If you're reading these articles I assume you already have the basics of storytelling and structure down. I'm assuming you already know how to make a decent and relatively believable plot of heroic characters doing heroic things even as they commit wholesale genocide and looting.

Here we take things from a slightly different perspective. Evil characters require evil stories, and sometimes, a strong stomach on the part of the game master. Of course by this point if you're already planning the plot it is most likely you have already answered for yourself any moral conundrums that might come up from the idea of allowing your players imaginations to crawl over into the dark side and play without flashlights. There are several schools of thought regarding how an evil plot is either different, or very much the same as any plot revolved around morally correct or only slightly questionable characters.

It's all about attitude.

The simplest way to run an evil game is simply take a basic adventure normally run by virtuous characters and alter the flavor slightly so that it can be run by characters with no morals. Consider this, what if Frodo was a right bastard? Perhaps the quest to destroy the ring is not a means of saving his precious shire from a world of bloodshed and madness but a means of removing a potentially disastrous threats from his own plans to conquer the larger races and enslave the world. Dragging along his slave and concubine Samwise, our little evil hobbit treks across the world convincing large stupid men and elves to defend him all while making pacts with dark terrors whose viciousness is matched only by their insanity and desire for the one ring. In one fell swoop the base adventure for nearly all fantasy gaming has been twisted into something perverse and evil for use in your own twisted and perverse games.

Which is really what it's all about. A paladin would want to vanquish the vampire overlord and save the princess for the grace of king, country, and god. An anti-paladin might have the exact same motives only afterwards he plans on taking the overlords resources and princesses purity for himself because that's what god, king, and country demand of him. So, planning out the plot of an evil game is really not that difficult if you consider and plan for the motives of the characters on the adventure.

Evil McGuffins.

The McGuffin is simply motivation made solid. The one ring, excalibur, random magical super artifact #45622 are all, conceptually and literally, plot devices. These forms of motivation also change extraordinarily little when you switch the motivations of the characters from those of the benevolent to the malevolent. However, evil characters tend to have more solid and much more easily defined motivations then those of good. An evil character might simply want to get rich, or rule the world, or become a new dark and terrible god. The point of the McGuffin should be to lead the characters towards their particular goals. However the trouble with group games is that if we have say, the “one” ring, it only really benefits a single character and can either lead to some interesting role playing or very uninteresting PvP.

So the McGuffin should be something every player can partake of and enjoy to some degree or another. The simplest solution is to make the McGuffin a place rather then a thing which allows players a bit of role reversal where they play the part of dungeon designer and defender as the good guys come and try to kill them and take their stuff. This portrays a nice foil to the typical adventuring hero who spends most of their career on the road whereas the villain has to worry about managing more local resources and somehow deriving income within a local area. It allows them to correct a lot of the glaring mistakes that they often see in other villains plans and fortresses and gives them the satisfaction of a job well done as they see their dark armies march out of the front gates.

Villains By Necessity took this concept and flipped it back to the heroic side by having the villains travel the various parts of their world and seek out the locations and tests they needed to finish in order to open up the dark gates that held back all the evil. Here we have the classic heroic journey turned on it's head into a journey to unleash the evil and reveal the shadow that follows behind any so called warrior of the light.

You think you're bad? You're a #$%^ing choir boy compared to me!

In any normal game it's expected for heroes to be heroes. They do heroic things. However they can only do heroic things as long as they're provided by the GM with situations to do exactly that. Thankfully most systems provide a wide menagerie of nasty people and critters that seem inclined to leap on the swords and guns of the good guys with little to no prompting. This isn't as true for the bad guys. So one has to get creative when it comes to letting villains be, well, villainous.

Consider encounters on the road. Should every thing on the random table of murdering things have to be monsters? Why not a simple merchant caravan to rob? Or some questing heroes looking for evil to slay? Why not a flamboyant, annoying bard to torture to death? Diversify, spread out player encounters and meetings so that every interaction is a chance to be bad. Don't have the soul sucking, ravening monster leap out of the bushes immediately and start threatening the characters with it's terrifying magic bendy straws. Instead let it observe and approach the players carefully as it sees something of itself in them and work out some kind of mutual agreement. After all, it's hard to stab bendy straws into people wearing armor and trying to club you over the head. But tied up innocents given over in exchange for far less valuable money are a lot easier to handle.

So, let your plot be open to the possibility of badness.

You must unlearn everything you have learned, start with a lobotomy.

Ultimately GM's used to running normal games where players are expected to be in their own way heroic will have habits and foibles that are normal for the heroic game but become glaring in a less moral game. Find them. Crush them. Stamp them out until they cease to exist. It could be simply the way all of your tavern keepers act. The way that all the hookers you portray are sleazy, or how all the drug dealers are shifty. Stop that. Seriously, quit it. Remember that you are the sole provider of perception in the game and that responsibility means that your words not only subtly manipulate what the characters do but also to how they feel in those situations. Remember there is such a thing as an honest thief, or an honorable assassin or a moral drug dealer. Remember that as amoral characters the perception they will have on things that are typically bad will be lightened up a bit. Likewise cops are devious, conniving bastards and knights are just the mailed fist screaming good and order even as they murder honest working men in the name of some blood thirsty god of light.

The way you portray the world has a significant impact on how the characters treat it. If you want the characters to feel stifled and maybe a little weirded out make the good simple village all smiles and merriment. This wouldn't so much get a nod out of players trying to be good but might make the bad guys gag and start hurling torches into thatched roofs just to wipe some grins off some faces. Foreboding castles don't make bad guys spines tingle, and dark overlords with spiky black armor are dime a dozen to the characters, so don't bother describing them like that.

The Conclusion to our Terrible Tale.

In conclusion it will be the climax and conclusion of the plot that ultimately determines how people feel about the game. Make it nasty, make it horrific, this is the GM's chance to hammer home just what kind of game they're running. Make it stick like blown apart brain matter on the wall. All the while however, it's important to note that the characters are in and of themselves independent of much of what the GM is going to give as exposition so ensure that they're somehow the trigger, the event that makes the conclusion possible. Otherwise it has all the impersonal and unfun feeling of a cut scene Give characters a chance to breathe and to be rewarded for their dark successes. Finally allow room for some form of continuance, maybe the next game you run the players are heroes who have to face the very characters they played last time.