Beautiful Good, Ugly Evil

[Serpentine]

It always bugs me that good is always beautiful and evil is always ugly (or sexy, or both). Especially in D&D - the Nagas are the best example of this, where the only Good naga is shiningly golden gorgeous, and the Evil ones are sickeningly ugly. So...

Original purpose for this thread: I'm looking for examples of ugly-good for use in an Iron Avatarist entry. Aside from the really freaky real-world angels (look up the old descriptions of cherubim), I can't think of any... Is there any Good creature in D&D that is also ugly?

Secondary purpose for this thread: isn't it annoying how good is beautiful and ugly is evil in D&D? About as annoying as Chaos being eviler than Law...

edit: Aha! I thought of one! Bes, the dwarfish Egyptian god of midwives and good luck who is meant to be so ugly he scares evil spirits away.
And it counts as on-D&D-topic cuz he was statted out in Deities and Demigods

[jebob]

Sherlock Holmes was originally envisioned by Doyle to be "more gaunt, ill-favoured and grotesque than we can any longer believe."

Sparkly vampires from twilight perhaps?

D&D-wise, I think drow are beautiful, although I think that might be one of the reasons for the wave of good rebellious drow.

[Serpentine]

Heh. The Drow open up a whole new bag of worms in the "matriarchies are evil" issue. Wonder if TVTropes has anything to say on that...

[Mordokai]

Leonal and, what's that other one... avoral or something like that?

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Somewhat of a paramount of NG alignment, but don't look really pretty. At least not the avian one. The leo guy at least has nice looking muscles

[Serpentine]

Ehh, that's a bit of a YMMV one. I mean, half-eagle and half-lion? You don't see any Bastion of Holiness half-slugs.

[dsmiles]

Well, Dwarves are (IIRC) "usually" Lawful Good. They're not the smexiest beasts out there. Although I do like 'em a little muscley.
Guardinals, too. I'm not really into the whole "furry" scene, so...eww.
All in all, not many. (See also: Desmodu, Silthilar)

[Zen Master]

Elves are evil. Of course they are generelly and almost universally misrepresented as good - precisely because they are beautiful.

[Mordokai]

Ehh, that's a bit of a YMMV one. I mean, half-eagle and half-lion? You don't see any Bastion of Holiness half-slugs.

With the all the suplements out there, it's only a matter of finding the right one. But seriously, there aren't many good creatures that could be considered ugly per se. At least not that I know of.

[Yora]

Erinyes and Succubus are evil.

Flumphs are good.

[JeminiZero]

Ugly Good: Deathless-They look like blueish Mutant Zombies or something.

[FelixG]

Erinyes and Succubus are evil.

Flumphs are good.

Flumphs are the crux of sexyness

[Mordokai]

Erinyes and Succubus are evil.

It always bugs me that good is always beautiful and evil is always ugly (or sexy, or both).

It was my impression that Serpentine was looking for evil creatures that weren't almost oozing with lust. Otherwise, erinye and succubi(and their counterpart, the incubi) are far too obvious answers.

[Saph]

It always bugs me that good is always beautiful and evil is always ugly (or sexy, or both).

Secondary purpose for this thread: isn't it annoying how good is beautiful and ugly is evil in D&D?

Dragons are the most iconic monster of D&D. Half are good, half are pure evil, yet they don't look particularly different to each other. (I think they look rather nice, personally, but either way, they disprove the "always" thing.)

[Coidzor]

Heh. The Drow open up a whole new bag of worms in the "matriarchies are evil" issue. Wonder if TVTropes has anything to say on that...

They're kinda evil regardless of the matriarchy aspect.

Gloura - Underdark Fey beautiful if a bit unsettling due to being residents of the Underdark. An entire subrace of them is evil but otherwise identical.

Hell, Fey in general are fairly likely to be evil due to their selfishness and lack of regard for harming others to get what they want.

Ehh, that's a bit of a YMMV one. I mean, half-eagle and half-lion? You don't see any Bastion of Holiness half-slugs.

Unless you're on the kinkier side of furry, that birdman looks like he's been slapped with an ugly stick. The leonid is just a leonid though, so not really ugly or beautiful just kinda meh, he's a lion guy, he can bite your face off with the power of holiness.

This does bring to mind a note in, I believe, Arms and Equipment guide about players balking at the idea of Celestial Vermin in regards to the bit about getting vermin an Int stat in order to make them trainable.

Secondary purpose for this thread: isn't it annoying how good is beautiful and ugly is evil in D&D? About as annoying as Chaos being eviler than Law...

I don't really care, because whether something is pretty or not doesn't really affect me as a player so much as, "wow, everyone who agrees with my character's philosophy are ***** and want to kill me anyway because the designers were biased against chaos."

So, in my book, pretty=good, ugly=bad is nowhere even close to as annoying as Chaos is less good than Law.

[hamishspence]

For evil, Eberron has some-

Daelkyr, and a kind of outcast celestial in one of the splatbooks. Looks like an angel with stumps where wings would be.

[Yora]

D&D is not particularly known for being subtle and dealing well with ambiguity.

[AstralFire]

I submit that this is because:
1) The players are largely supposed to fill in ugly-good. The heavens are there to provide inspiration, and a large amount of the good creatures are from there.
2) No one cares for neutral appearance (neither pretty nor ugly.)

[Saph]

Actually, come to think of it, the races in the Players' Handbook don't follow the "beautiful good, ugly evil" pattern either.

Dwarves: Good, ugly.
Elves: Good, beautiful, but include Drow, who are Evil and beautiful.
Gnomes: Good, ugly (okay, maybe not strictly ugly, but they're not going to be winning many beauty contests).
Half-Orcs: Neutral, ugly.
Halflings: Neutral, not particularly beautiful or ugly.
Humans: Neutral, beautiful (according to most of the pictures, and compared to what they're usually fighting).

If you want more proof of the "ugly good" theme, half the adventurers out there also tend to have an 8 Charisma.

[AstralFire]

I love me some dwarves, Saph. You know, that way.

And gnomes are adorable! But not that way.

I don't know what my fascination with the short is. Perhaps a deep desire to never need to bend when entering a door.

[Yora]

Gnomes: Good, ugly (okay, maybe not strictly ugly, but they're not going to be winning many beauty contests).
Halflings: Neutral, not particularly beautiful or ugly.

Have you looked at gnomes and halflings since the beginning of 3.5e? They are short, but almost every picture makes them as close to current standards of good looking as possible.

[Eloel]

Half-Orcs: Neutral, ugly.

I disagree. Half-Orcs tend to be cute.

[Baveboi]

Wait, how you define a race to be Beautiful or Ugly?
By Charisma? That way Baalors are hugely appealing. By illustrations? Really, that only indicates the taste of said artist, not the real appealing of the race.

Anyway, what IS beautiful or ugly between other races? I'd freak out if I saw a naked demoness OR a naked Illithid (oh gods... whyyyy). I think it's more of a taste (mental sanity) kind of thing. You could try to make evil races more beautiful by pimpin' 'em up or turn good races ugly (hound archon...) but that isn't really the point, is it? /sarcasm

[Saph]

Have you looked at gnomes and halflings since the beginning of 3.5e? They are short, but almost every picture makes them as close to current standards of good looking as possible.

The iconic 3.5 gnome looks like this. Bear in mind that this is supposed to be a really high-Cha, good-looking one.

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Now, I'm not saying he's horrible-looking, but there's a reason 3.5 doesn't have an entry for Half-Gnome.

[Eldan]

If you use the original Planescape art, guardinals really look more "strange" than "ugly".

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A though question, really. D&D really doesn't have much ugly good.

And phh. Gnomes should still look like this:

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[Murdim]

Elves are evil. Of course they are generelly and almost universally misrepresented as good - precisely because they are beautiful.

Alternatively, elves are usually Chaotic Good and are repeatedly said to be incredibly attractive, but if we take the artwork as a reference... in a way, they tend to look even creepier than the "monstrous" races. Case in point : Mialee.

Dragons are the most iconic monster of D&D. Half are good, half are pure evil, yet they don't look particularly different to each other. (I think they look rather nice, personally, but either way, they disprove the "always" thing.)

No, not even then. Metallic dragons are shinier than chromatic dragons.


Attractive Evil is fairly easy to find among both evil-leaning races (drows) and incarnations of Evil (succubi, erinyes, several archfiends and evil gods), though it generally almost always falls under the archetype of the "tempter". On the other hand, "good" mortal races tend to be "unattractive in a nice, non-creepy way" at worst, and I have yet to hear of any planar entity of Good that isn't supposed to be some sort of beautiful (though "beautiful" doesn't necessarily mean "attractive-in-that-way by most human standards").

[Saph]

No, not even then. Metallic dragons are shinier than chromatic dragons.

I think they look pretty similar attractiveness-wise. Shiny doesn't equal beautiful, unless we're playing Twilight: The RPG.

[JeminiZero]

Now, I'm not saying he's horrible-looking, but there's a reason 3.5 doesn't have an entry for Half-Gnome.

Apparently, its because gnomes are genetically incompatible with everything except those species that can reproduce with virtually anything thats alive (I.e. templates that can be applied to any living corporeal creature, such as Half Celestial, Half-Fiend, Half-Dragon).

[Aotrs Commander]

If you want more proof of the "ugly good" theme, half the adventurers out there also tend to have an 8 Charisma.

Or in the case of our current party, all of them...¹



But yes, the whole good=pretty/evil=gross kinda irks me too, particularly the BoED and BoVD.

I have to say, though, Serp, I thought the AD&D Monstrous Manual Dark Naga was kinda cool-looking. Though not beautiful, I don't think, it wasn't nearly as shudder inducing as, say MM 3.5's Spirit Naga. Though, well, that's 3.x artwork, which is almost always unfavourably comparable to something I would find extruded from the posterior of a herbivorous mammalian quadruped of your choice... (The edition that brought you animals, now with pointlessly stupid added Spikey Bitz! And Mialee.)

Actually, come to that, a lot of AD&D creatures were less of that tendancy. Medusae were not that scaly...thingy...in the 3.x MM, but were supposed to be more-humanoid and at least theoretically rather more attractive. Dryads, though more sort of neutral, were rather less...um...freakish in AD&D, so. But again, 3.x artwork...

There was also, in AD&D the Obal, which was a good-aligned intelligent fungus-y thing; hardly what one would call pretty.



¹"It's a dungeon-crawl", the DM said. And then changed his mind at th last minute and ran us through another module to level us up for that one. A social/investigation based module. Would it surprise you to know we totally FUBARed it up?<sup>2

2</sup>Actually, Cha 8 had nothing to do with it, we were just nearly all LG and too-well behaved to go around prodding things like we were supposed to, and the DM (who is after all a newbie) didn't figured out how to best adapt the module's schedule to us. Learning curve and all that...

[Eldan]

Okay, trailed the SRD for all good creatures. Findings:

Barely anything is ugly.


Potential candidates:
Tritons have weird artowrk and 11 charisma.
Storm giants have 15 charisma, but at least they are a little more hairy than most standard good guys. YMMV, I don't think they ugly, really. Just not standard male model beauty.

So, nothing, in the SRD.

[Amiel]

Ichabod Crane was also originally envisioned as transcendentally ugly, but of virtuous character, who always sought for the triumph of reason and rationality over crass evil.

So, a standard human(oid) perhaps?