RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games
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Halloween is traditionally the season for EEEEVILLLL stuff in RPGs, and Legendary Games has been delighted to participate in that, with a SPOOKY SAVINGS sale of up to 60% off creepy horror products here at Paizo and elsewhere, and with not one but TWO brand-new products focused on the bad guys:
- Legendary Villains: Dark Druids is available in wide release everywhere, including right here at Paizo
- The brand-new Mythic Monsters 22: Emissaries of Evil is available right now exclusively at the Legendary Games webstore and at the end of the week in wide release, featuring 13 of the foulest fiends who don't play for any of the major Team Evil groups like demons and devils.
While we're at it, though, it brings up one of the great questions in gaming: which monsters do YOU think are really the most EVIL in the game?
Had lots dark fun GMing some Sacristan kytons last night. They are somewhat evil
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Humans. They're just really insidious about it. Putting on a show of being good and honorable.
In sheer volume though humans preform more acts of evil then any other species on Golarion.
Humans. They're just really insidious about it. Putting on a show of being good and honorable.
In sheer volume though humans preform more acts of evil then any other species on Golarion.
This man speaks the truth. Evil is always more vile when it is hidden by a veneer. There's a reason why so many people hate Rich Burlew's Miko - she's pretty much the perfect deconstruction of the trope.
I find humans to be a sort of copout answer. Given that humans are your only reasonable sample size for sapient acts in the real world your results are skewed. After all dolphins arguably one of the other smartest animals on earth are interspecies rapists.
For Pathfinder I'd place the evilest creatures as creatures that self-select for evil but aren't forced into it by their being. Thus things like derro and natural outsiders are rarely in the upper levels of evil for me, because they don't really have control over it. I'd have to put my vote for evil outsiders that are evil outsiders by deliberate ascension of a mortal as the most evil group by and large. A lemure spawned from some evil guy's soul is essentially a new creature and not really responsible for its action, but someone who pulls the daemon prince act like Areelu are completely responsible and aware.
Daemons.
There is no act more evil than the destruction of a soul. You can't top or even equal that.
I was just thinking about this, and you see a lot of evil humans, and a fair number of evil half-elves, half-orcs, and elves, but you almost never see evil dwarves, gnomes, and halflings. I wonder why that is.
Precisely why my iconic Herald of Madness is a twisted little gnome.
I was just thinking about this, and you see a lot of evil humans, and a fair number of evil half-elves, half-orcs, and elves, but you almost never see evil dwarves, gnomes, and halflings. I wonder why that is.In Wrath of the Righteous you do. Maybe not gnomes, but Dwarves and (at least one) Halfling, for sure.
In past iterations of D&D, it was slightly more common.
The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil adventure diverts away from that view.
Athas (Dark Sun) had a horde of evil halflings for players to contend with.
And there is the famous evil Dwarf Obmi from Gygax's Greyhawk.
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Daemons.
There is no act more evil than the destruction of a soul. You can't top or even equal that.
I would argue the Qlippoth are just as bad. They want to wipe out all of mortal existence, along with their souls so no more demons can be created and they can finally reclaim the Abyss for themselves alone.
(Hint to Jason: Mythic Monsters 30: Qlippoth vs. Daemons, or else one release for each!)
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RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4; Contributor; Publisher, Legendary Games
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I was just thinking about this, and you see a lot of evil humans, and a fair number of evil half-elves, half-orcs, and elves, but you almost never see evil dwarves, gnomes, and halflings. I wonder why that is.In Wrath of the Righteous you do. Maybe not gnomes, but Dwarves and (at least one) Halfling, for sure.In past iterations of D&D, it was slightly more common.
The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil adventure diverts away from that view.
Athas (Dark Sun) had a horde of evil halflings for players to contend with.
And there is the famous evil Dwarf Obmi from Gygax's Greyhawk.
I love Obmi! He was the one clear exception I was thinking of, though the cannibalistic Forest Ridge halflings of Athas certainly qualify as well. There have been some in the history of gaming, but it feels like a distinct minority.
MORE SHORT VILLAINS NEEDED!
From a cosmic threat point of few, I guess the daemons, since they want to blow everything up. But it's more or less hardwired into their nature; they not only breathe, eat, and sleep; they're made of it. OTOH, their mission of universal destruction is so impersonal and such an often repeated fantasy villain motif (you've got qlippoths,demons, and some of the more minor fiend races vying for the whole "destroy/kill" angle) that it doesn't really have the same effect on me as it used to. I mean the whole "destroy everything because of projecting your own self-loathing onto everybody else" thing is a little bit different, but not that much in play.
On a more general level, I'm less enamored with fiends because I find they're often
a) defanged to be more or less nonoffensive
b)rendered in such a way that evil is equivocated with sexual deviance/promiscuity and/or mindless violence.
c)given more or less stock character type motivations/antics.
So yes, fiends can be quite evil, but I also often find that evil to be quite boring. Lately I've become more fascinated with creatures that either have free will or pushed innately toward good but nonetheless end up falling into villainy despite (or maybe even because?) of such good natures. There is a level of betrayal there that almost makes a tainted gold dragon seem ten times worse than a red dragon because you "should be able to trust" a gold dragon. A fallen celestial (NOT a devil!) gets my attention because the celestial forced itself from goodness and often keeps some twisted semblance of the inborn goodness it abandoned. Whereas these embers of good are supposed to lift the celestial above the depredations of evil, instead they only serve make the creature's evil more noticeable when it matters the most.
To put my point another way, putting more darkness on a dark canvas doesn't make the canvas darker. However, if you put darkness on a light background, then the difference really stands out. Evil that is tempered with some kind of virtue also often enables the evil to be more subtle, and subtlety can catch one more unawares. Ironically, if something is completely or utterly vile and evil, our psychological defenses can kick it and reject it out of hand much more easily than if the evil crosses into the uncanny valley that makes us look at ourselves through a glass darkly. The mind is equipped to deal with the gross and the blunt, less so against the more subtle and biting pain of unease and sorrow.