"... if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you," and all that. Pretty classic trope, really.
Why are gargoyles evil?
- Thread starter Bootlebat
- Start date
"... if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you," and all that. Pretty classic trope, really.
I would make bird and poop puns, but the censor bleeps out half of them.
The Crimson Binome
Hero
D&D is a world of black and white stereotypes. Gargoyles are evil because they're ugly. If they looked pleasant, then they would be good.
Sadly true, unless of course they're sexy/beautiful and female. Then they're also evil. Which is a trope I sometimes use against my players.
I liked that in The Dresden Files
[sblock]
The summer queen turned out to be a bad guy and the winter queen is actually the bulwark against a far greater evil.
[/sblock]
Bacon Bits
Legend
Eh, that's not really a D&D trope. That's a western trope from before the advent of birth control and modern medicine.
I say that gargoyles are evil because they're fun to make the PCs fight. Lots of creatures in the game are evil simply to make them into easy bad guys for the PCs to beat up.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
The entire quote is more informative. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
That first part is the key to an interesting story. Monsters fighting monsters isn’t a story, it’s simply a spectacle, or an inciting incident for a story about those who survive in their wake.
Few people are interested in stories about the Blood War, unless they involve mortals who are possessed of the will to decide their our actions and “alignment”.
But more importantly, the abyss staring back is only relevant if the being who stares into it isn’t the same as what is in the abyss.
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Counterpoint: aren't caryatid columns generally neutral? (Not sure whether there has been an official one for 5E yet, though.)
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Humans are fun to make the PCs fight, and they’re...wait, ok, you may have a point...
I haven’t read the latest book (maybe latest two? The last I read was [sblock]The one where two new Ladies are chosen, on opposite sides from the hopes and expectations of Dresden and the audience. Does Titania end up being a bad guy?[/sblock]
I love the Fey characters in those books so much btw. Especially the changelings.
Maybe.
It's well worth the read, I get some of my best ideas from his handling of fey as complex if inscrutable beings from his books.Back to the point of ugly = evil, I agree that it's a trope hardly limited to D&D. It's not even one I have an issue with in general, I'm okay with goblins being universally evil since I don't view them as a race of small humans with green skins. Same with gargoyles for that matter, they can be a cool if terrifying monster at lower levels if the party doesn't have much in the way of magic weapons.
But humans? The occasional extra-planar or Fey creature? Looks can be deceiving both ways.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Maybe.
Back to the point of ugly = evil, I agree that it's a trope hardly limited to D&D. It's not even one I have an issue with in general, I'm okay with goblins being universally evil since I don't view them as a race of small humans with green skins. Same with gargoyles for that matter, they can be a cool if terrifying monster at lower levels if the party doesn't have much in the way of magic weapons.
But humans? The occasional extra-planar or Fey creature? Looks can be deceiving both ways.
Fair enough. I’ve never equated “sapient humanoid social species” with “humans with funny hats”, as many call it, and for my group, having humanoids who only appear sapient be a rare and chilling phenomenon is more interesting and engaging, but I totally get the other POV.
Also, for us, human murder-bandits are just as much fair game for slaughter as inhuman murder-beasts, while inhuman thieves or whatever are just as “off-limits” for mindless slaughter as human thieves or whatever.
In our last session, the pseudo-Prussian Eladrin airship captain/intelligence operative (Eldritch Knight) butchered the Goliaths slavers who were true believers, and we all agreed that they would return to their giantish masters and sell out the dwarf slaves we’d saved, and dumped their bodies in the harbor for the fish. My Gnomish rogue and my wife’s Goliath ranger insisted on giving them a second chance, but the Goliaths wouldn’t budge, and when it came to it, we weren’t going to endanger the dwarves for them. Sometimes things just ain’t clean.
But what’s fun for us, is when it’s just as hard a choice if the enemy is orcs or Gnolls or goblins. YMMV, of course.
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