assault

For classic sorcerer villains, you might take inspiration from Lin Carter's "Thongor of Lemuria" series. Yellow Druids of a flame cult, Red Druids of a blood cult, both practicing human sacrifice and holding cities in terrified submission... and then the Black Druids of the sinister city of Zaar, each one of them a unique and gaudy villain. For them, see Thongor in the City of Magicians. Short reads, second-rate Howard pastiche, but the series is pretty fun.
 
Or, yeah, necromancers. You just can't go wrong with necromancers.
 
Dean Shomshak

@assault, how about an Eldar Worm? 

I've been toying with the idea of a low-magic Rolemaster 2e campaign. I'd limit the professions to fighter, thief, warrior monk, alchemist, healer, and seer. I may just ditch the realms of power rule and just classify spellcasters as arcane.

A Swords and Sorcery game requires Sorcerors.

Nasty ones, not PCs or friendly NPCs. At least a dozen of them, preferably more.

I need some ideas. Not builds, but fluff text, and perhaps some suggestions for Disadvantages and/or Complications.

Any suggestions you have for the magic bad guys Bob the Barbarian would run into would be awesome. (They don't have to be human, or even alive - just people who Bob would have to try to stick a sword into.)

I've been thinking of doing some old style D&D, except adjusted towards Swords & Sorcery.

Characters are humans, and not spellcasters. In fact, I've been considering making all PCs be human fighters, who spend most of their time fighting humans.

Alignments would be Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic, except the group needs to heavily tend towards one of these.

Naturally all this would set up howls of protest about how it's boring, etc, if I described it in a more D&D oriented forum.

All humans seems fine to me. Nonhumans in D&D tend to either be stereotypes, or deliberate subversions of the stereotypes, to the point of making it seem pointless to play that type of character anyway. Certainly, most of the stereotypes can be played as human.

The bigger problem is the "fighters only" bit. Obviously people are going to want to play rogues, but that seems more trouble than it's worth given what can be handled as skills in current D&D. And besides, Thieves were only introduced in Greyhawk. They weren't in the original boxed set...

Ultimately, it boils down to whether or not there is enough scope within the Fighter class to provide a reasonable range of PCs. I'm inclined to think there is, if you poke the players with a big stick made of suggestions.

(This character is a Scythian-flavoured Amazon from the steppes. This one is a shield maiden from a vaguely Germanic/Scandinavian culture. This one was trained as a gladiator by a decadent civilization....)

Hero would do it better, obviously, but D&D players are far more common.

I've been thinking of doing some old style D&D, except adjusted towards Swords & Sorcery.

Characters are humans, and not spellcasters. In fact, I've been considering making all PCs be human fighters, who spend most of their time fighting humans.

Alignments would be Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic, except the group needs to heavily tend towards one of these.

Naturally all this would set up howls of protest about how it's boring, etc, if I described it in a more D&D oriented forum.

All humans seems fine to me. Nonhumans in D&D tend to either be stereotypes, or deliberate subversions of the stereotypes, to the point of making it seem pointless to play that type of character anyway. Certainly, most of the stereotypes can be played as human.

The bigger problem is the "fighters only" bit. Obviously people are going to want to play rogues, but that seems more trouble than it's worth given what can be handled as skills in current D&D. And besides, Thieves were only introduced in Greyhawk. They weren't in the original boxed set...

Ultimately, it boils down to whether or not there is enough scope within the Fighter class to provide a reasonable range of PCs. I'm inclined to think there is, if you poke the players with a big stick made of suggestions.

(This character is a Scythian-flavoured Amazon from the steppes. This one is a shield maiden from a vaguely Germanic/Scandinavian culture. This one was trained as a gladiator by a decadent civilization....)

Hero would do it better, obviously, but D&D players are far more common.

I was always leery about allowing "Non-Danger-worthy" characters in Fantasy Hero games. There was a type of player we would run into in the Bay Area on occasion that would play a "wacky character"  as a way to grab attention, and would skew the tone of the game.  Some of those players would  moderate their behavior after the rest of the group objected to their previous antics.  Then they would play characters that were useful but weak, requiring security provided by the other characters (and therefore attention). It got to the point where I would reject "whimsical" characters out of hand. DNPC's were not "Adventurers" in my view. This did mean my FH games were a bit serious and grim, but they ran smoothly.

After more consideration, and study of Burroughs (Edgar Rice), I'm an idiot, since one of the few tropes Carter didn't steal from Burroughs was that Barsoomian women were all trained to survive in a hostile world. Of course Burroughs himself didn't follow this, which is why the incomparable Dejah Thoris became such an archetypal Damsel in Distress.
 
The Princess is, by default, a trained warrior, even if she concentrates on doing other things. That doesn't mean she has to be Joan Carter, but it does mean she isn't some feeble perpetual Damsel in Distress. (Don't get into a fight with La of Opar!)
 
There are good examples in Aaron Allston's Lands of Mystery. I ignored it at first, but as usual I was wrong.

Killer Shrike has the following archetype I'd love to play:
 
Savant
4Quick Study: WF: Common Melee, Common Missile
20Puissant: +2 with Overall
6Talented: Pick any 2 Skill Enhancers: (Jack of All Trades, Linguist, Traveler, Scholar)
8Athletic: Combat Luck (6 PD/6 ED) (12 Active Points); Not While Wearing Armor (-1/2)
17Danger Sense (Function as a Sense, Intuitional, Sensitivity: Out of Combat) 11-
 
 
 
Keep the stats low like Dex 12 and Spd 2, Con 13, PD/ED 4.  And pack it with skills
 
The package cost 55 +6 - 2 +6 +2 +1 = 68.  Even in a 125 pt game, that is a lot of skills!

High PRE. Diplomacy, Carousing (basically how to extract info from people by just being chatty with them) that sort of stuff

250. It worked well enough for "1st issue" versions.

Which is why creating such a "race" is so Evil.

250. It worked well enough for "1st issue" versions.

It may be worth remembering that Christian theology holds that humans are an "inherently evil" race. Everyone is born tainted by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve's disobedience to God. We can struggle against that evil taint, as individuals and as societies, but can never succeed completely. Fortunately, forgiveness is an option.
 
Dean Shomshak

One of the ideas that has become a big deal in D&D circles is that there shouldn't be inherently Evil races.
 
I'll refrain from ranting about this and cut to the chase.

Surely, creating an Evil Race is a very Evil act. The kind of thing that the Evilest of Evils would do, just to be Evil. (And because minions are useful.)

So, in other words, if inherently Evil races didn't exist, they would be created!

While I came up with this through an independent line of thought, Tolkien had already done it, as you would expect. He described the "creation" of Orcs as one of Morgoth's Most Evil Deeds.

Evil races can therefore plausibly exist, and the fact of their existence should, in fact, be horrifying.

If you need metaphors for racism, you can always look somewhere else. Just stay away from residential schools for Orc children unless you really want to go there.

Also, "race" isn't a good term. Something else would be better.

Thoughts?

 

"The races tend to act evil because evil gods made them to be that way" has been good enough for D&D for decades. It's good enough for an action/adventure game about characters becoming more powerful by killing monsters and taking their stuff. But:
 
1) Just because D&D does something, doesn't mean everyone else, or indeed anyone else, should do Fantasy that way. Or even Fantasy gaming.
 
2) I am no longer one of the young adult males who were D&D's original target audience. I am a late-middle-aged, effete pseudo-intellectual. I overthink. So even when I play D&D, I toss the metaphysics and do it my own way. But that would be very long to explain and likely of limited interest to anyone else.
 
Suffice to say that if Tolkien can build a Fantasy world on the theological and moral frameworks of Catholicism, I can do it on Enlightenment humanism. I have no trouble finding a sufficient supply of villains the PCs feel happy to battle and kill. I am quite happy with the result, and my players seem to be, too.
 
Dean Shomshak

One of the ideas that has become a big deal in D&D circles is that there shouldn't be inherently Evil races.
 
I'll refrain from ranting about this and cut to the chase.

Surely, creating an Evil Race is a very Evil act. The kind of thing that the Evilest of Evils would do, just to be Evil. (And because minions are useful.)

So, in other words, if inherently Evil races didn't exist, they would be created!

While I came up with this through an independent line of thought, Tolkien had already done it, as you would expect. He described the "creation" of Orcs as one of Morgoth's Most Evil Deeds.

Evil races can therefore plausibly exist, and the fact of their existence should, in fact, be horrifying.

If you need metaphors for racism, you can always look somewhere else. Just stay away from residential schools for Orc children unless you really want to go there.

Also, "race" isn't a good term. Something else would be better.

Thoughts?

 

One of the ideas that has become a big deal in D&D circles is that there shouldn't be inherently Evil races.
 
I'll refrain from ranting about this and cut to the chase.

Surely, creating an Evil Race is a very Evil act. The kind of thing that the Evilest of Evils would do, just to be Evil. (And because minions are useful.)

So, in other words, if inherently Evil races didn't exist, they would be created!

While I came up with this through an independent line of thought, Tolkien had already done it, as you would expect. He described the "creation" of Orcs as one of Morgoth's Most Evil Deeds.

Evil races can therefore plausibly exist, and the fact of their existence should, in fact, be horrifying.

If you need metaphors for racism, you can always look somewhere else. Just stay away from residential schools for Orc children unless you really want to go there.

Also, "race" isn't a good term. Something else would be better.

Thoughts?

 

I honestly read that as the Pinocchio coup, and imagined an army of wooden puppets led by a cricket.

But wood you support it?  Axing for a friend.

That's not unlike the actual coup.

50th anniversary of the Pinochet coup in Chile, which proved that there is no such thing as enemies, only friends we haven't made yet.