Slaughter your woooooorld...

[blackout]

Well, me and my gaming group are thinking of just plain going on a rampage. We're all playing Epic Level Psions, Chaotic Evil, and being stuck right in Faerun. Waterdeep to be specific.

Whatcha think? Share your own stories of mindless slaughter. Has anyone here run a short campaign strictly for the purpose of slaughtering innocent townsfolk?

[Kurald Galain]

Doesn't Khelben Blackstaff live in Waterdeep?

[Bender]

slaughtering thousands of innocents risks getting very boring quickly. You'd have to leave the actual slaughtering to minions or a great masterscheme, like ruining the crops and poisoning the water, starting fires and trapping everyone inside the walls...

just killing every commoner in regular combat isn't very thrilling after the first hundreds I think, and even then.
Plotting the downfall of a king, establishing anarchy, causing rows and rebellion... seems more interesting

[Awetugiw]

The challenge probably isn't in killing the commoners, but in killing those who don't want you to kill those commoners. And in the FR, there are probably quite a lot of those who are also epic.

[mostlyharmful]

I had that problem on Baldurs Gate whenever i got bored, just start hacking up randoms and suddenly your knee deep in high level teleporting mages with their twenty high level fighter friends.... ..... like the flaming fist has nothing better to do all day than idly scan crystal balls for PCs going mental. I figure you should have at least an hour to party before actual opposition (credible for epic psions) arrives in the form of Elminster and Khelban and kicks your asses.

[Tengu]

Evil characters mindlessly slaughtering cities is exactly the opposite of what I consider good fun in RPG. Each time such a group gets TPK'ed, one more person discovers and becomes a follower of Firefly.

[Xuincherguixe]

You'll need to mix up the mayhem. Killing a peasant isn't that much different than killing an Orc.

Mess with their heads. Convince some of the peasants that you're doing good by killing them. Leave a few alive. Offer them hope and then snatch it away. Start a corporation. Start a restaurant chain that doesn't do anything evil what so ever and people will think you're doing something really horrible because you're the ones who killed all those peasants. But it is a completely normal place that serves completely normal food.

Make people kill themselves.

Random stabbings will get boring quickly.

[Redblade]

Make a lot of pointless rules and say youl kill anyone who breaks them. Things like 'No using words with the letter e in them' 'no talking on odd numbered minutes' 'No urinating on weekends'.

Although that's more lawful evil... and I think most people (or indeed everyone but me) would find that even more boring.

[Anxe]

My evil party time started when one of my players stepped up to DM. After being bored by the lack of plot (We seriously had no idea what we were supposed to be doing.), we decided to attack the nearby town. Our first attack failed with two people getting away. We rolled up new characters, this time all of them evil or chaotic neutral. We went at it again. My character was an Anti-Paladin wielding a giant sock as his weapon. We burned down the inn this time, but got chased off by a fireballing wizard. We just decided to play ping-pong after that.

[Tallis]

I've never had a campaign based arround slaughtering a bunch of peasants, but I dropped a storm giant's flying castle on a city once, by stealing the power source. That killed about a million people. The same group got lost at sea and ran out of food, so they ate the crew. Later the anti-paladin was killed by the people of a small town, so the cleric killed them all and animated them as an undead army. She marched the army underwater to the next island and killed everyone there to add to the army and so forth until the gods finally stepped in. There was always some reason beyond the slaughter though. I think I'd get bored if there wasn't.

[Funkyodor]

Mindless mayhem just doesn't sound fun, it changes AD&D from Roleplaying to RollPlaying. Those fun moments in Baldurs Gate got me thinking, you finally get those wizards teleporting in with high level baddies and what do they have on them when you kill em? Quarterstaffs... No high level stuff, no spell scrolls or potions of healing, no books, tomes, or magic. Just "throw on the ground because no one wants to buy" quarterstaffs.

[Afraidofsharpie]

Does an unknowing wholesale slaughter count? Cause my Deathwalker, a homebrew class I plan on posting on the boards, unwittingly killed off an entire race.

You know of Bloodelfs correct? Well my DM at the time had a race like that with the exception that they were addicted to one large power source, and should that power source ever be turned off or weakened the race as a whole would suffer. Well come down to the finale of that campaign arc, we were fighting at the capital to stop the summoning of an Old One which is basically something on par with one of the Lords of Nine, my character recalls that the power source is one of infinite power so if I were to some how push said Old One into the source then find a way to detonate it we could stop the Old One and perhaps even kill. Fast forward to several deaths later, one of the advantages of the Deathwalker Class is that when you die your soul returns to your body after a number of rounds letting you come back for more punishment, and using several of my high level abilities the Old One is falling into what we prusumed was a bottomless pit. Then using a mixture of meta knowledge, a **** load of luck, and the knowledge that I would most likely survive I dove into the center of the power source.

It was very anti climatic, no big boom, no explosions, just a flicker and a ghostly whimper everything powered by the crystal just stopped working. My character of course died and the DM plotted him out of the game, cursing the Deathwalker all the while, but when my new character joined, the DM added some plot to my arrival with their powersource gone these arcane addicted elfs were fading away and by about a month in-game they were all but extinct.

[Chaos Perfected]

Mindless killing is only awesome when Richard does it. :P

But it has its place, you just have to mix it up a little. Be EVIL not Chaotic Stupid evil. Drove them insane, don't kill the paladin and his family, make the Paladin kill his family. ^^

[Kurald Galain]

Mindless killing is only awesome when Richard does it. :P

Or Black Mage, of course, the original black mage. Ftw!

[Wraithy]

W e were about to get killed by some artificially supererered orcs, so I somehow opened up an unstable rift to the elemental plane of air and slaughtered everything on greyhawk and its surrounding planes. now we play Eberron.

[Dullyanna]

W e were about to get killed by some artificially supererered orcs, so I somehow opened up an unstable rift to the elemental plane of air and slaughtered everything on greyhawk and its surrounding planes. now we play Eberron.

I just have to say, that's awesome. Anyway, if you're doing an evil campaign, then you should reward the people who play smart-evil (Or stupid-evil in a smart way), and punish the ones who just say "I attack the priest/beggar/fuzzy forest dweller" by raining Devas on them.

Edit: Oh yeah, if you're playing psions, it'd be cooler to make someone your slave and force them to eat kittens or something, instead of just melting thier brains on sight, IMO.

[blackout]

Hehehehehehehe.

Well, we're already running the campaign. Just made a low-level Paladin of Tyr kill his friends and family, as previously suggested, and then released him from our control.

He committed suicide immediately afterwards. Following that, we proceeded to desecrate the temple he was in, dominating more paladins and having them fight each-other for our amusement, and then we proceeded to wreck the town in general.

That's when Waterdeep's resident archmages came after us. We killed them.

Fun was had by all.

[Karsh]

Develop an epic psionic power to turn you all into Gods that uses souls as a component. Kill Neverwinter. Apotheosis.

[Talya]

Trying to do that in Waterdeep means your party would die very quickly, which I suppose is good.

There are at least 4 people who could appear instantly, any one of which would TPK you.

Khelben Blackstaff Arunsun
Laeral Silverhand-Arunsun
Qilue Veladorn
Halaster Blackcloak

That's not to mention that such an event would likely draw the old mage out of Shadowdale himself, along with a certain bard adventurer named Storm. And the Witch Queen from Aglarond. And Alustriel from Silverymoon. Etc.

Forgotten Realms is not the place to pull **** like that at all, let alone Waterdeep, where it will draw the most attention.

[Tengu]

Mindless killing is only awesome when Richard does it. :P

Or Black Mage, of course, the original black mage. Ftw!

In both cases, was rather than is - both did it too many times with too little variations to be funny anymore. Though yes, Richard is a complete Black Mage ripoff.

[AslanCross]

I never liked slaughter. Even when I played an NE character in Baldur's Gate II, I didn't shank people in the street for chuckles.

[DraPrime]

Aaaah slaughter, it can get boring fast, but it's fun while it lasts. My best
slaughtering experience wasn't in any tabletop RPG but in the video game Gothic. Basically, there's this place called the "old camp" where near the end of they game they think you're a traitor and it's impossible for you to get in. After that you get access to a spell that pretty much kills everything in 30 feet. Then I managed to teleport into the old camp, and the slaughter ensued. It was so satisfying to kill those guys who gave me boring and pointless quests.

[Krimm_Blackleaf]

I'm a big fan of slaughter, but I agree with alot of people when they say mindlessly slaughtering thousands of weak little peasants isn't as fun as one might think. Whenever I slaughter countless people I tend to enjoy it more when I have something to accomplish (anywhere from finding Larry the merchant to keeping up my kill count) or I have experiment with new and interesting ways to kill people. i.e. Casting grease in the town's square(which DM's in our group have decided is flamable) and chucking an alchemist's fire into the fray. Or all sorts of other interesting things... If you can't tell, I spend alot of time thinking about this kind of thing.

[Bender]

In every computer RPG game there comes a moment there is nothing left to do but try killing everyone and see how the game reacts. In the lame games you can't attack anyone you're not supposed to attack, in some the guards have inhuman strength and AC, in all of them you end up bored pretty quickly since there is no goal or gain. It gets really frustrating when the next time you enter a slaughtered city, everyone is alive again...
A fun one is escape velocity, a spaceship-type rpg, where you can command tribute of a planet, they will send wave after wave of ships after you, and if you destroy them all, they'll pay you a certain amount every day. This also gets boring after a while because at the time you start doing this, you already have the largest ship and the best weapons and you don't need any more money.

The king of them all is not rpg, though, it's carmageddon. I never get tired of crashing my car in screaming girls and scared grandma's and getting "splattering" or "artist impression" bonuses. (on condition you don't play the lame, parental approved, version with zombies of course)

[knightsaline]

Screw slaughtering peasants, you can do better than that! cause another time of troubles! destroy the world! make sure the illithid race begins! open a gate to the far plane in the middle of waterdeep! reset....THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!

peasant slaughtering is only fun for a few seconds (peasants being around level 0-1). Cause as much mayhem as possible! Cause Ao to have to smite you! Causing another time of troubles will make you GODS! Arcane magic will be erratic, Divine magic will fail entirely while those who have mastered the Unseen Art will be GODS!

If you have your black,twisted hearts set on slaughtering peasants, send them to a small island on krynn where there are many, many, MANY Mr Ts.

[Behold_the_Void]

I find it odd that your party just gets to jump into epic without having achieved any backstory-riffic deeds of villany. Especially if they jump in strong enough to tangle with any number of the epic Faerunian characters there are without having attracted any prior notice beforehand.

I don't know, that just sounds a bit too unbelievable for me. And random slaughter tends to get old after awhile, I've always thought.

[Green Bean]

I find it odd that your party just gets to jump into epic without having achieved any backstory-riffic deeds of villany. Especially if they jump in strong enough to tangle with any number of the epic Faerunian characters there are without having attracted any prior notice beforehand.

I don't know, that just sounds a bit too unbelievable for me. And random slaughter tends to get old after awhile, I've always thought.

Well, classes like Sorcerer and Psion are good to make 'instant characters' so to speak. The 'unlocking inner power' nature of the two classes mean that you don't always need a lengthy backstory. For instance, with a wizard or a fighter, you have to detail exactly why they didn't run out and start stabbing/casting years earlier. With Psionics and Sorcerers, it isn't that much of a contrivance to say "I was an ordinary commoner, but then my powers manifested." No one says that all psions manisfest level 1 powers, then level 2 powers, and so on.

[JackMage666]

I feel most sorry for the DM. He has to look at all these 1-3 level commoners, as you kill them. No fun for him, at all.

[leperkhaun]

have fun taking on the blackstaff, the sisters, and elminster. Also manshoon, fazoul, and saz tam if you go too crazy and they dont want to put up with you.

id be really really careful about taking on elminster and leaving any mage or the simbul alive. Mystra doesnt like people messing with her magister (the book elminster goes to hell is a case in point).

id also be careful about going around slaughtering dragons without mercy. There are more than a few CR 30-40 dragon/draco liches around.