Thinking about creating a special kind of evil campaign. The group of players will essentially be playing a group of fiends and/or mortals in service to the Nine Hells. (D&D 5e) The goal is to harvest as many souls for hell's use as possible. Keeping in mind that people you kill will only goto hell if they have committed sufficient evil in their lifetime or have signed away their soul as part of a soul contract (which you will be able to create and use). Any soul contracts you create MUST be honored and cannot be broken. However, how you choose to word the agreement and exploit that fact is up to you. For the fiends in the party, you will begin play at the lowest level of hell's totempole-like hierarchy and at certain milestones when you've collected a certain number of souls, you will level up. This is the only way to level up. If you do something really impressive, like collecting many souls at once or start a chain reaction that leads to a cascading effect of a lot of mortals becoming corrupted and turning evil, you will receive promotions in the hierarchy. As you move up the ranks, you will be given authority over lesser devils that you can use in various ways and will occasionally outrank your current superior and gain a new direct superior as you climb the ladder. You can also trade in souls for magical items of your choice. I'll create a chart with the soul costs of all of the standard magical items as well as adding new ones. The catch though, is that since the number of souls you have is tied to what level you are, you could potentially de-level yourself or at the very least drastically slow your progression. This is a personal choice you'll have to make when choosing if or when to buy items. You aren't going to be any of the devils that exist in the handbook, it's essentially going to be a sort of custom race almost that i've built and as you grow more powerful, you can also spend souls to unlock new racial abilities and perks. That is more or less the campaign i'm considering. So i'm curious if anyone might be interested in that. The roleplay to combat ratio will depend on your actions as players, but i'm going to try to keep it somewhere between 40/60 and 60/40. Remember, since you're acquiring souls and making deals for them, some of those deals will involve killing people like the monster who killed someone's family, a rival merchant, a noble's elder brother to ensure he gets the inheritance instead, etc. So there will always be opportunity for combat and I can adjust the difficulty as you guys play and level up. Also, after you successfully corrupt someone to evil, you'll have to harvest them to get full credit for the soul so that is another source of combat in certain situations. In addition to the things you bumble around and get yourselves into, there will be other elements in play trying to thwart you. Groups of adventurers who may hear of what you are doing and seek to put an end to you as well as occasional divine intervention with deities sending angels to protect their faithful from your influence and paladin and cleric orders actively seeking out fiends to destroy. So if you think this sounds like it might be fun, let me know here and if I get enough responses, i'll finish putting it together. I'm using a massive campaign world i've already built for this so most of the work is already done, i'll just need to flesh out a few things specific to how your characters will work such as perks you can unlock, soul costs for things, and so on. If folks aren't interested, I won't bother with it I suppose. :)
