The Evil Guide

The Evil Guide

With this Kickstarter campaign we bring together three original books: The Evil Guide: Cults, The Vault of Nightmares, and Whispers Beneath the Chapel as a practical toolbox for darker, more morally complex adventures.

At its heart is a flexible, easy-to-use system of rules, tables, and frameworks for creating believable cults, rituals, hierarchies, conflicts, and sandbox campaigns that go beyond traditional heroic storytelling.

The project also includes new monsters, items, spells, backgrounds, feats, and subclasses, along with extensive Foundry VTT integration featuring scenes, sounds, music, scripts, and more. All designed and made for DnD 5e, DnD 2024 and Pathfinder 2e. 

Become the villain

TRPGs let us immerse ourselves in entirely different worlds. But how often do we get to explore the darker side of an adventure or play the story of the villain? Guidance for running an evil campaign is even harder to find.

Stories rarely show how a syndicate is built from the ground up, how it stays hidden until the heroes arrive, or what happens when the villains win.

We have been running evil campaigns for more than a decade, and we have fallen into just about every trap along the way: Murder Hobos Parties, that kill anyone on sight. Unbalanced Rules for items and rituals. Unnecessary violence without proper consequences. We established rules for it, tested them dozens of times, worked on a Session 0 Guide, and we learned from our past misstakes to create the evil guide. We asked our self:

How do you encourage players to portray evil characters while still working together? How should consequences work in an evil campaign? How do you create a cult that feels believable and that your players might actually want to join?

We want to help you avoid the mistakes we made. The Evil Guide: Cults offers advice and ready-to-use material for preparing and running campaigns centered on cults. The Vault of Nightmares brings together the items, spells, rules, monsters, NPCs, feats, and new systems we wished we had when our players set out to become evil overlords. And Whispers Beneath the Chapel gives you a starting point for an open-world evil campaign.

Human made (no AI)

We value art made by people. Four artists and creative teams collaborated on this project:

• Kylie (Cantrips Media)
• Kyle Winrarn
• Cosmic Flame Studio
• BirdieMaps

All artworks were created by human artists.

Reward overview

Battlemap Library

After end of the campaign you will recieve a one time download link to the whole Battlemap Library and Foundry Modules.

PDF Books

You will receive the final versions of the book as PDF document. The different versions include, German, English translations as well as the DnD, Pathfinder versions.

FoundryVTT Module

You will receive the FoundryVTT module to the books, including additional content like music, sound effects, scripts and macros. 

Printed Hardcover Versions

We want to offer printed Versions of the books by making use of the print on demand system by DrivethrughRPG. After release we will give out the gift links to the books on DrivethrughRPG. Shipping costs may vary.

You get 3 books

A complete guide to designing, managing, and playing dark campaigns centered around cults. It includes nine detailed cults your players can join or fight, a library of maps and scenery for immediate use, and dozens of cult examples for different settings and game systems.

You also get a step-by-step process for creating your own cult, a practical half-page cult sheet containing the essential information, and dozens of rollable tables to bring your cult to life.

This book adds to your GM library:

• 100+ new monsters
• 100+ new spells
• 100+ new items
• 13 new subclasses
• 30 bastions
• A unique ritual casting system
• 30 devastating new rituals
• A new Necromancy system to control hordes of Undeads

This content is organized around three cult archetypes: the Death Cult, the Demon Cult, and the Hag Coven. Yes, you can form a coven!

The book also adds a wide range of good-aligned characters, items, and monsters to use against your players. Its new systems let players become true necromancers, commanding hordes of undead without slowing down combat.

A medium-length evil campaign in which your players explore the village of Berem as members of the local death cult. They take part in its schemes, eliminate witnesses, gather sacrifices, and perform a dark ritual to subjugate the village all while the guard commander and the local lord watch closely. Can your players deflect the accusations against them? It comes also with an alternative version, where your players are taking the opposite site uncovering the secrets of father Alros.

Test it now

You can test parts of the content now. The pitch version is available to everyone. You can jump right into your next one shot and test some of the material for yourself!
Here you can get an example of the foundry modules, from previous projects: 
Birdies Baldurs Gate Pack
Birdies Island Pack

About us

Hey, it’s me, BirdieMaps. You may have seen some of my maps or followed my larger projects, such as the recreation of Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter, The Lost Island, or the Atmospheric Map Library.

I’m also a longtime GM and have been running evil campaigns since around 2014. I love VTTs and what they make possible for TTRPGs not only for battle maps, but also for managing a campaign. When set up well, a VTT can significantly reduce a GM’s workload. That is why VTT integration matters so much to me.

I’m also responsible for the gameplay mechanics in this project. Alongside creating worlds and maps, I enjoy designing the spells and systems that my players and I have missed at our table.

Hi there! I’m Grounded Tales. I may be new to the creator scene, but I have plenty of experience as both a GM and a player including as a player in BirdieMaps’ evil campaigns. I started GMing in 2016 and celebrated my tenth year as a GM this year.

One of my proudest tabletop achievements is successfully running the legendary Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign for Call of Cthulhu. That experience sparked several ideas for this cult project.

As a longtime friend of BirdieMaps, I’ve contributed storytelling and worldbuilding ideas to his campaigns. I love deep lore and well-written characters, and those interests make us a strong team for this project.