Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 59 - Alignment and the Loss of Inherently Evil Creatures

Episode Date: February 7, 2021

Wizards of the Coast and Paizo have wisely removed some of the problematic depictions of ancestries and ethnicities, adding nuance to those previously portrayed as universally evil.  How does that change our games and what does it mean for DMs?    

Thank you for tuning in to episode 59 of the Taking20 podcast, Alignment and the Loss of Innately Evil Creatures. This week's sponsor is Sam's Pickled Flavored Toothpaste. Makes your entire mouth feel like a bottle of wine that's gone bad. God, who writes these? These are awful. that's gone bad. God, who writes these? These are awful. I received an email this week that the podcast aggregation service Feedspot named this podcast as one of Tabletop's Top 100 Podcasts to Follow in 2021, coming in at number 19 behind Titans Like Glass Cannon. That has to be because of you guys, because I didn't submit it for consideration, so thank you all for listening, and thank you to whoever submitted this. Please feel free to send me some feedback via comments below or to feedback at taking20podcast.com.

I'm always looking for show ideas and I would love to hear what you'd love to hear. Let me start this episode by saying this is not a political podcast. Nothing I say here should be construed as X group is right and Y group is wrong. It is important to understand the historical perspective of this topic, though, so we've got to go over some rough ground. I will use the term race quite a bit in this episode. It's a term dating back to D&D 1.0 to depict the ancestry of a character. Human, elf, dwarf, drow, gnome, dragonborn, warforged, yusoki, whatever. I am not and will not use that term to talk about human beings from a certain area of the world. So when I say race, we're talking halflings and shit, not Caucasians and shit. Got me? Okay, please don't sharpen your pitchforks quite yet. In an article published in

June of 2020, Wizards of the Coast said that in the 50 years of D&D, some races like the Orcs and Drow have been characterized as monstrous and evil. They went on to draw comparisons to how ethnic groups on Earth have been characterized and stated correctly that such sweeping generalizations are wrong. As an aside, they go on to say that they're correcting some of their depictions of ethnic groups in the adventures they publish, citing stereotypes like the Vistani people being similar to the Romani peoples, sometimes pejoratively referred to as gypsies. It wasn't just Wizards of the Coast that had problematic depictions, though. Hell, Harry Potter's goblin race has large noses and are obsessed with gold.

Pictures of them could easily be construed as playing on every negative Jewish stereotype you'll find on a German propaganda poster from the 30s and 40s. And many decried Star Wars The Phantom Menace and how the Trade Federation was portrayed as having East Asian stereotypes, and Jar Jar Binks as a negative representation of either Caribbean peoples or African Americans. I mean, The Phantom Menace should be decried not because of the stereotyping that may exist in the movie, but because it's a bad movie. But back to Wizards of the Coast. Since the blog post, Wizards of the Coast has published The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and presented the drow of the

Kryn dynasty as being more nuanced with a culture all their own. And to be frank, this was the right move to make. Characterizing an entire race as irredeemably evil or with negative stereotypes is troubling at the least. I was there during the early days of D&D, and having a group that could serve as a force of evil was convenient. Need a tribal warlike people on the rampage? Orcs are your go-to. Do you need a sneaky group living in dark places of the world and worshipping an evil spider demon queen named Lolth? The Drow were there for you. Black-hearted little monsters that Zerg rushed towns, overwhelming them with sheer numbers and obsessed with fire? Yep, goblins were great. The early versions of D&D characterized these entire

races as evil, and when I was gaming in high school, these made convenient foils for the player characters. Orc warlords, drow priestesses, Githyanki raiders, and so forth. Once I reached college, I gradually realized that that was just lazy writing to have every member of an intelligent race being inherently evil. I mean, at no point in their existence did two drow look at each other and say, Are we the baddies? If you don't get that reference, look up the Are We the Baddies sketch from Mitchell and Webb on the BBC. It's a few years old, still pretty funny. I realized that for any race of intelligent creatures, there may be a tendency for members to behave a certain way, but it couldn't apply to everyone equally.

My belief was crystallized when I read a fantasy book in college called Grunt, and it was about a war from the orc's perspective. That book showed a more nuanced characters of traditionally evil races, and it really opened my eyes to a lot of things. and it really opened my eyes to a lot of things. Whether we're talking about races, tribes, groups, or even a fraternity or hell, a bridge club, I realize that there are some who lean more good, some that lean more evil, and some that are just in the middle.

Especially Janice at bridge club. Wow, she is unrepentantly evil. Eats puppies evil. Catch up on scrambled eggs evil. Even if the vast majority of a particular race is evil, there have to be some that aren't. Some that are neutral and can tolerate other species or maybe even good and going out of their way to help them. Since that realization, I've always played every race and group described as evil as they lean evil or tend towards evil, but there are always outliers. If you made a 3D graph with the law chaos on one

axis and good evil on the other, and then drew a frequency graph, yes, the largest peak may be alignment defined for that race, but it would be a bell curve or some other type of Gaussian distribution. In every edition of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, humans are defined as neutral. That does not mean that every human's neutral. Humans can be any one of the nine alignments. Then wouldn't that be the same for the Wante, Rakshasa, or Duergar? By the same token, why can't there be evil representations in the traditionally good races? The fallen diva who believes the only way to redeem mankind is to expose them to an unrepentant source of evil so they'll turn towards

the light. Like Gabriel in the Constantine movie. Peter Stormari as Lucifer. Just perfect. Loved it. If you haven't seen it, go watch that movie. Or a silver dragon that's been corrupted by evil influence or curse and wants to protect the elves by keeping them in pens and not allowing them to leave. A traditionally chaotic good Leland from Elysium who's come to embrace a more structured type of good. I've played a number of campaigns where PCs and NPCs were from traditionally evil races but weren't evil themselves. They could have been cast out from their family and collective

because they had different beliefs. They didn't believe certain actions like theft, murder, or destruction were justified uniformly. They rebelled against the teachings and beliefs of the area where they were raised and struck out on their own path. Instead, I started giving each evil race a culture that's different from the traditional ancestries the players use. The orcs, for example, in one of my homebrew worlds, worship gods and goddesses that revere strength of body and sharpness of mind. underworlds worship gods and goddesses that revere strength of body and sharpness of mind. They're taught from a very young age that to display and prove strength is the best way to honor their leaders and their gods. So what do they do? They fight each other, all the way in

the nursery before they can even stand. When they get bored of fighting each other, they look for others to fight. From the outside, how does that look to the nearby human settlement? Like a bunch of evil creatures wanting to destroy everything the humans have built. Drow who rejected the teachings of Lolth and worshipped other deities or even worked with the surface worlders who were victims of drow plots through the years. And I love that that's what Wizards of the Coast have done with the drow. Another example may be moss trolls, who are traditionally evil, but maybe there's some of them who have learned that they can earn more coin and food by serving as guides and guards for humans traveling through their lands.

To paraphrase Parthenax from Skyrim, wouldn't there be some who overcame an evil nature through great effort? So my bad guys started coming from all sorts of races. Hell, one of my favorite campaigns I ever ran, via bulletin board, that's going way back, pre-internet days, had a halfling as a bad guy. No, not the cute little hobbit! Yup, he was evil. Reveled in causing pain to others and ruled his family with an iron fist. Because he viewed them as incompetent and only he could keep the family from falling into ruin. And if I'm honest, really thinking about it, all media have similarly matured.

Look at Batman from the 1960s, or Skeletor and He-Man, General Zod from the 1980s Superman II, or Mum Ra from the Thundercats. There wasn't any subtlety there. Mostly they were evil for the sake of being evil, wanting to destroy the world just to destroy the world, or rule it just because they wanted to rule it. But let's contrast that with, say, movies of the past 10 years, like some of the Marvel movies. Those movies aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but most of the villain motivations at least have a grain of believability to them. And by the way, spoiler alert for some Marvel movies going back a few years. Kingpin wants to get his wife and son back in his life, and he's willing to destroy New York to do it.

Ultron wants to replace organic life with synthetic to build the perfect system. Helmut Zemo lost his family due to the actions of superheroes. He is a normal human who knows he can't take on these superheroes directly, so he tries to turn them against each other. take on these superheroes directly, so he tries to turn them against each other. Expanding into X-Men, Magneto has seen how mutants are used and persecuted by humans and seeks to rearrange the world so that can never happen again. Loki has always felt like an outsider during his childhood, and in the Thor movies he learns why. So he tries to claim power, since he thinks he'll never do so under the current power

scheme. Every. Single. One. Of those reasons makes sense from the villain's perspective. Those worldviews just happen to put them at odds with the good guys. Movies, comic books, and other media companies in the 21st century have added nuance to villain motivations.

Our villains need to follow suit, and our villains need to be better. I've spoken about Wizards of the Coast a lot, but Paizo has done something similar, especially in the material that had been published under Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Goblins are now a fully supported ancestry for player characters, along with kobolds, lizardfolk, hobgoblins who are now trading partners with the world.

They've carved out kingdoms of their own. Full-blooded orcs are working with the good races in the face of a common enemy, the Whispering Tyrant. A succubus queen has repented of her ways and is now known as the goddess called the Redeemer Queen. In the first edition Pathfinder Adventure Paths, the Rune Lords were portrayed as corrupted monsters, reveling in sin and vice, but Sorshin and Bellamarius have re-emerged into the world, not to rule like Karzug and Kroon, but to serve as leaders of the

country of New Thassilon. Some will decry this as evidence of the game going soft or trying to be woke, but I disagree. This is a natural result of the tabletop RPG genre maturing, understanding that very few things are black and white, but mostly shades of gray. Not 50 of them though. but mostly shades of gray. Not 50 of them though. No, there's no red rooms or whatever in this podcast. The safe word is encumbrance. So there are two effects of removing races and cultures that are inherently evil. One, integration of the culture into the world at large in a believable way. And two, identification of new bad guys. Who do we turn to if we can't just paint all orcs as evil? So let's talk about integration of cultures. More connection and interaction between the two races or cultures tends to lead to better understanding of each other.

Perhaps there's a catastrophic event that shifts understanding of culture, or the need for the cultures to understand each other. Hobgoblins and elves fight each other for centuries until an extremist sets off a nuclear weapon in the middle of a battlefield, killing hundreds of thousands on both sides. A global plague necessitates working together instead of leaning on isolationist tendencies. Cultures connect because they realize it's socially, or financially, beneficial to both cultures to work together. Dwarves and orcs begin to understand that the dwarves can teach metal

working techniques to the orcs while the orcs have access to ores deep underground that dwarves just can't reach anymore. Perhaps there's a common enemy to unite against. The gnomes have become expansionists so the halflings and goblins work together to hold them back. Put a reason for the gnomes to be expansionists such as a religious belief or maybe a greater evil behind them, and baby, you got a plot going. If we can't just use orcs as bad guys, then who are our bad guys? Short answer, anyone. Everyone. The elf who was wronged, scarred, harmed, discarded, and becomes a villain because of it. The orc who believes that the different races are stronger together than they are apart, and that's how you show strength. Yes, you can still have orc who believes that the different races are stronger together than they are apart, and that's how you show strength. Yes, you can still have orc warlords who want to burn the local war

settlement, but it's because Thorag the orc wants to burn the world, not all of the orcs. There's a huge difference there. You can still have the pyromaniac goblin who's obsessed with fire. I mean, wouldn't it be just as good though if it was a pyromaniac human or halfling or maybe even a creature from a different plane like an elemental? Ooh, an earth elemental who's never seen fire before and is fascinated by it. You could have it fall in love with a fire elemental and make cute little lava children together. Wow, I'm sorry, that went to a weird place. I apologize. Let's get back to live action.

I love the idea of having evil represented in good races and good represented in evil races. But there are still some stereotypes I use and I will not apologize for them. In my world, mindless undead are evil, period, hard stop. In my world, it's not possible to reanimate a corpse and have the resulting creature be good in any way. However, intelligent undead, like liches, vampires, mummies, or even ghasts, don't have to always be evil. Some had this undead existence thrusted upon them unwillingly. Some may have chosen to be undead for altruistic reasons. Liches are just amazing as bad guys and NPCs and I need to

do a lich episode. Yeah, I need to do a lich episode. I'm doing that next week. There are some gotchas with this type of flexibility though. Certain game mechanics may need to be examined. Effects that work against alignment still work against alignment, but it may require reinterpretation. For example, I'm going to pick on one 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons spell called Detect Evil and Good. The description states, for the duration, you know if there is an aberration, celestial, elemental, fae, fiend, or undead within range. This presumes, though, the game mechanic were all undead or evil. If there were an undead creature who was of neutral alignment, I'd say this spell, Detect Evil and Good, wouldn't detect it. I mean, and I'm talking honest-to-goodness neutral,

role-played as neutral, not just saying they're neutral and playing them as evil to avoid being detected by paladins. Abilities that work against creature type and not alignment still work against them no matter what their alignment is. A sword that does plus four damage to dragons works against all dragons, good, neutral, and evil. A sword that does plus four damage to chaotic evil dragons may not work against all red dragons, just many of them. It makes a lot of spells and abilities much more situational. And for example, if you're warded against evil, maybe you're only warded against 99.9% of undead, not the 0.01% of the undead who aren't inherently evil, who can choose not to be evil. If you do decide to invoke some sort of flexible alignment like this, just make sure you take these changes into account

and communicate these changes to your players. Our game is expanding to people of vastly different gender identities, cultures, and backgrounds. The last thing we want is someone who happens to be from a particular heritage to be turned off from our game because the game is being culturally insensitive, or we are. If nothing else, if your players are getting used to the same old, same old Hobgoblin, try being flexible in your depiction of players and NPCs. Don't just treat all of them as carbon copies of each other. Don't make all of them other. Don't make all of them evil. Don't make all of them paragons of beauty. Don't make all of them grotesque caricatures

of a particular feature or way of acting. We're better than that. We've grown since then. Be willing to put a creature in your game that doesn't have the alignments depicted in your monster manual. Have a good red dragon, a gold dragon that was cursed to look red, or a green dragon who wants to dedicate her life to study, rather than expansion of territory and conquest. Make a mummy the product of a tragic event that turned a normal elf into a toilet paper-wrapped horror. He's good at heart and longs to return to the world, but knows that he can't. The genie isn't chaotic good, but instead has become evil after being trapped in that tiny lamp for 800 years. You may have listened to this entire episode and thought, no, that's stupid.

Evil is evil, good is good, orcs and dwarves would never work together no matter what. To that I say, good. Run your game how you would like. Find players that match your playstyle and want to play in that game. But I would encourage DMs to think outside the box a little bit. Branch out and allow some of the monstrous racers to be neutral, maybe even examples of good in your world. The redeemed or reclaimed member of a traditionally evil race

makes for a memorable gaming session. Design your bad guys, villains, lieutenants as the type of bad guy you would want to have in your game. Make the race or ancestry a secondary choice or maybe even purely cosmetic. Choose bad guys that are unexpected from traditionally good species and ancestries, but with solid motivations for acting the way he is. Your stories will be better for it. Thank you all for listening. Please leave us a rating and some feedback on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you happen to be listening to us. Once again, I want to thank our sponsor, Sam's Pickled Flavored

Toothpaste. It really is a big deal. This has been episode 59, Alignment and the Loss of Innately Evil Creatures. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.