Druidic Depravity
From Over the Garden Wall
Many stock RPG villains are essentially character classes in a dark mirror. The usurping monarch or invading warlord is a Fighter. The scheming lich is a Wizard. The criminal mastermind is a Thief. The cult leader is a Cleric. Etc., Etc. From a worldbuilding standpoint, this makes some sense. The same powers the players wield are also available to their foes. It is also satisfying narratively: the villainous archetypes serve as a foil for the characters. The lich is a cautionary tale to Wizards to not lose sight of their humanity. The warlord is a lesson for the Fighter in how not to wield power. This duality of character archetypes also fleshes out the villains. The criminal mastermind was once a lowly, level-one Thief. Such enemies imply a dynamic past, entirely unlike, for instance, a Tarrasque, who was born a Tarrasque and will die a Tarrasque.
Druids tend to lack a similar villainous foil. The wilderness kook who venerates trees and turns into animals doesn’t immediately strike anyone as a sinister person. When not a player-character, druid NPCs tend to be helpful. A typical druidic NPCs in tabletop literature (yes, I’m calling it that) comes from Night Below. Oleanne the druid is introduced as a safety blanket if the player-characters lose the initial encounter with kidnappers. The DM is instructed to say that they are not killed but knocked unconscious, and the first player-character awakens by “catching a glimpse of a wolf or a woman (equal chance of either) slinking away through the trees.” The druid is established as a friend, but a mysterious one. In town, there are whispers of the “Wild Woman of the Woods” but nothing is known for certain. Oleanne features prominently in a side-quest where a young boy struggles with turning into a werebear (perhaps a metaphor for puberty?). Oleanne is helpful, if mysterious and aloof. She travels with a pack of wolves, and I imagine her as San from Princess Mononoke.
By Dyson Logos
Villains do not need to be evil, doubly so for Druids (whatever “evil” means). Antagonist is a better word, as it means only that the character opposes whatever goals the protagonists (the player-characters) set for themselves, regardless of whether the goal is good, evil, or something entirely eluding such a cosmic label. I further break antagonists down between opponents and rivals. Opponents want the goal to not be accomplished by the protagonists or otherwise. Rivals want to accomplish the goal themselves, beating the protagonist to the glory. The classic rival is Gary/Blue from Pokémon. If you play Electric Bastionland by-the-book, the party always begins with a rival. Rivals are fun in a way that they can sometimes be allies for the players. They may have to team up with the rival temporarily on the way to accomplishing their shared goal, a recipe for a tense and dynamic adventure. This might be the easiest way to include an antagonistic Druid. For example, if both the player-characters and the NPC Druid share the goal of stopping of industrializing city-state from destroying the forest, it may be an antagonistic alliance (i.e., a rivalry) because the player-characters are agents of status quo that want to preserve both nature and civilization while the Druid wants nature to overtake hostile civilization. You can put your players at odds with a Druid without departing too far from druidic tropes.
From Red Hand of Doom
In my experiences (as GM and player), three villainous Druids come to mind: one a classic evil villain, one with more complicated motives and a third with almost inscrutable motives. To the extent they inspire ideas to incorporate druidic depravity in your games, I will go through each. Then I will muse briefly on how I incorporate both Druids and villainous Druids in a setting like the the Prismatic Wasteland, a whimsical, post-post-apocalyptic science-fantasy milieu. The Druid is a flexible trope, and any setting benefits from its Druids having a variety of motives and methods.
The first evil Druid I encountered is the Ghostlord from Red Hand of Doom: the blighter, “an ex-druid who has turned his back on the natural order.” This is basically a druidic lich. This character inspired a similar blighter in two interlinked campaigns—one I ran and the other in which I was a player. However, these campaigns linked the blighter less to their individual choice to abandon the natural order and more to their devotion to the land. They were a druid tied to a specific forest that, due to nearby industrial activity, became a blighted wasteland. The Druid’s devotion was unaltered, but they changed along with the land. Their spells focused on draining energy or moisture. Their vibe was similar to the bloodbender from Avatar: The Last Airbender. This type of Druid doesn’t have to be defeated if the player-characters can find a way to restore the land to its natural state. If the land is evil and corrupted, it is going to impact the Druids the same way it impacts the flora and fauna.
Druids do not have to deviate from the “True Neutral” trope to be an antagonist. Lizardfolks, often portrayed as True Neutral, in that they find concepts of good and evil “utterly alien” (Lizardfolk are correct about that). Nonetheless, D&D often frames lizardfolk as antagonistic to the player characters. Just like not all neutral lizardfolk should be enemies, not all neutral Druids are allies. Especially for adventuring parties with a point-of-view (i.e., non-Murderous Vagabonds), there is potential for conflict between a Druid’s goals and those of the adventuring party.
In a West Marches game I ran, there was an active cell of Druids that were often antagonistic to the player characters as they explored the eastern frontier of the map. These Druids had their own goals, not evil goals. In fact, my personal morality hews closer to their motives than those of the player characters. The player characters discovered a lush, green valley beyond weeks of travel through a desolate desert. From far away, they could see a settlement nestled in the center of the valley from the black smoke rising above. Irontown, the settlers had named it, in the belief that a booming vein of nearby metal would put the town on the map. But the settlers were wrong. The iron deposits were sparse. Nonetheless, settlers had arrived by the wagon-load, fleeing oppression and recession in the south. The would-be miners became loggers, felling tree after tree to grow their new home. The trade in lumber made some enterprising townsfolk quite rich, and when the player characters arrived, no expense was spared in welcoming them. But the town had a problem, they revealed. The valley was also home to a small circle of druids. These druids terrorized Irontown. The wealthy timber-merchants enlisted the help of the player characters, offering rewards the freebooters couldn’t resist.
In the end, it’s up to the players whether any given character is an ally or a foe. If the player characters were less money-grubbing freebooters, they may have sided with the Druids, becoming ecoterrorists and preserving the natural splendor of the valley. West Marches-style play or Gold-for-XP may encourage such behavior, but it is ultimately in the players’ hands. After all, the player characters could have sided with the ecoterrorist Druids and robbed the rich merchants of Irontown blind. But in the end, they sided with the encroaching civilization in their few run-ins with the Druids of Iron Valley. The Druids weren’t a main antagonist (there wasn’t one), but they were a reoccurring nuisance, bees in the players’ collective bonnet.
Not all antagonists even have discernible motives. In the same West Marches campaign, I was also a player. And once, a small group of us ventured north of Terminus, the town that served as our home base. We had heard rumors of a great jungle to the north called “The Armpit,” said to hold wondrous magics. (If you are curious about this campaign, or if you just want to see the map, I mentioned it in a tweet thread. The aforementioned Iron Valley was the area around the Silver Lake on the southeastern corner.) With half of the party being Wanted: Dead of Alive in the town of Good Bites Eats, we didn’t have much choice but to march straight through the Gerblin Forest. The eponymous Gerblins were the least of our problems. We were captured by a mad Druid. He captured us and trapped us in a funhouse maze deep underground, constructed of the roots of the trees above. The entire session involved us navigating and re-navigating a randomly generated dungeon that would change shape on occasion. Mapping the dungeon did no good. We did many things in that dungeon to get out, unspeakable things. We made it out with our own captive, a wererat who we used to spring traps as we made our escape, and with a grudge against the Druid that had trapped us. The Druid was too powerful for us to fight alone, we were told in no uncertain terms. So over the next three sessions, we recruited a small army of mercenaries and arsonists, hawking all our valuables to afford them. In a truly bizarre session, our army marched through the forest, scorching the earth behind us. A mass combat of soldiers against sentient trees ensued. In the end, we faced our once-captor. The Druid, it turned out, had captured us because they were lonely and needed friends. The Druid could have simply asked. But we met his crimes with crimes of our own. It was a dark day in the West Marches.
Science fantasy draws on many tropes from vanilla fantasy, but the Druid is not a trope that comes top-of-mind. But if wizards and knights exist in a science fantasy setting, why not Druids as well? One of my favorite locations in the Ultraviolet Grasslands is loosely tied to a group of “twisted druids.” The Forest of Meat is exactly what it says on the tin. But when the industry-disrupters created the meat growing on trees, the twisted Druids decided it was exploitative and made the plants red of tooth and claw. Likewise, Druids certainly exist in the Prismatic Wasteland. As I begin to explore my setting, I will remember that some Druids are twisted, others aren’t. Just like everyone else.
Trying to broaden how Druids slot into a typical fantasy adventure is an exercise in a broader mode of thinking for game masters. Tropes are easy and reliable, and we often gravitate toward them without giving them much thought. However, giving thought to your world, your player-characters, their allies and antagonists makes for a richer game. Considering the typically helpful Druid in an antagonistic light should spark other, similar exercises. How might the lich be an ally for the player characters? Why might a nomadic tribe of orcs need protection from a nearby predominantly human village? What ulterior motives does the sage in the tower by the sea have for spouting lore at the party? Even if you decide against going against the grain, the characters and world will be better off if you do it knowingly, not reflexively. Let the Druid be evil.
