D&D General what environments feel lacking in nice people?

[UngeheuerLich]

Reddit?

 

[Clint_L]

Well, in my game world:

The most corrupt, vile, and despicable people can be found in the highest offices of government, temples, and guilds. You want to see some truly insidious people doing unspeakable things? start your search in the fanciest buildings and look for people wearing the fanciest clothes. Power corrupts, after all.

Dude, this is supposed to be a fantasy game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Often, the Feywild and Shadowfell are depicted as "lacking in nice people." That is, they aren't necessarily evil, but they're rarely good--scary, capricious, selfish, etc. And the Elemental Chaos, assuming you use it, is more a place of just massive elemental energy, so it's a bit too dangerous for the denizens to be the hugs-and-puppies type.

I'm a big fan of using not-entirely-human figures as slightly alarming beings. They can be friendly when it suits them, but then something will happen and they'll remind you they're actually over a thousand years old and see individual human lives as curious diversions, like a pretty butterfly they might trap in a jar--or kill, preserve, and pin to a card. My Jinnistani nobles are like this; they aren't evil, but they are definitely ruthless and living under a different, non-human perspective on reality and behavior.

And we certainly can't forget the Far Realm, with its horrid abominations and twisted, corrupting stars and such. Eberron expresses this as the dark/evil/bad parts of Dal Quor.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The multiverse is alternate primes. I could have sworn 3.x still had them. Cubic Gates usually/often had one as one of the 6. And I'm pretty sure Manual of the Planes mentions them when it's talking about color pools.

I guess that'd be 4e. Which makes sense since that's when they threw out the Great Wheel Cosmology.

As far as 4e is concerned, every "alternate prime" is simply a different location within the overall material world. I don't think it ever committed to a specific description of the material world's nature--that is, it didn't have to be a globe or flat or any specific thing. (The benefits of never describing more than one small region and explicitly leaving the rest of the world open for interpretation.)

So "world of ponies" is a distant, perhaps inaccessible, other location within whatever qualifies as "the world." Perhaps it's a different planet within the same plane.

Or, if you wanted, you could do any of several other things. Perhaps a fragment of the Living Gate leads to shattered "could have been" realities, or any of a number of other things.

 

[GuardianLurker]

Yeah. I like my Alternate Primes/Multiverse. If it was good enough for Heinlein, it's good enough for me.

 

[Voadam]

The underdark is mostly evil with Svirfneblin as the exception. In the 1e Fiend Folio they are neutral with good tendencies and were generally a potential resource/refuge for good parties in the underdark.

 

[Hriston]

I have a strange desire to do some remixing of what environments are associated with the more or less good guys and bad guys, and then I remembered I am dumb.
so anyway what are the bad-guy themed environments as my mind has decided to betray me once again?

In some fantasy I've read recently, in The House of the Wolfings, the bad guys are from Rome, in The Broken Sword, the bad guys are from the land of the trolls which seems to be somewhere around Skandinavia/Finland, and in Three Hearts and Three Lions, the bad guys are from the lands of chaos which is analogous to northern and eastern Europe in terms of the action of the book.

 

[Voadam]

The sea in D&D generally has both: Good guy sea elves and merfolk, neutral locathah fish people, and evil Sahuagin and ixitchihuatl.

 

[Voadam]

Volcanoes in D&D are generally home to evil fire giants, red dragons, firenewts (1e FF) and such. I can't think of a general good guy monster/race associated with them.

 

[Hriston]

I will star with the classic the shire is green fields and pocket Forrest and mordor is an ash-blasted wasteland one is seem as a good place the other the heart of evil.

Don't forget, in The Lord of the Rings, evil also lurks in the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs, Moria, Isengard, and the Dead Marshes.