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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 6208157" data-attributes="member: 6686357">The thing about many societies that we modern liberals would consider evil did not actually consider themselves evil and did not extort the values of being evil. They believed themselves to be morally right. In the USA, the two main political parties consider their opponents to be evil because of differing values. It's not particularly difficult for a writer to give a non-evil society a rationale for, say, slavery, especially if you're using Egyptian-style "you can't abuse your slaves" slavery rather than American-style "kill them as you please" slavery, although it falls apart when you can just mass-produce golems to do all labor, freeing up the slaves to work in service and maintenance and worry about boredom and no OSHA compliance rather than being whipped by sadistic taskmasters under a burning sun.Already it sounds way more interesting than yet another cartoonishly evil society of evil sociopaths and I haven't even detailed the actual society.The "races are taught to be evil" things falls flat for me. The closest analogue for that in our world are the dictators in certain African countries. Do you happen to notice a big difference between then and, say, the yuan-ti? The yuan-ti have this huge, successful empire and can undertake building projects on the same scale as the pyramids. The African dictatorships lack basic infrastructure.Even the Wall Bankers (lawful evil at its worst) are dependent on everyone else NOT acting like @$$holes so that they can steal from them. A society were literally everyone is a sociopath simply could not function in any meaningful fashion.EDIT: Whoops! Didn't notice the second page.I like the idea that the roaming baddies are actually their equivalent of human bandit hordes, like mongols and vikings. That neatly solves the issues I have by giving goblinoid societies the same complexity as human ones, but we simply don't visit peaceful goblinoid villages in campaigns.</blockquote>

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