Quote Originally Posted by False God View Post
I've worked in law but am not a lawyer and am a political scientist so....kinda.

The fun part about building societies is that eventually the L portion of the alignment begins to overwhelmingly dominate the G/N/E portion of the alignment. Making a society entirely of evildoers like the Drow or Sauron's minions is really unsustainable in the long run. The Society you've built at large is more to support your evil operations, which will eventually make up a functionally small portion of the society as a whole.

The Society will exist largely to make it easier for you to recruit more trustworthy, more skilled, and if necessary more diabolical associates and underlings. Most of the members of The Society will likely be of a neutral sort, going about their daily lives with a general feeling that they can't stop you, but as long as they're not personally required to do your evil deeds, they're not going to try either.

In fact if your Society begins to produce goods and services of value, the other nations that likely surround you (or eventually will as your borders grow) will become more inclined to do business with you, regardless of your particular alignment. Especially if you emphasize the Lawful element of your society, and the positive monetary value of establishing trade relationships. Sure, you conquered some small neighboring feudal lords, ok, it's quite possible your trained assassins killed the emperor of Distant Land, but neither of these particular enemies of yours were allies of your allies, or even really useful trade partners.

It won't be until they start putting the pieces together that the new leadership of Distant Land is a puppet and you've been slowly eliminating anyone else they could possibly trade with via diplomatic maneuvering, economic undercutting or actual violence that you're their only option. At which point instead of your nation proving your value to them, they will have to start proving their value to you.

The ultimate outcome may be evil, or at least conquest. But world domination is not inherently the game of evil-doers, but since they do play it, the do-gooders have to play the game too. The end goal of course is the establishment of a society strong enough to withstand new world domination efforts by others, and of course the best way to ensure that you are strong enough to repel the efforts of "others" is to ensure that there are as few others as possible. AKA: world domination. Even if you don't rule them all directly, or even indirectly via puppets, you can at least make sure they're all playing your game by forcing them to engage in your preferred method of trade with your preferred trading partners.



.....again, no IRL commentary intended.



Well, it starts small and grows. You bring in a few and start a camp, that camp grows into a settlement, a settlement into a small town, so on and so forth, branching out and founding new settlements as is necessary to hunt new game, farm different crops, mine new materials.

Eventually the good you provide are replaced by the goods they provide themselves in the process of working for you. You start phasing out the supply of goods and replace it with currency which they can trade with each other, since now you've hired trappers to feed your mercenaries, healers to heal your warriors, and general labor that does not fight but builds the dwellings and other structures necessary to support your mercenaries and their growing entourage. Eventually your mercenary force transitions to a more structured military force.

Congratulations, you've built a society. YOU may be evil, but your society doesn't have to be.

"Base building" is one of my favorite elements of gaming, it's a shame so few DMs actually seem to want to run it.
this litterally happened in a game i dm'ed where i was outwitted by the players. by the time i caught on, they litterally controlled a fifth of the in-game world, had allies, manoeuvred their armies in chokepoints and were preparing to go full-on assault on the bad guys. were we playing dnd, their alignments at best would be chaotic neutral (for one of them. the others were more or less all evil). their society, after the ensuing civil war, became either neutral, or full-on good.

well, with one major difference. they didn't outsource or crowd-source the violence at first. they strong-armed their way into getting logistics going for them, built a corporation, and only then did they militarize it, once they had the means of production. but it was a post-apocalyptic campaign, so there was already infrastructure in place. all that was needed was to take control of it.

the campaign after that one, the team (where i played a pc) went about destroying that empire, and this time we did crowd-source the violence since that empire bred malcontents faster than you can say "4chan".