In the lands of Talingarde, only the most heinous crimes may send you to Branderscar Prison, but the sentence has but one meaning: You are wicked and irredeemable, someone that even a society that believes deeply in redemption, charity, and second chances cannot allow to be free. Each of you received the same greeting when you arrived. You were held down by rough hands and branded upon the arm with a runic F. The mark signifies ‘forsaken’ and the painful scar is indelible proof that each of you has betrayed the great and eternal love of Mitra and Their chosen mortal vassals.
You never really felt Their love before this, but it still stung a bit.
Condemned, you face at best a life of shackles and servitude in the nearby salt mines. Others might await the “gentle” ministrations of the inquisitors so that co-conspirators may be revealed and confessions extracted. Perhaps, some of you will be spared this ordeal. Perhaps instead you have come to Branderscar to face the final judgment. In three days, the executioner arrives and the axe falls, the pyre will be lit, or the noose tightened.
Through fire, rope or steel, your crimes will be answered.
For years it was known that none who were taken to Branderscar would ever escape, and yet the lax accommodations and guard only cause your blood to boil all the more. You are given a comfortable bed, and the light of the sun wakes you each morning through a stone slit. You are given fresh water and hot meals, while the guards drink from horns of wine and jest with each other about their lives openly, fearing you not. A cleric of the Morninglord comes at every sunset to ask if you repent, and is always sad and disappointed at the result. There is nothing worse than facing death amid such brazenly stupid jailers as these.
Yet none of your individual cunning is enough to make your escape on your own. You have all been well searched and every attempt to conceal anything on your person has failed. And if you could somehow slip your bonds and fly out of this prison, where would you go? Who from your former life would want anything to do with the forsaken? Despised, alone and shackled – all that you can do now is await your doom.
For each of you, your old life is over. For each of you, hope is a fading memory. For each of you, justice will be fairly meted. And who can blame fair Talingarde after what each of you has done?
If you don't want to burn it all down yet, you might not be up for this adventure.
It's Good to Be Evil is a Pathfinder 2e campaign, based on the Pathfinder adventure path "Way of the Wicked" by Fire Mountain Games, but with a fair amount of editing so that someone who has read it won't expect much more than the basic outline, and a bit of a twist in theme. I would like to approach the game far less self-serious in its portrayal of evil, hearkening back to works like Dungeon Keeper in their darkly comedic take on evil, though still not pulling any punches.
Let's not mince words: In this game you are playing a dyed-in-the-wool villain. You may have a semi-tragic backstory, some cobbled together justifications, or a fanatical belief in some delusion, but ultimately you are defined by selfish glee and a destructive bucking of the system. We're not talking about the performative costumed villainy of superhero comics either. This is more of the raze-the-town, oil-up-the-rack, kidnap-the-princess kind of villainy. That said, we want to keep it tasteful, with the best example given in Way of the Wicked being the way torture was handled between Darth Vader and Princess Leia as being off-screen but impactful.
This should be a game where you feel free to go out of your way to conquer, steal, and corrupt those around you, but Way of the Wicked is well-constructed to provide a backbone of motivation for the players. It will center around a conspiracy to restore the worship of the archdevil Asmodeus to the peaceful land of Talingarde, and unify its six Good kingdoms into a unified dominion of Evil.