Worst (morally & ethically) PC you have ever run

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

I wonder if you're the worst person I've ever met. At a certain age, it's hard to recall. But the truly vile do stand out through the years.

What is the worst PC you have ever run? I mean morally or ethically, not in terms of rule breaking or over the top silliness.

I'm currently playing in a game set in the 1920s, in Atlantic City - the game is influenced by "Boardwalk Empire." My character is a Tremere enforcer, a kind of evil Sam Spade. In his background he (as a mortal) served in Spanish American War and carried out war crimes under the orders of General Jacob Smith. In his first game he murdered a train conductor to feed on the man set up a train crash for the sake of personal expediency.

What is the worst PC you have ever run?

[CTPhipps]

* Thoth, Serpent of Light Sabbat Bishop

He was a Path of Cain follower who had no regard for the lives of human beings. They were effectively animals to him. He was also of the mind that vampire life was very precious and disgusted by the casual way that Sabbat treated it. He was notable for believing Set and Caine were from the same legend with both being a mistranslation of the same being. He was continually frustrated with the fact that the Sabbat was increasingly just a bunch of poseurs with little interest in the philosophical underpinnings of the sect versus diablerie.

* Erasmus, Tzimisce (secretly Tremere Antitribu) Sabbat Elder

My Transylvania Chronicles character who fled from the Tremere, adopted a new identity, and did his best to fight the Elders until he was forced to surrender. He refuses to go along with the Convention of Thorns and continued the fight into the Modern Era before he realized that the Antediluvians had been playing them all for fools once he discovered the Cathedral of Flesh beneath New York. He defected to the Anarchs and was struggling to deal with the immense amount of lives he took for a pointless cause but still was a casual murderer.

[DrHappyAngry]

Jeramiah Smith Follower of Set
He was a purposely weak character I made for a huge weekly LARP back in the '90s just to show people you didn't need a character with a ton of powers. He just used other PCs as weapons and with some carefully placed lies pointed them at his targets. To make a long story short, his lies caused pretty much all of the court leadership to get wiped out along with having the Brujah primogen staked and brought to him to eat. I had to have the Brujah Primogen wacked since he started questioning if I was really a Toreador. In the ensuing power vacuum, he stepped up to become the Toreador primogen. What was hilarious was he was a complete neonate vampire I started with the base stats, but after awhile everyone started treating him like an elder in a LARP where there were way too many people that had been allowed to play elders. I think of him as the worst just because he's the character whose actions led to the most player characters actually getting murdered, and all without getting his hands dirty. Really anyone who played the Jyhad well could've pulled off what he did, though. I just played him smarter and more manipulative than most of the people in that LARP.

Bob Rogers Nosferatu Antitribu
He wasn't that dubious, as far as Sabbat standards go, but since the rest of the group got stuck a lot, he had to step up with ruthless plans. Like we needed a place to stay for the day and everone else is freaking out. He took them out to the suburbs, found a secluded house, broke in, murdered the family and stayed there for the day. Nothing that bad as far as Sabbat standards are concerned, but I don't go full on murder hobo with my characters that often and am the only person running games in my circle these days so don't really ever to play anymore.

[Resplendent Fire]

I can't remember her name, but a Sabbat pack leader (Lasombra). Was a one-shot, and I think if we'd had more sessions I'd have had more nuance, but the situation was pretty tight and stuff had to be done.

[AnubisXy]

Had a low humanity Malkavian who burned through her ghouls rather quickly since whenever she'd get frustrated she'd order them to kill one another (using Dominate and Presence to push them to murder one another if they didn't want to). It was kind of a grim out-of-character joke that she had a new ghoul servant or two every session.

Had another Malkavian in a Sabbat game who had the bad habit of luring mortals back to the Pack's secret base of operations and then, oops, sorry but you know too much now so I have no choice but to kill you. Meanwhile the rest of the Pack, who had to help her dispose of the blood and bodies, were often wondering how the heck mortals kept stumbling into our super secret hideout.

[Darthpalpy]

In my (heavily revised) Transylvanian Chronicles. A toreador knight, degenerate to an extreme degree, upon the Via Peccati. Spent most of his considerably free time with Tzimisce Fleshcrafters, experimenting ways to deal a maximum of suffering to those he despised. Chiefly among them was Nova Arpad.
He created a mysterious blood cult which main annual ceremony was the ritual disemboweling and dismemberment of a fleshcrafted caïnite made to be a Nova A. lookalike as a symbol of the Demiurge (He switched quite rapidly to the "Cathari Path" and was one of the paths luminaries of the Black Monastery. That was just for starter.....
He then proceded to create a (litteral) garden of suffering pleasures and exquisite tortures on an isolated island in the Black Sea. His goal was to find the perfect equilibrium between ultimate pains and pleasures, as an expression of the duality of existence, to break the hold of the Demiurge...
Also killed Etrius by mistake (some "feu grégeois" on the wrong target, and nearly made the Red List at least a dozen time after that....

[Thoth]

There are two characters that come to mind, but for completely different reasons. The first is because the sheer scope of time the character was played and the breadth of depravity indulged in. The second character was only played for a single chronicle, but had a more personal meaning to it.


Rahtep the Builder - Follower of Set
5th Generation game set in prehistory which my group played all the way up to Gehenna and beyond. Slavery, assassination, torture, toppling governments, starting wars, the drug trade, building cults that used human sacrifice, international banking manipulation, black market organ harvesting, desecration of holy sites, the occasional genocide, etc. In short the coterie pretty much did everything at one point or another, it got really bad once the players got bored of more petty evils and started trying to really push the envelope.


Myself
My group ran a "Play as Your Self" chronicle. The character generation rules were scrapped as we just filled out the dots based on our real life abilities & knowledge, with the caveat that the rest of the group had to vote on if the dot allocation was accurate. The clans, generation score, and discipline dot allocation were randomized to simulate being dropped into an unknown supernatural world with no ability to min/max builds, just like a real forced embrace.

The PCs were out at a college bar when a sabbat attack occurred in their city, thus you had the mortals tortured almost to death by the time the Camarilla counter attacked. With all the vitae flying about everyone who got turned had equal chances to wind as pretty much anything. I ended up as a Lasombra with all three dots in Dominate. As such I became the coteries clean up person, which meant I was the one rewriting their families memories, coming up with ways to conceal their crimes, etc. Not a bad outcome, except that tends to make me complicit in everyone else's bad behaviors.

The first 6 months the coterie didn't have any clan or faction support, so they had to learn the hard way to do everything from feeding, not killing, controlling the beast, etc. Being the worst takes on a whole new meaning when the body count starts including people you actually know. By the end of that game the entire group was a tad bit unbalanced by the choices made by our characters, which were us, but definitely much darker versions.

Most people don't think much of the Brujah clan weakness, it becomes horrifying when family start pushing your buttons. Nothing quite like having to mindwipe younger siblings so that they think a burglar slaughtered their parents, rather than the eldest child going on a bloody rampage.

[Black Fox]

I played a Ventrue socialite who moved freely in human society (and of course was fabulously rich mainly through use of the proper mental disciplines, and taking credit for the hard work of others he controlled through the blood bond or disciplines). He tried to minimize killing anyone, and wasn't much of a fighter. But he was extremely manipulative and an expert at causing emotional pain. Other than killing and physical torture, there weren't many things he wouldn't stoop to in order to accomplish what he needed - blackmail, bribery, extortion, turning family and friends against each other, etc. He wouldn't engage in this if not needed - but if more honest, moral, and legal approaches weren't working, he switched to what would work.

The character was my attempt to run a vampire who seemed to be moral on the surface, but was an absolute piece of garbage in reality. I came up with many despicable things. He specialized in ruining lives under the sheen of glamour and success. He was less interested in forcing people to do things, but putting them in situations where they'd agree to do what he needed.

My favorite was kidnapping the daughter of a mortal to get him to do what I needed. No harm came to the daughter at all. In fact, she was sent to an elite boarding school in Switzerland and given all sorts of advantages she would never normally have. But she was told her parents had died in an accident, and my character was now her guardian (Dominate and Presence helped her to accept this). And her parents were told they would never see her again, but would be given regular updates - with pictures for proof of life and other mementos - to show how well she was being treated and that she'd have a much better material life than if she stayed with them along with promises of her physical safety and non-exploitation. But that if they ever went to the police, tried to contact her, or did not do what I asked them that the updates would stop, and I couldn't guarantee she'd continue to enjoy such a privileged new life. No direct threats were made about the daughter. The ST thought it was so cruel and creative, he allowed it to be narrated out to its conclusion as opposed to making me roll. The other PCs were (gleefully) disgusted by it OOC though IC they were simply told my PC had taken care of the problem and no one got hurt. Their imagination as to what would happen to the daughter was far worse than anything I thought up or intended. But that was the point.

[Craig Oxbrow]

As a near-forever Storyteller, I haven't had many chances to play and I tend to go with characters struggling morally when I do, so it's nothing on the scale of SPCs like the blood supplier the PCs discovered with a 'shipment' of young homeless in a truck, or the elder who invited them to join him for Christmas dinner as he hunted an expectant mother... So probably...

Michael Byrne, Brujah anarch (in the Enlightenment In Blood LARP at World Of Darkness: Berlin) who has lost all hope for making anything better - despite this being a night where this is possible - and decided to focus on smashing the system and punching people he didn't like. Cynical, belligerent, the only thing he had going for him morally was that if asked by the few other PCs he respected or felt indebted to he'd help... usually with violence.

[Ethryo]

We were doing a really creepy Sabbat Shovelhead 3-shot adventure. And we were encouraged to make depraved characters.
So I made a city gangrel scout who could only feed from underage kids who were high on drugs, so I snuck into people's home and injected kids with cocaine and heroine i order to feed from them. And I randomly embraced some of them as well to build the pac an army of canon fodder to take out the city we were tasked with taking.

[Matt the Bruins fan]

My very first vampire character was a Tremere child vampire based on Felicity Latimer from Bill Garnet's novel Down Bound Train. She was evil to the core before becoming a vampire, having committed murder and communed with evil spirits in her breathing days. She did things like entombing her sire within an under-construction dam in Turkey, and setting up an enemy to discover the drained bodies of his closest mortal associates arranged throughout his office (before dramatically spinning around in his chair to inform him that she'd embraced each of them prior to drinking them dry).