this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
        
      
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I can see the arguments against the concept of evil races. It's intimately linked with real-world racism about "wrong" groups that "deserve" to be colonized or genocided. Writing the fictional world as being populated by distinct groups that have conflicting cultural motivations is more interesting than "this group is bad because they are bad."
But... what about demons/devils?
It's interesting, so many cultures have demons or evil spirits. And sometimes those evil spirits can be turned to good, but not usually.
I think DND mirroring culture in this way is still mostly OK, whereas culture has thankfully mostly moved on from races being good or evil.
For demons and devils, that usually goes straight into supernatural, as they're not really a race, but physical manifestations of evil energies.
At tables I've played and run in the past, 'Outsiders' (fiends, fey, celestials, etc.) embody the epitome of an ideal or motive taken to its logical extreme, for better or worse.
Take Zariel for example.
That's actually why orcs in D&D were an evil race in the first place. At its core, D&D is derived from Lord of the Rings. Orcs in Tolkien's world were created from elves by an evil god/demigod to be his evil army. They had no choice to be good or evil in LotR so that property was inherited into D&D.
I'm okay with this change. Orcs in D&D lore have a different origin than in LotR and I don't see why they should always be evil. I consider this just one more reasonable change from the original game which had odd rules like dwarves can't be wizards and only humans could be clerics.
Just because they're evil doesn't mean they're always doing something bad.