You really don’t get it. Evil Lords “want” to be defeated. Just think about it. How long can he keep the things going?

The villages dried out by crazy taxes. The abused mines, with countless deaths to get as much ores as possible. The corrupted government full of incompetent creeps so dumb to actually belive your evil-messiah agendas. The psyco army guards out for blood who you can barely keep in check by letting them go wild on the poor in the slums. Everything is falling apart.

So, when a party of promising idealistic good guys start a quest to get your head, you let them do their thing. Hell, you even toss a lead here and there to get them on the good track. And when they finally reach you, everything goes out with a big BANG!! And Evil Lord is no more.

Then. Some times later, somewhere far-away. A mysterious carriage fully guarded and fully loaded with gold and jewels, quietly leave the kingdom. Undisturbed and unchecked.

Reminds me a bit of a previous campaign (not DnD). We (the party) spent so much time and attention murdering and threatening our way into a coup against the sickly King that we stopped paying attention to anyone else in the story.

Then in our campaign finale, we flub every single roll to execute the coup, and our whole plan gets hijacked by a more competent NPC to seize power for herself. Queue TPK* while we all get hunted down as traitors.

* Except for the party poisoner. He was happy to spend his life in prison so long as the new government let him brew poisons for use against enemies of the state.

“Heroes! I’m sorry, the next ale delivery is gonna have to wait. Our supply routes have been under attack by those same villains the blacksmith mentioned. This seems to be the work of the Dark Mother-In-Law.”

VLDL - Viva La Dirt League did a couple videos like this…

https://youtu.be/kssBps_jA0E

https://youtu.be/0DkERJuwwFA

The first game I ran was going to be a devious cloak and dagger antagonist with ominous hints and…

And that always just ends up going full ‘burn after reading’.