Nature of EVIL (factions)

[CorvusMask]

I decided to make thread on most evil factions on setting that aren't cultists, genocidal xenophobes, murderhobos or have inherent lack of free will (such as fiends by being literal manifestation of concept of evil into physical form made out of quintessence aka literal stuff experiences, ideas and alignment is made out of).

The twist here? Speculating on why these factions became evil and whether they have non evil PC potential ;D This might be caused by my annoyance at people assuming this setting is running out of evil, so I'm kinda running with that idea "Okay, let's theorycraft this, could you make non evil PC". After all, as gm, even without making up homebrew setting lore, you can justify anything. Forewarning: Yeah most of these are aberrations, who would have thunk it.

So lets start with almighty fish overlords, Alghollthu and their empire, the mind controlling alien fish wishing to rule their slaves from shadows.:

Why are they evil? Is it because of their powers lead them to easily dominate others? Nah, its most likely because they all share genetic memory from since they were primordial ooze and first Alghollthu with personality to form probably happened to be a jerk who wanted to abuse its natural mind control powers. Alghollthu have individuals due to individual experiences, different bodies and such, but all of them share same lineatic memory to their origin. Their intelligence, power and mind control abilities do kinda foster really narcistic personality types which then pass on to their spawn through the memories, which makes things like "introspection to learn error of my ways" very hard when you have thousands of years of believing in your superiority since from age of mindless cells. The easiest way for non evil Alghollthu I see is them having amnesia to start from blank slate, but them being huge fishes doesn't lead them well to PC status.

Honestly, I only see creations of Alghollthu such as úgothol(wow I did that accent accidentally and now I don't want to correct it) or ulat-kini having non evil potential, especially since ulat-kini don't have the feature of being single gender deep ones anymore. They likely have problems with overcoming psychic programming built into them like how some azarketi have ancient Alghollthu sleeper agent programming hidden inside their minds, but they don't have baggage of literally inheriting your ancestors' narcissism.

Dominion of the Black is vast, so let's focus on Intellect Devourer, the OG darkland body snatchers:

So this one is actually fairly clear besides being Dominion of the Black adjacent alien beings: besides their inherent ability to take over bodies by consuming brain, the main incentive for them to take over sapient hosts is that Intellect Devourers don't have much of sensory sensations in their natural form. Its very much directly stated they are fascinated senses like touch, taste and pain. In otherwords, they are very much addicted to tactile senses.

This is actually one of more common traits between various Dominion of the Black aliens. They in general lack empathy for other beings, seem to share overall philosophy of annihilation/void/oblivion, have tendency to see them as purely resources to be harvested and used(more intelligent beings better resources), but some of them also appear to have hunger for something specific. Chyezaeda have endless hunger for sustenance and knowledge, Neshmaal have hunger for life energy of creatures, Deh-Nolo are stated to have hunger for knowledge Brain Collectors aren't spelled out to thave this hunger(they are fanatical to the Dominion's philosophy though) but they do have biological ability to use stolen brains as storage space.

I'd say that Intellect Devourers would have better chance of becoming non evil than Alghollthu have since any being based around infiltration and deception has to have some level of empathy to learn to pretend like person whose body they stole, but likely all Dominion species have developed with ability to not think other beings as really "people" in order to be able to make use of their abilities on other sapient beings without sense of guilt. The main thing is over beings like D&D Mind Flayer who explicitly need sapient brains to reproduce, is that Intellect Devourers likely don't need humanoids or such, they just get more out of them due to abilities or infiltration potential. (though arguably animals likely have equal if not greater sensory input than humans) Another thing to realize is that while Intellect Devourers gain knowledge of how to use their new body's abilities and know their role and status in society, they don't gain specific knowledge or feelings of the body. Because likely if they did see the body's memories and live through them, they'd have better chance of learning to empathize with their victim that would be counterproductive for them. I'd think most likely case of non evil Intellect Devourer would be one that has lived as same person and have to be pretend to be friends with other people for so long they have assimilated into the role. Their culture itself has no strong incentive to encourage altruism or empathy because their ability makes them feel good because it helps them break away from complete lack of tactile sensory input.

PC wise though never playable since too powerful abilities, but I could see them being represented as reflection heritage being with lineage similar to morph-risen.

So another aberration empire, this time Neothelids worm empire:

So why are these level 15 gargantuan psychic worms evil besides having lot of power to abuse? Because they serve the plots of Great Old ones and Outer Gods. Whether because they were created by them or because their alien minds understand and agree their with the alien worldview of Mythos, Neothelids are very much first out of three aberrations listed here that is impossible to fully understand because Ctulhu Mythos relies on concept of "beyond humanoid understanding". Either way, they have knowledge from beyond this reality and plot with their worm servants to rule the world when Great Old Ones arise.

Technically Neothelids could be CN like some great old ones I suppose, but yeah this is very much best argument for always CE out of these three. Its hard to tell even if memory wipe would help here since its unknown how their connection to reality beyond reality works and moment you give them way of thinking that makes sense from human perspective, it doesn't work with Cthulhu mythos rules anymore. They are also last Mythos related faction I discuss because while all mythos factions aren't evil, they just like fiends kinda rely on concept of "it just has to be beyond mortal understanding or it doesn't count". Still though, I think its good thing to note that they aren't evil for evil's sake, their sense of normal is just what would be evil to most beings. Mythos beings can have malice yes, but not necessary from their perspective.

Undead in general, because too many factions to note, but I need this as setup for last one:

Okay, undead are fairly simple: Its pretty much directly stated in lore, outside of starfinder, that to remain as non evil undead you need extraordinary will power because you are animated by entropic energy that gives you inherent need to destroy living beings.
So as results undead are perfect pcs for beings who want to resist corruption inherent to them and do good in spite of their condition. Metawise this is because otherwise by killing yourself you could become immortal and stronger being :p Hence why there has to be trade off for being undead unless you are eeeeeeeevil already. In which case its just small price of losing your original personality and memories to undead corruption.

Uderfhans, created by horsemen as weapons of the apocalypse INCOMING SPECULATION:

So hear me out here: Uderfhans might have "anti souls" somehow made of negative energy that give them similar anthipathy to living beings as undead have(hence uderfhan's gleefulness towards violence and creating better methods of killing), but they aren't actually inherently evil despite being 99.99% evil. I'm sure at least one developer or writer will do spit take now.

Plot twist here? Fiends have no free will. Undead freewill is heavily affected by the negative energy corrupting their souls. So you'd think that uderfhans have no free will due to having souls of negative energy right? Nah, you are thinking of it wrong way around, they HAVE free will AND inherent taste for violence. Paradoxical? Yes. True? Evidence suggests so. Beings with normal soul made out of positive energy have free will and most of them value life. Uderfhans have souls made out of energy of destruction and thus most value death, but they do still have free will by same logic right?

So why is this relevant besides stating that "Its not really that uderfhans don't have choice but to be evil, they just enjoy killing so most of them choose to go with their masters' doomsday plan"? Because of freewill, some of them have created ambitions than just serving their master's will. Some of them want to survive as long as possible. Others want to earn uderfhan species their own glory independent of daemons and culture beyond mindless violence(even if that violence is used towards other things instead in calculated fashion). So it stands to reason that just like how there are super (fictionally) nihilistic serial killers among people, that there probably are uderfhan who have uncharacteristically pacifistic tendencies. Uderfhans have potential to create independent path from daemons, but the main thing that trips us up is that their inherent values are so much different from normal beings that to them, uderfhan who doesn't like violence is as weird as human who loves murdering people with death traps. Aka nobody expects it, but when you think about it, they are very much example of Bizarro people. How far that goes? Hard to say, there are lot of people who don't like killing in real life, but enjoy it in context of games, so I suppose I wouldn't be surprised if its something similar to some of them.

I would have written about serpentfolk next, but tbh, I doubt anyone reads all five of those :'D Nobody reads my long wind posts when I get excited to do lore talk x'D

[Temperans]

Dero are corrupted fey, so evil by nature of their corruption.

Deep One Hybrid are evil due to nature and religion. Theoretically it might be possible for a non-evil one to exist, but it would be extremely specific.

Xulgaths are evil due to the darklands (few good things there) and also probably because Aroden screwed them over by removing their protection from Darkland's radiation and by extension collapsing the forest and crops.

Mortics are living undead, so they trend evil by nature of undeath.

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Its incredible how many factions you remove if you filter out even just the murderhobos.

Also wow is there a lot of evil aquatic ancestries.

[Loreguard]

CorvusMask wrote:

I decided to make thread on most evil factions on setting that aren't cultists, genocidal xenophobes, murderhobos or have inherent lack of free will (such as fiends by being literal manifestation of concept of evil into physical form made out of quintessence aka literal stuff experiences, ideas and alignment is made out of).

The twist here? Speculating on why these factions became evil and whether they have non evil PC potential ;D This might be caused by my annoyance at people assuming this setting is running out of evil, so I'm kinda running with that idea "Okay, let's theorycraft this, could you make non evil PC". After all, as gm, even without making up homebrew setting lore, you can justify anything. Forewarning: Yeah most of these are aberrations, who would have thunk it.

** spoiler omitted **...

Interesting...

A Psycopathic Uderfhan who loves meeting all variety of children for the pure glee of seeing their diversity and the way they seem to innately burn with positive energy. The others are really worried about them.... no... not really, they are just really mad that everytime they try to kill the children being watched, they fly in to a rage and kill all the Uderfhan in sight that are endangering the children.

All that written, I don't know what a Uderfhan looks like... that is my next step... because you got me interested.