Lawful Evil setting

I don't know, its hard to describe any modern setting game as anything but "everyone in power is evil" and that seems to work, with plenty of the western world being "lawful" as well.

Is it really that hard? There are dozens of dystopian settings

Pretend Sauron won.
But without the ring.

>>53562728
>Pretend Sauron won
Lame setting. Here's how you do it right.
>Galadriel cannot resist the ring
>Becomes a Queen as Scouring as the Dawn or whatever
>Gandalf realizes this path will lead only to ruin, teams up with Saruman
>Hobbits do not continue their journey
>Gondor falls to the witch king, men get fucked in general
>Elves of Rivendell, Lothlorien and Mirkwood gather together to face Sauron and invade Mordor
>Galadriel destroys most of sauron's army and deals grievous wounds to The Enemy
>Isengard, Dunlending and Rohan ride in from behind and engage the elves
>Galadriels army is defeated, the ring lost but not destroyed
>In the aftermath of this inconclusive war of the ring, Mordor is weak but the Witch King rules over most of the kingdoms of men
>The "Free realms" of the Shire, Rohan, Isengard, Dunlending and a handfull of other spots toil under Saruman
>The remaining elves are beyond salty and despise everyone else, becoming thirty times more isolationist
>Dwarves wonder why the world is so fucked

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>>53558420
Basically, imagine a perfect world, but when the perfect part is, there's a nasty why is this evil stuff even here part to it that's the catch.

When challenging this, everyone says it's that way because the evil reinforces the law, when in actual fact a lot of it is excessive if not downright dumb, and often there in place to kill of individuality so people with rigidly adhere to the system through their own merit and wit.

Basically, it's the difference between the question of "Would you sacrifice a baby a day to keep the imminent doom away" opposed to "Why would we need the sacrifices if the benefits of the rule are down to an entirely different factor?"

Evil, being a byproduct of the uncaring amoral existence of nature itself is an excess, but it is used to instill values that being a goodie does not provide, even with rigid structure. Strength gained from bloodsport and other means of violence are less in good culutures which produces awful weaklings who drag the whole thing down and cause hard times.

The solution to unrest is violence as a reminder of the core values of nature so that people don't become overpampered in the ideal society, but evil ascribes it to it's own over the top values, insisting, that you've got to be this malicious prick, even when you don't want to.

It's basically not giving a larger community the benefit of the doubt on the idea that they can approve, adhere to nature and work around it's uncaring ways to benfit and empower, and instead placing it on excessive brutal if not lesson-teaching values based around punishment, demerit and the hierachy of sacrificing others for ambition.

It's bad because bad is added to it over better solutions because the capacity for common sense and value of citizenship and national unity is not taken into consideration because the leading body does not place trust in these values over what simple, effective Strong over weak rulership provides.

>>53564746
Basically, Evil is selfish, assuming and demeaning, and they want to subvert groupthink to the idea that 'Evil' is the thing they need to make their lives work, when things are slightly more complex. There are times where you need to get a little selfish and need to be a stone cold prick, but the kind of thing on the table that Devil has in mind subsumes what they are trying to sell as their idea of lawful.

Basically, you're either highly lawful and evil for a few selfish things you do and might not want to back out on if at all, or it's the other way around and you're a massive sociopath who seeks to manipulate everyone and knowingly or not spread 'Evil' in the broader sense through law.

Though D&D has a very skewed idea of Evil in many cases, I find the greatest ones being just about everything on Kender, Vistani and the Kingdoms of Kalamar Villians handbook when they got to the GOLDEN DRAGON PERFECT DICTATORSHIP part and somehow said the GOLDEN DRAGON was LE solely because it basically made fucking paridise because this 'inferred with the x's culture' and this is the only supporting reason for that choice.

There's some slight bias they weave into their shit on occasion in D&D, a good chunk of alignment discussion you'll note that they justify in splat or whatever adheres to this rigid structure of a subject having a behavioural quirk they always meet like a work deadline no matter what which acts as a dead ringer for a person's alignment.

Biggest example of this is usually Vampires, where they sometimes set them up to do smart things, then all of a sudden they double-down and go full CE-Stupid acting like Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires with 0 self control.

>>53558420

Mistborn

>>53558420
The trick, for me, is the idea that after establishing too big a power block, everyone accepts the domination by evil because it is the path of least resistance. Your evil ruler set up healthcare, education, and funds the arts. Healthcare takes your skeleton to be animated by the necromancer classes at school to toil the mines and the propaganda art makes it seem like a great idea. There has to be what could be seen as good things made by a fully LE overlord to pacify the locals into accepting without effort. If you can throw in a mental domination effect to lower local aggression, so much the better. All this serves to prop up the the LE overlord in an unassailable place of wealth, luxury, and power.

The PC would therefor be pulled from those the system failed to help and feel the need to destroy it (healthcare fell through for a parent and thus anarchy is better), payed by a neighboring nation to sow unrest, or looking to overthrow and rise to the top of the 'new' world order. These being the good, neutral, and evil motives most likely to occur respectively.

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I'm running a Dark Sun game, and the rulers in that is pretty lawful evil. Most cities ant territories are controlled by corrupt sorcerer kings who are about the most powerful beings in the world, akin to demi-gods. The idea of the setting is that the real gods of the world have long been dead at the hands of magic, and the world lies in ruins. Most cities have a huge slave economy, some sorcerer kings wage wars across the wastes constantly while others retire to the inner sanctum of their city to study the magic arts while spreading rumours and fear among their population through their devout templars. Even the sorceror queen of one of the last known forests in the world, who uses her power to preserve the land and allow her followers to live off this bounty, is thought to have truly evil intentions at heart.

With the death of the gods came psionics, which have become commonplace among the people of the Dark Sun world. The idea my players have really taken a liking to is that psionics is a way to manipulate the universe around you through willing it to happen, sort of like CHIM but everybody has the ability to ingluence their immediate surroundings to various degrees. The sorcerer kings have a whole city of people around them who wholeheartedly believe they are gods, or at least the next closest thing, and this belief not only makes the sorcerer king more powerful in a literal sense, but also makes the size of the area they can influence bigger as well.

>>53566331
OP here, some of these responses were super killer actually, and I'd love to foster more discussion.

>>53566803
>The sorcerer kings have a whole city of people around them who wholeheartedly believe they are gods

An interesting tidbit of lore that you may or may not want to use is that the inhabitants of most cities are actually stated to not believe that the Kings are Gods. They aren't generally loved and few believe their lies about godhood, but most are resigned to their supremacy.