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.