MATT: Hello! My name is Matthew Mercer. I'm a voice actor and the Dungeon Master for Critical Role
here at Geek & Sundry, and today's wonderful topic of GM Tips is curbing murder-hobo behavior
and running evil campaigns.
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No matter how much prep you do or how alluring the heroics may be, and how strong the call to glory
and justice might prove, sometimes the players will give in to the id and become
impulse-driven murder-hobos.
A murder-hobo by the way is a player character in a roleplaying game that has no home and
wanders the land killing things and taking all the shit off their corpses.
While this style of play can occasionally lead to some ridiculously funny scenarios, it can make
it difficult to maintain a long-form respectful narrative for the whole party and for you. However, there are
a number of interesting and fun ways to develop great roleplaying and story moments out of these
scenarios that can also possibly curb perpetuating such behavior in the future. Now many of these
are written for fantasy games, but these notes can be easily tailored to many other genres and settings.
Here's an example. The players get into an argument with a merchant and end up stabbing him
with a sword and killing him. You know what I'm talking about; you've seen it happen.
I've seen it happen. I've probably done it. In the game.
In the... game.
Now consider the legal ramifications of such an act. Will the party now try to hide the body and
play it off like nothing happened? If so, do they succeed? Or is there now a manhunt for a murderer
within the city and the party is always dancing around the rumor whenever it comes up?
Do they begin to see wanted postings with characters that look eerily familiar? Does the guard discover
them and attempt to take them in for questioning? If they go along, do they stand trial or will they
attempt to break free of prison, leading to a fun prison break adventure and leading the party into an
outlaw-style journey where certain townships are best avoided or done incognito.
What if a very powerful investigator is hired and finds them, besting the party with his men
and dragging them to his office where he makes them an offer that they have no choice in taking,
one that involves doing an uncouth favor for the same investigator? What if a family member
of the slain hires a seer or a diviner, discovers the murderer's face, and hires a bounty hunter
that is now hunting the PC for an ongoing period of time, introducing a
recurring villain to the campaign?
Perhaps they rifle through the slain merchant's stuff and they discover he's actually a very terrible person,
like a cultist to Asmodeus and the like, perhaps a higher-up within the order,
and he's likely to be summoned soon to a gathering he was leaving for.
Now if they just keep stabbing anything you put in front of them, perhaps you should talk to
the players about respecting the narrative that you've worked so hard to construct.
If they still seem negligent to your quest, just quickly TPK them with a series of high-level guards and
give them a whole epilogue on justice and the rarely noble end of the murderer.
Mind you, sometimes it can be fun for a group of experienced players to communally give in
to their dark side and decide to play a campaign of morally dubious characters.
Thus can begin the weird and fun experience of running an evil campaign.
[evil laugh]
[cartoonish gunshot]
Now, talk in advance with all the players and have them coordinate characters that can have
some semblance of working together in collaboration. Lawful Evil as an alignment works well for this
as respect for structure and rank aid in maintaining party cohesion when everyone is being an evil f***.
Now be aware, there are degrees of immorality, not all of the same kind of evil, and not all players
must be evil. A neutral individual among evil companions can still serve the same purpose, and one can even
start as a good character who slowly is corrupted by their surrounding companions.
Just check in with what kind of campaign the folks want to play out. Is it more serious, dramatic, dark
criminal underground story, or the sillier Saturday morning cartoon show villain type story?
Both are a lot of fun but make sure you're all on the same page before you get too deep
into the nuts and bolts.
Have players consider evil with limits, or a code of conduct. It helps when defining your character what their boundaries
are and what drove them to the darker side of life.
Let that internal conflict lead some interested inter-party encounters.
Many "evil" folks don't actually righteously consider themselves evil at all, only pragmatic.
As the GM, be prepared for a short campaign. Don't write a super extended story arc yet,
let it organically grow from there, if it's even meant to, as most evil campaigns end up with PCs
just killing each other. It's part of the nature of the beast.
Be very clear with your initial discussions with the players about the level of mutually-approved
player versus player possibilities in the game should they arise. However, it may develop
into a very interesting long running mafia-like story if you run it very carefully and the players are on board.
Now this is an important one. Make sure you and all of your players are clear on what
elements of evil you are comfortable with, and which elements everyone is not comfortable with.
You want to avoid a circumstance where a PC eventually pushes things too far and makes it very
awkward or too dark to continue enjoying the game. Define those limits early. If any time a player
begins to push those boundaries, you are allowed to as a GM or player to put a pause on it and
check in with the others, just to be safe.
Another cool thing is to consider a plot that enables the PCs to work towards a political foothold
within a town or city. As we well know, evil generally flourishes when business, politics,
and civilization are involved.
The glimmer of a promise of power, wealth, servants, and spies can entice any player's dark side.
You can also play with existing storytelling tropes and turn them on their head. You can have the
party encounter upstart adventurers who've hunted them down to stop their evil plots. Or have them
encounter dark entities that offer a chance to make dealings with them as opposed to
fighting them. Perhaps the heroes return from a grand quest where they save the town
in danger, recovering a great holy artifact, and your party is imparted with the mission to
corrupt the artifact, turn the heroes against each other, and eventually enslave that very town they saved.
Eventually, offer up some serious dangers to all things good and evil, where the party must
team up with more morally high-grounded interest to ensure both sides' survival. This can lead
to some very cathartic vengeance on those prissy paladins when the danger finally passes.
Anyway, I hope these tips have been useful to you. You can check out more GM's Tips episodes
here on geekandsundry.com. My name is Matthew Mercer, thank you for watching and I'll see you on the internet.
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