Vilain Campaign

[Nucleon]

Nucleon bids you hello.

 

I'm planning a new campaign and I was discussing its tone with several players, and we're considering the players as Villains.

 

Part of it is we've played numerous campaigns in quite a rich universe, now densely populated by (many of) the former PC heroes, that over the ages has taken its part of vilainy. The Vilain buisness opportunities demands are beginning to expend.

 

And besides, it's a different game.

 

I've DM only one such campaign to date, and what I must say, is that the Super-Villains' leader must have some long-term goal, unless the become cheap mercenaries.

 

Any comments or, better yet, advice?

[Ghost who Walks]

There have been several threads on this, a bit ago. (llok back a bit and you should find them)

 

Picking up the first dozen issues of the Thunderbolts (Marvel) should give you some ideas. After the first dozen or so, they got "popular" and boring.

 

One idea might be to have the head of your villains be an NPC, who the players work for (they can get rid of him later). If its a campaign thats been going on for awhile, it could be someone they ran into before...

 

But yeah, a goal is needed for a villain campaign. Players will generally run amok in it, and you need something to focus them on.

 

Unlike heroes, villains usually have nothing to 'defend'. no civilians, usually no headquarters, nothing. So you either have to give them something to keep them in one place, or expect them to travel all over the place.

[Mayday]

Just to really shake things up... have everyone bring a copy of their character sheets from their last/favorite group then everyone pick someone ELSE'S character and play the Evil alternate universe duplicate of that person who is now stranded here.

 

:-)

 

I think it would be very interesting to have the new player of Starside go after the original Starside, and you set the two gamers down together to work it out. Could get very complicated.

[TheEmerged]

I'm running a villain campaign now. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Some talking points for you.

 

1. Make sure your players are relatively balanced in terms of moral worldview. If you've got Stirge the Babykiller in the same group as Mr. Angst and Ms. Robin Hood, you're GOING to have problems.
   
2. Villain campaigns lend themselves to a more proactive approach -- which makes things rougher on the GM because you can't really herd them the way you do in heroic campaigns. You can't just say "Aliens are attacking the city -- CLOWN Around!" One approach that has worked well for me (and my players profess to love) is to give them a list of opportunities and let them decide which one to pursue. See examples below.
   
3. You're going to have some problems with published resources -- namely, that there simply aren't that many hero teams in print and DOJ has basically said they feel this should take a back seat. This isn't to say there isn't material out right now you can use; GRAB (from CKC) makes a wonderful foil for a mercenary group of PC's and in my own campaigns Eurostar has made a (final) appearance. I was also able to use one of the scenarios from Champions Battleground with much less twisting than I expected and with considerable enjoyment.
   
4. Don't allow your PC's to have the "World Conquest" motivation unless the opposition is going to be quite staunch. I find that I have to have 1500 pt NPC white hats running around to keep the players in check. Actual PC conversation from a recent session: "We can't just kill Victory, the Golden Avenger would hunt our butts down..." Without this the players are quite likely to get out of hand; in my experience you're better off with 'attainable' objectives or simple greed.
   
5. Sort of related to the first but worth a seperate mention. This kind of campaign almost can't help but involve moral grey areas. You're better off if you play this both ways; it's not enough to make the establishment greedy and corrupt or the "villains" more humane than obvious (I've had quite a bit of fun with PSI in this regard in my campaign) -- you really need to do both. Remember, every villain is either the hero or victim of his/her autobiography; few people actually think of themselves as villains.
   

 

Earlier I said to see below; this is where you're supposed to look Here are a couple of links to opportunity files I've given my PC's to work with. Note that the first one was also built as a "get to know the campaign world" handout and as such isn't brief.

 

The first handout

Second Handout

Third Handout

Fourth Handout. Actually used for our 4th and 5th Sessions.

[Redmenace]

Also. you might checkout DC's the Suicide SQuad kind of an amnesty program for super criminals ala the movie "The Dirty Dozen". The governmental controllers kees the villain campaign structured and gives the badguy protaganists a common enemy to strive against, their keepers, in early missions.

 

Alternatively, you could have them all incarcerated initially and make their breakout effectively the "Origin Story" of the group. As someone will want to recover them, primus, until etc, they will all have atleast a specific hunted in common and a comon threat goes a ways towards keeping a group together.

[Nucleon]

Thanks

 

Thanks guys, and some more thanks to the Emerged and Mayday. Now this campaign is taking a more precise shape. I won't tell here what I'm going to do (vecause many of my players may lurk), but I do admit that your advices will be put to exercise.

 

What I can say is this; In the aformentionned vilain campaign I GMed, the players were really stranded between uncertain deeds and hiding. What I did at that point was sending them into an alternate universe.

 

In that universe, the heroes they knew all turned redemptors, united and took the world over, to transform it into an over-organized, totalitarian society where crime was brutally repressed.

 

There, the players were seen by the oppressed populace like "the last rebels", becoming, ironically, heroes.