Hey Veeky Forums

The sea people. They were the real life reapers

Mongols?
It's another trope, but there's nothing more angering than a bunch of nomads that rekt your armies and cities and masacre everyone that doesn't surrender at the first chance.

Also crusaders, given you are on the receiving end. A bunch of armored clad knights that come to steal your territory because their death cult prophet LARPD there.

An empire is just when a kingdom (or equivalent large gov't) gobbles up many of its neighbors right? So couldn't you take any kingdom, pump up its numbers, and boom instant empire? I think most pre-modern cultures would jump at the chance to invade and take the things from Those Assholes Over There, if they had the means.

Thinking about the Big Bad Empire trope: do good empires exist, in a modern moral context? Big and bad seem like redundant descriptors for an empire.

The spread of Islam. Voracious and evil beyond belief, they destroyed more longstanding nations and cultures than any one else. Think religious fanatic Orcs who go to 'heaven' if they die killing others.

>The happy merchant meme is the work of the Doge z who secretly controls the world governments
This is some sentient soy tier shit

I don't know if that is a good or bad thing...

in terms of storytelling the big bad empire usually fits the description. They're shown as having vast resources (troops, money, land, food, etc) while being exceptionally mean about it.
Realistically people think of any enemy as being bad but it's played up quite a bit in fiction

>They're shown as having vast resources (troops, money, land, food, etc) while being exceptionally mean about it.

So... The Ottoman Empire?

If you're one of the conquered states then the Ottomans would have come off as evil as fuck, especially the whole "taking the sons to raise as troops" part

It'd be a fucking great campaign setting.

All of Renaissance Italy is a great bit of history
Venice takes the cake for its politicking but there's a bunch of crazy shit happening. Like Pope Alexander and his son Caesar who basically wanted to restarted the Roman Empire. Or the time the French armies got their shit handed to them by the Holy Roman Empire (a separate political entity to the Pope), but the HRE commanders didn't have enough money to pay them, so the hoard marched to Rome and sacked it for a month, raping and burning the city down the entire time
If you're interested I highly recommend Will Durant's Story of Civilisation: The Renaissance. It's half focused on the artists mainly but it's got a lot of detail about each city-state and its shenanigans throughout that period.

>aren't Victorian Britain, Nazi Germany or Imperial Rome

Nazi Britain
Imperial Germany
Victorian Rome

Belgium in the late 19th and early 20th century. Playing from the perspective of a people similar to the Congolese would be pretty interesting, grimdark as hell.

>that image
WTF Venice? What's the deal with this?

Did... Did Venice just bait everyone it didn't like into a war and then switch sides on them?

In a nutshell: the Pope was butthurt that Venice wasn't part of his bootlickers so he invited the French to tear them a new one. He realised that inviting another country to invade Italy wasn't the brightest idea and tried to back out and team up with Venice, but then Venice got mad about how they were dividing up the spoils
At the end of it, basically nothing had changed

N-DIMENSIONAL VENETIAN MAKRUK

Student at Ohio University here, the drama department runs a "sci-fi dystopian" play that's meant to be a parallel to what Palestinians go through against the evilz J00z

>French and Venetian victory

Fucking Venice

Imperial Britain, Victorian Germany, and Nazi Rome.

Victorian Nazis

THE
PERSIAN
EMPIRE

Gold, Bronze, Black, Marble, Maniacs, Monsters, Immortals, Extreme for Extreme's Sake.

>Victorian Rome

>Imperial Germany

Egyptian Empire ruled by the god kings.

Any country with imperial ambition can always be treated as the evil empire. The Athenians were fucking assholes who pretty much said, when one city would not bow to them and demanded a debate instead of a war: "It is the right of the strong to do what they can, and the duty of the weak to suffer what they must.". Then they invaded the other city, and killed all men, enslaved all women and children etc.

>He thinks he isn't living in the contemporary Roman Empire at this very moment

get woke

>Victorian England
>bad

The US purchased Alaska, Louisiana, and Parts of Liberia before that entire country immediatley went south. Americans, particularly with the idea of manifest destiny, will freely buy out vast swathes of land and incorporate it. In fact, a large portion of Canadian history is basically just Canada trying really hard to maintain soverignty and expand to it's current borders despite Americans trying to take land.

>grimdark as hell.

The muthafuckas are building roads and schools and MAKING US WORK FOR IT ? How dare those evil whiteys ?? we just want to go back to tribal warfare

>severed hand based economy

Though that user has it wrong I think. Didn't things generally improve in the Congo after the Belgian government stepped in?

>1st or 2nd Reich Germany
the 1st Reich was actually referring to the roman empire.

I just gave my friend $1,000 in exchange for one of your kidneys, that means it's mine now, right?

Nah the conquered it from Spain. In the war the Philippines declared independence. US decided the only free people should be theirs and ignored the declaration. Fast forward and a third of the Philippines is dead.

To be fair they gave them top notch education and very well paying jobs. After a while the people went pretty much "shut up and take my son!" Hence why they took Muslims too then.

The Aztec Empire?

The cultures of the New World were fucking brutal. If they'd progressed past the Stone Age they'd be top tier Acheronian evil empire contenders. Massive theocratic organizations centered on human sacrifice, tribal warfare including skinning captives alive and exterminating all the children, and blood sports where the losing team gets fed torso first into the priesthood's heart harvesting apparatus, it all makes the Galactic Empire seem like the Star trek Federation. Give them technological or magical equivalence to civilized people and you've got a truly terrifying enemy.

I've always thought that an 'evil empire' who are basically what the Japanese in WWII *claimed to be* in their propaganda (rather than what they actually were) would be super interesting to fight.

"We don't want to expand, because we don't want to have to be responsible for any of you, but a number of immoral, monolithic regimes have begun rapid expansion elsewhere on the globe and we need to get big in order to stand against them, which will protect all of you and prevent them from constraining your spiritual growth and ruining the moral fabric of society."

Spanish or Portuguese Empires, hell you could even try using Imperial Brazil.
There's also Napoleon's France, the HRE, the Byzantines (which counts as Imperial Rome but people overlook them anyways), and of course, the Ottoman Empire.

I just read the OP again after another sip of coffee and saw that you wanted a "big bad" empire. Well nevermind then, you could still use at least some of those examples.

>the 1st Reich was actually referring to the roman empire.
1st Reich referred to the HOLY roman empire, important difference

I should further elaborate that this propaganda successfully predicted every bad thing that capitalism has caused in the last 50 years as "things that will happen to your children if we lose this war"

Belgium.

...

The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, a completely different state populated by Germans and Franks. The only thing the HRE shared with the Romans was control of what was formerly Gaul and Germania Inferior (Switzerland) and Germania Superior (the Benelux nations). The borders of the Roman Empire were traditionally held to be the Rhine and the Danube. Augustus rather famously failed to conquer Magna Germania, and no Roman mission was ever again launched across the Rhine.

The HRE was only "Roman" because Charlemagne ruled with the blessing of the Pope in Rome.

>The HRE was only "Roman" because Charlemagne ruled with the blessing of the Pope in Rome.
And because he claimed to be the one reviving the West Roman Empire and actually held a very good claim to that because he already ruled most of the WRE's previous territory and was already involved in wars to reclaim what left (Iberia and Moorish lands)?

Charlemagne's claim is entirely legit, it's only the Ottonians later that had a filmsly claim based on the pope's blessing (which they abandoned entirely later on). This is also why Napoopan abolished the HRE: his own empire resembled that of Charlemagne much, much more. This is why he claimed to be the successor of the Charlemagne that was the successor of the WRE, cutting the "HRE" out of the equation.

Yes, though the severed hand time was when the belgian congo was the personal property of the king, rather than a belgian territory or anything.

He was forced to give it up to the belgian government because of the brutality he was ruling it with - the bullet rule was just pure fuckery, for example

>Scotland shows up at the end just to try and shit on England

The Eternal Jock.

Crusaders. A collection of small nations that are united together under a common cultural belief and DEUS VULT-ing.
And because it's a TTRPG, they're terrifyingly effective because even the base infantry zealot has access to a few holy magics. If your entire infantry has access to even a cantrip, that's a lot of ranged power that can wipe out your enemies. It'd be like bringing more accurate, more powerful musket lines to bear against enemy swordsmen.

>not realizing that we should all let both sides of the conflict just blast each other into oblivion, saving us all time and money
People who blindly support either group are morons.

Ultra-nationalist revolutionary / imperial France

>narcostate
>good

Hijueputa gonorrea

What are you talking about? The Israelis killed everyone in their way or threatened to kill them until they moved. When anyone objected they killed them too. They're 100% evil conquerors.

>ib4 anecdotal story about how they traded some glass beads for the pastures of some Bedouin tribe

That's the exact fucking thing. And knowing the Israelis they either drove off or killed them later anyway.

Corporate colonialism: Look at (Dutch and English) East India Companies for examples, then realise that modern mega corporations' have a long way to go...

Too be completely fair, when all your neighbors want you dead for existing, you need to protect yourself by ANY means.

>sentient soy
Explain this.

>for existing
Or for appearing out of the nether one day with the flimsiest of justifications, killing everyone and taking over their land.

How about belle époque themed France but give them the technological advances they'd envisioned to have in our time. Also they should be colonizing far away for the pure purpose of spreading their culture instead of the typical economic goals.

Plot germ that I got from TG that I mean to try...

An Austria-Hungary BBE would give you the opportunity to have human feudal troops under an Orc warlord. Heavy Cavalry banner with goblin wolfrider foragers. Endless waves Hobgoblin infantry supported by halfling slingers...

And they would fight elves.

>and the emperor would BE an elf!
>not even a dark-elf, just a really inbred (arminger rules) minor high elf marcher lord lineage that just kind of metastasized over the centuries
>their distinguishing characteristic Being Really Good At This Feudalism Thing

LDK - Lithuanians Great kindgom - They fought both crusaders and mongols at the same time, won and both even were integrated into the country.

Aye that's what I meant, things got better when the government stepped in an took over from Leopold.

It's kinda bizarre how you can go from as big a dick as Leopold II to the absolute babe that is Albert. I guess that's hereditary monarchy for you

>for existing
They didn't want to slaughter all the Jews until the fuckers arrived spouting memes about God and how that justifies military dictatorship.

What's worse is that the West played along with this nonsense.

Revolutionary/shortly post revolution France are terrifying and non cliche'd.

Trading Companies, like the Dutch East Indies. They were a government that had only the goal of generating profit. While Profit and Conquest may have similar means, the ends drive this kind of government to do some stuff and empire would never consider.

Other than that, maybe a monastic order like the Teutons or Knights Templar? Those are considered theocracies and have to operate with religious doctrine in mind.