Yeah, having "always evil" humanoids does have some problematic issues. My "favorite" example is Burnt Offerings, the first Pathfinder adventure (back when they were still doing 3.5 adventures). The adventure starts in a frontier town where people have gathered to dedicate a cathedral to some of the gods. The celebrations are interrupted by an attack by goblins, who are described as utterly savage: they lack discipline, they eat babies, they burn everything they can, they sing horrible songs of savagery while assaulting the town, and so on. Eventually it turns out that the goblins are lead by both someone from town and an outsider, because of course they couldn't pull something like this off without human(ish) leadership.
I mean, the only redeeming values the goblins have in that adventure are the XP value and comedic value. They are utterly evil. But at the same time, Sandpoint could easily have been placed in the American west and the goblins replaced with Indians, and you'd have an old-school Western movie.
One of my least-favorite parts of 5e is the way it doubles down on this attitude, by saying that certain people are born evil because their gods want them that way, and thus it's OK to kill them by the dozen.
That's one of the reasons Eberron is my favorite setting - humanoids (and plenty of other monsters) don't have fixed alignments. You have orc paladin orders who have been holding patrolling the borders of the area where most of the archfiends are imprisoned, and they scoff at the newcomer humans who think they understand the Binding Flame. You have oppressed goblins in the cities of Khorvaire being considered second-class citizens. You have clans of treacherous elves who hired out their services as mercenaries during the Last War, and after a while decided to conquer a large swath of the country they were supposed to be defending instead.
I mean, the only redeeming values the goblins have in that adventure are the XP value and comedic value. They are utterly evil. But at the same time, Sandpoint could easily have been placed in the American west and the goblins replaced with Indians, and you'd have an old-school Western movie.
One of my least-favorite parts of 5e is the way it doubles down on this attitude, by saying that certain people are born evil because their gods want them that way, and thus it's OK to kill them by the dozen.
That's one of the reasons Eberron is my favorite setting - humanoids (and plenty of other monsters) don't have fixed alignments. You have orc paladin orders who have been holding patrolling the borders of the area where most of the archfiends are imprisoned, and they scoff at the newcomer humans who think they understand the Binding Flame. You have oppressed goblins in the cities of Khorvaire being considered second-class citizens. You have clans of treacherous elves who hired out their services as mercenaries during the Last War, and after a while decided to conquer a large swath of the country they were supposed to be defending instead.