Tournament Arc, Part 2/8
I’ve been spending more time than is healthy lately watching Magic: The Gathering let’s plays on YouTube. I’ve learned a couple of things from the experience. One is that Zenith Flare is straight up busted in Ikoria draft. But perhaps more germane to today’s discussion is this guy, General Kudro. Just look at him. I mean seriously, look at him! That walrusy fucker is just itching to throw his men’s lives away while shouting something maniacal about “the greater good.” I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s black mana in his casting cost. But more importantly, I don’t think that the color of death is necessary to make General Kudro a villain.
When I sat down to write out today’s blog post, I wanted to dig up a series of old articles about the colors of Magic and what they represent. It’s no coincidence that I found them copy-pasted onto somebody’s Obsidian Portal site. The colors of magic symbolize extreme archetypal forces, and that’s useful stuff when you’re a GM looking to whip up a villain. Imagining manipulative or destructive antagonists is easy. But in terms of today’s comic, with the forces of Good lined up to ROFL-stomp a hapless opponent in ‘honorable’ combat, the big takeaway line is this:
At their best, white mages are self-sacrificing and moral. At their worst, they are uncreative and even authoritarian.
Just think about all those stories of treacherous angels and well-meaning servants of tyranny. Think of Neil Gaiman’s sympathetic Lucifer (a black mana character if ever there was one) struggling against an unjust (white mana) cosmos. If you construct your story carefully, it’s possible to set up the white hats as the bad guys and the black hats as the good guys. And if you can reconcile yourself with that, then you suddenly gain access to a wider range of stories.
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we trade tales of nefarious do-gooders? What monomaniacal paladins and overzealous witch hunters have graced your games? Sound off with your tale of do-gooding done badly down in the comments!
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a bimonthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
A player of mine’s character once yelled at a paladin:
“My hometown was terrible. Then you showed up, and you didn’t fix anything! You just gave everyone hope, and that made everything worse!”
…And indeed, that hope did make things worse. The forces of good faced off against the forces of lawful evil (the PCs), and inspired the common people to break laws and throw their lives away in hopeless rebellion against the evil empire while the forces of good stayed hidden in the woods, indeed doing little else but inspire people, and provide them with ideas about how to rebel, and throw their lives away. The forces of good knew they weren’t strong enough to face the evil empire themselves, but didn’t seem to have a problem with letting the common folk throw their lives away to weaken said empire.
And when the PCs finally confronted them, the PCs were the ones called things like “corrupt” and “tyrannical”, when mostly they’d just been urging people to obey the law, and pointing out that there were serious consequences for this sort of rebellion.
This sounds like a riff on Hell’s Vengeance:
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Hell%27s_Vengeance
And also every IRL revolution. 🙁
Well, then your PC’s were on the wrong side.
Was this town, by any chance, called Longacre? 🙂
Yeppers.
They were, perhaps, too heavy on the Lawful and not high enough on the Evil for that adventure path. Their opposition among the common folk wound up looking less like oppressed goodly peasants, and more like crazy people rebelling against the very concept of authority figures.
Looks like Fighter has a higher wisdom than Antipally. (And probably a thin sheet of lead under his armour, too).
Lead foil really ought to be sold in most magic shops.
I love his expression of “this is why plausible deniability is so useful. I did exactly what the Handbook said, and it’s worked out again”. Because, well, “Fighter” of the “hero party”, obviously he’s a good guy, right? Whereas actually proclaiming your evilness really makes people get a specific first impression, and those things stick.
I’ve toyed with the idea of having the in-universe tome The Handbook of Heroes fall into another characters hands. I imagine they slowly become more and more Fighter-like while the now-not-such-a-dickbag Fighter heroically sacrifices himself to reclaim the book and restore the curse of THAT GUY.
Never quite got past the planning stages though. As it turns out, pulling off that kind of arc isn’t so easy in a single-panel comic.
Tricky, yes, but I can see the appeal. The question is, who would have to get the book?
Personally I find “good is just evil with a different aesthetic”, incredibly tiring, partially because well if it isn’t good why call it good?
Even outside of dnd context where it’s more like “light” or “darkness” the whole “in this world the angels are just as bad as the demons, ooh what a clever subversion we are doing” was fun the first time but kinda seem overdone to me. By now it seems like if an angel show up in a show they are more likely to be a genocidal authoritarian asshole than a caring and compassionate individual, so there isn’t really much subversion about it.
Magic system is a little better in regards to being actually interesting ideals that don’t map closely to good or evil (through like usual white is not good, is a lot more cleanly true, than black is not evil).
Still to not be entirely nancy-negative over here I’ll give one example that worked well for me from my gaming history.
We where fighting against this this destroyer cult with several different sub-cults worshiping different aspect of their religion. At one point we met a worshiper of one of these subcults that was Lawful Good, and since my character had a personality trait where he always tried talking to people first before resorting to violence I spent some time conversing with him while we investigated the structure we found him in.
He believed that his order would purify the world and create a just society where people would follow the rules and do good or, ultimately after a few chances be burnt on the pyre. Classic oppressive theocracy stuff.
The thing which made me buy that he was good was that 1)the rules people had to follow was actually pretty reasonable in themselves, it was just the punishments that were out of proportion. (don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t lie and so on until you get something that’s an unreachable ideal for a lot of people) and 2) he was very clearly deluded and hadn’t really thought his beliefs through. Over the course of the conversation it became clear that he really believed that more or less everyone would just act nice to each other and not break the rules (with perhaps only a few exceptions that was the same sort we as classic dnd good guys would be stabbing for their dastardly deeds anyway.) and that should his side win he’d balk at actually going through with what he preached. (or go through a gradual start-of-darkness arc ending with him no-longer being good).
This connection made it work fine for me, but I must admit it worked a lot worse for the rest of the group which hadn’t spent all that time talking with him and instead did other stuff, they just found it frustrating when it inevitable came to combat with him and his bosses and they couldn’t use Smite Evil on the guy advocating that most of the world should be burned at the stake.
I think that it’s less good and evil being similar, and more apparently good people turning out to be evil. For instance, in the post above, the supposed “forces of good” acted as beacons of hope, but turned out to be charlatans who only talked about that stuff, while going to hide in the forest the moment that the fighting started. Less about the twist of good being bad, and more good people actually being bad.
I do agree with the point of angels, though. While even the most virtuous being can fall, that’s supposed to be a very, very rare event under exceptional circumstances; yet it seems like all an angel has to do is sneeze badly and they’ll fall harder the fighter d10 elevator express.
Honestly nowadays the angel being evil because it’s a fallen angel seems a lot less common in various media than the angel being evil because it’s an angel and angels just as evil as demons with the only difference being that they look shiny instead of dark (except possibly a fallen defector to humanity who get’s to not be an unright bastard).
I think you’re conflating the word “evil” with “antagonist.”
As a counterpoint, I offer you this sterling example of Lawful Good:
https://lupin.fandom.com/wiki/Koichi_Zenigata
Zenigata (from what I have heard about him) feels like a very different thing than what I’m talking about, and what I got from the comic… description? (accompanying essay? doobledoo?)
As I understand him, he doesn’t really belong on a list with authoritarianism, tyranny, injustice, overzealous witch-hunters (that is people burning the innocents), a bloodthirsty general callously and needlessly killing his own men, a fictional fascist and an angel that seek to commit actual genocide. Monomaniacal paladins are the only of them that might refer to something non-evil and even there it’d be outside of my experiences with what those words would usually imply. (Which is not to say that my experiences are better than yours should they differ, just that they where what colored my response).
I commented on “evil-called-good” rather than on “antagonist-that-actually-are-good” because the description contained several examples of evil behavior and evil people ascribed to the side of good and zero mentions of non-evil antagonists or antagonistic behavior.
I think I went too far on the “evil-called-good” examples in the blog post.
What I’m arguing is that it’s possible to have a “white mana” character that is also the villain of a story. In the same way, I don’t think a good alignment means a character can’t be the villain of your story, or stops being good when they oppose your protagonist.
Compare this guy as the prototypical antihero: http://dashingnerds.com/mtg-card-of-the-week-toshiro-umezawa-betrayers-of-kamigawa/
White mana, sure part of why magic doesn’t call that color good or black evil, and instead have a set of five colors. Sidenote: As a general trendline it seems to me that black is closer to being “the evil color”, than white is to being the good one, and also those two seems to bring out the worst aspect in each other. A mono-white card is sometimes a bad guy, a mono-black card is often, but crucially not always, a bad guy. A white/black card on the other hand is as good as always a bad guy through.
It’s easy to have your main villain be evil of the shiny oppressor variety and magic says that character is a white mana character. (Umezawa was before I got into magic through, so maybe things where different in those days, through the link doesn’t actually say anything about him except for “samurai” and “likes watching things die”).
When that get’s called good it stops being interesting to me because well, what’s the point in calling your evil character good?
More interesting to me is how one could absolutely have a good character as a primary antagonist, and you don’t even need a villain-protagonists for that, good people can easily oppose each other. For instance any time two non-evil fantasy kingdoms go to war any honorable noble knights or equivalent sworn each side are likely to fight each other.
The word evil and antagonist is actually the same word for far eastern languages.
I have a really bad habit of leaning towards that – or at least, non-cackling-evil demons tend to pop up in my games if I don’t watch it. My Orpheus campaign featured a brief meeting with an angel, the gist of which was “angels are really incomprehensible” and “its hands are tied when it comes to being active in matters, but it is here to help your actions in righteous matters”. The one who had really rolled up his sleeves to pitch in against the end-of-the-world scenario was Sandalphon, but the players missed that plotline and it was all fine without him anyway because the PCs had plenty of plans. There was, however, a really very benevolent demon group in my Changeling game. They were sort of based on the heresy in one of Louis de Bernieres’ books – “I believe that I am an angel. I believe that you were an angel” – and given there were actual archdemons sticking their oar in in the area they had lots to do that was perfectly reasonable behaviour. The PCs never really trusted them (reasonable on their part) and by the end of the campaign had competently murdered about a third of them without them actually catching on as to who the serial demon-killers were. The PCs were after all fairy knights and heroes – demon-slaying was right in their wheelhouse. Sadly for the demons in question, they weren’t being assassinated by angels or the Church, but by those nice young ladies and gentlemen they kept running into in town…
If you dig the whole devil-with-a-heart-of-gold thing, I do have a recommendation. If you’ve ever seen the old Jim Henson’s Storyteller series, this reminded me a lot of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errementari
It was on Netflix in the US as of this week.
Okay. Antipaladin proves that Evil does not need to be cowardly.
But he might want to learn from Falstaff: “Discretion is the better part of valour.”
Damn. Shakespeare really did invent half our idioms. Had to do a quick Google and double-check.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/59/0f/3e/590f3e95dfdecbb85f8b3287bb48daba.jpg
Shakespeare was brilliant at what he did. ^_^
Well, in the Way of the Wicked PbP campaign that is currently comatose, my Le Fighter (emphasis on Lawful, he is just evil about going about it), certainly fits the ‘greater good’ trope.
From his background, he has been guarding the empire’s border for years, only to witness barbarian raids kill ‘his’ people, without the Empire doing anything remotely effective about it. Once given command of a unit of his own after just another raid that left some imperial citizens dead, he went ahead and razed two barbarian villages to the ground, putting everyone in there to the sword (and fire).
While some of the people in the border villages hailed him as a hero, he was still promptly tried for his crimes and found guilty. At least the judge sentenced him to being beheaded instead of being hanged like a common criminal. So there is that.
Still, once he escapes prison and becomes king, he is SO going to reform the Empire. First order of business: Make for a strong economy to support a strong army, that then can drive off/destroy/assimilate those damn barbarians. And then the monster-infested wild northern lands…
So, given the turmoil the land was in before, if he’d actually manage to pacify the empire and get an economy running, this would actually benefit people for the most part.
Remember, one of the tenets of Lawful Evil is ‘compliance will be rewarded’- Dead and starving peasants don’t pay taxes or make viable recruits for the army (in our world, a lot of child labour laws were enacted when it turns out that malnourished and malformed children do not good soldiers make!).
Also, you have to give people some things in order to be able to take them away again in order to ensure compliance. It’s just being evil but practical really.
Also, since the guy has a single rank in Knowledge The Planes, he is convinced that he will merely be supplying the ‘necessary evil’ that the Prime Material Plane requires for existing in the first place. Let the people then provide the Good on their own terms.
Or, as he might put it…
“They accuse me of taking away your freedoms. Well, they are not wrong. I WILL take away your freedoms! I will take away your freedom to starve, your freedom to freeze to death in the winter, I will crush your freedom to die of preventable diseases, I will annihilate your freedom to die to barbarian raids!…”
Remember, Havelock Vetinary is also Lawful Evil.
I would not take Havelock Vetinari as an example of Lawful Evil… he’s a tyrant, certainly, but one who has devoted his life to serving the people of Ankh Morpork, and who relies on a well-crafted reputation for ruthlessness to avoid actually needing to be heavy handed.
I don’t think you could go so far as to call him LG, but certainly not LE either.
Vetinari is an interesting case. To me, he’s objectionable in political terms (tyranny) rather than moral terms (he’s an enlightened despot).
Vetinari is the embodiment of enlightened realpolitik.
He’s prepared to go the extra distance to make his city and by extension the world he can influence the best place it can be to live in, but he is also prepared to take harsh measures to do it.
Without the likes of Sam Vimes to balance him, his reign would probably be a lot worse – and he knows and accepts that, has even built his policies around it.
Pictured here, le Fighter: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/419hYW9s2UL.jpg
In a long running game I was in, one of the PCs alignments was incredibly tough to pin down at first. She was secretive and very rarely volunteered to share information she recovered on her own, had a habit of grabbing fellow PCs whos morality matched what she felt the mission called for when she felt she needed help, was very ready to kill at a moment’s notice, and vaporized a hallway full of scientists trying to kill a monster, with pretty much no remorse.
She was also the most active pain in the neck for enemy forces, often would “loan” other characters helpful equipment, and in general was the one ready to do terrible things for the greater good. Plus when not in kill mode, was quite friendly and reasonable when dealing with most PCs and NPCs. So yeah in retrospect, LE. She most often came into conflict with a pessimistic yet slightly idealistic (what a combo) CG PC several years her junior, who was adamant about behaving in a less lightning-blast-happy fashion, and their arguments often boiled down to “You can’t just do heinous crimes like this” vs “These things need to be done, would you rather I didn’t do [x]”.
Of course Mr CG there also shot a man locked in a cage to death, lied about it, and left without even trying to explain himself when other PCs noticed and asked “what the hell?”
So that was a fun little slippery morality zone.
The slippery morality zone is full of Neutral banana peels.
The first time I had a sort of “are we the baddies” feel is from my first campaign. Long story short there was a festival being held in town that no one wants because the country is at war and heavier taxes means no one can actually enjoy a festival and life is shot. But the corrupt and greedy lord wants to celebrate his recent victories so he forces the festival to happen anyways, and we get hired to teach him a lesson.
The plan was pretty simple at first: we basically vandalize and humiliate the guy every time he tries to do something publicly, such as putting graffiti on a statue of him, getting his soldiers drunk so they absolutely flop a military parade they were suppose to do, and to top it off when we fought against him in the tournament (how topical!) we more or less humiliated him in front of his friends and family by bearing him in about two turns and him failing to meaningfully fight back.
But, as it turns out, enacting petty vengeance against the guy doesn’t actually help anyone. The lord was furious that everyone was insulting him and felt unappreciated, and the common folk continued to suffer under the taxation and bad life quality. So when demons started popping up due to the diabolical plot of the county’s enemy nation, my party was quick to skedaddle. But we haven’t gotten paid yet, so we tried to get our money.
Naturally, demons got to our employers first, and I can’t even say it wasn’t our fault. The party was already half-way out of the city before we realized we never got all our money, so concerned about saving our own skins that we straight up never considered to stick around and save the town. But you know who did? That greedy lord who we pretty much made a laughing stock out of because we figured all he was was a selfish and shortsighted man. Turns out when he’s working with his soldiers, the guy is a formidable knight and made the most use out of his innate bless+knight command ability. He even helped us when we needed to fight our way to safety.
It really made me think ya know, with politicians you hear about how sleepy and corrupt they are and you just sorta nod your head and think “yeah they are” and go on about your lives. But when the chips are down and shit hits the fan all you can do is take care of yourself. But then you see those same scumbag politicians who you’ve heard have been bleeding their own people dry, and you see them giving their all to help everyone they can. They aren’t doing a great job and a lot of people still die, but in the end they didn’t runaway. It just really makes you think.
I think that self-reflexive moment is the beginning of the end of the murderhobo period in a gamer’s development.
I’m currently playing in an adventure module (details will be omitted, to prevent spoilers). In it, there is a LG ally who is described as, “She doesn’t have a mean bone in her little body. She believes in the power of friendship and looks forward to kicking evil’s butt with the characters by her side”. The DM proceeded to only use the last part, leading her to kill enemies who surrendered, casually mention killing anyone who wasn’t good, including us, and state the belief that good there is only good and evil, no neutral. I really threw her for a loop when I repeated her beliefs back to her, then did so a second time after interchanging the words “good” and “evil”. I think that she solved that moral quandary by turning on and off again, though, because she proceeded to stare at me silently for a minute, then start talking with someone else like nothing had happened.
So… You’re saying that the GM in question misplayed the character, or did these shenanigans deliberately for comic effect?
Given her most powerful weapon was the ability to shoot magical evil-killing sparkles, I’d say he plays her for comic effect. She also has the voice of Mickey Mouse.
Not a do-gooder as such, but I do have a story of a fallen angel. Mykiel and his flight were loyal servant of the goodly gods of good, and his flight was sent to go and fight an evil lich that was ravaging the countryside which her apprentices and Far Realm horrors. He and his group flew into battle, and proceeded to get murdered, horribly. But Mykiel survived, and was captured. One of the lich’s apprentices took Mykiel, and experimented on him, while the Far Realm horrors caused rips in reality. Mykiel was able to escape, but found himself alone and broken, his flight dead and his body twisted. His direct superiors were too dead to give him orders, so he had to figure out for himself what to do. So what happens when someone suddenly has to think for themselves, at the same time as their mind’s been exposed to the Far Realm and everyone they’ve ever been close to is dead? Whelp, time for cult stuff.
He decided that the deities had sent his flight to their deaths, and that the gods must therefore be evil! He became obsessed the world, and the laws of physics, having been created to make people unable to stand up to the deities, and that churches are just a scam to give deities worship, and that he’s the only one who has seen the truth behind the lies, and that why won’t people just wake up and see- okay, my BBEG is literally just a conspiracy theorist, except if a conspiracy theorist had angel powers then learnt eldritch blast. But don’t worry, he’s not here to hurt you; he’s here to free you from the prison universe the deities created, by sending you to the freedom of the Far Realm. Oh, sure, he has to kill people from time to time, very sad, but the deities killed everyone when they made them mortal, he just moved up the clock for a few to save the many.
He tended to extremes, being willing to sacrifice himself for people he loved, while at the same time being abusive in an attempt to make people stronger. He always sought to minimise death and help people, but he had no choice but to kill someone to reach his goal, he’d brutally slaughter them. He could and did flip between weeping tears over having to fight someone, only to start screaming vows to kill you a moment later. He had gone from a lawful, unthinking servant who did what his boss said to be good to an emotional conspiracy theorist who did whatever he thought to be good.
You know what I appreciate about this character? You didn’t mention his alignment once.
I think it’s more interesting to develop a character first than to lead on ‘what their alignment ought to be.’ I’m sure you could argue it to death, but in terms of at-the-table play I think that “bipolar conspiracy theorist angel” is more compelling than “no really, he’s still CG!”
Magic’s Kamigawa block may have been lackluster in terms of cards, but its story shone in terms of demonstrating both white villainy and black “heroism.” The villain of the piece was a man who had basically forced a bunch of feuding petty kingdoms under his banner and had stolen power from the gods themselves to become an immortal, untouchable tyrant who wanted to conquer the world. The protagonist just wanted to get paid and live a comfortable life. But he still saves the world (grudgingly,) gets the girl (briefly,) and…
Well, ends up stranded in another universe and blind because his patron goddess got peeved by his specific methods shaking up the status quo too much for her tastes. Though his descendant went on to kill one of Magic’s greatest villains (temporarily.)
Card game lore gets weird.
there was an article about the mtg color wheel ages ago, comparing the motivations of the different colors and color combinations. Ironically, they used Emperor Palpatine as the default example (I know, I was dumbfounded by the audacity of it). but they broke it down by motivation as opposed to result.
if He was White, he was motivated by the greater good – the loss of life and political intrigue were a necessary evil in his eyes, with the goal of unifying the known universe and bringing in an age of prosperity.
If He was Blue, he was motivated by curiosity – the end result was less important; it was about IF it could be done, not if it SHOULD be done. test, trial, hypothesize, and line the whole shabang up as a final grand experiment to see what happens.
if He was Black, he was motivated by personal power, pure and simple. this is the most obvious portrayal of him, and the side we see in the films and stories. puppettering and backstabbing, intrigue and shadows for the sole purpose of, to quote the meme of him, “UNLIMITED POWER!”.
If He was Red, it was because this was what he FELT needed to be done. this was about drive, passion, and emotions, not logic or ethics. it is the simple pleasure of the child and an unopened box – the need to TRY.
If he was Green, it was because it was about returning things to their default state. for a social species, it makes sense to unify themselves against outside threats. but what is “outside” when you are the known universe? this was more of the equivalent of a tribal chieftain pushing the various warriors and shamans into not bickering with each other, and focusing on the tribe itself.
same person, same actions, COMPLETELY different colors, or corresponding alignments (typically White: Good, Blue: Lawful, Black: Evil, Red: Chaotic, Green: Neutral) based on motivations.
When it’s all too easy to get locked into alignment concerns, looking at another game for angles on character development seems like a good idea for GMs. I love these a lot.
Any chance you can find the article? I’d be curious to read it.
tried searching for it for about 4 hours before I posted, ended up giving up. ><
Well hey, kudos for the attempt! I’m honestly surprised I managed to find the ones I was after.
Are there any MtG novels worth reading? I’ve played on-and-off since I was 12, but I never really bothered to get into the lore.
anything from the Weatherlight saga or Urza is pretty good, stay away from the newer stuff – it went down hill, then underground, and is currently burrowing core-ward in quality & consistency with each passing set.
Ouch. I remember being unimpressed with one of the short story collections (can’t remember which) and not wanting to go back.
It’s frustrating too, because the story hinted at by the cards is tantalizing and interesting. I’m just wary of spending the hours only to be disappointed.
I always thought the Star Wars universe was ripe for this kind of storytelling. Especially in the years prior to “The Phantom Menace.” If you look at some of the stories from this universe, it would be so easy to reframe the Jedi as bad guys.
On the one hand you had “good” Jedi who were authoritative advisors to the leaders of the galaxy that had their hands in all levels of government. The same order that preached emotions were bad and only cold logic should prevail.
On the other you had the “evil” Sith who were passionate people hunted down to near extinction.
That does sound interesting, personally I’d keep the jedi focused on intuition and a lack of passion rather than turn them towards cold logic. Since the latter is rarer and thus more interesting to me.
A tyranny not born of calculation but rather of distance and detachment.
You would probably also have to remove, or otherwise reframe the Siths “rule of two”, because the whole “hunted down to near extinction” is a lot less sympathetic when it’s something they did it to themselves rather than something their enemies was involved in.
There’s a lot of potential for “gray side” stuff in Star Wars. I’m no expert, but I believe that some of the expanded universe delved into the concept.
As far as the films go, I always wished that if the prequels wanted us to view the Jedi Council as detached and decadent, they had leaned a little harder on the idea. As is they come off as feckless bureaucrats, and we’re left to intuit the conflict from context.
Why’s Fighter on the left?
Oathbreaker might be at a severe disadvantage considering his steed is a small-sized dog that he can in no way ride.
The first long-term villain that I threw at my party was an Aasimar Conquest Paladin whose attitude of “Good is something you are, not something you do” led to him dong tons of atrocities thinking “I am descended from heroes and angels, so it must be okay if I do it.”
Fighter isn’t Good, but he’s smart enough to fight for Good.
Fighter is Good! It says so right on his character sheet. Never mind the eraser marks.
Considering my group’s necromantic shenaningans, (impromptu) planar genocide and take-over-the-world-ambitions, I should’ve used a lot more morally upright antagonists, but it never occured to me.
Using morally superior (not in the smug sense) NPCs feels like I’m trying to educate my players to “be better”. They’re playing in whatever way is fun to them and me waggling Sheriff McGoodheart’s “The Law-abiding Citizen’s Almanach to Good Deeds” at them would take some of that fun away I fear.
Other than that, I’ ve used quite a few White-mana antagonists: need-driven aspiring tyrants, paladins as a Musketeers-like secret police, druids as isolationist xenophobic pacifists.
By the way, concerning an inevitable tournament in my WitcherTRPG: I’m pretty sure that my players are reading your comic as well. Not even a day after “Tournament Arc 1/8” they pitched an in-game tournament to a local ruler, to raise his prestige. The merchant and craftsman will seek sponsors for the prizes and build the grounds, the bard is serenading potential champions and lovely ladies to serve as “cheerleaders”, the doctors is setting up a medical tent and started researching STDs, the witcher is planned as a “bonus boss” for especially tough contestants etc.
Yes… yes… My empire grows! Now you must convince them to buy all our playsets and toys!
Good call. Teaching didactic morality play lessons to players is lame. Exploring conflict is fun. That’s where all those ‘white-mana antagonists’ that you mention come in. Their motivations are clear and maybe even justifiable, but your PCs oppose them for their own diverse reasons. Figuring out what that means thematically is down to each of you as individuals. The GM is allowed to have an opinion, but imposing it on the rest of the table just comes off as preachy.
I have a tale that only sort of relates to the topic. One of the homebrew settings, there was a set of nations in the mountains that the gods separated from the world – a nation of aasimar, and a nation of tieflings. They were intentionally created and planted there to fight and determine if the Evil or Good sides of the pantheons were ‘best’.
What the two nations soon discovered, however, is they could ‘go through the motions’ of ‘evil defeating good’ or ‘good defeating evil’ in a cycle – flashy, showy, monologue-happy “Plays” of Good vs Evil for the gods. The gods as a whole were unimpressed by this, and closed the two nations off from the rest of the world. Knowing no other way to live, both nations continued their ‘act’ of Good and Evil. Most commonly, the ‘Evil’ nation would ‘kidnap’ a member of the ‘Good’ nobility, who would be ‘rescued’ as part of a normal wedding ceremony.
That is, of course, until a group of adventurers from outside found their way into the two kingdoms, assumed it all to be real, and slaughtered their way through the “Evil” kingdom, looting destroying the castle on the way out in the name of justice and gold.
Thus was born Lord Malevolent – a tiefling paladin player-character from the Evil nation, seeking great wealth to rebuild his family’s holdings without having to tax the common people of the nation (who have suffered enough with the brutal death of their Queen). Following the way of “True Villainy”, a set of rules and regulations to ‘Evil’ passed down in the Malevolent family which was oddly similar a standard Paladin’s code, re-flavored to SOUND ‘bad’, he often turned heads. Especially with his black, spiky armor and frequent monologues about how he and his trusted, beloved friends and companions would overcome adversity for the well-being of all… followed by a villainous laugh.
(Takes notes)
I love that the gods were so embarrassed by their homebrew setting that they hid it behind a pay-per-view wall.
Antipaladin needs to switch to an anime-derived system. Even if your antagonist are well meaning, when you enter a tournament arc where everything’s oriented against you and you’re clearly outnumbered, your odds of winning have never been higher.
Too bad we decided not to keep the sparkles: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/style
It’s too bad Antipaladin didn’t get a chance to hang out with Sir Malevolus during the Rusty and Co. crossover. Dude could have shared some good tips about picking your battles.
Page not found!? Must be Sir Malevolus’s dastardly doing.
I see Fighter lied on the admission form.
What? Impossible! It says right here that Fighter is Good! What goodly PC would ever lie to tournament officials?
You want stories of Good villains? You have come to the right place then 😀
In one of our first real campaigns we played as a bunch of young heroes decided to defend their kingdom from the forces of evil. The only problem was that the forces of evil were the ones running the kingdom. The twelve paladins that defended the king and their country were a bunch of prideful jerks, the nicest one and later the only truly good among them was still a mess of a person whose few good traits were related to his bastard son and the woman he raped during a siege and which got him that bastard. The good and wise king realizing the state of the kingdom was plotting to destroy it so her daughter could reconstruct it from the beginning. While the princess was trying to save that kingdom to prevent its downfall and try for her father to not being remembered as the king that let his kingdom fall around him. And the bad guys a bunch of barbarians without culture or respect for anything, according to propaganda, while in truth they were the ones who were fighting a defensive war against the expansionist kingdom. And all of this leaving aside a lot of other character that also got their share of guilts and schemes.
And that was just a setting, in other one the forces of Good, in caps, are on the verge of a civil war over how to be good and how good they need to be with the forces of Evil. Both sides are good, but some are more good than others and that is the problem. But at least Darkness and Chaos got a nice show to watch while eating popcorn.
And speaking of Magic, that White also embodies oppression and dictatorship is just such a garden of villains for the campaigns on my group. Grabbing what could be a force of good and spinning into a force of evil, oppression or tyranny is natural actually for us. Believe me, in my country the justice league would be a criminal crew and the police would be lead by the Joker 🙂
I thought you might be the guy for this thread.
Does your group even do white-hat games?
Well, clearly good vs clearly evil is kinda boring to us. Grey and black can be interesting, black vs black even more. But white vs black is… too common and simplistic. Nobody can sell us a perfectly good group of people doing good for the right reasons. We are, maybe, more cynical, realist or pragmatic not only as a group but as a people, in our country i mean. So then white vs black… tabletop games can be played as a form of escapism, many play them to think of a better world, we play worse worlds to make catharsis of the one we got 🙂
So no, we don’t play that much white-hat games. Evil is fun 😀
Think that even the forces of Goodness are fighting among themselves in our setting canon. And i mean the Forces of Goodness as a multiversal concept and force fighting against the other 5 factions 😛
(curiosity about your country of origin rises)
All according to plan 🙂
Judging by his shaking, Antipaladin is probably regretting the fact he has an Aura of Cowardice instead of an Aura of Courage.
In his place, I’d be more concerned about the lack of lay on hands.
So, the pennant of the forces of good is a Hippocampus, but what’s the pennant of the forces of evil? Elf Princess’s text bubble is (in)conveniently hiding it.
Laurel says it’s a skull and crossbones.
Looks more like a Kelpie than the memory and learning part of the brain to me… 😛
http://funnyhorse.pictures/mythical-horses/kelpie/7-kelpie-pictures/detail/53-kelpie-horse
Fighter’s clearly on the wrong side of the field here. I wonder how much that undetectable alignment enchant cost him?
How dare you? It says “Good” right on his character sheet!
Oh gods, a tournament arc. My FFXIV pathfinder group literally just finished with one that took as long as the entire quarantine period thus far and has resulted in a huge round of rebalancing after our party’s warrior soloing half the enemy team (none other than the Warriors of Darkness, to make this extra-topical with the comic!).
Literally brought back memories of the game itself nerfing warrior down from absurd levels of self-sustainability and damage in Stormblood, it was so crazy.
Ha-ha! Once again art imitates other art imitating a video game! The classic story!
I have a campaign concept I’ve been cooking up in my head for a while where the party is in the employ of a conglomeration of various Good and Neutral churches. The organization is led by a Witch-Hunter General and is full of famous Paladins, Clerics, Inquisitors, and other kinds of holy heroes. One of the characters I was thinking about having is a Paladin that follows the party like a DMPC and does all the annoying DMPC stuff: bossing the party around, stealing all the glory in combat, taking credit for their accomplishments, etc. Basically, imagine Gilderoy Lockhart as a Paladin. Eventually, the story would reach a point where the party is falsely accused of a crime against the church and Lockhart would jump in on accusing them and claiming to have caught them in the act himself. The party would then get to fight him and repay him for being just the worst teammate ever. It would later turn out that the Witch-Hunter General had been compromised and their whole accusation was a conspiracy, but the Lockhart character was kind of designed to be someone the theoretical party would just relentlessly hate for being an obnoxious showoff.
Oof. I like the idea of smacking around a DMPC, but the “eventually” is the big drawback. I imagine the party would try and ditch Sir. Gilderoy at the first opportunity.
Okay, Antipaladin, don’t Panic! You can still win this! First, take your adorable and Evil Puppy in your left Hand and use him as a Shield. This take both Druid and Paladin out of the Fight since they can’t hurt an Innocent/An Animal. Challenge the Paladin to a 1v1 tell him it’ll happen after you dealt with all the others
Watch out for Fighter and Inquisitor on this though, since they will gladly murder your loyal Friend. First Disarm Fighter by casting hold Person on him, and take his Blade, as the resident Minmaxer it’s probably the strongest Weapon on the Field, and you can wield it in one Hand as it is a Bastard Sword. All the while watch out for Arcane archer and use your Meele enemies as Cover from his Arrows. Also keep in Mind that Pugilist will try to Grapple you, make sure you keep a tight Grip on your Puppy, otherwise Druid and Paladin will rejoin in the Fight.
Target Priority: First incapacitate Fighter, then kill Inquisitor, incapacitate Barbarian (via Hold Person same as Fighter), kill Fighter, Kill Arcane Archer, then kill Pugilist, Kill Barbarian. So now only Druid and Paladin should remain.
Now Backstab the Paladin while he’s not expecting it, after that finally Face Druid in the last Fight.
YOU CAN DO IT ANTIPALADIN! I BELIEVE IN YOU! 😀
Can you get XP for coaching? I feel like you deserve XP for coaching.
Also of note: I kind of want to see this battle sequence now. A lot has to go right, but it would be a legendary upset if AP came through!
To me, this comic is more about the reason roleplaying worlds like Golarion are able to survive massive threats roughly every six months, and that’s because the forces of Good generally work together while the forces of capital-E Evil do not. Lawful Good archons and Chaotic Good azatas probably don’t hang out on weekends, but they almost never let their political differences get in the way of the great fight. Lawful Evil devils and Chaotic Evil demons, on the other hand, hate each other about as much (and possibly MORE) than they hate the Goodies. This is because the different types of Good have largely mutually compatible worldviews, while the Evils do not. There isn’t really a “Greater Good of Bad” for the Evils to unite to fight for. (Recall that the comic has plenty of evil characters who could have joined Antipaladin – it’s just that none of them care enough to do so.)
As for dickish good guys, I do have one antagonist Paladin who became too accepting of civilian casualties and unethical science in the fight against evil and fell, reclassing into the ex-Paladin archetype Vindictive Bastard. She remains posed to wreck the party’s face when the time comes, though at the rate they are sliding towards evil themselves, she might un-fall if she puts them down!
I was also a player in a campaign where events had caused the not-that-bad government to go to war with the local orcs in what was turning into a war of conquest via mission creep (exactly as the true villains had planned, of course). The PCs ended up having to fight a force of knights who, from their perspective, were defending their citizens (who had kind of been provoking the orcs). My character actually managed to capture and barter for the life of the knight commander, after which she chewed him out for getting good people on his side killed.
Oh, in my Shadowfire setting there is a group of Good Is Not Nice warriors called the Sanctifiers, who are basically the inquisition. In fairness, the dark magic and demonaeic worship they want to snuff out IS really dangerous and immoral, but the righteousness of their ends tends to lead to aggressive and overzealous means, as they have little respect or tolerance for anything that gets in their way, traits that occasionally make their job HARDER (because no one wants to cooperate with them). One of their major roles in the setting/campaign/story is getting in jurisdiction turf wars with the lighter-touch-using players/protagonists. They also later become pawns for a hidden evil faction that finds them easy to manipulate.
I always feel like a jerk when I look at Vindictive Bastard. I want to make it work as a player rather than a GM. But I think it’s more powerful when the paladin actually falls in-game. But you can’t plan for that, so you have to make a paladin build that you’re actually excited to play. That means you’re less likely to want to go through the fall-from-grace storyline.
My internal conflict knows no bounds.
I dig your Shadowfire guys. The Witch Hunters of Mordheim were very much in my mind when writing this one:
http://broheim.net/downloads/warbands/official/Witch%20Hunters.pdf
Two stories. The first was a rogue written on the concept of looking at Golarion hard through the eyes of a peasant orphan who did the traditional rogue upbringing of guttersnipe on the streets. Looked hard at all the paladins and clerics running around with supreme magical power while normal people suffered, and how the gods in particular seemed to be playing out some sort of massive conflict without a real concern for how many humans died in the process. In fact, human death seemed to be a big part of it. So she had the idea that the gods were just running a long con on humanity. So she had a real low opinion of people who claimed to be “good” and didn’t live up to it.
And the second one was a honestly great concept of a Paladin in Ravenloft being tempted by the Dark Powers and going full on into the “Evil must be purged by any means necessary. Preferably fire.” It was one of the best things I’ve seen that guy do.
I love that you used the IRL notion of, “How are we still in shitty medieval times when we have magical super powers?” and turned that into an in-game motivation for a rogue. That’s the sort of in-game / out-of-game slippage that Handbook-World thrives on.
Poor Antipaladin…
Nitpick maybe but I do not believe Neil Gaiman’s Crowley is Black against White, as defined by MtG. That was the whole plot actually: White Heaven against Black Hell, and in the middle their representatives Crowley and Aziraphale united against the whole conflict.
The antagonist in that book I would actually describe as Green Fate, the idea that Armageddon was natural, preordained and inevitable. Green often really sucks, and Good Omens would be an excellent example.
I was referring to Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer. From Sandman.
https://i2.wp.com/thegameofnerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Lucifer-Funnyjunk.jpg?resize=560%2C488&ssl=1
But to your point: I can’t see Adam Young as a Green entity. Kid’s at the epicenter of a supernatural end of days. The entire point of his character is how humans hover between forces of good and evil. That’s a black/white gold card.
If you want a Green apocalypse, go for global warming.
One of my campaigns started as detective mystery. The party, trio of inquisitors, were sent to investigate a disappearance of a noble under suspicious circumstances, dark arts were suspected to be in play. They found clues that there was an underground nest of ratmen connected to the city’s sewer system. But that wasn’t the only conspiracy in play: while it was true that the ratmen killed the noble, a necromancer raised him afterwards. At some point a vampire necromancer visited the party with an offer to team up against the ratmen. By inquisitor’s holy teaching ratmen were abomination that needs to be purged, but so were undead. But the party really didn’t want to go into a rat town alone, so they agreed to an alliance.
So good thing; they burned the rat town down. Bad thing: they gave the vampire “get out of jail” card and they helped him to raise the full city graveyard of zombies, you know, to fight ratmen. And the best part: they didn’t even need this alliance, because they sent a plea for help to the inquisitors’ base earlier, and a squad was on the way, the party just didn’t wait long enough.
I also once wanted to start a campaign about devils who defends hell from Forces in White. And because hell is the place where bad people suffer after death, the players – the devils – would be a good guys. But I never started such campaign and soon forgot about it.