I want to drop some futuristic colonists has the bbeg in a fantasy campaign and I want them to be has menacing as...

Isn't this generally a bad thing to do in regards of keeping the planet pristine?

Crash a comet on the planet for terraforming purposes. Is there people living down there? Why should we care?

I hate redditors too but you're fucking retarded, and reek of tryhard new.

It's an automated generation ship. Over the centuries the colonist population has descended into quasi-barbarism, but still with high tech. They also have developed a religion that regards the planet as their Chosen Land, theirs by right of the Great Maker. They don't attempt communication with the planet's primitive indigenous beings and drive them forcefully away from settlement sites, killing any who seriously resist.

I like this.

2000ad is running a story about this right now.

The forces of evil and light were in the middle of a battle to determine the future of their next age.
The orcs and a sauron equivalent.
The humans, elves, Gandalf parallel, dwarves, etc etc.
And then the invaders chose to strike from above.
Anti ship weaponry rained from above on the gathered forces.
Many years later the story has moved on to the aliens ruling the world from their floating 'fortresses'.
Some humans, even the most noble in the past, now serve them.

What makes them evil?
Well, they're not in the sense of traditional values of a fantasy world.
They're a corporate hegemony.
Noble houses who rule arms of a corporation.
They are efficient and without outright malice.
Just the coolly detached efficiency of a corporation unleashed in a fantasy worl (albeit with some dune like dressing.)

Now, the real potential for evil comes from the properties of the world.
They fuel their ships, tech and even society on an energy called quinnessence.
That's right.
Magic.
Everywhere else it is rare and requires huge harvesting efforts to gather.
On this new world though, it's everywhere.
So prevalent some people can manipulate it without technology, creating effects they need machines to produce.
These natives, even the non weilders, have it riddled in them and every little drop counts...
So, some they are capturing to deconstruct for new technologies or harvest for their essence.
Eventually that'll be everyone's fate.
Sucked dry, and not In the fun way.
Some, though, are being harvested to be turned into weapons to further the ambitions of the lucky corporate house which found this world.

Meanwhile, an incognito Gandalf figure has been rescued from ex royal guard now working for the aliens, by an orcish servant of darkness who saw something during the orbital strikes.
Something brought down a ship.

Anyway.
Tldr.
Aliens corporation are here to turn you into space petrol.

They are dispassionate, efficient, and (not without reason, mind) do not consider the inhabitants of the setting to be "people." Their goal is to steadily and entirely eradicate all life, then use the remains to kickstart a more familiar biosphere.

Sekrit tweest: the colonists have been genetically engineered by their homeworld leaders to exhibit little to no ambition or empathy. Such unexpected first contact events are actually very common, so they want a crew who won't balk at simply wiping out natives and wiping their existence under the rug. If the average citizens of their empire learns that their leaders are engaging in habitual genocide, they're likely to revolt.

...

Make them Communists.

I'm reminded of the TNG episode Symbiosis where the people from one planet were trading a cure to another that just happened to be highly addictive.

No ambition? I think you chose the wrong word there, if you lack ambition you'd be perfectly content just sitting on the ship. Lack of ambition = lack of desire to expand/colonise unless required to. It'd be a poor quality in a colonist.

...

>It's an okay planet, but it would look better with a giant crater over there.
>>Let's drop a comet on it to get a big crater, plus it'll destroy the local ecology.

The slumbered their way across the vast gulfs between stars on a one-way slower than light journey to a likely habitable planet.

They don't have the fuel to turn around, their ship was only designed to last the one journey, and the power's starting to cut out in the cryo bays. They've got no other choice but to carve out a slice of that weird planet below.

Maybe in a few generations they'll be ready to talk, but for the moment it's life-or-death for those futuristic fuckers, and they hold the ultimate high ground: orbit.

that's babyeating tier, the communists killed more people than literal Nazis (unless you use a you no-true-scotsman to defend their honor).

They need to terraform the ecology into a survivable form. They might be willing to make the sacrifice of living in a dome while it gets done, but they want their kids to live in a better world.

Obvs destroying the old ecology isn't fantastic for the old inhabitants.

Nah, it depends on if you count letting Ukrainians starve the same as murdering them. I mean, they're dead either way, but one is a thing you do and the other is a thing you don't do.

As the other user's said, make them cool, dispassionate, and efficient. They need a slice of that land, and they're going to take it. They give the inhabitants a choice: move or die. They aren't going around murdering babies for the lulz. They go to the local natives, tell them to move, and if the natives say fuck off, they start killing until the rest get the hint and fuck off. The colonists don't really give a shit about the natives one way or the other. Sure, if they don't listen they start killing, but it's not like the colonists are hunting them down to genocide them or anything, they just want the natives gone.

>I want bad guys
>But I don't want them to be that bad
>bad guys can be sympathetic
Edgey

...

>FTL
FTL isn't more dangerous than relativistic flight, unless it's warp bubble drive, which won't make your rocks fly faster than your real space velocity when you exit the bubble, but will release a solar system cleansing radiation pulse when the bubble is deflated

Many FTL concepts don't involve large magnitude real space velocities, and thus may be useless for the release of bolides.

The most likely possible method (taking a shortcut along the brane topology of N-dimensional space) likely isn't compatible with high speed travel at all.

>The vessel isn't moving.
>It's the rest of the universe that's moving.

I like this one.

>They weren't the ones that chose their destination, the ones that did merely observed an oxygen-nitrogen terrestrial planet with no spectra indicating any level of industrialization, and none of that matters because they are 30 lifetimes from home, at the limits of their life support systems, possessed of technology that might as well be god like magic, and driven by personality and theology to be fruitful, multiply, and restore the industrial and technological base they'll need to once again command all the orbits of a star system.

>They use the best and lowest impact methods they could bring across the stars to carve the bones of this world for the materials needed by a high technology society that can't yet harvest asteroids.

>But a carbon neutral strip mine with effective runoff and groundwater protection systems is still a fathoms deep pit were that sacred mountain once stood, and a nuclear powered induction smelter is still going to fill the sky with scorched, powdered rock and light the cloud from below with a hellish glow.

>time travel isn't dangerous, you guys!
>I mean, look at me, I just killed my grandf--

>implying multiverse theory isn't real.

Sure, you just killed your grandfather, but that just means that that universes version of you wont be born.

>implying it is

There was literally famine in the Ukraine every year since the dawn of time. The fact that sonetimes there was no famine means Stalin saved more Ukrainians than he starved. Stalin killed WAY more jews than Hitler though.

Just make them Americans.

>I want them to be has menacing as possible...
Maybe give them some kind of power armor that makes people think they're actually giant space golems at first, only to peel open a corpse and find a body inside. Also, use the language gap to your advantage, don't give the colonists a translator, make the players muddle through never knowing what the enemy is saying. Lastly, emphasize the colonist's range. Nothing says scary like a missile wiping out an entire village on the other side of the horizon without a single enemy ever being seen.

Simply showing up kills 50% to 90% of the planets population.

You want to make them evil?
>Be colonists looking for life
>Find fantasy planet
>Enlist "evil" races of fantasy planet to round up everyone they can
>Upload the prisoners' conscientiousness, steal their "souless" empty bodies for personal use
>The uploaded prisoners have to work off a debt in a simulated "hell" for the privilege of getting a body back
>Even if they earn back a body they're still just a slave for the colonists with a few more rights
>To the fantasy heroes it looks like evil gods invoking a mass Aztec sacrifice of souls

The colonists aren't even sadistic, just businesslike and efficient

Have you read Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny? The premise is what you want, with the original crew of the colony ship using technology to make the descendants of the colonists that they are actually the Hindu gods, and they eventually begin to believe it too.
However, you'd need to make your PCs able to reach the same power level as them eventually, as they are incredibly powerful...

The plant it's the one they have found with the right combination of factors that they can survive on, but the planets current biosphere would kill them.
They have the equipment to change the planet to what they need, killing all life currently on it in the process.
They have no fuel left to keep looking.
They are the last of there kind.
One will live and one will die

>all of these "they need it to survive" suggestions

Don't, OP. That just paves the way for more of the ever so clichéd tragic villains trope. Maybe they lack the same morals, maybe they dont hold other sapient races in the same regards as themselves, or maybe they just want it and dont give a hot shit about whining primitives. Whatever the reason, it all tracks back to the same thing : They want your damned planet and as far as they know no one really stands a good chance of stopping them from taking it. If the natives want to kick up a fuss then they can be wiped out like every race before them.

Honestly just look at any contact between a relatively advanced civilization and a more primitive one, without getting too much into a diatribe of the evils of colonialism even most "nice" colonizers tend to unintentionally shaft the natives in one or more ways. It's even better because you can plausibly claim that the colonists aren't actually evil people because the narrative that colonialism is evil has only been advanced relatively recently and we (assuming US) still have a lot of cultural remnants of an era in which expanding and driving out natives was considered a heroic endeavor (consider: pioneers, cowboys, etc... even Pocahontas ends up with the white people and the native americans reaching some kind of land sharing agreement)

Yea, it'd also be cool if they used synths to infiltrate cities and villages.