go about it. They can become the emperor’s elite soldiers; they can try a coup against the emperor and take the empire for themselves, and so on.
7 A Barbaric Clan
Raid And Pillage
Art by Taras Susak
The idea is somewhat similar to the previous one, but the players will already be in charge immediately, and their evil group will be significantly smaller, consisting of a mere clan or horde rather than a large empire.
The players choose which places to attack, whom to kill, or whether there are NPCs worth recruiting. It’s a great concept for a more strategic game, as they need to expand the clan and, thus, manage NPCs along with themselves, and their resources will come from pillaging cities.
6 The Future BBEGs
DIY Bad Guys
Young Kas and Vecna, by Lily Abullina.
Instead of a long campaign focusing on evil people, create a short story that serves as a prologue to your next big campaign. Players will develop their evil characters, and whatever they do here with your plot is now the premise of the next big game.
You can translate all the consequences here for your ing game, where the now-hero player characters will have to face the villains their players created not too long ago. Have the players deal with their own creations.
5 Design Your Dungeon
Protect Your Treasure
Art by Taras Susak
This idea is very unorthodox, but it can work in a fun way. Give your players a dungeon, minions, and resources. Tell them that a party of NPC adventurers will eventually explore their dungeon. These adventurers are stronger than the players, so they need to prepare themselves.
The players get to decide where to place traps and minions, using their skill checks to determine the efficiency of the traps. They’ll have to ambush the heroes and retreat when necessary, wearing them out until they have an actual chance against these stronger characters.
4 Kill A Legendary Hero
Bonus Points If They're A Former PC
Archmages of Greyhawk by Kai Carpenter
What if the big bad guy is actually a big… nice, good guy? Anyway, the party has a goal, but they know there is one character, a mighty hero, who’s capable of stopping them. So, before they do anything, they’ll hunt this guy down.
Because the game is from the villain’s perspective, they can even try to balance the fight in their favor through cheap tricks, such as staging the fight in a city with innocent bystanders, threatening them during the fight, or even targeting characters important to the hero.
3 Political Drama
Add Some 'Game Of Thrones' To The Story
Waterdeep Sunset via Wizards of the Coast
Evil campaigns aren’t just about hunting and killing people. Political drama can work extremely well here, where the campaign can also focus on heavy roleplaying. You can use your political power to threaten other nations, manipulate them, and more.
From the DM’s side, this one can be a bit complicated to design, as you’ll need to create a lot of characters and nations, each with its own problems that the players can exploit. However, it might be worth it if you and your group enjoy the roleplaying aspect of D&D.
2 Awake An Evil Deity
Rise, My Lord
Death Cultists by Aurore Folny
An evil god — maybe the BBEG of a previous game — was defeated, sealed away, or maybe even destroyed. Still, deities never stay down forever, do they? Especially when they have such loyal servants such as you.
The party’s goal is to discover whatever happened to this ancient evil and how to reawaken or restore it to its former glory. Once your evil god is free, you shall conquer the world together — assuming there will be no backstabs in this alliance.
1 Monster Poaching
Hunt Them And Sell Them
Owlbear Parley via Wizards of the Coast
D&D has a plethora of iconic monsters, and fighting them is a big part of the game. However, instead of running into those by accident, why not track them down, capture them, and see what you’ll do with them?
This idea can also take many different forms, where the party tries to tame creatures such as an Owlbear for their own evil agenda, or they can sell the creature to the highest bidder. They can also kill the monster and sell its remains — maybe a hag out there needs a mind flayer’s tentacle for a potion or something, and she pays well.
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