Cliches which trigger your autism

>Thieves Guild
>doesn't operate as a guild

What do you mean?

>Any kind of Chosen One prophecy
>"Savage" races with zero complexity and simply exist to be spiritually, morally, and culturally superior to humans
>Human empires which the author/GM uses to justify bloodthirsty jingoism in the name of "justice" and "progress"
>Villain monologues
>Kneejerk subversions of classic Hero's Journey tropes solely as some kind of shallow commentary on those tropes (And Hero Protagonist lived comfortably with his living parents who loved him very much and he one day went out adventuring just because!)
>Darth Vader clones, especially female ones who make no narrative use of the fact they're women
>Cults are just crazy babbling street loonies in burlap robes who at the end summon some StoreBrand C'thulu monster

Shit really triggers my trap card.

I think he means instead of working like a normal guild such as setting up jobs for aspiring thieves, most cliched Thieves guild work like a mafia and hide in the criminal underground.

Please, no frogposting on Veeky Forums.
Thank you.

>"Savage" races with zero complexity and simply exist to be spiritually, morally, and culturally superior to humans

I try to avoid this shit but then people accuse me of making my orcs like Warcraft.

>Necromancy is evil
>All Undead are evil and must be destroyed

Fuck this

>Darth Vader clones, especially female ones who make no narrative use of the fact they're women

Except if they played up the fact that the villain is a woman then the complaint would be that they have no depth or character development and rely solely on the fact that they're an evil woman

Warcraft Orcs are cool. They are a rare case of a fictional race that is neither inherently good nor evil.
They are just people with their own culture, heroes and villains.

But when I hear "morally superior savages", I hear Na'vi. And I fucking hate them.

kill yourself retarded queer

you virgin frogposter. No wonder the white race is dying.

>All the good things that should fall within the realm of undeath and necromancy are conveniently considered a different thing

"The lich controls the upper levels of the dungeon. His lair is located in level 5 and it is here where the final encounter with him will take place. The dungeon is deeper however and a sealed door behind the lich's throne room leads to level 6 to 8. The lich never bothered to explore deeper and does not know of the ancient demon who is bound down there."

REALLY? Is the lich a fucking retard?

Like how the channeling of positive energy, aka healing spells, went from Necromancy to Conjuration to Evocation during the editions of D&D, but negative "evil" energy always stayed in the same Necromancy school and Pathfinder even made them "evil" spells.

This is a really specific one that I've never heard of before.

Happens in a lot of premade modules.
The lich and demon are just placeholders though. Could be anyone.

I haven't played premades since middle school so I guess that's why I'd never heard of it.

Yep, OP, yours actually triggers my autism enough that just seeing it mentioned is enough to run me off on a mental rant on the point of the Thieves' Guild in Leiber and so on. Good job.

Have you ever run a guild?

3.5 BoED did the same thing by adding the "immortal" type to classify good undead, arguing they don't count as undead because they are not fueled by negative energy, dumb shit.

>Nobody knows for sure what lies beyond the ocean
>Flight and teleportation spells are common

>X civilization/city/species was at peace for centuries and forgot how to fight.
>Young, large, but somehow homogenous nations.
>Hordes of half-naked "barbarians" going toe to toe with professional armies in field battles and somehow winning while also outnumbered.
>Peasants are so incompetent that there is no conceivable way that they could survive.

This can make sense provided the spells have limited ability so I assume you refer to awesome levels of flight and teleportation.

>Dark Elves are inherently evil and usually live underground
>Gnomes tinker and make steamwork/clockwork robots, or otherwise are fairly technologically advanced in an otherwise fantasy world
>Trolls are weak to fire and have enhanced regeneration

>Dozens of human cultures and languages
>Other races share the same culture and language all over the planet

Yes, I meant D&D level or comparable.

This is really indulgent but I felt a little proud reading this that I'm not hypothetically annoying this user with my DnD game story tropes.
>chosen one prophesy
One of the PCs in my game was handed the relics of his grandfather, who spent his whole life trying to be the Chosen One of prophesy only to realize that it was false and he had wasted his chance to make a difference.
>savage races are perfect
The savages in my game live in a sprawling slum outside the main city and trade in criminal vice and smuggling.
>human empire jingoism
The main superpower in my setting is a oligarchic republic, and has collapsed from a former continent-spanning empire down to a single city-state. Also, they aren't humans.
>villain monologues
The PCs met a villain, a mummy lich, but they let him monologue because he was actually more interested in telling them his story and then asking them for a favor than trying to kill them.
>subversion of hero's journey
I deliberately had my players read up on the hero's journey and figure out a way to write their backstory around that structure.
>Darth Vadar clone
So far no one in the game fits the bill. There's an evil inquisitor, but the PCs haven't come face to face with him yet.
>cthulhu cultists
Well, the allowed mindflayers and beholders to gain a foothold in the city government, so I guess I'm guilty of this one.

>humans are the most numerous and dominant race
>humans are simultaneously a jack of all trades with no specialty but all the Best Wizards and Best Warriors are humans

>>Any kind of Chosen One prophecy
Chosen Ones can be done well.

But if your prophecy is even remotely similar to the Dark Crystal, you're doing it wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I love the film. I think it's a masterpiece.
But holy shit is that plot a steaming pile of contrived nonsense for no discernible reason other than "prophecy".

To be fair Drow in D&D are not inherently evil, they are evil because Lolth is a gigantic control freak of a goddess that keeps them that way, outside of their sociosphere its easy for them to grow up as adujested individuals.

This.

In my setting, technically all clerical magic, all deity worship, it is all considered within the "school" of necromancy as you are communicating and exchanging energy with the spirit of your god.

A thieves guild would still need to hide, and by arranging jobs for thieves they need to have some kind of network or organization. You could even say they're organized crime.

>3.5 BoED did the same thing by adding the "immortal" type to classify good undead, arguing they don't count as undead because they are not fueled by negative energy, dumb shit.
deathless, actually.

I never liked Common. I understand its use as a game mechanic but Common should be a Creole or Pigdin language based on the language of a race that trades or travels a lot.
But it probably shouldn't be a human tongue because who the fuck would bother to learn their language? Could be based on: Elvish because it's a linguistic equivalent to Latin, Dwarvish because they engage in trade and have an ancient script, Gnomish because they travel wide and far, Halfling because its easy to learn.
But as a pigdin language it should be somewhat difficult to communicate and never the preffered means of communicating

Unless they were encouraged by the local lord to act like the other guilds, forcing them to become more about selling insurance against theft (by them or anyone else) than about the actual thieving.

Ah sorry, beaner here, they were called immortals in spanish.

it's propaganda against goths.

>>Trolls are weak to fire and have enhanced regeneration
I don't see the issue unless you just don't like that one version of trolls has become the popular perception.

This.
It's either a pidgin like the original Lingua Franca or it's some sort of world language that became widespread by an empire's conquests (like Greek and Latin in ancient and English in modern times).

watcha got against regenerating trolls?

>Darth Vader clones,
I don't know what this means. Someone who was light and fell to darkness and was redeemed? Someone who carries a fuckawesome sword? Force powers? A villain?
>especially female ones who make no narrative use of the fact they're women
So exactly how should a female villain act if you don't want her to be villainous?

I feel like this came from kneejerk reactions to the word "necromancy" and how people used to say D&D was satanic because it had gods and resurrection. They made a concerted effort to put certain spells in an evil light and set apart others as holy to be more agreeable with traditional values.

>I don't know what this means.
Big guy in scary black armor who exists solely to kick the shit out of everyone. The "Black Knight" archetype is played, mostly because it peaked in a movie from forty years ago. There are far more interesting ways to have the villain fuck with the party than just hitting them with his sword. Ironically Vader himself was far more subtle and indirect of a villain than most of his imitators.


>So exactly how should a female villain act if you don't want her to be villainous?
>implying I said women can't be villainous

Well, it doesn't helps that Gygax was a christian himself, maybe he has some unconscious bias against morbid stuff like meddling with corpses, even a lot of non-religious western people still think desecrating corpses is wrong because of christian influence despite the fact different cultures had different concepts of honoring the dead.

>tolkien - christian
>gygax - christian

SEETHING

Please no frogposting on Veeky Forums.

No worries, man.
I've actually used the deathless in a long-running campaign.
>first party does some stuff, gets some levels, and dies off
>second party does the same, discovering a prophecy about ancient evil, blah blah blah, end of the world, they die off before it gets much further
>Third party accidentally stumbles across the prophecy
>players groan. Are you for real? we did this last time.
>hey, my old character had some cool stuff. let's retrace our steps from our last party, and pick up their gear.
>hey yeah, great idea
>all the bodies have disappeared
>lots of eyerolls.
>they chase down the prophecy
>visit several continents collecting holy relics to ward off ancient evil
>turns out collecting holy relics was the ancient evils' plan
>now that they're all in one spot, lich arises and starts fucking up shit.
>relics are destroyed
>everyones' asses are getting kicked up and down the block
>Goddess of Death shows up
>out walks party 1 and party 2 characters as deathless
>we beat back the ancient lich
vastly simplified, because the campaign lasted three years and too much happened. The end scenario was amazing, when the deathless showed up I started reeling off the old character's descriptions. Everyone was baffled, and then they were all OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT and everyone was genuinely excited and ecstatic to see their old characters come back to fight against evil, one last time.

Necromancers fall into three categories imo.
The first ones are the classic evil guys who raise armies of zombies to take over the world.

The second ones are more cleric like types who communicate with the dead and can either heal or harm the living. If they are more powerful, they will also return the dead to life instead of raising them as undead. The typical shaman also falls into this category.

The third ones are the fantasy equivalent of transhumanists who want to overcome mortality and archieve some kind of transcendence over life and death. These are the ones who will turn themselves or others into (preferably powerful) undead on a voluntary basis. Alternatively, they could seek immortality without becoming undead.

The first ones are the cliche. The second ones are rarely called necromancers, in spite of being exactly this. Instead they are "priests" or "clerics" or "shamans". The third ones almost never turn up and when they do, they somehow turn evil most of the time.

Same here. I actually fucking love Warcraft Orcs, and I'm not and have never been into Warcraft. My Orc races in my setting are just basically northernersTM but live alongside Humans and Drow. Also Goblins are a subspecies of Orc is my setting that work in a sort of cuttlefish genetic offshoot style I.e two different ways of living and procreation, being big and strong (orcs) or being fleeting and cunnING (gobbos).

>all slavery is chattel slavery
>all slaves are nothing more than property that can be traded with no more question or hassle than selling an animal or a tool
>serfdom doesn't actually exist
>indentured servitude doesn't actually exist, or at least, isn't a generally mutually beneficial arrangement
>limited rights don't exist, all slaves are essentially nonhumans
>slaves never get paid in anything other than a bare minimum of food and shelter
>slaves never own property themselves, or live in their own house
>all slavery is explicitly racist
>slave owners routinely abuse, injure, or even kill slaves for the lulz and force them to live in visibly unhealthy squalor, even though this is the equivalent of crashing your own car for fun
and most of all
>all slavery is known by every sympathetic character to be wrong, or at least a necessary evil, and all decent people have sympathy for slaves, it's really only rich assholes; people who grew up in a society where slavery is normal still come to see it in essentially the same light as 21st century westerners

I just hate that something that is more or less constant to nearly every historical civilization in human history, something that defined human economic theory for literally every era before the industrial revolution, is reduced to a tired screed about pre-civil-war-american racism that says nothing new. We fucking know slavery is bad, you don't have to beat us over the head with it. If you include it in your setting at all, make it make fucking sense for a civilization that is presumably not actively trying to be evil. If characters are from a society where it's widely tolerated, then have them generally tolerate it. It's not about muh realism, just about making characters make sense for their setting. If you can't do that or think it's "normalizing" or whatever fucking SJ buzzword applies, then don't include it at all.

In real history, slavery was a spectrum, ranging from horrible to actually not all that bad. or at least better than the alternatives for the urban poor. In ancient Greece, trained doctors and scholars often sold themselves into slavery with wealthy families because it was a better life than they'd get on their own. In many societies, slaves were often paid and enjoyed legal protections against abuse, and would expect to be freed after some time. Contracts like indentured servitude and serfdom are more nuanced than simply "that guy over there is my property." I'm not saying that slavery should be portrayed as this happy no-big-deal thing, I'm not suggesting whitewashing - just a nuanced understanding that the whole subject was a spectrum of behaviors across numerous cultures and value systems, and can't be cheaply reduced to the lawful-evil stereotype politely declined by virtuous people that nearly all fantasy portrays it as.

>if you don't share my post modern philosophies in a fantasy world you are a nazi in real life!

>>Young, large, but somehow homogenous nations.
This isn't impossible, just very unlikely. It has happened a handful of times in IRL history, with the unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, and the reformation of Poland, off the top of my head.

It's just, I think, something that happens mostly when people want to portray a world very different from their own but don't actually think through the implications of it, and/or are uncomfortable with portraying actions they believe are morally reprehensible without explicitly condemning them at every step.

>>Hordes of half-naked "barbarians" going toe to toe with professional armies in field battles and somehow winning while also outnumbered.
It only works when the "professional" army is portrayed as actually being incompetent, made up of shitty officers who only got the job because they're somebody's son, and manned by poorly-trained levies who barely know which end of the spear to point.

Worthless people derive self-value from vapid pretense.

I researched this topic for a homebrew setting and I agree.

Luckily, the first slave who came up in our game was a realistic one and even a player character.

She was born into slavery and was owned by a rich merchant who treated his slaves quite well. She was mainly a housemaid for the mansion and could move freely in the city to go to the market and shops to buy stuff for the household. She lived quite a good life, better than most poor people, because the merchant made it a point that his slaves are clean and healthy and can at least read and write.
When the merchant died, his oldest son inherited the mansion and the slaves. He continued the overall good treatment, but he also used his slaves for his sexual gratification. Then he started to lend them to his friends. This was the point when the character couldn't take it anymore and fled. As an escaped slave she had to flee to another country where she hired as a mercenary and finally became an adventurer.

I guess that's a rather realistic story.

>children as the main characters
>children going on adventures across the dangerous monster and bandit filled wilderness/through war zones and not dying or getting diddled
>children straight up defying or outsmarting adult leaders, military commanders, etc
>children saving the day
>children being involved in romantic relationships
>children being used when older teens or young adults would have served the story purposes better
Pokémon, the last airbender, the early Harry Potter books and half of all weebshit comes to mind.

If the average age of the party is under 16, and it’s not some short goonies type adventure or set in a small town, into the trash it goes. I know real kids and they’re fucking retarded. No one under the age of 16 should be wandering out in the wilderness and somehow saving the day.

>It only works when the "professional" army is portrayed as actually being incompetent, made up of shitty officers who only got the job because they're somebody's son, and manned by poorly-trained levies who barely know which end of the spear to point.
I was going to say something similar.

Pepe is BLACK

>the siege is over in less than a week
>the whole siege is just the invaders trying to break down the walls without even trying to starve the enemy out
>the bad guy hordes outnumber the civilized peoples but come from barren wastelands that could never support that kind of population

>selling insurance against theft (by them or anyone else)
Doesn't that make them more like the mafia not less?

>Dhampirs
A vampire is a corpse, it shouldn't be able to reproduce the normal way.

Good grief, that's some uncanny valley stuff if i ever seen some.

>Elves and dwarves automatically dont like each other.

Aren't Dhampirs created Blade style in some settings, where the mother gets bitten during pregnancy so the kid ends up with half the vampiric curse/disease?

I'm okay with vampires reproducing if the offspring is an inhuman abomination, a human with vampire powers is lame and boring. It's the same reason I hate it when people fluff tieflings as half-demons rather than planetouched, cambions already exist to fill in that role.

>implying

A corpse shouldn't be able to walk, talk, consume any kind of food or drink, or exist indefinitely without rotting either, but magic changes up a lot of the usual rules for corpses.

I only do this when it makes sense, like when its an elf from an all-elf citadel meeting a dwarf barbarian, the same way a rich human would scoff at the sight of the proles but worldly elves and dwarves are generally bros.

Based Vetinari

the what? kid, there aint no mafia. kapeesh?

It really depends on their circumstances. Child soldiers are a thing. Fuck I'd play a child soldier game. African style or not.

>The quiet, serious and stone-faced waifushit is an ex-assassin of supposed pant shitting calibre
>Retired adventurers in general. Worst is the king gareth scenario (overleveled party founds a nation and rules by might)
>the thieves guild is secretly manipulating the government/is never actually threatened by anything due to dirt and connections
>Nature good/industry Evil
>"your backwater hick villagers are known for being impossibly stubborn"
>Ambition is evil
>Batman villain syndrome

>Batman villain syndrome

/co/mrade here. What do you mean by this?

Probably "We can't kill him, we'll lock him up in Arkham, so he can escape in five minutes later and kill a hundred more people".

Ah, so more, "shitty writer who can't build up their own new villains and rely on bringing back recognizable names at the expense of previously established story" syndrome.

I mean "I'm going to strap you into my overly elaborate deathtrap and cackle about how I've finally got you, how I'm going to see you broken and humiliated before you die" Basically a combination of monologing and underestimating - I understand the narrative need but just once I want to see the fucking hero set up camp and take a score of poisoned crossbow bolts to the back

Thats not just Batman villains though. A lot of bad guys do that.

I mostly associate that with that scene from Austin Powers ever since that movie came out. It's hard to take it seriously.

>I'l just leave him unsupervised with one inept guard and assume it all went to plan.

memory tells me it was extra heavy for batman, plus I've been watching the telltail series recently so it;s on my mind

That's more of a James Bond thing, isn't it?

Batman just happens to have a larger rogues gallery than most heroes, but unless your hero murders their villains to give them a shorter publication life expectancy, Punisher-style, then it's expected that any/all of your villains will break out jail eventually.

who elected you to be Capo?
this. It would probably have a small vocabulary with grammar being somewhat fluid.
christianity is literally a religion based on a walking corpse

Well Austin Powers is supposed to be a comedic satire of James Bond movies and spy flicks in general, so that particular scene was just pointing out how absurd the whole death trap gimmick really is.

>characters are soldiers, literally professional killers
>slaughter their way through countless mooks
>defeats the main villain
>no we can’t kill him or we’re just as bad as him

Yes, but much like how Austin Powers directly led to Daniel Craig's films being a gritty reboot of the franchise, they took some overused tropes and so thoroughlye viscerated them that they're rarely used in seriousness anymore.

I had a party that pulled this shit so often that my next character was a legitimate soldier and had to obey RoE and laws of warfare just to prevent the murderhoboing from getting out of hand.
>fighting mobs
>the wounded and few capable survivors of a battle surrender
>cringy mope machine who gets pouty if they dont have their way executes them
>wants to keep a rogue AI monster as a pet because LOL ITS A DOGGO, GUIZE! After nearly blowing the damn thing up
The next time he threatened to execute uniformed combatants i told him i was going to give him a free ride on my helicopter

>thinks complaining about peepees will make them go away

Then you're doing something wrong any need to make them nastier.

>These foul necromancers are making a mockery of death!
>Anyways, I cast resurrect on the bard

I always chose to think that "Thieves Guild" is a tongue-in-cheek internal joke that criminals use to describe whatever power structure they have. It's obviously not a guild in the straight sense, and the term is cant.

It's like a narcocartel calling itself an "international trade and shipping company".

>>slave owners routinely abuse, injure, or even kill slaves for the lulz and force them to live in visibly unhealthy squalor, even though this is the equivalent of crashing your own car for fun
>he doesn't crash his car for fun and insurance money

>he uses orcs elfs and shit
Dude, why not simply use humans?
Anything a orc nation can be a human nation ca be

>moral savages
>justified jingoists
you can't hate both of these

This one gets it.

>make a Get of Fenris ahroun character for a W20 game
>play him as obsessed with martial prowess and destroying Wyrm-things
>play him without going absolutely ballistic on everyone 24/7, but just being terse with septmates from other tribes
>accepting challenges from other garou but not going out of my way to fucking demoralize and fuck with weaker / younger garou
>"No user you're supposed to be a badass and start fights all the time for no reason"

WoD has been some of the trope-iest shit.

I started replacing Common with Trader's Tongue because I *despise* linguistic homogeneity in any setting.

The idea is that Trader's Tongue is a thing spoken by travelers, which primarily is people who carry large amounts of goods and money from town to town, e.g. traders, caravans, and adventurers. Thieves might speak Trader's Tongue, Guards *maybe* speak Trader's Tongue, some rare elevated merchant-nobles definitely do, but the average person doesn't.

I feel like the average person doesn't want anything to do with the sort that speaks Trader's Tongue anyway, so it works out pretty well.

Frogposting.

In my campaign "Common" is just short hand the language spoken by Empire the players belong to. Foreigners and more isolationist locals usually spoke "simplified Common". That was mostly because Albionian doesn't roll off the tongue very well (yes the DM was lazy and were from "Albion")

>vampyre
>wytch
>daemon
>magick
>wyrm
>grimoire
>gryphon
>faerie
>djinni

Also
>moslem