Eeeeeeeeeevil

hairyheretic

I'm just getting an Abyssals Exalted game going, and since this will be my first foray with an evil game, I was wondering if anyone had any advice?

Sarky

Try and plan for creativity of your players. Without morals getting in the way, they have far more options to try. You'll be surprised.

Might help to have some safeguard in there to make sure they don't just kill everyone for the hell of it, unless the players are smart and can control themselves. I'm not too familiar with Exalted, but in other games being surrounded by a very large and powerful city guard, or having certain geas type spells cast on them, can help.

hairyheretic

Exalted is a rather over the top manga style game. Your players are *very* powerful. With the right charms, a single one can probably tear through an entire army on their own.

That being said, there are equally powerful beings out there that will oppose them. The Abyssals are servants of the Deathlords, demi-god powered beings of the Underworld. Their eventual aim is the destruction of all Creation.

Anyways, I'm more interested in hearing of any problems GMs had when dealing with evil party members. While I don't mind them being evil to the world at large, I don't want to see internal fighting cause problems within the group.

Sarky

It'll really depend on your players. Any evil games I've played have either had intelligent bastards capable of remaining polite while manipulating the others to their own ends, or have had one character so much more powerful than the others that others are cowed into obeying.

The biggest problem I can recall from my last venture into evil games was the story. When most of us start off writing games for shining exemplars of light and truth, it can be hard to get into the frame of mind to write an evil plot. It's just alien to some players.

Your players have the whole of Creation against them, so maybe that'll keep them from being "too" evil. They also have some rather powerful patrons who probably don't approve of petty bickering, and might demonstrate this by sending some horrible punishment to anyone getting out of line. Problems with individual players are pretty similar whether good or evil. A firm hand in the GMing should take care of it. One other option might be to make them so busy they don't have time to fight amongst themselves, whether it be a constant supply of enemies or a load of plot turns and orders from on high.. I recall members of my party wanting to desecrate every body they found and sacrifice them to their gods in exchange for power. This could have unbalanced things and would certainly have taken up loads of time, so a few obstacles were placed in front of them. The area might not be unholy enough, the bodies might be too badly damaged, they might be on an urgent mission and just not have the time, or the deity just might not answer (or be offended by a shoddy ceremony and smite them a bit to discourage future wastes of time). If it's done subtly enough, the players won't even notice you're stopping them...