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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4655872" data-attributes="member: 2067">Forked from: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showpost.php?postid=4655642" target="_blank"> Ampersand: Wizards and Worlds </a>Scott had some pretty interesting thoughts over in that thread, but I figured a new thread would be better to discuss some of his ideas.I wanna say that we've tread this ground well before, but for the sake of completeness, here's the thing:"Evil" in fiction isn't the same thing as evil in the real world.Specifically, the idea of "cosmic evil" is pretty deeply ingrained in the Fantasy genre as a whole, and its origins in myths and legends (and its main development in the modern era through a distinctly Christian figure in Tolkein). In most fantasy, evil isn't just misunderstood. It is baby-eating, puppy-kicking-capital-E-Evil, to a level as deep as the soul. It is a direct choice to align one with quick and easy power at the expense of everything good about you. From the orcs in LotR to Lord Voldemort in HP to Sephiroth in Final Fantasy, evil is on a deep and cosmic scale. You know what you're doing. You're tossing in your lot with those who revel in raising the bones of the dead to fight those that were once their friends for the sheer schadenfreude of it, for your own glory, for personal gain over the gain of the world.This was emulated pretty well by the old alignment system and old cosmology assumptions: when you killed an orc, it wasn't the same as killing a shark, because when you killed an orc, you killed something that had paid for power with its soul. Now a sort of postmodern fantasy is possible, but then the central motifs of the D&D game (such as Killing Things and Taking Their Stuff) take on a much more disturbing kind of tone. In the Real World, a shark isn't considered evil or bad for eating a swimmer much these days (anyone who watches the Discovery Channel could tell you sharks get a bad rap). Exterminating sharks so that we can be safer in the waters or even so we can eat the fish that they were eating is largely considered a much more vile thing to do than the shark eating something that it thought was a dying seal and that happened to be some guy on a surfboard.If PCs killed orcs simply for being orcs, then the game gets pretty disturbing parallels pretty quickly. I'm kind of surprised you got this idea from WoW when EBERRON IS SITTING RIGHT THERE. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> The noble warrior culture of the goblinoids there? Heck, even the old story about the elf/orc rivalry and how Gruumsh lost his eye is basically a story of a land-grab that someone didn't get invited to. Seriously, there's a lot more than WoW. Really, this is something that all modern fantasy has to address in some way. A lot of fantasy archetypes are based on old racist stereotypes about other groups of humans. Racism wasn't always bad, so we had things like dwarves with obvious parallels to Jewish stereotypes, for instance (more than just dwarves, really -- remember old gnomes with their big noses?). Modern fantasy all has to re-contextualize that so that it's at least palatable. Making "evil" humanoids not necessarily evil is an old idea that dates back to at LEAST 2e, and is well present throughout 3e and even more influential in 4e. Conflicts are more nuanced that Cosmic Good vs. Cosmic Evil in a lot of source material, but Cosmic Good vs. Cosmic Evil remains a strong fantasy archetype. I mean, in part, this is what some of the people reacting against the "Good planes are always boring" idea are saying: Good vs. Evil isn't the only conflict in our repertoire.It's an interesting direction to take, which is why it's been done a lot, especially in the last 10-15 years as people begin to react against Tolkeinish fantasy. But that doesn't mean that the big cosmic conflict concept is ignored (as Harry Potter has shown, it is alive and well, just one of a myriad possibilities!). 4e dodges Cosmic Conflict mostly, but allows it to still be present, which is a pretty good middle ground, and opens up the game a little more than older editions were inclined to do, which is quite nice. Isn't that the stereotype? The guy asking for help in the tavern is probably a wizard who will use all the MacGuffins you give him to destroy you and your party? Isn't that half of 1e adventures? Your PC's do something to inadvertently doom the world and then have to save it? (Desert of Desolation comes to mind pretty strongly)Heck, the campaign I'm running right now, using the 3e book Elder Evils has that has one of the plotlines, and it was explicitly encouraged by that book!Because its such a stereotype, it's almost more notable when your PC's AREN'T sent on mysterious missions that end up dooming you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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