I feel better playing well-motivated antiheroes than full on villains.
I liked Diabolical because you were a lovable, mostly harmless villain (like Megamind), or, at least, could be.
I like Champion of the Gods and Exile of the Gods because even though I was a wild barbarian of destruction, I was doing it for the (admittedly messed-up) Gods.
But I felt a little weird about Tower Behind the Moon, since I felt like a lot of the villainous options weren’t that well motivated. You can be a total jerk, but you have no external motivations to do so, and so even if the actual actions were less evil than the other games, it felt more mean since I didn’t have to do it.
If I’m playing normally, AKA doing a self insert, then I avoid being evil. If I play one of these books with a role play in mind then being something I am not is weirdly freeing. Being a complete jerk in Vampire the Masquerade Night Road is good fun but doesn’t go into twirling mustache territory since it is mostly out of self preservation or convenience.
This is why I think it does such a good job of setting you up to be evil. What is evil? And do you even know if you are evil? Sometimes evil isn’t so obvious, as they can be good guys to one side and totally evil to the opposite.
I think it is clear by the choices you make in the story if you are evil or not. I do not wish to give away anything, but there are certainly some downright dastardly things you can do in Fallen Hero that any sane person would classify as manicially evil, downright hostile, and would certainly earn the death sentence on a grand scale. If the ending to this game doesn’t cut evil, than that is due to the way you played and I would recommend trying again.
Honestly I got to the point where if there’s the option, I can’t really play anything but an evil character anymore.
When I had more time to play through games and such I usually did the normal “good” playthrough, then did the “evil” playthroughs. The main problem was the evil playthroughs were usually never as fleshed out, or you missed quite a bit of stuff/opportunities and I always liked to see everything that was possible.
Fortunately after getting married, my wife tends to play through all the good paths of a game which means I’m free to play the evil side since I don’t really have the time I used to for multiple playthroughs. (Wish I did though!)
Not to mention after decades of gaming in general, it was the norm to make you the hero by default so I’m a bit done with it and will generally pick evil if there’s a choice to do so.
Of course as with anything there’s always exceptions.
Well, the de Merre and Bleys raids are easy enough to find.
If you want to kill the children, well, I’ll tell you the easy way to do it. Stop the uprising, be 2COM/1INT Eclect, keep rations at subsistence, and raid Helots and Yeomen every winter turn, to lower morale. You’ll get a desertion in Act 4, then you get to do the dark deed.
