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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 764646" data-attributes="member: 7394">Well, all good rules are meant to be broken. How was Hitler and the Nazis not the epitome of evil in the last 100 years? OK, I'm not going to go down this road any further except to say that if you want to find a motivation for pure evil, study them and their philosophies. Watch the holocaust movies. After losing your lunch, their relevance to this discussion will be apparent.Now, on to the issue at hand. I think the blackguard makes more sense than a core class. Why? It makes more sense for an evil god, demonlord. etc. to invest a character with power once he has already proven a knack for survival. In fact, it makes more sense to specifically try to corrupt a champion of good. At first level, what's to stop a novice character from seeing the light and denouncing evil? No, evil wants much more of a commitment than that. The main point that Eric Cagle makes in this month's Dragon Magazine is that evil doesn't form in a vacuum. It comes from disappointments in life, poor upbringing, conditioning, and societal prejudices. In fact, I'm convinced that if you take selfishness, the most common form of evil, out of the equation, the next most common form of evil is the person who does evil while thinking they are acting for the greater good. If X group causes non-stop problems to group Y, how is it not a good thing to eliminate group X? What if this person has suffered at the hands of group X? What if the physical appearance of group X is revolting to him or her? What if group X wears strange clothing, worships pagan gods, and speaks in a harsh sounding language? Once the character obtains the ability to eliminate group X, the person tallies the pros and cons of doing such a horrific thing and acts accordingly. They may be so convinced that they are doing right that they are willing to sacrifice themselves for group Y, and even considers themselves holy.So, bring a 1st level character into this scenario. Maybe he has all the reasons to do something horrible, but he's a minor schemer, or a punk streetfighter. He's just as likely to end up dead as he is to really do something aweful. Evil might watch him with interest, but its going to wait to see if he survives the hard knocks that comes his way. If so, and if he buys into their philosophies, then he might be worthy of advancing to blackguard status.A final thought is that even in a fantasy world, evil may not recognize itself as such. Evil can take the road of necessary compromises, such as decreasing individual freedoms in the name of protection, or torturing someone to gain information necessary to thwart another evil being's horrific plan. This is the slippery slope of evil, and one must begin this journey from the point where they are trying to do good.</blockquote>

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