D&D Christmas Carols: Dark Lord Wenceslaus

This requires some explanation.

Much as I’d love to devote all of my attention to creative endeavors, I, like most other college dropouts turned artist, have a day job. Not the worst one in the world, but one that I find to be largely menial and uninteresting. Part of this job involves spending a lot of time in a warehouse, alone. I don’t mind the solitude–and in fact I quite like it. It allows me time to think which I might not otherwise find on a busy day. Many of the posts here on Papers and Pencils were conceived while talking to myself as I herd boxes.

Earlier this month, as I often do, I was alternating between humming and singing. This particular day, I was humming my favorite Christmas song: Good King Wenceslaus. It’s a great song which a lot of people, surprisingly, have never heard. Unfortunately, I only knew the first verse of the song, and I wasn’t even sure I had all the words to that right. So at my first opportunity, I printed a copy of the lyrics off the Internet, and began to teach myself the song.

Since committing the entire song to memory, I’ve sung it a lot. A lot. I’ve been telling people that my girlfriend is visiting her parents for Christmas right now, but in truth she said she needed to get away from my constant recitation of that damned song. And as with anything, if you repeat it enough, it starts to sound weird. About a week ago, the way I sang the first line; “Good king Wenceslaus looked down,” placed an unusual amount of emphasis on the “Good.” Doing so made it sound as though this was the good King Wenceslaus. As opposed to the not good one.

The idea tickled my fancy. On the spot I began to compose “Bad King Wenceslaus.”

You may wish to turn back now.

I’m going to warn you: a girl I liked once told me I had a nice singing voice. And despite the fact that no one who wasn’t trying to get into my pants has ever agreed with her, I still have a completely unjustified confidence in my singing ability. Flee while you can.

A Post Without Value: My First Attempt to GM

The vast majority of the time, I like to think that my posts have a point. That I’m communicating ideas which might be useful to someone else. I endeavor to avoid anything which seems overtly self indulgent. And I always work to write posts of quality. Posts which do credit to my dubious claim of being a writer. But, life is not always so kind. One too many distractions have emptied my backlog of posts, and I’ve only got a short amount of time before my self-imposed posting deadline. So today, I’m afraid, you don’t get something even slightly well considered. All I have for you is a shitty story about my first serious attempt at being a game master.

It was not a great first attempt.

Here’s an excerpt from some of the notes I still have. I believe this is from our second game, after the players discovered that their first quest giver was evil.

“Four months have passed since you left the service of the dark lord Grome-Lah to join the goodly king of Taladore, Vladamier. The king’s daughter, Reina, has become quite fond of her father’s new bodyguard, the powerful samurai, and of the playful gnomish bard with his stories. All in all you, and the people of the city along with you, enjoy a new age of prosperity.
However, this peace is fated to be short lived, for you soon begin to hear rumors. Corpses walking in the night. At first it is passed off as a mere old wives tale. It is not too long, though, until the rumors persist enough that king Taladore sends you to investigate the ever growing belief that the dead are walking”

Aside from the lengthy writing of a kid who is far too impressed with himself, this isn’t a terrible start to the game. I had a bad habit in those days of using the names of Star Wars characters in my games (Grome-Lah was my clever adaptation of Nom Anor and Tsavong Lah), but so long as the players didn’t recognize them, there was really no harm. And even though I wince now at my clumsy attempts to get the players to care about the NPCs, I don’t think it affected the game drastically.

What did affect the game negatively was my poor understanding of the rules. Though I’m pretty sure every GM could say that about their first game. I’m curious to know: if D&D 3.5 was your first system, how long did it take you to understand when you should ask for a Spot check, and when you should ask for a Search check? Because I pretty much used them interchangeably in this game. I also allowed my players to do pretty much anything with their characters that they wanted. Which, truth be told, is still how I do things. But now I make my players work for the things they want. The next time I have a druid player who wants their animal companion in a forested setting to be a camel, they’ll need to travel to a desert first.

And speaking of letting my players get away with anything, I also didn’t know how to let them fail. When their tactics were bad, I would reduce the number of enemies in the room. When they failed to make any attempt at diplomacy, kings and emperors would go out of their way to be extra friendly just so the half-baked plot could be moved along. I even changed a few DCs just so they wouldn’t feel too bad about making poor rolls. I’ll never forget how dirty I felt when the bard attempted to scare some orcs with his bagpipe music, and I fudged the DC because I didn’t want him to feel underpowered.

But that’s all small potatoes. Everybody makes these mistakes the first time they sit behind the GM screen. Everyone thinks they’ve got a great story to tell, or believes their friends might get upset if things don’t go their way. As a person runs more games, they will grow into the role of GM. But these common failings are not my greatest sins.

For, you see: I had a DMPC.

His name was Zerek Mexiel. He was a Tiefling Lich, and a 20th level Wizard, and I thought he was such a cool addition to my game. Ostensibly, his purpose was to observe humans for research purposes. I made clear to my players from the start that the Lich did not care if they died. In fact, the effects of their deaths was a subject of great interest to Zerek, and he wished to study it. So, if anything, he would be happy to see one of them die.

Which might have been kinda cool if I hadn’t used him to repeatedly intervene on the party’s behalf.

Here’s a particularly poorly written bit from my notes:

“The corpse falls to the ground and lays still, finally at rest. As it strikes the ground, however, a welt on its neck is revealed. The red glowing eyes of your lich companion go wide. For the first time since you met him, he speaks: a grating sound, like a master smith’s saw against steel. [ed. WHAT?]
“That mark on the creatures neck, it is the trademark of a former student of mine! One who I banished from me over 30 years ago. If you wish to find him, you must involve the king’s powers.” And with that vital piece of information, the creature again falls silent, fading slowly from sight.”

Yeah, that’s not good.

I’ve reached the point where I don’t hate all of my old writing. Pretty much anything I’ve produced from 2009 onwards is decent. This garbage was written many, many years before that point, and I’m mortified that it came from my pen.

Are you not entertained? Does my humiliation not please you?

Dragons & Warriors

Not too long ago I thumbed through my library of video games and pulled out an old favorite from 1986: Dragon Warrior. The first one. Not a remake of it, or a port of it, or even an emulated version of it on a computer. I’ve got a square gray cartridge and a boxy Nintendo Entertainment System; both of which I repaired and cleaned myself. The cartridge’s battery didn’t even need to be replaced after 25 years. In this era of red rings, it’s hard to believe a video game product was ever intended to last that long.

Objectively speaking, the game is terrible by today’s standards. Not just because of improvements in technology, but because of improvements in philosophy. If you didn’t grow up with the game, then needing to select “stairs” from a menu is going to drive you nuts. In its day this game literally revolutionized the way developers looked at creating console RPGs, but the 25 years since then have seen a lot of improvements to the formula. None the less, I’ve made it about 80% of the way through the game as of this writing, and this will be the second time I’ve replayed the game since 2009.

There’s something about the game which connects to the heart of what an RPG should be. Not just video game RPGs, but tabletop RPGs as well. When the game starts, you’re given no directions. Maybe there was some help in the manual–even as a child I didn’t have that–but in the game itself you’re just given a request from the king to save his daughter. He doesn’t know where she is, or what challenges you’ll have to face, but that’s what he wants from you.

After that, the world is completely open to you. You can go literally anywhere, and the only barriers stopping you are monsters who become more ferocious the further you travel from Tantegel castle. Combat is simple; painfully so. But combat isn’t really the game’s challenge, it’s just a function of how far you leveled and what equipment you have on you. The game’s real challenge is exploration and problem solving.

A perfect example of this is the Golem. Near the end of the game’s “plot,” the player is likely to come upon the town of Cantlin. The town is difficult to reach, with a veritable maze of impassable mountains surrounding it, and a slew of extremely tough monsters blocking the path. It’s all worth it, though, because Cantlin is the highest level settlement in the game. Aside from townspeople who give you vital clues as to how you can defeat the Dragon Lord, the best purchasable items in the game can be found there. Unfortunately, any time you attempt to enter the town, you are attacked by the city’s protector, the Golem.

The Golem can be defeated by conventional means if the player is very high level, but it’s unlikely that the player will reach that level before they want to visit Cantlin. The solution is found on the other side of the world, in a town which the player should have found and explored much earlier in the game. A villager there has heard stories about the Golem, and relates to the PC that the flute is said to soothe the Golem. If the player has found the flute, they can play it, put the Golem to sleep, and defeat it while it is incapacitated.

This is the kind of puzzle solving which oldschool console RPGs were known for, and some might call it Pixel Bitching. That is, a problem with only one solution which cannot be logically deduced. However, I would disagree. This kind of problem solving is translated directly from tabletop games. Players are given ultimate freedom to explore and learn about the world. That should be their goal. They can then apply what they learn about the world towards accomplishing goals, such as defeating monsters. It’s a method of gameplay which gives the player a sense of empowerment and accomplishment. They were not presented with a challenge for the purpose of having them overcome that challenge. They encounter challenges which they are able to overcome because they played the game well.

The necessity of imagination is another element of Dragon Warrior which connects to me as a tabletop gamer. The game has a distinct and interesting visual style. However, by the time the player has hit 3rd level, they’ve seen pretty much all of the visuals the game has to offer. In fact, the most impressive visual in the entire game is when everything flashes different colors for a moment as you summon the Rainbow Bridge. And it doesn’t even end up looking any different from normal bridges! My point is that the game didn’t need to feed players an elaborate story with impressive visuals to keep them engaged. Rather, it gave them a vessel for their imagination in the same way tabletop RPGs always have. The limited scope of the game’s visuals and plot allowed players to fill in the blanks. True the world didn’t react to our imaginations the way it would in a tabletop game, but that’s besides the point.

Dragon Warrior is also the first game I played where I truly needed to make a map in order to succeed. I had played games like The Legend of Zelda before I played Dragon Warrior, and I’m told a lot of people did make maps for that game, but I never needed to. In Dragon Warrior, though, the game is truly impossible without a pencil and some graph paper, and sketching those maps was an experience which honestly changed the way I look at games. Always before I had viewed hand-made maps as a sign of poor game design. I believed a player should never need to use tools outside of the game in order to complete the game. But I was wrong. Making my own maps so I could explore the pitch-black caves of Alefgarde gave me a sense of investment I’d never felt before. And that’s something I want to give my players when I run a tabletop game.

That’s all I really have to say. I know this post wasn’t strictly ‘on topic,’ in relation to tabletop RPGs, and if you didn’t like it because of that I apologize. What it all boils down to is this: every time I sit down with the original Dragon Warrior, I feel as though I’m connecting to something basic. Something which touches the heart of what a role playing game is. I’m not sure why I feel that way–perhaps it’s just because of nostalgia. I don’t know. Regardless, I wanted to try to express this sentiment to you.

My standard tabletop ramblings will now resume.

What It is that I'm Doing Here

I recently had the good fortune to attend Paizocon, held here in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve always wanted to attend a gaming convention, but until now never made time to do so. Which is insane, because there are half a dozen awesome conventions in Seattle every year. For its part, Paizocon is small. I think there were five rooms being used by the con. But there was still a lot of cool stuff to see and do, which I’m sure I’ll be mentioning in at least a couple upcoming posts. But first I’d like to talk about something a little more personal.

My outlook on tabletop gaming has changed a lot in the last year, largely influenced by blogs such as Hack & Slash and Untimately. I’ve started to see the many ways in which my fundamental assumptions about RPGs have been wrong. It wasn’t so long ago when I fully embraced everything Pathfinder had to offer, but as I’ve experimented and learned, I’ve become much more critical. Among other things, I’ve dropped half of the skills from my games, and even concluded that the entire skills system is too fundamentally flawed to be salvaged. I’ve have always maintained, and continue to hold, a great deal of respect for Paizo as a company. I think they’ve made a lot of good decisions in how they’ve chosen to handle the 3.5 property. But I knew even before I left for the convention that I didn’t fit into the Paizo community as well as I would have when I first bought the tickets.

There were times when I felt as though I was visiting an alien culture. I spent several minutes talking with a representative of Louis Porter Jr. Design. A very friendly fellow who was absolutely flabbergasted by my aversion to using skill rolls unnecessarily. I was likewise baffled by my inability to express the benefits to him–though I like to think that if we’d had a longer time to talk we might have come to an understanding. Unfortunately his booth was rather busy. I did end up purchasing his supplements “Dangers and Discoveries,” and “Debatable Actions: The Non-Combat Resolution Sourcebook.” Both of which I hope to learn from.

This was typical of many of my interactions at the con. I briefly sat in on a few smaller workshops while waiting for things I was more interested in to start, and was often frustrated by the assumptions made there. Obviously the official rules were used, as one would expect at an official function. But, as an example, one speaker made an off hand comment about how it is highly undesirable to run a game where the players are using characters of vastly different levels. I wanted to point out that some of my best games have been run with characters that have large level gaps between them. Though I didn’t, because it would have been rude to interrupt a lecture.

I don’t want to paint a terrible picture of Paizocon. I did very much enjoy my time there. Some of the seminars I attended were incredibly informative. In particular the two I attended dealing with terrain building. Sean Reynolds taught me more in two hours than I think I could have learned in two months of watching YouTube videos. I even met a number of other attendees with whom I had some very pleasant conversations about Pathfinder’s mechanics, their failings, and alternative choices. None the less, the whole experience has left me wondering where I fit within the Pathfinder community.

This has never been a question which really bothered me before. I do my own thing, and I do it my own way, and that’s what keeps me passionate about my work. I don’t have any intention of changing that outlook, but I wonder if I should change how I describe myself. In particular the fact that Papers & Pencils is often billed as a Pathfinder blog. It’s true, I play Pathfinder, it’s the system I’m most familiar with, and many of my views are informed by years of playing it and D&D 3.5. But I’ve never bothered to read up on Golarion, or participate in the Pathfinder Society. I think I have a grand total of 3 posts on the Paizo.com forums. I don’t think I even have a very wide readership amongst Pathfinder players. Most of the websites which link to me are, amusingly, OSR blogs. As are most of my biggest influences.

So where, exactly, does that put me? I play Pathfinder, and love the game for all the things it does well. But, I approach gaming the same way I approach everything else: with a critical eye. I believe that if it’s worth my attention, then it’s worth my criticism as well. I’ve been heavily influenced by people who reject the new-school ideologies of the game that I play, and other Pathfinder players feel cut off from my writing because of that. So when a person asks me what my website is about, what can I honestly tell them? What is an apt description of this blog?

This is Papers and Pencils. I like games, and I write about them. You probably won’t agree with what I write, and that’s okay with me.

A Personal History of Role Playing

When I was young, I liked to play pretend. When we’re young, we all do. I played “Star Wars” a lot, putting myself into the role of Luke Skywalker, waving sticks around and making “vroosh!” noises with my mouth. As I got a little older, and my friends started to be more interested in bicycles and video games, I continued to enjoy playing pretend. Which isn’t to say I didn’t love video games or bicycles. I distinctly remember being a member of a “biker gang” which wasn’t allowed to cross any streets, so we just rode around the block over and over. But while my friends stopped playing pretend, my fantasies only became more elaborate. I even started making up my own characters, drawing pictures of them, and writing notes about their various abilities and weapons. Looking back on it, these pieces of paper were proto-character sheets.

I owe it to Bill Amend, the brilliant cartoonist behind the long-running syndicated comic strip Fox Trot, for first introducing me to the concept of tabletop role playing games. You see, one of my other passions as a young child was reading the comic strips in the daily newspaper. Even after my family stopped having the paper delivered, because my parents didn’t have time to read it, I convinced my grandmother to save the comic page for me. I even kept all of the comic pages in a box under my bed. If you’re not familiar with Fox Trot, one of the primary characters is ten year old Jason Fox, a geeky kid who excels academically, and is passionate about many “nerdy” pursuits. I can’t recall precisely when, but at some point during my childhood the strip featured Jason and his friend Marcus playing Dungeons and Dragons. The game wasn’t mentioned by name, but the core elements were all on display: a dungeon master’s screen, dice, and the DM weaving a world for the player’s character to explore.

The notion intrigued me. I was too young then to remember what precisely went through my mind, but I knew that whatever they were doing looked fun, and I wanted to play too. I constructed a GM screen out of black construction paper, and glued little pieces of note paper to the inside of it. On the note paper, I wrote the rules I had made up for the game. I also recall creating small tokens–doodles on pieces of paper–to represent adventurers and monsters. I also had a bowl with numbered scraps of paper to take the place of the dice. My parents warned me that the game I was emulating was an evil one–which would prove to be a major point of contention later in my life. But, to their credit, they didn’t go so far as to forcibly stop me from pursuing the project. I spent at least a few days working on my primitive version of D&D, but never really figured out how to make all the elements come together into a cohesive game. Nor could I convince any of my siblings to play with me. Eventually I gave up and largely forgot about the project, as kids are apt to do.

Eventually I joined my friends in growing out of playing pretend–though I never did stop quietly imagining myself to be someone else. That’s something I still do to this day. But so far as role playing is concerned, I didn’t take my next step until I was about 14 years old. That’s when my family finally got an Internet connection, and an entire world outside of my orthodox catholic homeschooler existence opened up. Writing about my history with the Internet and the impact it had on my life could be a whole other post altogether. But what’s important is that it didn’t take long for me to break my parents rule about never talking to other people on the Internet. In short order I found forums, and on forums, I found people role playing.

It was awful. The role plays I participated in those days were all themed around the Legend of Zelda mythos, yet most of the players were playing Final Fantasy characters. Not ripoffs mind you, characters like Auron, Sephiroth, and Red XIII were (for some reason) determined to save Hyrule. I hesitate to even mention the character I played, because I don’t think anyone directly involved remembers, but my character was actually named “Link Skywalker.” He traveled through dimensions living through other people’s lives. After living through someone’s life, he had all of their abilities and equipment. I honestly cannot tell you how tempted I am to simply edit this paragraph out and let my readers go on blissfully unaware of how shamefully bad my early role playing was.

It was around this same time that I joined a saber fencing class, which may seem irrelevant. However, this is the class where I first met Jeremy. He was quite a bit older than me, and in the advanced class, but we connected over our shared nerdiness. It wasn’t long before we spent more time talking than we did fencing, and I eventually learned that he played Dungeons and Dragons. I had always been interested in D&D, since I realized it was what Jason and Marcus had been playing in that old Fox Trot comic. However, my parents had made it very clear to me that such games were strictly forbidden–not just by them, but by “almighty god.” I wasn’t really convinced that D&D was evil, but at that time I was scared enough of my parents that I didn’t pursue the topic further.

My forum role playing continued for several years, and the quality of it improved a great deal. I abandoned my original character almost immediately in favor of one I dubbed Beloch Shrike (partially after the villain from Raiders of the Lost Arc, and partially after the villain from The Paradise Snare by A.C. Crispin.) The rest of the group similarly matured, and we experimented with a lot of different things. Some of the most important friendships of my life were formed during these early role playing experiences. Eventually, I even attempted to start a website, titled Epic Journeys, which would serve as a nexus of tools, information, and guides to help people facilitate running their own forum role plays. The project never really got off the ground, though I did actually manage to accomplish one thing. As part of the project, I coined the term “Online Text Based Role Playing Game,” or “OTBRPG,” and added it to Wikipedia (not then fully aware that this was a serious violation of Wikipedia’s rules.) Not only was the article never removed, but I have since actually met people who use the term without knowing I invented it. Seriously, google it. The phrase has entered somewhat common usage. This never ceases to crack me up, but I digress.

Everything changed for me, quite suddenly, in the last half of 2004. I was seventeen, still heavily involved in forum role playing, and starting to develop a taste for philosophy. My continued interest in Dungeons and Dragons led me to begin looking through the Catechism of the Catholic Church (big book o’ rules) looking for any mention of role playing or D&D. After finding none, I went online and found a forum dedicated to Catholics discussing their faith. I asked them what they thought about D&D being evil, and if you want to see something hilarious, the entire thread is still online and available to read. (Though apparently it now shows up as an unsafe link in most browsers. As best I can tell it is still safe to visit.) Most of the answers from other posters seemed to agree that there was nothing inherently wrong with D&D, so I printed the thread out and proudly presented it to my parents. After reading the printout, however, they summarily denied my request to be allowed to play the game. My parents were pretty terrifying people, and I grudgingly obeyed them.

Two months later, in September, I met Stephanie, and the changes in my life accelerated. We had a lot in common, including a shared interest in Dungeons and Dragons. At that time I had still never played, and she had played only once or twice. I won’t go into the details of our relationship, as is still somewhat painful, and certainly outside this blog’s subject matter. Suffice to say that I was head over heels. By November we were dating, and the relationship lasted for six years. In those early days of our relationship, I did a lot of things in order to spend more time with her. I bought a copy of Starcraft so we could have Battle.net dates. And, more relevantly, I took my fencing buddy Jeremy up on his standing offer to borrow his copy of the Dungeons and Dragons third edition core rulebooks. I hid them under some papers in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. Most kids are probably hiding weed, booze, porn and sex from their parents when they’re 17. I was hiding role playing sourcebooks. Some might see it as sad, but I’m actually rather proud of that.

The first little bit of D&D I ever played was with Stephanie. It was bad. I GMed a really short adventure for her where she fought a mummy. I didn’t understand any of the rules, and I was throwing stats around left and right without any idea what they meant. Fortunately, my parents and the rest of my family were out of town the following week, so Jeremy came over to give me a proper introduction to the game. Again: most kids throw drinking parties when they’re seventeen and their parents are out of town. I threw an adventuring party, and I’m proud of that. When Jeremy arrived he brought a gift with him: my own set of dice. They were a deep red with blue flecks, and they came in a plastic cylinder. He also brought with him his brand-new 3.5 edition core rulebooks, helped me roll up my very first rogue, and ran me through a simple Colosseum adventure where I fought some green needle monster things. It was glorious.

I continued in that way for quite some time. I purchased my own copies of the 3.5 rulebooks, and Jeremy would GM for me at his home. His ladyfriend, Jacie, eventually joined me as a gnomish cleric, and the two of us had many fine adventures together. I don’t remember how long it took for my parents to find out, likely just a few months if I remember correctly. I had just returned from a game at Jeremy’s, and went to find them to let them know I was home, my laptop bag filled with D&D supplies still in hand. They looked at me funny, and asked what I did when I was over at Jeremy’s. I tried to be nonchalant, and told them that we mostly just played games. They responded;

“Do you play Dungeons and Dragons?”

“Yes,” I said.

They didn’t really react much at all to that. Merely nodded and seemed to accept that this was a thing I was doing now. I never have been able to tell what things will make my parents angry and what things they can accept. For awhile I thought that, perhaps, they had mellowed out a bit, and become more accepting. That notion was proven wrong recently, when I asked them if I could buy my younger brother the Pathfinder Beginner Box for Christmas. They denied my request, adding that they didn’t like what “those types of games” had already done to one of their children. Cest’la vie.

Never the less, I took my books out from the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, and placed them lovingly on one of my bookshelves.

Jeremy and I continued to play together, and I tried my hand at GMing several times. I’ve always loved crafting worlds. In fact, as a young child I used to spend a lot of time drawing complex maps for a monster-filled series of caverns.* I was born to be a GM, but running games for one person can be a limiting experience. I needed a larger group, but I had been home schooled since the fourth grade, and didn’t really have the social tools to make friends. At least, that is, until I enrolled in college for the Fall 2005 semester. College is supposedly an eye opening experience even for kids who attended an actual school, so you can imagine what a change it was for me. I met so many wonderful people there, including Chris and Jeremy. They were my first gaming group. I was so happy to finally have one that I actually purchased Player’s Handbooks for both of them. We had some great games together, and they even invited some of their own friends along, giving me a nice full party to work with.

To repeat an old cliche, the rest is history. Gaming groups have come and gone, and there have often been weeks or months at a time when I don’t get to play, but my love for the game always remains. It’s been over seven years since I picked up my first sourcebook–which seems like such a short amount of time compared to the lifetime I feel I’ve lived as a gamer. Jeremy plays in most of my games, and still serves as my GM whenever we play Zalekios. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that there will always be people out there who want to play games. All they need is someone to suggest it, and be willing to show them how it’s done.

*Holy shit. I can’t believe I never thought of using these old drawings as a dungeon for my players before. I know exactly where they are.

On Zalekios Gromar, and the Undervaluation of Evil Campaigns

Everybody who plays RPGs is familiar with the harm that religious zealotry can cause. Thankfully, the general populace’s opinion of role playing has largely shifted from “satanic” to “dorky” in recent years. But as a person who had to hide his Player’s Handbook from his parents as a teenager, no one is more aware than I that this prejudice still exists. There are people, a lot of people, convinced that role playing games are the first step on the road to virgin sacrifice.

I suppose they’ve almost got it right. But it’s not “virgin sacrifice,” it’s just “virginity,” amirite?

Taking that into consideration, it’s only prudent that Dungeons and Dragons has spent a long time avoiding the subject of evil PCs. Player Characters are good almost by definition, and the evil alignments only exist as labels for NPCs. There are other games which are not quite so shy about evil, such as World of Darkness, but they have that luxury only because most people are unaware that there are pen and paper rpgs other than Dungeons and Dragons.

Even the excellent Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 book “The Book of Vile Darkness,” which was labeled with a sticker marking it as containing mature content, skirts the issue of evil PCs. It presents itself solely as a tool for GMs, to help them create truly vile villains for the truly heroic heroes of their gaming group. Though, to give credit where credit is due, I still think publishing the book was a courageous move on the part of Wizards of the Coast, and I applaud them for that–even if they did avoid a few issues I would have liked to see addressed. Publishing a book which covers topics as controversial as cannibalism, slavery, and incest had the potential to generate a lot of bad press. I like that Wizards of the Coast had enough respect for their product, and for their customers, to risk that.

Yet still, the very concept of evil PCs is relegated to a three page appendix in a 191 page book. Which saddens me, because I love evil PCs.

Who hasn’t imagined what it would be like to break the rules? To take what you want, eliminate those who frustrate you, or even force the world to march to the beat of your own drum? It’s only natural to think about these types of things. Musing about how nice it would be to punch a cop in the face while he’s giving you a speeding ticket does not make you a bad person. It just makes you a person. If anything, it’s a coping mechanism to deal with the sense of powerlessness being at a cop’s mercy can cause.

There is nothing wrong with playing the bad guy in a pen and paper role playing game. Nothing wrong with capturing damsels (male or female) rather than saving them. Nothing wrong with stealing the quest reward rather then earning it. Nothing wrong with constructing a fortress of evil, rather than raiding one. Of course, it’s important that everyone at the table be comfortable with the content of the game. Topics like rape, slavery, or racism should be verboten in groups where they would make others at the table significantly uncomfortable. However, villains exist in any D&D game, so any table should already have an acceptable level of villainy established.

Allow me to introduce you to Zalekios Gromar.

Zalekios is a level 12 gestalt character, with four levels of Hexblade, ten levels of rogue, and ten levels of warlock. He is the most chaotic evil motherfucker in the room, and that’s true even if he’s in the same room as Orcus. He’s committed every depraved deed you can think of from conceiving a child with the same succubus which gave birth to him, to using that child’s bones to fashion a sword. He is a murderer, a slaver, a cannibal, and a rapist. He is a highly intelligent sociopath with a penchant for taking unnecessary risks just to further pain those who cross his path.

He’s been my player character for half a decade now.

I was in Highschool when I first rolled up his stats. I only had one friend who shared my interest in D&D at the time, and as the more experienced player he did all the GMing. Sometimes his girlfriend would join the party, but most often it was just him and I. After playing several of the traditional hero types (like Tarin the Half-Elf rogue, or Xunil’Nerek Sharpedge the Illumian Fighter), I got it into my head that I would very much like to play an evil character. I had read about the Vasharan race in the Book of Vile Darkness–an entire species of pure sociopaths intent on killing the gods themselves–and I wanted in.

I won’t bore you with the details of a campaign which has lasted five years or longer. To be honest, a summary wouldn’t sound all that different from the summary of a normal D&D game. I fought an ancient civilization of phase-shifted trolls, infiltrated a magic college, explored a castle which sank beneath a lake in ages past, foiled a plot to trick two nations into going to war with one another, killed a dragon, and established a stronghold. Zalekios has even been taken through at least one published adventure (the Standing Stone) without completely breaking it. The only thing which really changes is an evil game is the motivation and the methodology.

Allow me to use a recent game as an example. For reasons unknown, the plane of fire intersected with the prime material plane. A rift was torn between the two dimensions, and now a large area of land which was once peaceful planes is a flaming hellscape. I don’t know yet how it happened, but when it did happen it burned down my secret apartments within the city. So, thus enraged, I set out to see what was up, and what I found was a tower filled with fire-breathing goblins.

Now, Zalekios had decided recently that he wanted to acquire some minions. Conquest was starting to sound good to him in his old age, and subduing a tribe of goblins seemed like a good first step. So what did Zalekios do? He kicked in the tower’s doors, melted the faces of the goblins which got in his way as he ascended to the top of the tower, and confronted the goblin king. Zalekios waited until a large number of the goblins had rushed to their king’s aid before cutting the king’s head off, picking it up, and taking a bite out of it as though it were an apple.

I then stood up at the table, and (blatantly ripping off a game I’ve never played) shouted “I am the blood god! Bring blood to the blood god! Brings skulls for his skull throne!”

This serves as an excellent example of how an evil game can function. Allow the player’s to revel in their bloodlust. Give them motivations like rage and vengeance to get them started on their adventures, and allow them to further their own evil schemes within the context of the greater storyline. The GM which runs Zalekios’ game does a good job of this, even if he does constantly complain about how difficult Zalekios is to plan for. I’ve promised him my next character in ones of his games will be a paladin named Kronus Mountainheart to make up for it.

Despite spending five years inside the head of an imaginary sociopath, sometimes to the point of excitedly shouting his evil proclamations at the table, I think I’ve become a better person rather than a worse one. It’s difficult to point to moments in time and identify them as when you became ‘more ethical.’ However, it’s only since I started playing Zalekios that I came to acknowledge and confront the fact that I carry a lot male/white/heterosexual/cisgendered privilege. I would call that an ethical step forward.

In closing, I’d like to offer a lists of “evil campaigns” which I’ve come up with. I’ve actually got a notebook filled with potential plots for future campaigns which I’d like to either run or play in someday. Evil ones probably make up about 25% of those. (Note that all of these below are for D&D/Pathfinder unless otherwise noted)

Band of Thieves The PCs would all play the role of thieves, and each adventure would be focused on stealing some item or items. At low levels they might simply be knocking over taverns or shops for money, but they could eventually build up to stealing great pieces of artwork or even the crown jewels.

Band of Assassins Much like the band of thieves idea, but rather than the object being the theft of items, the adventures would focus on killing people. At first perhaps they’re merely contracted by a jealous wife eager to have her cheating husband out of the picture. However, as their levels rise they could find themselves in the middle of political intrigue, or plots to usurp the throne.

Urban Vampires There are games specifically designed for the players to be vampires, but I would very much like to try it in Pathfinder. Vampires have such a unique blend of limitations: inability to go into sunlight, inability to cross running water, inability to enter buildings without an invitation, etcetera. I would love to throw all those restrictions at players, and watch them try to survive and flourish in a town. Particularly one in a setting where everybody knows monsters exist, and there are many out there eager to fight them.

Slavers Touchy as the subject may be, slavery is a reality in many D&D style games. And where there’s slavery, there is the slave catcher. Someone who needs to find people which can be taken without being missed–or who needs to be able to fight off those who miss them. Adventure variety could come from certain kinds of slaves being needed (such as ogre slaves for a large construction project) or re-capturing a specific slave which has escaped.

Pawns on the Overlord’s Chess Board I actually did start running a campaign based on this idea once. The PC’s boss is Dark Lord Evilguy, and he needs them to further his goals so that he might achieve the world conquest he’s so long desired. What’s great about this is that it’s just as open-ended as a standard campaign. While good heroes fight goblins to save small villages, these PCs would fight the small villages and tell the local goblin tribe to start sending tribute to Mount Scaryhorror.

BBEG* in training The PCs start at level 1. Their only task: to conquer the world. They could choose any method they find preferable. Perhaps they’ll construct an elaborate plan which is undetectable by the forces of good until its too late. Or, perhaps, they’ll immediately set out to conquer one small village at a time.

Imperial Navy This is for the old West End Games D6 Star Wars game. I don’t have much of a plan for it really, but I would really love it if all of my PCs were members of the Imperial Navy. TIE fighters, Star Destroyers, and greasing rebel scum. That’s the life!

There are more, but I think that will do for now. Thanks for reading.

*(You may see this on the blog from time to time. It means Big Bad Evil/End Guy)