So, what is your Favorite "Villain" race these days?

[TheSword]

One of the coolest RPG products I've had the honor of working on uses Similar But Legally Distinct Brain Gorgers as the high tier baddies on the material plane (there's a higher tier non-material baddie running the show). Love 'em.

What’s the product?

My WFRP 4e adaption of Dragon Heist, Golden Vault, Dungeon of the Mad Mage - has mind flayers down in the Sea Deeps opening a portal to the far realm using a captured Hallaster and the rune stone of the rune stone cavern. That is causing mutations, magical instability (miscasts) and other chaotic shenanigans. Not to mention some serious issues in Undermountain.

It explains why some of the weirdness of Warhammer would exist in the Forgotten Realms. They’re the big bad of the campaign. Can’t wait to run it.

 

[jdrakeh]

What’s the product?

Spoiler

King For a Day revised edition by Post World Games.

 

[TheSword]

Spoiler

King For a Day revised edition by Post World Games.

Oh wow. Just read the Endzeitgeist review. 5 stars + seal of approval. That is some high praise!

How did I miss this! Guy, Ryan and Steven do not read this. May have just found something to follow Enemy Within.

 

[jdrakeh]

Oh wow. Just read the Endzeitgeist review. 5 stars + seal of approval. That is some high praise!

How did I miss this! @GuyBoy do not read this. May have just found the next campaign!!!

It's a great campaign. I was one of three editors on the revised edition. Jim doesn't skimp when it comes to editing and QC on his products. In addition to the main storyline, there are TONS of side plots and adventure seeds scattered throughout. It feels very much like a living world with all of the detail it provides.

 

[TheSword]

It's a great campaign. I was one of three editors on the revised edition. Jim doesn't skimp when it comes to editing and QC on his products. In addition to the main storyline, there are TONS of side plots and adventure seeds scattered throughout. It feels very much like a living world with all of the detail it provides.

I’ve been looking for something I could run after finishing the Enemy Within campaign. A system agnostic adventure which sounds pretty darn impressive sounds a good choice. Thanks for the recommendation.

 

[jdrakeh]

I’ve been looking for something I could run after finishing the Enemy Within campaign. A system agnostic adventure which sounds pretty darn impressive sounds a good choice. Thanks for the recommendation.

You're welcome!

 

[Celebrim]

Just wondering what villain race GMs are throwing at their players these days. Is it the classics of humans, orcs and goblins or something else?

For me it is still Skaven (Rat people for those that may not know that name) but do have a fondness for goblins.

What is yours?

In the most recent D&D campaign that I did, the most long running reoccurring villain species was the Sahuagin, which I treat very much like HPL "Deep Ones" and which are without a doubt my favorite villain species. Goblins show up a lot in my game, but it would be unfair to call them a "villain race". They are more a "tends to be villains" race, but as a potential PC race they are treated with I hope some complexity and not every goblin that shows up is a "bad guy" much less a monster. Bugbears on the other hand, while technically goblins, never show up except as villains. Basically, they are the product of genetic engineering/selective breeding to create uber-goblins, and exhibit the traits of cruelty, arrogance, and bloodlust that the engineers thought were positive traits.

Other D&D monstrous species I have a lot of fondness for are Derro, Giants (of all sorts), Taer, Gnolls, Troglodytes, Dark Folk, Harpies, Hags, and Bullywogs. Also regularly appearing are Lizardmen, Genie, Slaad, Modrons, Kobolds, Trolls and various Fey, but when they show up they are more in the ambiguous category of things you can reasonably bargain with as often as not (red and blue slaad being assimilating are a bit of an exception and are more like "borg" - "lets be friends" has a whole different meaning to them). Although I should say here that my Kobolds are rat-folk and not the dragon-folk you might be expecting.

In my Star Wars campaign, the humans are the goblins. The majority of monstrous characters in the game are human. There are only a few races that might more (as a percentage) be represented as villains - notably the Koboks and the Shistavanen - but even then they are more like "goblins" than an actual villain race and both have an element of "Frankenstein's monster" where the humans are responsible for the madness. Sci-fi is I think different than fantasy. In fantasy its perfectly OK and maybe even necessary to have both people and not-people and things that incarnate certain abstract ideas. In science fiction, everything is just some sort of people except perhaps things that people made in foolish hubris.

In CoC, Deep Ones unsurprisingly show up a lot for similar reasons to Sahuagin in D&D - they can be threats at both the start and end of a campaign, they are suitably inhuman and monstrous, and they work as villains on a large number of levels.

 

[Celebrim]

To be sure, laziness is often the goal for me, not a pejorative. It's very useful to have a quick and easy way to communicate to the players "These are the bad guys. It's okay to kill then." Or, alternatively, "You don't have to pause the quest and have a moral quandary here, it's okay to move on with the main plot."

I do this by the expediency of "It's trying to kill you." Occasionally this leads to "Are we the baddies here?", which is fine, but that just gives opportunity for RP.

I question the need for a quick and easy way to communicate to the players, "These are the bad guys. It's okay to kill them." Self-defense is a valid reason, whether or not they are the bad guys - and indeed is probably the only valid reason.

My species situation is considerably more complicated than that, to the extent that you can and characters do argue over this question in world. OK, so the Free Peoples are people, but should Fey count or are they something else entirely? And I mean, its one thing to say an Sidhe is a person, but a sprite or atomie those are hardly better or smarter than rats and it's OK to kill rats right? What about Giants? What about Goblins, are they really still people? And sure, kobolds are definitely not people, but does that mean it's moral to kill them without any more cause than that? What if they are just minding their own business? And animals, is it really OK to just kill them for fun? So why is it alright to kill anything just for fun?

 

[Celebrim]

Orcs.

I like to subvert the dominant discourse.

Often a wise course.

 

[Meech17]

I have a group of almost all newer players, and even the ones who have experience started in the current 5E era of D&D so none of them have this baggage, which has proven interesting.

I wanted to lean into classic tropes with my first session and see where it went, so the bad guys for the level 1 party were of course goblins. While the party didn't hesitate to fight back against them they also stopped to question their presence. Are these goblins normally seen this close to town? No? Why not? Something must be going on.

So they investigated, and ended up talking to guard captain, who offered them a bounty for more goblins. He spoke of them as if they were little more than wild animals, and the party was a little taken aback by this.

So if they continue to dig into this, I think I'm going to have them discover that they Goblins are moving into human territory, because Gnolls are pushing them out of traditionally Goblin Territory. Gnolls are moving into Goblin territory because Humans are pushing the Gnolls.. Make it all circle back to the BBEG, who happens to actually be a Gnome. So we'll see if this goes anywhere.

In the last session they met a wizard who is being positioned to be their patron, and he's a Drow, which they didn't even bat an eye at. They went and rescued his familiar from a Yuan-Ti Shaman/Witch who was going to boil it into stew. Trapped in the basement with the familiar was a young goblin, who I had placed there for dramatic effect. The fight was supposed to transition from her hut into the basement and they'd find her dunking the goblin, and putting the familiar on deck, putting the fight on a clock. They actually ended up beating her ass a little harder than I expected so they saved the familiar AND the goblin..

This put them in a really funny moral quandary. Do they leave it trapped in this basement to starve? No.. They can't do that. That's far too cruel. Do they just set it free? That could be risky. Do they kill it? That's cruel as well, it hasn't actually done anything to warrant the death penalty as far as they're concerned.

They restrained it and took it back to the wizard's tower where they've decided to camp for the evening. We'll see next session what they do with it. If they ask the wizard to take care of it, I think he'll agree and start to raise it up as his apprentice. That could be funny for them to come back and visit him in a few adventures to find the goblin now an fledgling wizard in training.

So TL;DR I still use all the classic evil races, but none of them are inherently evil. They all have motivations for their actions which leads to a morally grey world. I know some people find this tedious but my players seem to be going with it for the time being.