Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6360647" data-attributes="member: 18">Gosh, I totally did not! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The 3E BoVD is the perfect example "not getting" Evil. Let's be clear, I don't need evil to be banal or at real-world levels of unpleasantness, but it should be something recognisable, something genuinely scary/hair-raising, and not something that not just ridiculous or laughable or Snidely Whiplash. The BoVD, unfortunately, was about as scary as a particularly weak Halloween costume, and indeed, the whole thing was mustache-twirling, over-the-top, makes-no-sense, Black Metal ridiculousness of the worst kind, which associated a lot of stuff that isn't inherently evil (rather, stuff that's deviant from the norm or mainstream, and certainly CHAOTIC in D&D terms, but not Evil) with stuff that actually is Evil for purely stylistic "WOO HAIL SATAN 1980s-STYLE" reasons, and just seemed like a giant bad joke. It was in no way "mature", in no way scary, and in no way informative or inspiring. The 2E Book of Villains had a zillion times more insight into Evil and how to use it appropriately.I mean seriously, if you write a book on Evil for D&D, and more than a quarter of that book seems like it could be called "Black Metal" or resembles trashy 1980s views of Satanism, you're doing something very very wrong. And with the BoVD, I'm not sure even a quarter of the book DIDN'T seem like that!Sorry, I probably seem mean, but really, it's like, to me, when your vision of Evil is 1980s Metal Band "Evil", not, y'know, Sauron (who was much more restrained that the BoVD), or Morning Light Mountain (holy crap A for evil there, from SF but would fit right into fantasy), Utuk'ku or Prince Regal or some Fantasy Pol Pot or the like, that's not really cutting it. I mean, yeah, there's movie Thulsa Doom, who is basically in charge of a 1980s Metal Band of Evil, but he should be a fraction of what's going on, not the core.At least it's not QUITE as awful as the BoED, so there's that going for it, because ludicrous as it is, it actually commits, whereas the BoED was just rather half-hearted.</blockquote>

Verification