Are irredeemably evil creatures necessary for D&D?

Do we need evil creatures as morally acceptable fodder for our TTRPG games?

📖 Read the Prismatic Wastelands blog post, "Killing Creatures".

Transcript

There's a blog post posted earlier in the week on the Prismatic Wastelands blog looking at settings and which creatures in those settings it is morally acceptable to murder. It got me thinking about a subject that's come up a couple of times, though not recently here. What it made me really think about again, but maybe in a more general way than I have in the past, is: Do we need to have creatures that are just by their very nature, their essence, to murder? I think the answer for me is, I don't.

Do we need irredeemably evil creatures?

If I'm remembering correctly, the last time this came up, at least in terms of my channel, when I was talking about orcs and when Wizards of the Coast was reframing orcs and basically rewriting their history and their past to take away the fact that they're inherently evil, a lot of people were really mad about this. And one of the big things, topics, was that, hey, we need things that are okay to kill. Players just need things they can kill and not think about. I don't remember all the things that I said about that. I was generally in favor of whatever Wizards were doing for a couple of reasons. One is that you can do whatever you want, unless you're playing a Wizards game. I don't know why you'd feel beholden to what Wizards wants to do with their orcs. It's your game. Do whatever you want with your orcs. But then also that I like the complexity of creatures and not just having a really simplistic answer like, oh, hey, it's an orc, so just kill it. Those are probably my two prongs of thought.

Well, looking at it now in a broader case of, hey, do we need to have in a setting creatures that, again, just their very existence says, "kill me?" And my answer being, I don't think they are. Well, how do I get to that conclusion? What do I mean? Where am I getting at?

Well, first of all, I think if we drill down to the beginnings of the game, right, at the White Box, OD&D. The original D&D was a hodgepodge of different media literature influences. Sword and Sorcery, Lord of the Rings, Moorcock, Michael Moorcock and Elric, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, John Carter of Mars, and it just mashed in a whole bunch of stuff. I think it's really from Tolkien that this concept of orcs as an evil, evil thing that can just be killed with basically moral impunity. You don't even have to worry about it. Just kill them.

When I look at Sword and Sorcery stories, at least in my recollection, and I'm sure some of you folks out there who are way more learned and have better memories and maybe have read some of the Conan and other stories more recently, maybe have some to say about it, generally in those stories there aren't a type of people that Conan is just like, "Aha! Kill! I can kill you!". I mean, Conan doesn't ever really seem to suffer from any kind of moral doubt anyway, but he's a mercenary. He's in the moment. Sometimes he's working for some people and he's murdering some other people. And then the next episode he might be working for some of those other people, and he's murdering the people he used to work with. And sometimes he's just murdering and sometimes he's trying to escape being murdered. I don't really recall there being some people who were there. It's just like, "Hey, murder them!" There probably were, but the Conan stories weren't really about moral choices.

Conan, I'm not going to say he was amoral. I don't know. I'm not sure that Howard ever gave Conan or gave us access to Conan's internal thoughts to know what he felt emotionally about murdering people, but it was part of the world, this idea that life is cheap. And if you're on one side of things and they draw a blade or a sword or a weapon, then you draw your weapon , win or you die. I think part of that the Old West vibe that D&D has is about this life is cheap. In a bar with some folks, suddenly it turns to guns, and you better just pull out your pistol and fire before the guy on the other side pulls out their pistol and fires. It's not about, "Well, this person was such and such, so it's fine". It's like, that's just the way life is on the Old West. You better be ready to kill or you're going to be killed.

Getting back to the literary influences , Tolkien and the orcs have a special place, and D&D, as it built up mythology around itself, sort of hooked into that same concept of orcs being essentially born and bred by their evil god. But even given this, and I don't recall at what point that mythology of orcs came in, certainly in the white box, they don't have the space to put in a whole lot of the history of the orcs and where they're from and who gave birth to them and whatnot. Maybe Greyhawk Mystara, if you know, put it in the comments, it doesn't really matter. Even within that, the game gave you, the player, the tools to do more than just kill them.

You could learn their languages. This comes up a lot when we're talking about old school players, how important it was to learn language, to know how to speak goblin or orc or bugbear, so that when you come upon them, you don't just kill them. Not just because maybe you don't want to, maybe you can't, you may run into a whole bunch of them, but that you can potentially trade with them, ally with them. If I'm remembering correctly , the story of one of Gygax's players who beat the Tomb of Horrors, they did it by employing a whole army of orc mercenaries who they then used cruelly, but were employing to go and clear out areas of the dungeon so that they could win the challenge. They didn't just find these orcs and kill them because they're evil, they used them.

Part of what I think makes orcs and other things a little bit more uncomfortable, as our thought has progressed through time , is that it isn't so simple, just, "Well, these things are orcs and kill them". In Lord of the Rings, Aragorn, Legolas, Gandalf would never hire orcs. They would never be friendly to orcs. Orcs were literally the tools of the evil. They were evil tools, and so you encounter those tools, you wanted to get them off the board. And when the AD&D formed more complex relationships with these creatures, that to me makes it even weirder that they are then treated as, "No, they're just evil, but we're going to trade with them and we're going to maybe employ them and sure, we'll do things with that, but they're evil". It feels like that, which many people have pointed out in better ways than I have, how it's more like the other in sort of an ethnic way. And that, well, sure, maybe we'll talk to them and maybe we'll employ them and we'll pay them to do stuff, but ultimately they're lower than us. They're just the orc, but we'll hire them to carry our baggage, or we'll send them in front of us to die at whatever horrible trap Tomb of Horrors is going to throw at us.

So you have this complexity that's there , and on top of it, you have these tantalizing details and things like AD&D where they will tell you, "Hey, in the wilderness, you might encounter not just a band of bloodthirsty orc warriors, but basically a whole orc village on the move". And they would even lay out, "Well, here, it's this many wagons and this much stuff". D&D, as it's becoming more complex, as it's becoming a more well-rounded world , I certainly remember old discussions back in the day where people would get into talking about, well, if they are evil but you've got villages and presumably babies and non-combatants, how do you treat them? The argument of is killing an evil baby a good deed because they are evil with a capital E, and yet they're a baby. There was always this friction there. But if we treat things more complexly and say, hey, culturally, they might be evil because they have been brought up, worshipping a Gruumsh-wanai, an evil god, and they've been taught to do things that at least we and another society feel like are evil, and now we're on separate sides of some kind of battlefield. Is it okay for us to kill them? I think the answer for most of us would be yes. I mean, they don't have to be orcs.

In lots of games, there are humans that get in the way. They end up on the other side of a battlefield, and you understand in this particular conflict, you are the enemy, and they are the enemy, and you're the good guy. So, hey, kill them if you must , and you do it. And I don't know too many players, I don't think I've run into any that really feel bad about that because it's understood that whether they're orcs or people or whatever, that, hey, in this kind of dog-eat-dog world that D&D tends to imagine in these fantasy landscapes that when you're on opposite sides of a battle or a struggle, life and death, that's, those are the stakes, the ultimate stakes, as people like to point out.

Where are my fantasy Nazis?

The argument that comes up a lot is the, hey, we need the fantasy Nazis. We need the fantasy Nazis, somebody that you can just go, yeah, and kill. When I think of players , I think of two groups very broadly speaking. One, I would say, would call them profiteers. The classic, "We're going in the dungeon to loot stuff and bring it back, sell it, turn it into XP or just gold". And that's our game. And then you have the do-gooders. "We're out to save the princes and princesses, vanquish the evil demons, restore the kingdom's huzzah". The profiteers, you could call them neutral. I think D&D's always had this inference that they are ultimately good. I don't know any adventures that really didn't try to shade. And hey, there's a thing you could do to help people. And through helping them, you can also profit, but you're helping. You are putting down or eliminating something evil or bad that's taking place. And hey, there's profiteering. So usually, I think the game—and I would say that most groups, even if they're in the profiteering group, most tables, if they're in the profiteering group, still probably shade towards being do-gooders to some degree. But still, you can even say, "OK, they're neutral".

If you're the profiteers, you don't really mind killing things. That's part of the game. You're in there, "Hey, they're stopping you from getting the thing you want to get". Well, if you can't bargain with them, if you can't threaten them, you're probably going to kill them. And you're probably not going to feel too bad about it because that's kind of the game. And you know that if the roles were reversed, they would be killing you. On the do-gooders' side of it, then whoever's arrayed against you, they're up to no good. They're preventing or they're just preventing you from doing good, which I guess amounts to the same thing. And you probably also don't feel really badly about eliminating them. They may not be monsters in the evil sense, but still, they're the tools of the bad guys. And so you may try to reason with them. But at some point, when they're unreasonable, swords are drawn, spells are cast, and you get it on.

In terms of the Nazis, I really find that comparison super interesting, because, yeah, the Nazis are a great villain in movies, and any kind of fiction media in which they appear, because, yeah, no one feels bad killing a Nazi, but when you think about it, there were only Nazis for, what, six, seven, eight years. I mean, if you take the Nazi state when Germany fully embraced Nazi state to the fall of the Third Reich, how many years was it? And who were these people before and after they were Nazis? Well, they were just people. They were just German people, and others too who may have embraced Nazi ideologies, and of course there's still, unfortunately, more than a few of those running around in our world today, but ultimately here are people. The Nazis weren't orcs born evil and bred to be nothing but evil pawns in an evil game.

They're people, and so it was the state, it was the culture in that moment that made them Nazis who were fine to kill. They didn't have to be another species. Then fortunately, they were our species. They were us, and a lot of the interesting stuff about the Nazis is how you got people who were just people and turn them into at least the ones who were the most virulent and active into, frankly, a monster , and then turn them back again , or obviously not turn them back, but eliminate the monstrous elements and then return to just people. And that can be the same with any sentient creature. Yeah, there are cultures who are going to do bad things and express ideologies that are not only relatively wrong, but I think on a universal level wrong.

And the game can be about dealing with them. And in that way, I think, is it as simplistic as evil kill? No, but I don't know that interests me that much. Does it interest you? Is that all you want? It's just, "Ah, kill," because you can still do that. Like I said , whether you're playing a do-gooder campaign or a profiteering campaign , even if you're just fighting other people, do you really as a player sit back and ponder, "Well, what is this people? Was it nurture? Was it nature? Why are these particular people who are cultists who are trying to murder us and sacrifice us so they can return Orcus to his undead throne?" Do you try to save them? Could we put them in sanatoriums and convert them back to normal people? No, you just run them through, because if you don't, they're going to run you through.

But the option is there if that's something you as a table want to delve into, and some will. And to me, that's often the more interesting thing is, "Well, can we get these cultists back? Can we maybe get these cultists, a few of them that we have, and turn them, deprogram them to help us take down the larger cult?" And if we can't, why don't we just kill them? Because that's the game.

Must we have capital E EVIL tings?

I know folks love to find things to pick on and get angry about, frankly, especially it seems like nowadays, but probably always. So I know people will pick on the fact that, "No, we need this evil thing". I would say, I would ask you, do you need that evil thing? Does your party, when they're not killing the evil thing, but they're killing things that are just evil as individuals, does it really give them that much pause? Is it really that much hesitancy around, "Oh, well, gee, these cultists, they've got kids, and maybe they have wives and husbands at home, and parents, and what will they think?" No, you just kill them. So I would say, I don't think I need, certainly for my game, I don't need a capital E evil class of creature that's just there to be killed, because when it comes down to it, it's a dog-eat-dog world in these fantasy games. They're usually dark. At least mine are usually fairly gritty. There's not room for that kind of emotions. I think about what Morpheus said to Neo in, I guess probably the first Matrix movie, I think. But basically, when Neo was saying, "Hey, when we're in the simulation, and all these things are attacking us, and the agents are coming in, they're inhabiting people". And Morpheus goes, "Yeah, they are". And it kind of stinks. I'm paraphrasing, obviously. But until we free them all, they're potential enemies, so you have to treat them as such. And I think we tend to do that in the game. "Hey, yeah, you're just a guy , initiated into a cult, and you're trying to kill me with some flame-bladed dagger. Maybe if I had the time and opportunity, I could try to talk you out of it, but right now you're running at me in a smoky, dark corridor, so I'm just going to run you through". And that's the game. And that's the game.

Let me know what you think. And regardless of whatever game you're playing, game on. Talk to you later. Bye now.