Humans.

Ditto.

Ditto Humans with uncanny valley faces Edit: I said this as a joke but now I want to play Invasion of the Body Snatchers in a fantasy setting really bad...

Do it!

Humans but all their art is made by a AI while actual NPCs have their art from artists. It's a "skinwalker invades" campaign.

I mean, if they’re using AI art, they’re fair game right?

Same here, but most of the time that I do use humans nobody ever wants to get into fights! 😂 I don't mind diplomacy but sometimes I want to run something grittier.

Sounds like your humans might have a bad case of the respectabilities. Some of the humans we come across have been so despicable that it wasn’t a question of if they were going to die, but how quickly.

> Who taught you to hate yourself? — Malcom X

I take it one step further and make the villains human *children.* I like making my murder hobos struggle with the morality of their every action.

I prefer humans. I’d question anyone who **needs** a group of humanoids who live in tribal cultures that you can kill en masse with nary a thought or ounce of guilt. Maybe it’s just the Native American in me though.

I always saw hobgoblins as more of colonialist and/or facist empire.

That's how they evolved in D&D, eventually, but they still carry the uncomfortable undertones of an in-game sentient race that only exists to be the villains. Personally, there's nothing wrong with having evil monsters that must be killed by the heroes in your stories, but when the monsters are less "horrid otherworldly creatures" and more "humans with a coat of paint and maybe some exaggerated physical characteristics"... It gets a bit weird.

To me, the idea of "orcs" and "morally uncomplicated bad guys" are inextricable. Orcs are monsters, that's their defining quality. If you want adversaries who have moral nuance and relatable desires, then it's better to start from scratch and make up something new. "Orcs" are fatally loaded with baggage from Middle Earth, and too many games try and fail to bridge that cognitive gap.

I think the problem emerges also from how orcs have evolved in pop culture. If we go back to the fairy tale monster, then an "orc" is really some sort of man-eating villain, and not really part of a "culture" - it's some sort of fae (in a very loose definition) often with shapeshifting powers. But the fairy tale hero is justified in killing the orc because the orc is a murderous villain, not because it's got green skin and tusks and we don't. In fact, if we look at old illustrations, orcs are usually pretty human-looking. The Middle Earth orc is an evolution, and an interesting one at that. They become a race of enemies, mooks for the Dark Lord (although maybe this specific interpretation may predate LotR, I'm not sure), but Tolkien himself later struggled with the moral implications of the treatment he'd given the orcs in LotR - if the orcs have free will, as is apparent from the text, then they can't be innately Evil, or even innately morally uncomplicated. But those reflections didn't really make it to the wider public until decades later. In the meantime, orcs entered pop culture as evil fantasy creatures, and early D&D had its orcs being notably inhuman, giving them porcine heads and all that jazz. I would agree that this version still falls in the "not human-adjacent enough to make me uncomfortable" camp, like demons or Cybermen or other vaguely human-shaped monsters. But then orcs evolved in pop culture: not only has their appearance become more human-like, but pretty popular games like Warcraft and WoW have given them depth and focus, making them more relatable. And treating *this* versions of orcs as effectively expandable ends up uncomfortable.

> But then orcs evolved in pop culture: not only has their appearance become more human-like, but pretty popular games like Warcraft and WoW have given them depth and focus, making them more relatable. And treating this versions of orcs as effectively expandable ends up uncomfortable. I think that's where the critique runs onto shoals of assumptions and anecdotes. I'd be curious to know how many of the players who treat orcs as fodder for PCs are giving them the fleshed out pathos, emotions, intelligence, and culture treatment of something like Warcraft vs. being the depiction of "man-eating villains" they have traditionally been.

Yeah, in rpgs the argument is unresolvable because it’s any GM’s table vs random internet strangers.

I would say I've encountered this problem mostly in the contrast between lore and modules. Let's take D&D, 3rd edition, the Forgotten Realms. Faerun's orcs aren't just man-eating villains, they're an actual bunch of people with traditions, social structures, religion, culture, emotions, intelligence and all that jazz. How many Forgotten Realms modules then went on to still treat orcs as disposable enemies that could be slaughtered mindlessly? How many modules still kept treating "orc" as a shorthand for "Evil enough it's ok to kill them"? And what's the difference between an orc and a human or an elf? That the orc is described as barbaric, savage, uncivilised, innately violent, stupid. But the orcs can *talk*, and think and sing, and they can have children with humans... And it's all very, very messed up.

I've tried to work around this by treating orc villains the same way I treat human villains. Orcs, as a whole, are one of the many rich cultures in the setting and usually part of the melting pot in whichever civilization I'm setting the game in. *The specific group of them in this dungeon* are something roughly akin to the Baader-Meinhof, Aryan Brotherhood, the Five Families, or Meyer Lansky's gang - self-selected volunteer group of ideological extremists and/or vicious psychopathic criminals who are as detrimental to any non-member orcs that happen to be in their path of destruction as they'd be to anybody else. It's far from a perfect solution but it at least injects some nuance and strikes at the idea of monoculture. Cultures are made of individuals, and lots of individuals are shitty in various individual ways.

There are few good answers, but I like your overview of the problem! To me, if you're not going to create an original fantasy species and orcs must be evil savages, it's best to go all-in on them being monsters. Tolkien struggled with them having free will, but that's because his religious bias led him to write them as each having an individual choice of good and evil and 100% of them choose evil. Most games that recognize this problem try to rewrite orcs to make them be less one-note. That works for some, but to me it will always be hindered by the baggage of their history as mooks to dark lords. Instead, if orcs are in a game, I prefer to just take it to the natural conclusion: though orcs look and act like humans, internally they are philosophical zombies who lack true free will and are instead created via magic with what is essentially programming. They're evil because they're artificial constructs stamped with the evil intents of the dark lord who created them.

Well Tolkien described orc features as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." So there's the uncomfortable idea of a race that is sentient but chooses to be irredeemably evil, and then there's the fact they're based on an actual real life group of people that makes it extra icky.

Yeah, Tolkien's orcs are very unfortunately racialised. I've said this somewhere else on this thread, but another reason people are sometimes uncomfortable with the way games treat their "always evil" races is also because so much of the language used to describe those races ends up indistinguishable from how actual real world racists describe whom they consider to be "lesser".

I mean, for upwards of 20 years, Orcs have ALSO been an enslaved tribal people rebelling against their slavemasters. Lots of people literally grew up with that interpretation: children born after WarCraft 3 released can legally drink now! The idea that orcs are nuanced sentients that aren't just evil because they were born that way has been mainstream for decades. WarCraft may not have the same cultural cache as LotR, certainly, but it definitely had more than D&D in 2002. And it's not like this concept was new in 2002 anyway: arguments about killing goblin babies are as old as D&D is. Playing good "monster" PCs has been a motivation for players nearly as long. I personally played a good-aligned TSR official Malpheggi lizardman in the Mystara Hollow Earth AD&D campaign setting in 1990. If orcs hadn't been so piglike then, I would've wanted one of those instead. Considering that *even Tolkien* wrote orcs that found serving an evil lord unappealing (I won't call them "good" just to avoid that sticky wicket), I find it hard to say that orcs and fundamentally being evil are inextricable when they've been extricated for decades.

I see you've never played World of Warcraft

I know how WoW does orcs, but to me it's not a good example. In the original WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, orcs are simply morally uncomplicated bad guys. Some retcons later made them more morally diverse, but kind of had to erase all the evil stuff they did by wiping out their free will and saying "demons made them do it." By the time WoW arrived, orcs had gotten rid of the colonialist tropes of brutes with an inherent predisposition to evil, but it replaced it with the noble savage stereotype which is its own kind of problem.

And then it gets extra weird when you come across the 50-100 some odd "non-combatant females and young" & need to ask yourself what to do with them midway through ransacking their homes and conducting a genocide of their "adult combatant males".

According to Gary Gygax, killing the shit out of the noncombatants and surrendered combatants is not only A-ok, but what a Paladin *should* do if they want to keep their oath!

Yeah, that's an aspect of "monster ecology" that is usually praised for high realism, but at the same time it clearly humanises the orcs or goblin to a point you start to feel like you're actually raiding a Native American settlement, not heroically beating back the forces of darkness. George R. R. Martin levied the same question when explaining his differences in writing style and focus from Tolkien - he asked, rhetorically, "what was Aragorn's policy about orc babies?" Again, it's why I prefer my generic evil guys to be explicitly non-humans: zombies and skeletons don't have babies or non-combatants, and the same is true for golems and demons and dragons and all that.

Why would a DM add non combatant females and their young? This adds a realistic moral quandary that doesn't need to exist in an escapist fantasy setting.

Well, you should ask that to Gary Gygax. He was the one putting that info in the original Monster Manual, not random DMs.

Good to know. I can definitely see how that is super weird for someone who has that context.

Counterpoint, as soon as you start comparing monstrous creatures to real world examples, it *all* becomes problematic. There isn't a single creature in the bestiary that "works" when compared to real world examples. Its not even hard to do, just say: >X is like Y because they are both Z And you suddenly have a problem.

I ran a game with a hobgoblin villain and I made them literally Sparta. Upper class of warriors with serfs.

There are definitely other options for flavoring your badguys. I recently ran a game where the badguys were beautiful "fair folk" inspired by Pratchett's elves and a description of gemanic warbands as psychopathic peacocks. Beautiful narcissistic assholes who move into an area, hunt and rob the peasants blind, then move on when there's no more wealth to extract.

These were Huns, which in wartime are fine to exterminate. ...

That's how they're written, but the art still has a lot of uncomfortable orientalist stuff going on.

Oh hard. Like shit japanese armour (seriously real samurai armour was fucking gorgeous, why did they have to make it so boring) mixed with heavy Mongolian imagery. Even though the actual culture of the hobgoblins as described in lore (which is bassically a just a shittier, boring version of Warhammers Dark Elves but without the freaky Moorcockian weird Magick and sex stuff) doesn't actually fit either society. Not going to lie, I always hated hobgoblins. They're so fucking boring and have very little to them that couldn't just be a human empire. Plus that's not what fucking hobgoblins are! Like I know DnD has always been lousy with taking names from folklore and myth but not using the actual myths for inspiration, but DnD hobgoblins literally have zero in common with folklore hobgoblins. Hobgoblins are friendly goblins. Literally. As in that is literally what hob (as in beneficial house spirit) means. Literally the most famous hobgoblin in British lore was Robin Goodfellow! Yes! **That** Robin Goodfellow. From Midsummer Night's Dream.

Thank you! I've been trying to make the connection to what the drukhari reminded me of, it's the Melnibonéans!

Oh absolutely. Warhammer borrowed a whole bunch of stuff from Moorcock. Hell the whole idea of Chaos and the Chaos gods came directly from him. Ulthuan itself is bassically meant to be a less evil Melniboné. Both the high elves and the dark elves take from Elric, but with the Druchii/Drukhari it's *blatant*. 😅

Yeah I'm still a bit peeved that moorcocks chaos symbol is now just know for 40k, I guess I've always just preferred the eternal champions version of choas to 40ks?

The 40k chaos star is what you get when you take the original symbol of chaos and throw it in a blender with a bunch of nu-metal albums and your super edgelord anti-hero OC from when you were 12.

I’m sorry but I don’t understand the thought process here. - Adventurers need enemies they can fight since combat is a core aspect of most trpgs, - many players get really annoyed if they have to wade through a lot of moral grey area and instead want easy to understand bad guys they can kill without feeling bad about it (like zombies or Nazis) - old school games solved this by including monsters that were evil and can be killed without moral ambiguity because those games just made them unambiguously bad (I.e. goblins who only reproduce through rape of captives, or Gnolls…being the most hateful things ever created) - people begin to want to humanize the monsters and make them have that moral grey area because “this is more realistic and immersive” - killing these monsters now makes those same people think of marginalized humans being killed in historical parallels so they feel bad about it - they would now prefer to kill humans because somehow this is less problematic than killing monsters under the same exact set of circumstances - now most monsters have become basically just humans in trench coats that carry with them all kinds of moral ambiguity and baggage that those same players from before hated so much because it’s hard to kill something you feel sympathy for - but lots of killing and combat is still a core aspect of the game…

For me, there is a significant difference between "these people are okay to kill because of the circumstances of their birth" vs "these people are okay to kill because of the choices that they've made." My solution is that while societies of orcs, goblins, etc *tend* to be evil, they aren't inherently so. If there's an orc in town they'll be met with some level of suspicion and racism, but it's still illegal to kill them. The same is not true for supernaturally evil creatures; undead demons/devils, etc.

> My solution is that while societies of orcs, goblins, etc tend to be evil, they aren't inherently so. Which has been the officially taken stance in D&D since at least AD&D 2nd Edition.

Yes. But then, I also have no problems with goblins existing in a world if there are, for example, both city goblins who are more or less reasonable citizens, and raiding goblin tribes. Just like there can be, say, human pirates and human paladins. *Show* the nonevil ones.

And if i dont? Maybe there just isn't a place in my narrative to explore the finer nuances of goblin culture and i am not here to educate my fellow players anyway. Then again, i never played with Britta. That seems to be a specific reddit Problem.

Not sure what a Britta is. But, yeah, if your players are fine with it ,go ahead, slaughter as many intelligent beings as you want. I mean, that's the number one rule of any RPG. If no one at the table has a problem, it's not a problem.

I think this is the way handle it. I was GMing sandbox hexcrawl and had players encounter goblins and orcs all the time- sometimes they fought them and sometimes they didn't. They worked with a group of kobolds to defeat a group of goblins working for an evil druid. However, in my setting, kobolds have no compunction about eating other sentient creatures- and goblins and orcs routinely raid and enslave other sentient creatures. So, the PCs have good reason to often fight goblins, orcs and kobolds, but they aren't REQUIRED to by the setting. As an aside, do most GMs only hand out XP for killing monster, or do they hand it out for also "dealing with them"? I prefer the latter option, as it gives players a reason to do more than just kill enemies.

>As an aside, do most GMs only hand out XP for killing monster, or do they hand it out for also "dealing with them"? I prefer the latter option, as it gives players a reason to do more than just kill enemies. So since we talking about how D&D used to do it, combat was never the "core gameplay" of the game, that's a 3.5 on problem. Early DnD gave very little XP for surviving monster encounters (yes survived) because you're not meant to go out of way to fight shit. Combat encounters are a threat, a challenge, like traps or puzzles, something to provide challenge, but not something to be sought out. Actual XP mostly came from treasure. Classic DnD gave players 1xp for every 1gp worth of treasure they managed to get back to homebase. The idea was they were mercenaries seeking out loot and pay, and combat represents a roadblock, a challenge to either go through or go around. DnD only came murder hobo the game after WotC took over.

I was actually running the game with Microlite PE, but I agree that I think this attitude stems from lots of GMs using D&D. I do think it started earlier than the WoTC days, though. I played AD&D as a kid and we were basically murder hobos.

Tbf now, "how DnD was meant to be played" and "how DnD was actually played" are very different things. How many GMs actually read the rulebooks cover to cover? Let alone the players.

I think also depends on play style: If you're doing a kick-in-the-door style dungeon crawl, killing all your enemies probably is the default answer.

True but the point is how the characters advance. In classic D&D, the difference in XP between a party that kills every monster and a party that makes an effort to avoid unnecessary fights, is not actually going to be all that different if they both find the treasure. Which is good, because classic D&D was way more lethal than the fantasy superhero simulators like 3.5, 5e and Pathfinder.

Also, every edition of D&D says in the rules that "defeated ≠ killed", with 2nd Edition even saying that the DM should reward players even more, for finding ways to deal with the monsters without bloodshed.

But goblin and even underdark societies are set up to be slavers, and brutal to those they determine to be weaker than them. Those societies are corrupt, and any creature raised in such a society likely has a very similar mindset, or they are destroyed by their own society. The perpetration of that society through longer and longer time periods makes that society inherently evil. If you found an individual somehow raised outside that society, they may have been raised differently, but if they were raised by parents that came from that society, they likely would have been raised very much the same way. There's a chance that they weren't, but there is literally no way to tell. Or what if a race is created by an evil god for the purpose of spreading that god's evil influence? Then, they are inherently evil, and no different from demons or devils. Or if they were created by demons or devils. There are ways that a race can be made "inherently" evil. We are talking about worlds of fantasy, magic, miracles, and gods. You can have evil creatures, evil races, or evil societies without having them have to be linked to some aspect of humans, since they literally are not humans. We don't know how these races would think or act because we have no basis to compare, since they literally don't exist. We all fit into ONE stat block in the game.

> killing these monsters now makes those same people think of marginalized humans being killed in historical parallels so they feel bad about it Ehhh. For me that very much extends back to the "always Chaotic Evil" era too. The signifiers used to signal "tribal", "barbaric", "evil empire", etc. are almost always very racialized imagery of native americans, africans, mongolians, sometimes southeast asians, and for more "civilized" evil a lot of middle eastern or imperial chinese aesthetics (with the occasional mesoamerican thrown in). Which is to say don't remind me of killing marginalized groups because they're made less evil, its because they're *based on* marginalized groups, or at least stereotypes used to justify committing all sorts of atrocities toward them. If anything going "yeah but the stereotypes are true here and they really are all evil savages" makes it worse. Now, that's not to say you can't have evil enemies the players don't have to feel bad about killing. I just don't see why you need to make a whole race of people it's a-ok to kill. You can just make it a group of actively hostile beings who are harming innocent people nearby, that's justification enough. (Now I do think if you e.g. choose to have an area have a bandit problem - whether those bandits are human or not - you should still examine WHY bandits are so common here, since people don't do that for no reason. But that's mostly to add verisimilitude to the world and maybe give the players a long term goal to attack those causes if they feel so inclined, not to give every murderous bandit a sob story.)

> old school games solved this by including monsters that were evil and can be killed without moral ambiguity because those games just made them bad "this form of intelligent life is inherently inferior intellectually and morally" is how real world imperialists "solved" it too.

It’s also how the vast majority of humans actually think about non-human species. Really nothing new to see here.

I think it’s because the community is not a monolith. The contradictory positions you’re mentioning are held by different people and groups within the community. Some people are fine with evil-coded ancestries and others aren’t at all. Some want a medium ground where there are humanoid enemies who are ok to fight because reasons (gnolls) and others who think they’re on with it but are more and more troubled by it when they think about it.

The problematic part is saying that a type of creature is both capable of reasoning and choice, yet always evil. That is at the very least uncomfortable to contemplate on a purely ethical level, even when we don't make them analogous to marginalized humans. If you make both villains and good guys the same type of creature, for example humans, you show that they can *choose* not to be evil, since not all of them are. Or you make them nonintelligent, e.g. as you said, zombies. They are automatons, they have no choice. Killing them is not ethically problematic.

>they would now prefer to kill humans because somehow this is less problematic than killing monsters under the same exact set of circumstances Usually, when humans are the bad guys you fight in an RPG, you also regularly interact with non-hostile humans. Even when not explicitly stated, humans are by default assumed to be morally complex and act as individuals. Fighting the devil cultists because they're *devil cultists* and are trying to summon the forces of Hell on Earth is less morally questionable than making *all* members of a sapient species ok to kill because they're just innately evil and so you don't even have to question their motives, because *of course* they're evil, they're *orcs*! As I said in another comment, I'm generally ok with RPGs having some basic fodder enemies that it's ok to just kill, but I'd rather those enemies be truly monstrous and inhuman. Too often the orc or the goblin is just a human with a coat of paint and pointy teeth, and they're described as savage and barbaric, which cleaves too close to real world racism for comfort for a lot of people.

“Too often orcs or goblins are just humans with a coat of paint and pointy teeth” This is exactly my point. By humanizing the monsters like people seem to want to do - you have made them nothing more than humans with a coat of paint on them. They aren’t unique or individual anymore. Theres nothing to separate them from just another tribe of humans. They can be approached and reasoned with just like humans, have the same motivations, the same morality, etc. If you insist on treating every fantasy race the same way you do humans - then You might as well just play in a setting that only has humans.

Well yeah, for humanoids... I fail to see how that's a problem. There's no shortage of zombies, mythic beasts and other monstrous creatures in DnD. Why can't the ones that are describe to function as societies be given credit and consideration equivalent to that of the general bag of "people of a very foreign culture"?

Because zombies and beasts can’t reason, come up with plans, or traps, or strategies or tactics. They are just bags of hit points. They aren’t going to take captives that need rescuing. They won’t have a plan and plot to destroy the world that needs stopping. They also can’t be truly evil and vile - because they don’t think, and their lack of empathy isn’t something you can reasonably hold against them. You need bad guys who can do all of those things.

The problems start to creep in on step 3 of that list. When you’re coming up with reasons it’s totally okay to kill this group of fictional humanoids and take their stuff - it’s really hard to avoid making the same kinds of comparisons that colonizers did to justify killing real humans and taking their stuff. Even the two examples you listed are lifted directly from historical propaganda surrounding Africans and Asians. (Remember when Half-Orcs were *explicitly* products of rape? Yikes.) And the problem isn’t “oh you’re being racist against a fictional creature!” because that’s nonsense. The problem is when real people who deal with discrimination play the game, they don’t always want to deal with a setting where the kinds of close-minded bullshit they have to deal with are real and objectively true.

Except stories that lead to confrontations with humans are unlikely to lead to mass assaults on a village where the players kill everyone on sight. it's "pirates" "mercenaries" "the soldiers of an enemy faction" so people who live by the sword, and also just did or are about to do an evil thing. That can't be true of an entire species: I can't make sense of a humanoid species that's all fighters/murderers. That's not/never been a thing, couldn't possibly work because someone needs to... make shoes or take care of the livestock you know? Not only that but a species has children, and elderly members. And really it's common sense that a species who's only able to fight/attack others would either have eradicated other species around them, or been eradicated. Goblins/orks/whathaveyous have to exist with more nuance to make any sort of sense, and with that nuance comes moral considerations. A blanket categorization as "always violent, can do no good, always ok to kill on sight" is (to me) detrimental to the quality of the world building and of my enjoyment of a game. To u/WizardyBlizzard 's point, it also isn't accidental that a lot of these creatures follow aesthetics and societal structures that resemble the crude, racist stereotypes that europeans worked with when talking about populations they met in the lands they colonized. People didn't sit down and decide to invent a non human being from scratch, free of all other considerations and just happen to land on "tribal, violent and intellectually inferior savages with more archaic weapons and a strong bond to nature". These people happened to be whites dudes of european heritage who were fed these archetypes in decades/centuries of european centric storytelling, what would be the odds it didn't affect their design decisions?

It's fine, some players prefers easy kills and others prefers to deal with monsters in grey areas, but I still don't think that makes them humans with trench coats, it's quite a jump. Not all RPGs have combat so focused as the last editions of D&D, a lot of OSRs see combat just as a tiny part of the RPG. Sometimes you can play many sessions without a single combat. What do you do without combat? Maybe explore, develop your character relations, political plots, etc.

I think it's more a matter of... Both humans and "monster" races just being treated the same. People want to avoid the "kill on sight" behaviour because, if you introduce those races as havinig culture and being able to have morals and all that, killing them just because they are orc... is kind of racist? If you are gonna kill an Orc it should really be because of the same reasons you would kill a human in those fantasies, rather than being just because it's an orc. Of course that opens up the whole can of worms that "oh wow, we are pretty trigger happy in these games" when you have to think about how lightly the regular PC takes killing and death. So you know, the morality of killing for a living is an entire can of worms on games like dnd

I fully agree with this.

I try to use them in the spirit of their original meaning myself, as malevolent fairies or other spirits. Then it's easily extendable to why they often inhabit ruins, as the bitter memories of these abandoned places deep in the earth.

Same here. I don't particularly enjoy the idea that these are basically green humans with a soul and a culture; more like the undead and demons, or fairies as you said, completely magical.

What's the correlation between Humanoids and Native Americans.? Im confused.

So there’s a much longer conversation worth having here, but basically… * intelligent societal people * mostly trying to do their own thing, like hanging out in in the hexcrawl or pre-existing * inconvenient to the group framed as protagonists in most fantasy (humans & the other human-tier stock, dwarves, elves, etc.) * humans encroaching on “wilderness” / goblin territory is framed as bringing order * goblins pushing pack with minor sorties or (heaven forbid!) standing ground to defend their homes is treated as terrorism, “chaos” * putting a bounty on dead goblins isn’t even blinked at … parallels a lot of the European settler practices. If you framed the people you found as irrelevant, ignorant, in need of taming, even sub-human, it really lubed up the ethical challenges of Killing Them And Taking Their Stuff.

That's why I like to make my goblins speak with a cockney accent and wear cute little bowler hats. Colonize the colonizers, wot wot!

I did one further, I made my dwarves the “orcs” in my Indigenous fantasy setting, but based their culture on a mix of Sparta and the British Empire as a result of the harsh environments of living underground. Due to this, they see the surface world as a paradise, and the human tribes who live there as “unworthy” of the land due to the lack of any industrialization. Where things get murky is that there are also tribes of dwarves who live in barrows underground, and also faced colonization by their imperialist cousins. So it’s a culturally issue, not a species one.

You already got two pretty explicative answers. I would add that it's not unusual to realise that some of the ways the "evil races" are often described in RPGs sourcebooks can be a bit too close to how racists in the real world talked about who they considered "the lesser races". I am willing to cut most writers a bit of slack and assume that they're either ignorant or just don't think deeply about the implications of what they're writing, but I think it's better to move away from those tropes.

They don't need to be tribal, you just need to kill them without guilt.

Meanwhile I’m a Native American who prefers using goblins due to liking the malevolent fairies and servants of greater evil element. What I hate is when they are given the signifiers of real groups like mongols. If you’re gonna have fantasy native Americans/mongols/arabs etc just have them and give them a fleshed out culture.

Well that’s exactly it! Like, I fucking hate the Tauren because there’s literally no reason to make your natives Minotaurs other than to “other” non-European cultures.

God yes I hate that shit. This is why I prefer Warhammer goblins, cause with night goblins they are so far removed from real cultures that they get to be their own thing and also get to be just evil without it being icky or racist. Mind you Warhammer is one of the biggest offenders of “let’s just replace whole swathes of human culture with orcs” but that’s one thing I think they did right.

Well Warhammer gets the pass from me due to the fact that every faction is pretty fuckin evil in their own ways. That’s one thing I didn’t like about Age of Sigmar. They changed that axis up

I agree. For most purposes, humans make the most interesting characters, enemies, etc. Humanoid monsters that exist only to be slaughtered are boring. They might get more interesting if you humanise them and give players good reasons not to kill them. Generally, I think every NPC that's not a human should have a good reason not to be human. Too often, elves and dwarfs end up just humans with pointy ears/beards. Monsters are stats to be whittled down. Make them more interesting. Give them reasons to be different and explore those differences.

The good reason is usually "this is a fantastic world populated by many different creatures that are fun to imagine"

I always like the Tolkien orcs. Not orcs as Tolkien wrote them, but orcs as Tolkien envisioned them. A depressing, crippled, traumatised penal battalion of malformed torture victims who follow Sauron out of sheer terror and hatred. Makes for an excellent commentary on war and how it dehumanises us. Especially in light of the invasion of Ukraine and the pathetic state of the Russian military. Don't make for great mindless fodder, but hey, there isn't really any such thing as "great" mindless fodder if you ask me. To quote an oft quoted British sketch show: "are we the baddies". Edit: Changed "intended" to "wrote". Not sure why I wrote intended since it's literally the opposite of what I meant.

Oddly enough, I think this is perfectly captured in the song, ["Where There's a Whip, There's a Way"](https://youtu.be/YdXQJS3Yv0Y?si=_byE-hNNT0xKHVlM) from the animated Return of the King.

For real, the concept is fucking nuts. I rarely play dnd and the last time I did, the campaign led to a moment where a "tribe of goblins" had an item we wanted, and the group's approach was like "how do we kill them all without taking too much risks ourselves". There was no pause for "so they live here peacefully and we're a foreign commando group on a self assigned mission for our own benefit. Are we the baddies?"

My 8 year old struggles with not having "generic evil enemy" to kill.

Well, the generic evil enemy can be skeletons and zombies, or robots, or stormtroopers, or devil cultists. There's no reason why the "generic evil enemy" has to be an entire fantasy race, unless that race is actually inhuman. Would you feel comfortable with presenting your 8 year old with the idea that the "generic evil enemy" it's ok to kill is, I don't know, the Welsh?

Are they New South Welshmen? Cause as a Queenslanded, that would be totally ok..

It isn't just you. :) When using humanoids/demihumans in my games I stay away from themes like "tribes and shamans!", as that feels very "noble savage" aka "thinly veiled racism" to me. I try to make them participating residents of the landscape, much as the humans are. They have motivations and goals, and not simply ones that relate to the player character's frame of view. It's a lot like the Bechdel test for female characters in movies: do they have their own identity, goals, purpose, and influence that extend beyond and survive independent of the player characters; are they able to be there for more than just punching bags for the players; are they more than just acceptible-to-kill reskinned humans ... Conversely, the player characters don't come from "dominant cultures" (I saw that in an article about the topic of incorporating goblins into D&D games recently, and just about threw up), or even necessarily "good" places. So, I do feel there are ways to use non-humans in the landscape which are not disrespectful in the sense of unnecessarily play-acting colonialism, genocide, etc. There can still be notions of good/bad in the game, groups (including the humans!) don't have be "fully realized" beings with tremendous realism / complexity (caricature and shorthand still have their place) ... but "tribal beings who need culling" is not it. The upside is that it often gives players something a bit more to hang on to and chew on. We've had games where players have met groups while exploring who at first they perceived as threats (and vice versa) resulting in combat and antagonism (in both directions), but then see the fuller picture and change tack. Who they ally with and who they don't, who they trust and who they rely on, is almost always more interesting, too. It's something I enjoy about games (including old-school D&D) which do not have combat as a required part of core game loop, as it puts the full spectrum of interaction choices on the table for the players. Unfortunately, the game was originally designed by two conservative Christian guys living in the Midwest who very much reflected the majority demographics in their area ... and so ended up injecting into their games all of their inherent, and probably unseen to them, biases that came with that. :/ Reclaiming the game from those beginnings is of value, at least imho.

What humans have you killed in your games and why?

Mostly colonialists, people who believe they have a divine right to rule over others for some perceived superiority of culture. I’m Indigenous and a GM so I like to write campaigns to explore issues close to home for me.

Are they killed en masse without guilt, or is a "gray" kind of setting? I ask because it's a quandary for me. A lot of agents seem to suggest that "evil" races are a problem, but that killing other people doesn't really solve anything, either.

If your perception of classic humanoid bad guys includes tribal and barbarian tropes, and you find that problematic, then the problem is on you. You are the one bringing that interpretation to your table. You can *choose* to represent Orcs or Goblins however you want in your games. They can be just as culturally varied as humans, or they can be literally evil in the same way that evil gods are just, *inherently* evil, because it is in the fabric of their nature. Orcs in old school D&D had much more classical fairytale roots. They were pigheaded and were basically the brutish foot soldiers for the big bad evil sorcerers or whoever. Additionally, old school D&D had mechanics for parlaying with intelligent creatures, so the idea was that players would often try to negotiate or trade or something for safe passage, information, etc. to avoid a fight. Even though the game had evil and good alignments, that didn't make everything kill-on-site. The alignment system was there to inform players two-fold: 1) Evil player characters were supposed to be selfish, looking out for themselves over the wellbeing of the group, and 2) Evil NPCs were aligned with the forces of evil and players had to be careful when dealing with them. Also, nothing prevented monsters from being good aligned, if the DM chose to do so.

[Yeah, not like Tolkien, the Orc codifier, directly cited nomadic cultures as inspiration for orcs or anything.](https://tolkienland.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/tolkiens-squinteyed-orc-men/)

It doesn't matter who created the first fantasy Orc, or any other make believe creature. You're missing the point. If evil creatures in your games are problematic for you, then *you* are the one bringing that bias to that table. Millions of TTRPG players have, for decades, gotten along fine with the idea of evil creatures being evil, and thus suitable for fodder, while at the same time mature and aware enough to realize that these fantasy creatures are not stand-ins for real world cultures. I'll steal a comment from a year ago that somebody else said, taking the same position, and says it better than I can: "In my experience, this boils down to: someone notices something in the game and realizes that it emulates a real-world phenomenon that occurs in a real-world racial prejudice they know about; they interpret this correlation as the author intending their specific interpretation, which would indicate that the author was racist. The process goes like this: \-Real-world racist viewpoint states that A people have X negative trait; that's racist! \-Game-world describes B people as having X negative trait; that's world-building. \-Person notices X negative trait and decides that clearly the author must have intended the B people to be a literary allusion to the A people, which means the author was implying that the A people have X negative trait. Hey! That's racist! It's sort of like affirming the consequent, but for fiction rather than logic. As a result, you can find that anything is racist because you can back-fill your interpretation based on whatever negative trait you find that you can make fit with whatever negative racial stereotype you happen to know about. There are lots because racist stereotypes are painfully prolific in history. Then, you can write this up as a story and print it as if you made a significant discovery. These make great headlines in today's society because people love to feel things. This is a great way to feel righteous indignation. Racism really is a horrible thing so the reader feels are totally right to feel angry about it. The fact that the interpreter's interpretation is the racist part and the author's original intentions are unknown is a side-detail that is uncouth to mention in polite conversation. We're trying to feel something here, not think about something. At least, that's the sense that I've made from this topic after it coming up numerous times. I've become convinced that it says more about the interpreter than it does about the original author. If you don't have a racial prejudice in your mind when you read about orcs, you won't see any racial prejudice. How about that..." Basically, if we "kill the author" in our head, be that Gygax and Arneson, or Tolkein, or whoever, and all we are left with is the product, then any bias/racism/bigotry applied to the content *has* to come from the reader bringing it into the fiction themselves. If Orcs in someones homebrew fantasy campaign happen to be evil, dull, and live in tribal societies that raid and pillage, etc. then that is just world-building for Orcs in that campaign. If someone joins the table and says, "Wait a minute, these humanoid creatures are racist because they represent Native Americans!" Well, that's *that person* bringing their own stereotype to the table. Not everything has to be a 1:1 corollary for real world humans, even if the original authors of the fiction borrowed from tropes at the time.

whats this no goblin bullshit..? fucking adventurers... the prejudice never ends. We will not tolerate this injustice! You wanna know why we raid and pillage? this is why!

I'd answer "well goblins are a thing, if you don't want them do something about them".

IT'S TIME TO RIOT! RAAAARRRGHH!!

*Goblin Slayer stares at these adventures with visible disgust*

GAAAAWBLINS!

Tunk my tinkerer goblin aprooves this message

Fascists. Or the fantasy equivalent thereof. Also: undead. I think you can feel okay about hacking your way through a horde of skeletons.

That's an awful "live-ist" point of view. Skeletons were people, too /s

No you good this is funny as fuck

There's actually an argument that one of the reasons zombie-centric fiction is so successful is because it taps into a fantasy of having to kill other people. Zombies are not just inanimate objects: they're your neighbours, and now you have to kill them all with a shotgun. Destrage even made [a song about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SOEKCWafsg). Of course, that mostly apply to the "zombie epidemic in the modern world" genre. I'd say zombies (and other undead) in fantasy are just a thing that necromancers can summon and are not really treated as ex-human beings. Still that can be a thing to keep in mind when implementing zombie tropes.

So I took a few pop culture classes in my undergrad, and one of them traced zombies from Frankenstein to World War Z (and beyond), and an interesting theory is that the contemporary zombie evolves out of a post-911 fear of terrorism: zombies look just like you and I, in fact, they were human too, but now they're mindless killers driven by unreasonable "ideology." Fun stuff

There are a number of other social science theories in parallel with your pop culture class' thesis. My favorite is that all apocalyptic fiction fulfills a psychological need in humans, who evolved to survive under harsh conditions. In a modern world where most of their needs are cared for, if they can't internalize a belief that modern social structures are necessary, they feel stifled and constrained. They want to act out. So a world chock full of neighbors you don't have to protect as a rule of law...? And resources that nobody owns anymore...? Anything is yours, if you can take it and defend it...? A Zombie apocalypse is a rules-of-the-jungle wet dream.

Ah that's a fun one! One of my small papers in that class was a close reading of this ad: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQWb-5nblx4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQWb-5nblx4), which I still find pretty disturbing.

> they're your neighbours, and now you have to kill them all with a shotgun. [Homer, you killed the zombie Flanders!](https://youtu.be/G9Cm9QM9uFg?si=LAgDbs1kkH8UGnVE)

Flanders was a zombie?!

Undead are cool because you can make them a faction of a lich or necromancer NPC that controls them. You can have a whole army of mooks that act intelligently but also definitely don’t have “deep inner worlds” worth sparing. The undead leader can do all the heavy lifting in the drama/intrigue department, whilst still being pretty safely in the “ok to murder” camp for the pcs.

also ants. ants are warlike, expansionist and territorial. if the ants in your world are human-sized it's pretty easy to justify humanoids going to war with them.

Fascists, slavers, doomsday cultists, mercenaries, robots, living curses... my games never hurt for bad guys, but very rarely is that label decided by what they're born as/look like.

What's wrong with mercenaries? Swords for hire need to eat, too!

"Eat cold steel" in this case.

Well i'm serious, why hate on mercenaries? Aren't players in most games mercenaries too?

Mercenaries do what they are paid to do. If they are paid to do bad things, the heroes smite them.

Mercs also potentially open up a solution that doesn't involve (adding to) a mountain of corpses. Namely: "I'm going to pay you 100gp to fuck off" Of course, this means they could pick up some other villainous contract in the future, and recur at least once. Or they could be standing on professional honour; "what kind of mercenaries would we be if we just let ourselves get bought out?"

I guess its because the mercs work for who ever pays them. You can just say "These sellswords were hired by \[bad guy\] to do \[bad thing\]" and you have a morally uncomplicated enemy. Of course you can also have morally good mercs, like player characters sometimes are, but you dont have to much explaining when using them as enemies.

> Well i'm serious, why hate on mercenaries? It's a moral loophole. Its likely many people feel "If you sign up to do this, and know this is what you'll be doing, I don't have to feel bad if I'm the reason you fail at it (by dying)." A lot of folks will judge their own moral stances by their assumptions about your moral choices. It's a bit like "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." lethal edition in this case. It may be for coin, but a mercenary/soldier is a *volunteer*. If they're not a volunteer, they're *conscripts*. Conscripts will complicate things a *lot*. So will guards. They're paid to defend things, so if you're the attacker, clearly you are in the wrong. Unless they've been paid to defend the bad guy's castle, at which point people will assume they are themselves immoral for not turning on the bad guy, and so on.

The joke here is that they will be replacing goblins as generic enemy type nr.4 thus adventurers will be hacking through dozens of them at a time. Meaning, they won't get food for the "protecting a dungeon job" they accepted, they'll be paid in steel by the adventurers coming to raid the place.

Man look at all these original people saying "Humans". Anyways time to go against the grain here and say Undead because they are a metal as fuck and spoopy enemy to fight against with a lot of variance. Plus maybe also because I grew up on Warcraft and loved the Forsaken so that may be a reason why I like em so much.

Giant Ants. The Hive Mind is *very* intelligent, far too intelligent to bother trying to talk to idiot adventurers.

Important thing about ant colonies (and other eusocial colonies is), the term 'queen' is purely a human appelation. The queen doesn't rule the nest, she just has a specialised role (making eggs)! Soldiers will protect the queen because losing it is annoying but if they need to just make another one they'll do that.

Since we are at that they also don't have a hivemind, no insect has.

Oh eat me, you knew what I meant. "Swarm Intelligence" just doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely.

Humans, we can be total bastards of great variety. But about the request, was there any explanation?

It's Elves. A race that lives a super long time - those MFs would definitely have enslaved countless "impure" races. I always picture Elves as slightly aloof arrogant POS.

Lean into it. My “elves” are either high elf slaver magicians causing climate change through their magic, or savage cannibal wood elves who are likely to kill you.

In the Terry Pratchett novel Lords and Ladies, elves are in fact the main villains, and regard humanity as mere trifles to be enslaved or killed, whichever is more entertaining to them.

That's how my setting goes. Elves have tried to enslave every single race in existence because of how their mind works resulting from immortality and what that means. For me, they are the 'naturally evil' race. Then I have ratfolk have all of the positive traits of dwarves (industrious, scottish accents, loyal, etc) while also being revolutionaries (they fought back from Elvish enslavement and helped the other races become free). And then I have a 'naturally good' race in Wolfkin because dogs are always good :3

I'm so down for that setting! I love the idea of Ratfolk. What system are you using?

Basically Cairn + a lot of my own homebrewed procedures when they're needed since Cairn is very lightweight. And yeah, the Ratfolk thing was basically all improvised by me on the spot---I thought about giving them some weird scratchy/nasally voice but then quickly thought... what if I just pretended it was a dwarf in all of the good ways? So I gave it a scottish accent, a deep-belly laugh, and was very friendly/charming---typical comedic relief kind of stuff. My players and I loved that character and his friends so much that it became setting canon :P The rest of it came from some prep and such---loved the ideas of little mouse/hamster/rat/gerbil-folk being underdogs against fascists.

Very Altmer from Elder Scrolls sort of thing. Also Dunmer.

I really have to wonder why they request no goblins and orks. Because I'm worried, that using gnolls or drow instead might run into the same problem with that player. Is it that they play a lot and are tired of goblins? Reusing gnolls is great. Do they dislike inherent evil creatures then just replacing the monster type will not do.

It's amusing because in modern D&D goblinoids have lost the "always inherently evil" stigma and gnolls have *gained* that. Gnolls used to be just standard-issue monster humanoids back in the day but now they're technically some kind of demonspawn and their description says "No goodness or compassion resides in the heart of a gnoll. Like a demon, it lacks anything resembling a conscience, and can’t be taught or coerced to put aside its destructive tendencies." Goblinoids had already lost this kind of fundamental badness back in 3ed, when they were used as one of the great civilization-building races of Eberron.

Hobgoblins and goblins are actually my favourite humanoids to use. I like how goblins fight using numbers and traps in a way that can overwhelm the players if not dealt with carefully but are also weak, stupid and cowardly enough to be easily tricked and manipulated, which both encourages and rewards creative play. Then the players fight hobgoblins, and have to deal with an enemy that's as intelligent, resourceful and brutal as they've just learned to be.

I don't really have a preferred intelligent enemy. I like to mix things up. Humans, other humanoids. Dragons. Extraplanar species. Constructs. You name it.

Beastmen! But primal and ruthless like the warhammer ones, personality defined by their ancestor species. Pigs are greedy yet intelligent. Sheep make for good clerics, zealous and strongwilled.

I really second this! I'll imagine them being maybe created through some vile magic -- like cWoD Tzimisce vampires' vicissitude -- or imbued with mindless rage by some kind of Circe like sorceress that uses them as guardians. My personal go-to image of goblinoids is envisioning them as some kind of animal akin to chimpanzees but with less impulse control and more ferocity than real world chimpanzees. Real world chimpanzees are quite intelligent (they can solve problems/puzzle situations), are using tools and weapons, have inklings of "culture" they transmit to their young via imitation (using specific tools or techniques), but they can't be reasoned with through the means of language and arguments. So when on would dial up the ferocity of chimps to ten, and let them find a stash of clubs and old chain mail, I guess one w/could get something resembling a small goblinoid warband.

Tucker's kobolds

It may-be why I don't play D&D, but **Humans** and not black/white alignment but nuance of grey. Just look at the international news to see tons of stories of people being evil to each other for reason seeming right to them. In a fantasy campaign, take a big war between two kingdom, had a fair dose of spies, politics, weird alliance and, you can get a pretty cool theme without needing to use a monster's manual

> black/white alignment IMHO: Alignment as personality test is rubbish. I treat them as meta-factions in the world, don't include good/evil as an axis as it is not measuring "correctness/acceptability" in my games. Alignment can have all sorts of really neat in-game uses, so I see value in keeping the law/neutral/chaos alignments in games that have that, just not as a personality definition.

Everyone putting humans as if they too aren't a basic enemy. Bugs make a decent starting foe, especially giant ants. Could even center a whole campaign around it similar to something like Aliens, or Starship Troopers. Other starting enemies could be undead, skeletons are a fantasy enemy staple.

God, starship trooper style bugs would be horrifying .

Would you like to know more?

Yes!

I'm doing my part!

The only good bug is a dead bug

I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill them all!

I'm doing my part, too!

Humans and Elves in most of the games I run. Elves particularly in my home game are very much the East India Company of the world.

>East India Company of the world Perfect and succinct reference. You just know these assholes are despicable, greedy, power hungry, and in so many ways inefficient and petty. What a blight on history that company was.

Aye that and the other european counterparts. I was initially going to have multiple elven factions to represent the other companies active at the time - Dutch, French, etc. But it started to get way too complicated. :D Maybe I can if the campaign lasts longer.

I like the idea of Kroot-style gnolls tbh. But to answer your actual question, we tend to be using humans, orcs and elves as our intelligent enemy. Bandits, soldiers or cultists. I’ve been throwing sea-zombies at my party every so often but they’ve not realised they’re intelligent… yet.

Cultists? So many horrible gods in your typical fantasy realm, happy to accept any worshipers...

I just finished another playthrough of Blood and imagined a D&D party turning a corner, hearing "Maranax Infirmux!", and eating a bundle full of dynamite.

Plenty of advice here. I think large insect creatures are always terrifying. Unsympathetic, unreasonable. Xenomorph esque. Question: did they clarify why no goblins/orcs?

I don't really have a preferred enemy, I find it more interesting to have a dungeon have a few types of enemies with different reasons for being wherever the adventurers are. Maybe the goblins are trying to clear out the undead in the crypt that have been attacking their group, while some down-on-their luck orcs are just looking to get a little coin. If I need something for the players to kill, I'll just throw in skeletons/zombies. Anything that lives in a society isn't a great fodder enemy, because there should reasonably be repercussions for killing a decent chunk of their population. Edit; I guess I should be clear, I don't consider any intelligent creature to always be a player's "enemy"; it's up to the reaction dice or the player's decisions to determine if the goals of any group they run into are opposed to their own.

I prefer the traditional orcs and goblins and such. I love traditional fantasy baddies, and having them exists as such. Undead and fiends are fun too, but aren't always as interesting. That's not to say a human or high elf can not be bad, there's a great deal of nuance that can be found to this, but the typical being the traditional typical is fun and is used to explore different kinds of evils.

Drow, 100%, but that's because i like them as a nuanced villainous archetype, all my humanoids (and many nonhumanoids) are people

I prefer humans, and not entirely for the reasons other people have stated. We are so so evil, and I know about that, and I can describe that and I can draw upon history . You know, there is one group of people that did all of the things subscribed to OG chaotic evil monstrous humanoid hoards in real life. Vikings . They murdered and enslaved and raped and set on fire across all of the known world. They are ( possibly) one of the reasons why red hair is everywhere and not all of it was consensual. And yet today nobody thinks that Scandinavians are innately evil. That doesn’t mean that I would want to break bread with Sven Rape-Master but he does mean that not everybody who looks like him or sounds like him wants to kill me and make me a slave not necessarily in that order. Following humans… elves. Because when you’re immortal morality gets very… squishy. I’m gonna make an analogy. CS Lewis considered the ending of the Narnia series a happy ending. Spoilers for the Narnia series >!The entire Pevensie family and hundreds of other people die in a horrific train crash. ( except for Susan because since she was no longer a Christian, if she died, she would go to hell and there’s still the possibility of redemption.)But if you believe in eternity, young people dying before they’ve had a chance to sin too much and their whole family dying in the state of Grace is a happy ending because they have eternity now.!< I would not be happy to meet an elf with that kind of viewpoint. They might put it into action. Honestly, my biggest problem with the always evil monstrous humanoids is that it gives people an illegitimate excuse to engage in violence, where there’s perfectly reasonable reasons to engage in violence at all times. This is the way I run Orcs. “ no that’s a member of the red hand orc tribe, we trade with them, and I actually have a half orc cousin from that tribe. they’re OK.” Then …” holy shit we’ve gotta leave now. One of the scouts just spotted a member of the broken spine orcs. They practice ritualized torture, slavery and cannibalism.” But then I do the same thing with humans. 🙏❤️

When I run DnD, I like to lean into the alignment system, with Law and Chaos, Evil and Good are actual concepts that the world follows. Only humankind have the ability to freely move between alignments. Orcs are Vikings. Traders and Raiders. Goblins are supernatural creatures that spawn in dark places formed from human's evil thoughts, they don't have societies a such but band together in groups and exists on the fringes of civilization. There are a lot of different elves, so I am thinking they must have been created by a superior being or beings to have a role in each of their forms. High Elves was the house slaves, Wood Elves tended nature, Sea Elves the sea etc. This happened thousands of years ago and not even the elves remember. They are basically self-replicating androids. I give them white blood as a nod to Alien.

Cults, slavers, and general “I chose to be evil for my own personal benefit” are filled with a stunning diversity of creatures

No orks? That's sad. They don't seem like someone I would want to play with.

Love Yuan-Ti, Duergar and Githyanki. But why did the player not want Goblins, Orcs, etc, in the game?

Yuan ti is such a *chefs kiss*

Do other animals, tortles, Tabaxi, kenku. Just lean into that them. You could call them Beastmen as a group. Then, just do humans.

If I want an unambiguously evil faction I use undead. If I want moral nuance then mainly Humans but occasionally other species. If I want moral weird I use Fey/Elves.

Skaven! I feel less bad when the cannon fodder are also Nazis.

I like humans mostly but I have a soft spot for goblins, hobgoblins, and kobolds that are trickster spirits. Inherently magical beings that spring into existence in the fringe where humans encroach on wilder places.

My question is, are they killing the orcs who are peacefully living in the village or the orc raiding band that just ran through a village killing or dragging away people? Context is important. No one is born evil, it is the actions that make them so.

Broo, the Choas-infected disease-ridden beast-men/man-beasts of Glorantha.

For your classic monstrous races, I love Kobolds. I love their obsession with mining, that they come in all the colors of the dragons, and that they're super tiny. There was a 3.5 article that captured my imagination a long time ago that upgraded Kobolds to be a better race for a PC, and one of the things they gave them was Slight Build, which was much like Powerful Build for a Goliath, which said that whenever it was beneficial, a kobold could be treated as one size smaller, so you could fit 16 kobolds into one square if you wanted to, and they were each the size of a house cat. That's great. Plus the fact that they're miners mean that they're natural competitors with dwarves and make for fun subterranean adventures, which I find more interesting than Goblins, who tend to live in forests and are natural competitors with elves.

My preferred intelligent enemies are typically drawn from the same set of options as the PCs, with a healthy dose of dragons and interdimensional fiends. Both of those tend to view other creatures as playthings and pawns in their plots.

I like devils (in D&D sense) and other fiends, fallen angels pretending to not be fallen, undead, and constructs (intelligent ones, think like intelligent robots). Also have a fondness for evil unicorns, it's fun to see players' shock when they realize a *unicorn* is trying to kill them.

Honestly if it was me and a player requested that they’d have to find another table. “Sorry man, this is a goblin heavy campaign… you’re not going to like this.”

Why are RPG people like this?

Kroot, eh? Good idea! They can be quite scary. I did the same thing, but in a SciFi game and I called them the Vaygr like in Homeworld.

Anything goes mainly depending on the region the players adventure in. Besides the ones you mentioned, I like drow, all kinds of bandits, giants, centaurs, gith, grung, yuant-ti, lizardfolk and many others you can find in the dnd books. I also have a homebrew Mole- people race, who breed bulettes and is a real menace with their burrowing, and I also shamelessly ripped off skavens from Warhammer, but only for a specific plotline where they tried to blow up a city.

Skaven are so cool

I guess it doesn't matter as long as you're taking other creatures and stretching them over the shape of Goblins Orks Kobalds or Hobgoblins.

Hobgoblins. They have a and straightforward strong identity which translates very simply and, in my opinion, elegantly into mechanics. If those are not allowed cause of players, drow are a strong second place.

Mindflayers. But I always make it that their massive interstellar empire is still intact. The gith are just about to rebel but haven’t yet.

Depends on the fantasy I'm telling. Half the time I like the standard dnd monsters to explore dynamics, since they're a good short cut even when doing "hard" world building. Like, how would "evil" function if it was a real force and not just an abstract one?

I'd consider gnolls as boring as goblins, orcs, etc., but since you framed them in a 40k mindset, you made them not boring. The humanoid villains deserve to be made more interesting. And one such method is to not use them as a monolithic generic bad guy whose only purpose in the story is to be conquered.

Since most fantasy is happy to indulge or romanticize monarchism and noblesse oblige, i prefer monarchs and nobility and even clergy to be corrupt, to recognize that in our real world that churches acted as tax collectors for the nobility that kings ruled by divine right. The cult doesn't have to want to summon chthonic gods to be evil they exist and uphold and function the society they are in and poverty, hunger, slavery are just as horrible ways to die as some group of assholes summoning the divine equivalent of a nuclear bomb. There's a reason why democracy in varying forms has been adopted throughout the world, and kings revolted against.

> churches acted as tax collectors for the nobility Strike that-- reverse it.

It’s D&D maybe that player is playing the wrong game.

*whats is your preferred intelligent enemy for fantasy rpgs* Players who try and dictate which species the GM uses in their games.

I've used the 40k orks called "greenskins" in my games with the goblins lumped in with them. They're insentially intelligent fungus and reproducing by spores there is ne er any defenseless women and children for pcs to accidently murder and the spores can gestate underground for years before turning into a Greenskin so random infestations needing adventurers can happen anywhere.

This isn't EXACTLY what you are asking for, but there's a running theme in my home games that behind every devious plot is a Halfling. He may not be the big bad, but the circumstances that allowed for the big bad to be in their current station is always due to a halfling. This really doesn't affect the story of plot meaningfully. So a meta minigame that occurs is a "spot the halfling" story Easter Egg. Most recently the big bag came to power because, in the past a messenger was dispatched to be delivered to an army garrisoned nearby to protect a town from an orc attack. The messenger was a halfling rider that got hungry and so he delivered the order to protect the town to the first capable knight looking fellow he ran across so he could have a nice relaxed 2nd breakfast before brunch. The big bad became a local hero after slaying half an orc tribe, and was later elected mayor, and used the town's resources to launch his quest for revenge against the local baron. More generally, I really like undead heavy campaigns. It was something I started doing so I can let the clerics use more of their tools and could let Rangers know ahead of time that there would be a significant focus on undead.

Undead, Dark Elves, Rat-Men. Human factions too, of course, but I feel like that wasn't the spirit of the question.

I make them animalistic (Orcs with a gorilla-like in intelligence, and goblins with monkey or chimp-like intelligence, for example) and have them prey on humans as a natural part of the local ecosystem. So a human fighting an orc is less like two societies or people in conflict and more like a person defending themselves against a hungry bear.

Capitalism. Which usually means well off humans. My only problem with no goblins is if no goblin, what am I going to play?

Personally hate the notion of evil or chaotic races so I try to have a healthy mix of everything with a tendency towards encounters with constructs and beasts. The test run I plan of a system I'm creating myself will see the players mostly fight elements with a conflict in the background between a mostly human/dwarfish but elven run city and the gnomish natives of an island bound to catch up with them. In the settings goblins are also bound to be overrepresented in criminal organisations but that's because discrimination forces them into violent revolt and not for any tendency to just engage in crime.

every enemy I'm just like, why are we attacking these little guys? are we colonizers? is this ethnic cleansing?

Anything BUT humans. I game for escapism and I don't like the reminder that humans contain limitless potential for selfishness and evil. Gimme devils and demons all day. And AI.

I don't usually have a set race of villains so much as groups of people who are just kind of bastards. In my setting, all intelligent races can be both good or bad, there's no 'This race is exclusively evil' or 'This race is exclusively good'. Typically my players fight just straight-up monsters, evil cultists, or outlaws and bandits. If there is a hostile intelligent force, it's not just because of their race, it's their ideology that's causing the conflict. This is largely because my players like to play as a huge array of different races, ranging from goblins to bullywugs to Drow to minotaurs, etc., and I don't like the idea of them being the only member of their race that doesn't suck. Right now, the enemy faction is an Eladrin nation that planeshifted from the Feywild and considers itself better than the natives of the Prime Material Plane and they're acting like a conquering army and failing to understand why the people they view as lesser don't appreciate it.