There are certain actors who love to play villains. Gary Oldman comes to mind, as does Jason Isaacs and Alan Rickman. There’s a certain magnetic quality to them on screen even when they’re portraying characters that are intensely unsympathetic. We simply can’t stop watching them. They know the worst-kept secret of any antagonist:

It’s good to be bad.

The same is true at the gaming table. One of my favorite parts of running games is portraying villains. For a habitual rule-follower like me, it’s a way to have my cake and eat it, too. I get to break all stuffy societal rules while acting entirely within the bounds of my imaginary world. There’s a certain dark joy to it, a near-cartoonish whimsy.

If you’re looking to give your players the same experience, it can be a challenge. Evil adventures are comparatively hard to come by, and with good reason. It’s hard to create a story from the villain’s perspective that isn’t a grim slog. It’s one thing to play a villainous NPC for a few minutes at a time, but living in an evil PC’s skin for multiple sessions can be grueling if the adventure isn’t engaging or makes you uncomfortable.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a few suggestions to help guide you if you’re in the mood to design an adventure for the vile villains at your table.

Set Boundaries Early and Often

Evil, as a concept, is largely subjective. At its core, being “evil” is about transgressing and rejecting social norms. How one defines the scope of good and evil, then, becomes very important.

Running an evil campaign does not mean ignoring the social expectations that exist at the table between players. If anything, it means being hyper-conscious of your players’ boundaries as they explore what it means to shatter boundaries as their characters. What that means is going to vary from table to table, but as a general rule, you should not engage in conduct in-game that is going to make your players uncomfortable out-of-game.

By that, I don’t mean the momentary discomfort of challenging character growth; I mean the feeling that a table is no longer a safe or fun environment.

The best way to ensure that this doesn’t happen is to have a discussion with your players about boundaries before the game even starts. Ask them what kinds of content they’re comfortable with, and what they consider to be an absolute no-go. Enforce those player boundaries if you see other party members pushing them, and empower your players to enforce their boundaries for you. You are, after all, only human, and your players should have the right to tell you when you’re in danger of violating the trust they’ve put in you. This is a conversation that you should ideally have before the start of any campaign, but it is doubly important in an evil adventure.

Remember: it’s good to be bad, but it’s not good to be cruel.

Violence Isn’t Always the Answer

Too often, people think that villains or anti-heroes have to be violent in order to be truly “evil.” Evil isn’t just about doing violent acts; it’s about breaking the rules to get what you want.

There was an excellent thread on Twitter recently discussing morally ambiguous adventures in which the author said that “violence is not the end. Violence is a means to an end.” Put another way, violence is a tool for the players to reach their goals, not the goal itself. Violence for the sake of violence, even if everyone at the table is comfortable with it, gets boring fast.

You can only burn down so many villages before it gets boring. Tearing a swath of wanton destruction across the countryside isn’t going to be interesting for very long if there’s no point to it.

This is not to say that your players can’t be violent if they want to be. If your party wants to burn down an orphanage, for example, let it burn. But there should be a reason why. Doing it “just because” is definitely evil, but it isn’t narratively interesting. Doing it to “send all those other orphans a message,” however, gives both you and your players more to work with moving forward.

Encourage your players to think through their motivations before they go off on a killing spree, even if they don’t necessarily make those motivations explicit. You will almost certainly get more depth and nuanced play as a result. Again, this is something that you should do for any campaign, but it is doubly important for evil adventures. And it will be easier to get your players to engage if you follow my final piece of advice:

Lighten Up!

For me, evil adventures are at their most fun when they embrace the inherent absurdity of the exercise. When you’re asking people to play characters that are inherently transgressive, it can be hard for them to fully relax into their roles without some sort of emotional release valve. That’s why, as my friend Dan recently told me, “it’s a lot easier to improvise comedy than drama.”

There’s a big difference between playing villainous NPCs and villainous characters. When you’re designing an evil adventure, it’s critical that you keep that fact in mind. Villains that the DM controls can be sketches, whereas villains that the players control should be fully-realized characters. There are exceptions to the rule in both directions, but what it boils down to is this: you need to give your players the space to create characters that they want to portray for four hours at a time. That’s going to be a lot easier to do if everyone is able to laugh a little.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t still tell a story with heart or depth. Take, for example, Escape from the Bloodkeep. That miniseries is a deeply silly parody of Lord of the Rings from the perspective of the forces of Mordor, but it is also a meaningful exploration of found family, breaking cycles of abuse, and gaining self-respect. And everyone is having fun being deliciously, bizarrely evil the whole way through.

There’s a theory that my clown teacher shared years ago that I think is apt here: comedy doesn’t come from just one extreme emotion. Instead, it comes from the ridiculousness of smashing together two opposing emotions. Each enhances the other, and the resulting absurdity/unpredictability is where the real fun lies. It’s the lich king who whispers positive affirmations to himself during his audience with the dark lord, or the spider queen who’s drinking wine at nine in the morning because she can’t find a good man. Your players will make stronger, more interesting choices if they’re not restricted to the grim and morose.

Being evil doesn’t mean sinking completely into the darkest part of your own soul; you won’t be able to stay there long, and you might not like what you find. At the end of the day, you’re a group of people sitting around pretending to be supervillains. Give yourself space to laugh at yourselves a little bit, and you’ll all have a lot more fun.

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