Flesh renders were savage and evil outsiders of demonic origin who existed to slaughter all living things. Although these horrifying, lanky creatures were primarily known on the world of #Eberron, a number of them were unleashed into the King's Forest of Cormyr by Lolth as part of her plan to destroy the town of Eveningstar. #dnd#forgottenrealms#Realmslore
I have made a Jorasco halfling warlock who is a priest of Kor Korron, which I will be playing in an #eberron campaign. (Specifically, he is a priest of Kor Korron, pretends to be a wizard among his peers, but likes to pass himself off as a cleric in public.) I am not very familiar with Thelanis, but I understand there is a fae court there. Do any of you have ideas for which archfey I should suggest to my #DM?
I think I am done with D&D, and the reason is "evil species."
If you're writing speculative fiction, the fastest way to get me to lose interest in your setting is to say "members of this species are {always|usually} evil!" If your setting has evil species, then I do not care about the lore of the setting or any stories you tell in it.
For some kinds of games this doesn't matter. For example, in main-series Super Mario Bros games, Goombas are an enemy race, which would kill my enjoyment of the story...except it doesn't matter because the selling-point of a mainline Mario game has nothing to do with the story.
But in a role-playing game, where I am expected to care about my character and their place in the world, having evil species makes getting into the game impossible.
The trouble with Dungeons and Dragons is twofold.
First, every official D&D setting has evil species. Hence, I am not interested in playing in any of the official D&D settings as written.
"Just house rule it" is the usual refrain from those who believe D&D is the only possible TTRPG. But in many D&D settings, such as Faerun, the link between species and alignment is so deeply embedded in the lore that changing it would require rewriting the entire setting from scratch. The result wouldn't bear any resemblance to "canon" Faerun.
Eberron is different. It has evil species (including aberrations, undead, and fiends), but the species-alignment connection is not so tightly coupled with the setting that it couldn't be removed. It would be a nontrivial amount of work, but a dedicated homebrewer could remove evil species from Eberron.
A dedicated homebrewer could also write a whole new setting from scratch that doesn't have evil species. But that brings us to the second, and larger, problem with D&D: the community.
If you even talk about the idea of making a D&D setting with no evil species, or house-ruling Eberron to remove them, the D&D community reacts with nothing less than outrage. Almost all such responses take one of three forms.
The first response is what I call the "denial-confirmation response." It usually goes something like this.
Oh come on, this is a rediculous complaint to make about D&D. The so-called evil races aren't REALLY always evil. {Drow|Goblins|Trolls|Orcs} are more often evil, but they CAN be neutral or even good, so how dare you complain that they are evil races? The only exceptions are the creatures that are literally made out of Evil energy, like fiends and undead.
This bizarrely contradictory response starts out by denying the existence of evil species, before confirming that actually, D&D does have evil species, of both the "always evil" and "usually evil" varieties. The creatures who make this argument always seem to think it's some sort of gotcha: they expect me to suddenly agree to like the official D&D settings if they just repeat back the exact thing I dislike about it.
The second response is a variation of the is-ought fallacy. It usually goes something like> We HAVE to have species X as an evil species, because they {were created by an evil god|need to consume flesh to survive|did something evil to become who they are|are literally made out of evil energy.}
The trouble with this response is that species X is not real. All the lore about it is made up. If you made up some lore explaining "why" liches are evil in your world, then either
a)Change the lore, or
b)Accept that I will never be interested in playing in your setting.
The third, and perhaps most outlandish, response to my preference is a motte-and-baily argument which attempts to conflate "evil species" with "evil characters." Usually, this argument is accompanied by another motte-and-baily equting my preference not to play in a setting with evil species with somehow forcing everyone else not to play in a setting with evil species. It usually sounds something like this:> D&D is all about righteous heroes going into a dungeon to kill unambiguously evil orc slavers. We need evil species so that we can have clearly evil villains without needing a bunch of angst wondering whether they are okay to kill. Why do you have to shove your "morally gray" agenda into everything? Why can't you just let me enjoy my simple guilt-free dungeon-crawling game in peace?
Putting aside the fact that no one is forcing you to stop playing games with evil species, evil "species" are not the same as evil "characters." The orc slavers at the end of the dungeon would still be just as unambiguously evil if they were human slavers.
@laidbackdm I am going to go with Sharn in Eberron, but I would also like to mention Gloomwrought, a gloomy metropolis in the Shadowfell introduced during 4e. It’s quite good.
I'm not even done with my current #Pathfinder campaign yet, but the #Eberron campaign Notion I'm building using the template from @slyflourish has like 20 NPCs, three different villains with colliding motivations, an idea for a first session dungeon.
The notion template makes just dumping prep into a database to use later so easy.
I've been re-reading Fourth Edition D&D books, because I've been flipping through every #Eberron book I have to cross reference lore and get ideas for the campaign I'm writing up.
Fourth Edition listed tactics with every monster. Perhaps not so thoughtfully detailed as The Monsters Know What They're Doing by @KeithAmmann but still, suggested tactics are RIGHT THERE in the monster listing.
5e and Pathfinder 2e could really learn something from the system they shun.