A Dark Lord is not evil. He is intelligent. In the world of monsters, one has to be cruel to survive...

Pally Hate thread?
Pally Hate thread.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=dY8_vZXo8oY

Doesn't Kenshiro explode people before they've even said anything or done anything evil in front of him or to his knowledge? Like he walks up to people minding their own business and pokes the pressure points that make them explode. For no reason.

But he was right the jedi were evil. They were planning on a revolt to imprison and kill a democratically elected chancellor

Their target was a Sith lord. He just happened to be chancellor. He also usurped that power vis a vis his little jedi killing clone army project and emergency wartime authority.

Jedi kidnap and brainwash children.

Recruitment and training is not the same as kidnapping and brainwashing. Might as well say the military kidnaps and brainwashes young adults.

Yeah, that's fine and all, but I really don't think you needed to kill those babies and virgins.

Or crucify those nuns. Or impale those healers on spikes. Or burn down that orphanage.

children have no choice in being recruited

it is slavery

it is the will of the force

many children don't want to go to school but they still have to.

I do agree that Jedi taking children is terrible, but I also have no problems with them killing space fascists

false equivalence much?

But are they really space fascists?

I concur

I actually want to see more stories like what OP is saying.

The truth is, the kind of hero-vs-evil stories that we tell and celebrate in fantasy, these stories are inspired by the authoritarian of the real world. In the real world, the only real dark lords were in fact the inspiration for the Good Kings and Holy Sages of our fantasy stories. The story of the good hero who goes out and slays the evil lord, that's just the shit people tell themselves when they go out to murder a heretic.

That's easy for you to say because the real world doesn't have force-sensitive children, nor a cosmic battle of lightside-vs-darkside which chose children will inevitably be swept up in one way or another.

I mean, surely it depends a lot on the individual lord. I'm sure there's at least one out there who is largely benign and makes hard decisions in the genuine good of his people and also has a fetish for black armour, spikes, and gothic architecture, but then there are probably a bunch of assholes who sacrifice dozens of people to improve the lives of a chosen few, or conquer territory just for the sake of making a bigger legacy for himself and ignores the suffering of his subjects.

Likewise, a paladin who goes after the first example would be an idiot, while a paladin who goes after the latter two would be justified, assuming they have done their research and made a conscious decision about it.

I get that you're trying to be contrarian with the whole 'paladins = blind faith = bad' and 'dark lord = political acumen = good' thing, but your argument is very silly and contains very little actual substance beyond anecdotal justification.

...

...Sith?

Categorically, yes. Like... explicitly. That's not even a question.

>evil despots are just misunderstood

I find this whole "Teh jedi were evul!" nonsense to be tiresome.

Questioning morality of fictional characters is fine.
Doing so by comically applying bias and ignorance is contrarianism pretending to be retardation and is not amusing nor clever nor rage inducing trolling.
It is just tiresome to see.

Kindly find a new dead dog to beat, this one won't hunt.

>Moral relativism
Get out and stay out.

You didn't actually say anything tho.

This is a thread about moral relativism and deconstructing the myth. Jedi morality is a tangent to that but he was still contributing to the thread. What the fuck are you even trying to say?

The dark lord is not intelligent he is evil

>The truth is, the kind of hero-vs-evil stories that we tell and celebrate in fantasy, these stories are inspired by the authoritarian of the real world. In the real world, the only real dark lords were in fact the inspiration for the Good Kings and Holy Sages of our fantasy stories. The story of the good hero who goes out and slays the evil lord, that's just the shit people tell themselves when they go out to murder a heretic.
That's the kind of statement that's only believable when it's accompanied by lots of evidence. Your post would have been much more interesting if it had included some.

I don't see the Sith as evil, just as, y'know, a gathering of folk.

The Dark Lord is actually Jesus taking revenge upon humanity because he's being manipulated by a hot topic emo cunt from space

Dark Lord comes from a different era. He started out in the ye olde times of the Conan the Barbarian late iron age.

Back then there was a Dark Lord in their traditional Dark Tower every few hundred miles or skull themed Doom Fort as the case may be. Patchworks of little pocket kingdoms really. Some places you couldn't mover for the sheer number of isolated fortresses of despair. They were small affairs really, little stubby towers a few floors high but very impressive for the time.

Back then you just needed some intimidating looking black armour with some wooden spikes strapped on and painted black, a few big burly bastards in scary masks and you were a Dark Lord of all you could see from your tower.

Every so often another belligerent Chose One would arise to cast the local Lord down. It was the way of things. Sometimes a new Dark Lord would arise and take his place, sometimes a neighbouring Dark Lord would move in and give the tower to a favoured son or a loyal servant to become Dark Lords in their own right. It was the way of things.

Little petty lords lording it over a few villages, maybe a coastal town. The priests and the shamans and such would object to you on principle but they objected to more or less anything and were too much trouble to try and stop. Indeed half the Dark Lords were part time priests and shamans so half the time it was just professional rivalry.

Now there is only one Dark Lord left. His domain is more vast then any of his peers from back then could have dreamed of, containing hundreds of villages and dozens of towns and even a genuine city, but it is small compared to the surrounding nations.

And the Industrial Revolution, with all this entails for the common man, is in full swing. The neighbours look to his land and it's rich and unspoiled arable lands as food for their factory all but slaves.

The Last Dark Lord is a traditionalist. His nation barely has a standing army and even if he started conscription wouldn't be able to field the sorts of numbers that they can. And he never really modernized what he does have. Everyone else is fighting with early rifles, he has a few crossbows and mostly longbows.

He is by no means a good man, he has raped and killed hard in his time. He is a relic from the times when that wasn't such exceptionally bad behaviour and has never felt the need to justify it.

But his people do generally enjoy a better quality of life than his neighbours. At least they do if they stay out of his way when he is in a bad mood. And he does care for his people, or at least value them which is probably close enough. He didn't really come from a culture that was big on love and caring.

War is brewing now and the days of the Last Dark Lord are coming to a close. When your opponent wears black spiky armour and introduces themselves as "The Dark Lord" or ends their name with something like "the Unholy" you don't have to look hard for justification to invade and annex.

The party therefore must decide whose side they are on. The modern industrialists with the banality of evil who cause great suffering through indifference or The Dark Lord whose a total bastard who intentionally causes suffering but not on such a scale and generally leaves scars that can heal.

Sith are people who see through the lies of the jedi and don't fear the darkside as they do. They hope to one day peace, freedom, justice and security to their empire

No, that was Anakin's particular delusion, and partially impossible as freedom and security are anathema to one another once you get past a certain point. He didn't bring justice or peace to his empire either, oh he ended a war, yeah, but the formation of the Empire just led to an insurrection, that later grew into full on rebellion, really very quickly.

DUDE LMAO THE BAD GUY WAS JUST MISUNDERSTOOD DUDE LMAO MORALITY ISN'T BLACK AND WHITE.

Degenerate.

Is that a picture of Arthas before he finds frostmourne? How ironic.

Neat.

...dude killed the younglings.
You don't get to call other people evil when you walk into a nursery with a plasma sword and psychic powers, backed up with merciless clone soldiers because you apparently need it, intent on murderizing everthing inside.

Actually imagine if Anakin was killed by one of the kids. Most hilarious spanner in Sheev's plans.

>GOOD IS EVIL
>EVIL IS GOOD
>AM I DEEP YET

>People who believe Paladins are idiots.
Paladins are righteous and honest people. Even if you oppose their views it would be less intelligent to ignore their words, since they will typically act on them.

I would play the shit out of that.

>calls himself Dark Lord
>politically savy
I'm pissed at him because I voted for Mr.Evli, a true man of the realm. Elections were rigged and he's not my lord.

Reminder that mr. Evli won the popular vote

no
the guys he kills are either psychopaths murderer who think it's funny to randomly kill people or are lawful evil tyrant that muder those who disagree
there is also a fabulous rapist, a guy who kill children by making them work to exhaustion, etc

war that he was at the origin of, i must add

Yeah true, but he didn't cause it, it was going to happen one way or the other.

Is that where Drifters went?

Lord fedora.

Somebody has been reading The Mistborn series.

That's actually not a bad set up.

PCs could be tasked with teaching Dark Lord to manage his assholery in a less detrimental manner and also try and get him to embrace new ideas.

I do though like the image of Dark Saxony surviving up till 1820 equivalent times.

Just keep telling yourself that, Mr. Lawful Evil.

Honestly Lawful Evil might be one of the best alignments for a ruler.

>Muh Lord Ruler

Remember when good was good, evil was evil, and you had to do a lot more to make your setting deep and interesting besides reversing those two concepts?

I miss those times.

Yeah. I mean moral quandaries and grey areas are fine, but I like them best when they also exist side-by-side with less ambiguous examples of morality. True good guys, despicable villains, and some folks in-between.

A world with a Big, Bad Evil with a capital E that also has moral greys - like a people siding with him because they're persecuted and only he is offering them "salvation" - makes for a richer setting than just flat grey or just black-and-white.

>not having a misunderstood dark lord who uses his power and minions to make life better for his people
>not having a well-meaning, good hearted but naive paladin misunderstand the dark lord because he looks like he's evil
>not having them both join forces to take on the truly evil dark lord who's genuinely evil
OP is a total pleb.

Remember Gygaxian LG?

part of "muh dark lord" is childish perspective flipping, but I think some is also a crude reaction to neutered conceptions of the good.

When good cannot be hard, rational people in a hard world automatically get redefined as evil...or something like that.

A Benevolent Ruler is not good. He is intelligent. In the world of wonders, one has to be wondrous to survive. The Benevolent Ruler is acting in the best interests of himself and himself alone. When he acts generously he's only doing so to achieve a goal. He is not morally incorruptible like the Paladins would like you to think, he doesn't find purity helpful.

People who believe Paladins are idiots. If The Benevolent Ruler was left alone with an apprentice he would make him into someone like himself. An intelligent, calculating, and politically savvy king who knows how to ruin his people and have them love him for that.

What are you talking about? They've always had a choice. The only time taking children forcibly was a thing was when people were hunting and killing force users.

Johnny Cash was the original emo.

A Dark Lord is only evil to the people who don't benefit from it. If you're his underling, you're probably going to be living a comfy as fuck life.

No one in power leaves their friends in poverty.

Why side with either of them? They're dicks.

>A Dark Lord is
Four words into your post and you are already boring as fuck.
It's not even the "Dark Lord" thing (though your choice of description there is tellingly unoriginal and dull), it's the fact that you legitimately started a "Dark Lord subversion/deconstruction" thread and probably actually thought it was a good and original idea at the time rather then something so overdone that I'm guessing you weren't even into your twenties yet when people first started on that shit on this board.

Well... no, not really? The counterexample that comes to mind is Stalin. Sure, some of his underlings benefited. Others got purged. There wasn't any clear way to know which category you'd wind up in.

It seems like "rational" and "good" line up pretty well most of the time, though. I guess that some of that stems from the fact that the world is very unpredictable, so there are a lot of cases where you might as well do the right thing rather than the "hard, rational" one-- you don't have enough information to decide which option is best.

Most actual moral ambiguity comes from the fact that nobody knows precisely what "the right thing" is. You get situations where both sides believe they're doing the right thing and, honestly, both of them have a point. The "Asshole Serving the Greater Good" scenario is relatively rare.

For cash, women, power, the redrawing of the map and glory.

No you

A evil lord

“Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!”

Because of the opportunity to reduce the total amount of dickery.

Evil is subjective

T. Tywin lannister

T. CE character

Wouldn't that be more of LE or NE character?

I doubt CE character would give a damn fuck about evil and just go about his evil ways.

I'd imagine such a character would have a severe shortage of personnel.

You'll be surprised

The alignment system is shit and everyone knows it.

True. Peaks and valleys make for more interesting topography.

False. Sith are not for the betterment of Society. The Sith are for the betterment of themselves. They seek to improve, and it is up to each individual Sith to decide for themselves what that means. They don't care about moral constraints, or silly Notions like nobility. All they care about is making themselves better. Freeing themselves. That's not to say that the philosophy couldn't lend itself to a noble individual, but at the end of the day's the Sith are still self-driven and goal oriented.

So the "Dark Lord" is actually the good guy then?

Man, LoTR would have been so much better if she'd just taken the ring and become Elf Hitler.