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

[Cadence]

As far as "always bad" I've lately only had some groups of aberrations (Mind Flayers and their allies), demons, and the undead.

 

[Celebrim]

As far as "always bad" I've lately only had some groups of aberrations (Mind Flayers and their allies), demons, and the undead.

In terms of combat encounters, undead, vermin, constructs, and oozes are very large percentage of the things PCs will fight. Not only is there the moral clarity involved of destroying something that is mindless or nearly so, and often the sense that regardless you are doing humankind (and elfkind, and goblinkind) a service by removing them from the world, but they often are much easier to just fit into an ecosystem than other types of creatures. Undead and constructs in particular can be dropped into sealed dungeons without a need to explain how they survive.

Aberrations, evil spirits and fiends fall into similar categories along with unseelie fey and other unambiguously evil creatures, but they tend to only show up a lot at higher levels. In my cosmology, aberrations are all products of ill-conceived magical experimentation - "things that ought not to have been". Hunting them down and killing them is unambiguously good - there is no redeeming value at all to stirges, quickvipers, kopru, beholders, etc. Any active vampire is unambiguously evil, and active or not the best that can be done for everyone involved including the vampire is to kill it immediately as an act of mercy.

 

[FrogReaver]

My DMs seems to be halflings.

 

[Neonchameleon]

At low levels humans, orcs, and goblins. At higher levels humans, devils, demons, and aberrants.

As a rule the only "always evil" group are demons, who just want to watch the world burn. Even devils can be reasoned with and bargained with and have motivations (but watch the small print). Aberrants come close; they want to colonise and turn the world to be like wherever they came from which is inimical to the PCs.

This doesn't mean that an orc raiding party this side of the wall isn't kill-on-sight.

 

[Yora]

My setting has serpentmen and dark fey as the two big bad forces in the world.

I also like gnolls as inhabitants of the wilderness whose encounters generally go poorly and often violently, but I try to give them some depth and diversity.

 

[Bluenose]

My last campaign was quite episodic and had a variety of enemies from adventure to adventure, but the most common types were creatures associated with the Darkness rune or alternatively humans from the nomad tribes of the area. Oddly for a Glorantha game, there were not many times Chaos became a problem.

The next campaign I'm playing will be Traveller, and hte bad guys are unequivocally Aslan from the Glorious Empire. Which may mean PCs from places that hate Aslan because of their expansionist tendencies wanting help from expansionist Aslan to fight slaving/human-phaging Aslan. The alternative source of military help is someone people used to playing default Imperials probably won't think of, those lovely mind-ripping Zhodani.

 

[ART!]

It occurs to me that I haven't used villain races for decades. I think the last time was when I was running a MERP game and there were Tolkien orcs to kill without remorse*.


* I know that during or after writing LOTR, Tolkien struggled with whether orcs were inherently evil and therefore ripe for slaying.

 

[Celebrim]

* I know that during or after writing LOTR, Tolkien struggled with whether orcs were inherently evil and therefore ripe for slaying.

That's a slight misunderstanding of his philosophical problem. After writing LOTR, Tolkien struggled with the fact that people were taking his books seriously, and one of the philosophical problems he had was that he didn't feel he portrayed orcs in LOTR as being inherently evil and unredeemable enough. He also struggled therefore with the origin of orcs as elves (or humans or both) because he didn't like implying that Melkor could so corrupt something of Illuvatar's (other than himself) such that it was effectively ruined and defeated. It would be fine to suggest that Melkor could corrupt an individual, but he rejected that Melkor could corrupt a race of elves (or men) so far as to make them irredeemable. He therefore began to wish that he'd portrayed orcs as more robotic puppets and less like they had personality or independent thought. He never was anything but fully committed to orcs as little demonic figures there were instruments of diabolical tyranny, and so never struggled with the idea that they should be opposed and slain. He only struggled with the mythopoeic justification for that.

 

[Gradine]

I'll echo that High Elves make for great villains. But there are a lot of races that make for great villains but, that's different from being a "villain race", which are largely out of vogue these days (for good reason). That said some races are, based on ecology and typical canonical cultures, tend to make great antagonists. Yuan-ti and sahaugin are good examples here; cultures that aren't so much evil in a high-level ontological sense but organized and centered in ways that are diametrically opposed with largely cooperative civilizations. I usually try to make sure that there is some dissenting faction in the case that I do; neutral/good members/organizations within the culture that oppose their more anti-social tendencies.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

My DMs seems to be halflings.

The worst is all the halfling bards...

Forward yesterday cutting words lead you astray
I'm the opposite of weal know I'm gonna steal
I like to play guitar, in my head Ima superstar
All's I got is time, got no meaning, just a rhyme

Take time with a wounded hand
'Cause I cast a spirit that will heal
Take time with a wounded hand
'Cause I like to steal
Take time with a wounded hand
'Cause I can cast heal
and I like to steal

I'm half the man I used to be
(It's a half-pint bard that I wanna play)
Well, I'm half the man I used to be
(It's a half-pint bard that I wanna play)
Well, I'm half the man I used to be
(It's a half-pint bard that I wanna play)
Well, I'm half the man I used to be
Half the man I used to be