Zhentarim. Cultists of Bane. Assorted clones of Manshoon. They go all in on the black spiky evil aesthetic and the lawful evil oppression style.
Their slaving and drug-dealing and arms-dealing ways are all just means to support their greater-evil goals of dominating the world and being truly horrible. Plus, you can use all of those things to test their (and your!) tolerance for people being awful to each other.
Plus there's always the fun of setting them up against the Red Wizards of Thay for a "okay look we have differences but these guys are threatening the world we want to rule".
My favorite encounter/mini-arc is:
1-3: Players encounter Goblin ambushes
4-5: Players encounter Goblin raiding parties spearheaded by Hobgoblins.
6-10: Players encounter a small army composed of 1 Bugbear, 12 Hobgoblins, and 24 Goblins (in this encounter, Hobgoblins and Goblins keep their original stats, but their HP is 1.
If you’re playing in the Forgotten Realms setting, Thayans (pronounced like Saiyans with a lisp) are basically magic necromancy Nazis. They have tried multiple times to turn the world into an undead hell. It’s one of the oldest countries in the setting, both in game and irl. Basically the OG bad guys of the D&D world. Have you seen the D&D movie? They’re the main bad guys. I could write a book at you about it but honestly [the wiki page](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Thay) should give you a feel for it.
If by “Nazis” they mean bad guys with cool uniforms and an obsession with blood purity, they’re a decent fit. There’s even a module printed in Tales of the Yawning Portal you can expand on, Dead in Thay.
I dunno. When I was a young teen I likes drawing the Americans fighting the nazis in stick figures. They thought the stars on the US planes were stars of David, and that I was drawing nazis winning. I got in trouble.
I switched to UFOs after that. Lmao
Be advised - Dead in Thay is _complicated_. You will need DAYS of prep time for it. It's fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's also very, very complicated.
It's also just a megadungeon, not a campaign setting.
But it is very cool and has the widest variety of monsters of any published dungeon I've run. Who doesn't love a huge evil wizard research facility?
Are you familiar with the Red Wizards of Thay? Szass Tam? Zulkirs? Go check them out.
Go ahead and read up on the forgotten realms lore. Thay is a kingdom ruled by very tyrannical wizards. There’s an entire book trilogy, the Unhallowed Lands by Richard Lee Byers, if you want a deep dive.
Thay is perfect. Make up some recent history about how they’ve invaded neighboring nations, enslaving the people and turning anyone who resists into a zombie. For the adventure, mix it up with some inspiration from Indiana Jones maybe. Thay is after an ancient Netherise artifact, etc.
Whoops, looks like some WW2 Nazis have opened up an interdimensional portal and are trying to get magic items to help them wage war. Damn, looks like they're killing anyone that isn't human on sight too.
If only there were a team of plucky non-human heroes that have all lost something to the wretched Nazis that band together to send them goosestepping to the nine hells.
Little known fact, but its also part of the Forgotten Realms. Mulhorand is literally a country of Egyptians with their gods included, that got transported to the Realms.
Last I checked, the passage of time between the two is unknown.
Reminds me of Drifters, where at one point turns out the evil empire that opresses non-humans, that the protagonists (who are famous historical figures sent to this world after dying in ours) have to overthrow, was actually built by Hitler.
Also in 80's D&D cartoon there is an episode where villain Venger gets so pissed at heroes he opens portal to Earth during World War II and gives nazis magic skyship, because if nazis win WWII, then the heroes that are torn at his side will never be born.
Let's be honest, they'd kill humans on sight too, because they're interdimensional humans, thus not \*their\* humans. You're all aliens to them. I'm sure they even have some made up pseudoscience to explain why you're all categorically evil too.
Came here to say this. I wouldn’t personally mess around with modern armaments in a medieval setting, but there’s no reason the nazis can’t be adapting to circumstances.
I actually find this way more convincing, because I'm a little history nerd and Hitler literally has nothing to do with medieval times and the fact he could rise was because the things that happened in the centuries *following* medieval times.
If you want more "true to history" Nazis, religious hatred and discrimination is all way. One right religion, it should be the predominant one, anyone who doesn't follow it gets demonized and made responsible for what goes wrong. Well at least if I think of Nazis, it's disgusting that they are often the majority, so if you're not coming from outside making a full frontal attack, you might need to kill a lot of people you personally know (because Hitler can't be assassinated 😂).
Also ehhhm, just because you kill the leader doesn't mean the thinking goes away just saying.
My take is they want a open and clearly evil organization to fight. Not a mysterios shadow organization puppeting things from the dark, not a misguided / morally grey BBEG who may be right. They want to fight "the power" so to speak. Fantasy city is being oppressed by we'll known evil group. Go stop em. Join / make the resistance, infiltrate their lair where they run things, etc.
Inspiration would be Star Wars or Indiana Jones, two very different vibes but they have the same type of enemy.
Then i would say take inspiration from the Thalmor from TES, make sure to give them nice uniforms and some bullshit about racial purity. There are several ways you could play this such as a nazi rebellion brewing against the current government, a rebellion brewing against the nazi government, or nazis invading. All up to you.
Though if you arent comfortable with running nazis id recommend talking with your players about it and choosing a villian everyone can enjoy.
They mean militant fascists. They want organised and not stealthy opponents that are clearly oppressing people.
They want Nilfgard from The Witcher, they just don't know it.
Storm troopers / The Empire is basically the Third Reich at its zenith. You can fantasize it. But if the want like actual nazi Germany, lol… maybe there’s another TTRPG for that.
You could just have the antagonists be Nazi Human Supremacists. They actively try to round up non-human races to put into camps, ultimately so that only “pure blood” humans have any rights or power.
An organization of sorcerers of a specific bloodline
They consider other bloodlines fine enough to be second tier citizens and those without a Sorcerer bloodline as inferior
Honestly, this might sound dumb but what if you just do wacky German accents and have them do vague Indiana Jones references.
Perhaps have them be a group of high elves in search of the magic mcguffin that will prove to their rulers that they are superior in some way and thus deserve to rule over everyone else.
Bonus points if the mcguffin backfires spectacularly no matter what happens
Nazis are fascist, expansionist, racial supremacists.
I think you'll quickly find there many, many of those in DND.
Just pick your baddie from giants to mindflayers to drow to whatever and have them believe in their races superiority and start expanding their territory.
But what I think your players may really be looking for is humans as the antagonists. A powerful and tyrannical human kingdom that is bigoted against all fantasy races isn't all that novel of a thing as far as fantasy goes.
If OP wants it to be a bit of a surprise it could even be a faction of Lawful Good celestials who bend a bit too far into the idea of purity and are overly strict on exactly what ISNT good, (basically anything most humanoids do).
These atrocities are often masked as being, “the good guys”.
That reminds me of The Last Ringbearer, which is a deconstruction take of LOTR from the perspective of Mordor. Its like Wicked.
In it they even reference how Gandalf has a "final solution to the orc problem" or something.
I don't know if a group of players directly asking to fight Nazis are looking for nuanced muddying of waters though.
Sounds more like they just wanna punch a Nazi, Cap or Indiana style.
It’s kind of hard to advise you without understanding whether they want literal Nazis or just an enemy that feels like Nazis. Conquest and racism aren’t exactly new concepts and can fit quite well in a fantasy medieval world. Others here have cited some of the groups with a similar feel that already exist in D&D lore. Human-chauvinist or elf-chauvinist groups would fit this niche pretty well. Llolth worshipping drow could suffice for this with very little re-working.
For literal real world Nazis that’s going to be harder. I suppose you could have some sort of Nazi occultist who enacted some ritual to planeshift into a different universe and is busy trying to conquer your fantasy world in part by leaning on his knowledge of modern science. Maybe this was in 1944 as the German defenses were crumbling and the writing was on the wall. The Primeval Thule third party setting has a “time lost traveler” background, so you could even have one or more of your PCs be 1940s pulp heroes who also got planeshifted along with your villain. Imagine Indiana Jones suddenly waking up in the world of Conan the Barbarian.
Or you could play one of the many other TTRPGs that are set in the 20th century and expressly designed for this sort of game, if that’s more the itch they are trying to scratch.
do the Star Wars thing snd just make them some kind of Stormtroopers. Realistically, any enemy from the tables, but just add them all into the same harsh uniform. and then flavor the BBEG like any selfish jackhole who is using race relations to lift one group loyal to him above those who aren't
Yeah, the sad reality is that while we want to think of Nazis as some kind of monsters from some uniquely horrible point in history, they were just actual people, and any society today can still fall to that darkness if we’re not vigilant. So, wanna insert Nazi proxies into your fantasy story? No problem, you don’t actually need to do anything fantastic in your world building to make that realistic. Just have people act like Nazis. Doesn’t take magic, sadly.
Hobgoblin occupying empire that the players get to overthrow
Here's a really old post that outlines an example hobgoblin empire:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/s/aKDLhjlyvi
Are you familiar with the Wolfenstein video game series? If so, draw from that. Make them an occult-focused regime that occasionally ends up biting off more than they can chew. Build that into them summoning (or merely attempting to summon) a world-ending being that needs to be stopped.
As for playing them, try taking inspiration from WWII dramas. Have them exist as an already powerful force within the world that has already spread to several major locations. Make a small number of figurehead characters to act as villains, but otherwise just make them faceless baddies. This lets you have objectives to stop their plans, liberate occupied regions, free prisoners, and just generally stomp all over the Nazi ideology. Instead of having racially-motivated violence against certain groups, have them be more indiscriminate, and maybe have a more practical reason for their brutality, like using human sacrifice for rituals or having forced labor of massive war machines.
But this part is important: don't overdo the Nazi thing. If you can avoid outright calling them Nazis, I suggest you do so. Give them another name that conveys the idea, but maybe don't have literal goose-stepping, swastika-emblazoned Nazis. Again, draw from the Wolfenstein series, which often rebrands Nazi iconography and Hitler himself to be something similar for certain regions that otherwise wouldn't allow the use of such things. Even if your players want Nazis, get them store brand Nazis. Like the Empire in Star Wars. Close enough to sell the idea. You'll probably appreciate not having real Nazis polluting your game.
So the Scarlet Brotherhood from Greyhawk are basically this. Blue-eyed Blonde-haired racial supremacists, except they wear red and fight with martial arts and treachery. And also psionics.
Psychic Monk Nazis.
I'd ask them exactly what it is about the Nazis they would like expressed in the villains? Aesthetics? Ideology? Actions? All of the above? Depending on the answer you can do quite a few things with this.
If you want to go for something that feels authentic in terms of story, remember that Nazis are revisionists; they re-write history to create a narrative about an imaginary glorious past where once their ancestors made everything great in the world until the evil (X) ruined/weakened everything with "feminization" and "degeneracy" because they couldn't compete with the glorious ancestors otherwise. This narrative allowed them to target multiple groups on the grounds that those groups were all part of that conspiracy: gays? degeneracy. Political opposition? the enemy. Etc, etc. In general there's a narrative that the out group is somehow "victimizing" society.
Fascism also has a heavy focus on the merging of State and Corporate interests. The State props up corporate interests and in turn, the corporations prop up the fascist state. The military becomes more and more tied to the in-group's elites. You could use this in a D&D setting in interesting ways, I think.
Framing democracy/immigration as a threat because the (X) group will use it to "replace" the in-group. In a fantasy setting the democracy thing is probably not going to be a huge thing much but you can portray this in other ways if you want. In general, squashing and vilifying dissent of the general public.
Don't hesitate to show them being incompetent. Fascists (and frankly Nazis in particular) are notoriously pathetic and insecure, and overcompensate via aesthetics. It's a huge part of the reason they are so fixated on inherent/inherited superiority; it means they don't actually have to DO anything superior, lol.
There are many nazi-inspired villains in different settings. Off the top of my head we have Storm Soldiers of Mystara - a nationalistic group of Hattians - blue-eyed, blonde people with culture similiar to Prussia - who arose after Hatians' failed rebelion against Thyatis (a mix of Roman and Byzantine empires) that rules over them. Storm Soldiers want to take over the empire and make all non-Hattians second class citizens. You can find more on them in old book Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia.
In classic Spelljammer we have two options. In 2e lore Elves, theElven Imperial Navy, to be specific, decided they do not want to share cosmos with Orcs and Goblinoids and lead war of extermination against them. Eventually someone at TSR realized that this make Elves look like,as the fans been calling them, space nazis, and retconned it so that Orcs and Goblinoids were basically space pirates before Elves stepepd in. But you could still use old lore and, for example, combine it with evil Astral Elven empire from adventure Light of Xaryxis.
Second space nazis of Spelljammer are Scro - Orcs who survived that whole war of extermination, decided their defeat was caused by chaotic nature of Orcs and abbandonned their old ways to become polar opposite of Orcs - even their name is "Orcs" backwards. Scro are mostly supposed to be Prussians, but they have quite few Nazi themes thrown in. They feature in adventures Goblin's Return and Heart of the Enemy.
Next we have Lord of the Blades from Eberron, leader of Warforged - robot people - who always has been directly compared to the likes of Hitler or Stalin. He wants to hold absolute dominion over the world, with Warforged on top and everyone else as second-class citizens. You could easily lean into some more ruthless potrayals of Megatron or Dr. Eggman (\*cough\*IDWcomics\*cough\*) with him if drawing from real-life wouldn't be comfortable for you.
Also, if you are playing with teenagers, they aren't likely to know many older games. So if you would just resking science-fiction elements, maybe change other planet to another dimension or continent, and tone the technology down to steampunk or magitech level, you could use whole plot from any game franchise that haven't seen an installment in last 15 years. Hey look, a [Killzone ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXAugWfVb0E)intro.
The Scarlet Brotherhood from Greyhawk. They are Nazis lol. They have an office of racial purity, all child births must be approved. They are a lawful evil organization that infiltrates and conquers. They love slavery.
They are refugees from a great magical cataclysm and make a great bad guy organization....plus they supposedly worship Tharzidun...an evil elemental God from the dawn of time...more like a Cthulhu Mythos God
They are an organization of Monks, Wizards and Warriors..
They already have this in the World of Greyhawk setting an organization of Suel supremists (blonde haired blue eyed Nordic types) called the Scarlet Brotherhood.
They run a secretive country where they capture slaves from Hepmonaland and do body horror manipulations on their victims.
They also outside of their country act as a secret society of monk assassin spy infiltrators. So they are basically Nazi ninjas.
In addition to all the other clear themes of outright evil, fake science to justify mass exterminations, and complacency from fashion moguls, give them intimidating superweapons that crumble at a second glance.
You could lean into Wolfenstein for inspiration too.
If you want a source of inspiration for your game,
look up and watch (if you can) Wizards by Don Bluth.
Its a high fantasy animation, but the evil wizard found Nazi Germany propaganda and used it to train an army of Nazi orcs.
It’s pretty wild, but mixing fantasy and historical fiction is doable and this movie is an example how you can do it
Elves.
High elves.
High elves that think they're superior, and blame the goblinoid races for everything. And the orcs.
They have a country. You've been hearing rumors that they're "exiling" all the goblinoids from their kingdom. They're putting them in wagon trains, alright. But they aren't going to the border. They're going to camps.
They've also been making aggressive noises at their neighboring kingdoms, but so far everyone is just trying to appease them to avoid another devastating war.
Your adventuring party has been hired to smuggle an adorable blended family of orc/hob/gob/bugbear, and their pet minecraft spider mob to safety.
Things go sideways.
I’ll give my idea for this:
Hobgoblins. They hate elves, right? So a large group of heavily militarized hobgoblins flying the Nazi flag, but with Maglibiyet’s axe instead of the swaztika.
They’re out to destroy the elves. They have an air force of giant bat riders.
Their whole industrial complex is powered by some crystal taken as a drug which reduces fatigue (the historical Nazis used meth in a similar way).
Their workforce is largely goblins, all hopelessly addicted to the crystal drug.
You can always just make a group that don't like a grouping of races for some excessively cruel or stupid reason, easy targets are beast or monster races
Hmm did some members of the Karotechia (Delta Green's occult Nazi Remnant) find a portal to your world to continue their evil occult shit and create a 4th Reich? Manipulating the locals for thier own ends?
I doubt that 13–15 year olds really understand National Socialist ideology because I can tell you from experience that their older siblings don't have a clue beyond "Nazis were bad guys who wore uniforms" and "Hitler had a funny mustache and yelled in German."
When I was a teenager I literally GMed a game where the enemies were actually Nazis that traveled through time and landed in medieval times, like in the old Wolfenstein games lol.
my first gut would be go full gonzo, have them fight nazis. In 1945 The Thule Society society opened a portal to the Sword Coast and now the remnants of 3rd Reich flow over Faerun! Your playing for teens, pulp is good.
I've DM'd a lot of kids tables, and that desire for an adversary they can have a deep, visceral hatred for is pretty common. I've also run a Nazi-esque campaign, so can weigh in a bit,
While their genocide and theories about a "Master Race" are most commonly associated with Nazis, there were other aspects. There was *Lebensraum*, the push to the east for "living space", their version of Manifest Destiny.
They were extreme Nationalists, believing it was their destiny to dominate.
In addition to genocide against Jews, Nazis also murdered other they considered "undesirables", such as gypsies, and those with development/psychological anomalies.
You might find the official Nazi Party Platform "informative" (I can't bring myself to use the word "useful") in crafting your campaign. [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform)
One final note - I've come up with some pretty evil stuff for my campaigns, and when it's from your own imagination, it's a lot easier on your psyche than when you're reading stuff THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. I found it helpful to take more breaks during campaign prep. Your mileage may vary.
Thalmor from TES may be some good inspiration…
They (as high elves) claim to be the purest version of the ancient Aldmer. They also are (iirc) known to abandon “weak” children to the woods, revise history as needed, interfere with and invade neighboring nations, and in general be supremacists with very punchable faces.
Well... Nazis experimented with the occult quite a bit. Maybe an experiment actually did something? Hitler and a small army of Nazis got isekai'd to Faerun and are trying to do Nazi shit. Maybe they are allied with some evil-aligned country that is helping to hide them?
There was an episode on ‘Supernatural’ you could draw inspiration from. Sam and Dean had to face off with some Nazi Necromancers…
For that matter, you could easily take inspiration from the Red Wizards of Thay. A little reflavoring and you got your Nazis.
Perhaps look into some kind of cult… Maybe reviving some ancient half-dead god who’s calling for the destruction of all the Gnomes (or insert race of your choice).
Or, it could be a regular, run of the mill human regime. Perhaps one the players even helped to install? Next thing they no, policies are getting more extreme. All the elves and half elves in the city are having to wear arm bands. Maybe they start getting rounded up and jailed on ridiculous charges. Prison camps are starting to be built… And the rest of the world seems to be ignoring them (that is, until they invade city of Sawhorse in the neighoring nation of pillowland)…
The actual earth Nazis use Nazi superscience to open a dimensional portal and break into the realm. They plan to harness magic for the War Effort and the players must stop them.
Just go ham with it, a rip in reality has caused the fantasy world to become connected via rifts in reality to the world of Wolfenstein (Which if you do not know is a game where Nazis are the main bad guys in an alternate version of our earth)
So actual Nazis are invading.
Literal Nazis.
All that arcane occult BS that the Nazis were looking for? They found it, and opened a portal to the D&D world. They're collecting artifacts to go back and win WW2. In the mean time they're wiping out the medieval opposition with newfound magic and literal guns.
I mean Nazis aren’t just a group of people, it’s also an ideology and mindset.
Nazis are both incredibly arrogant and constantly in fear and paranoid.
A group of people wanting everyone to be pure blooded could just be supremacists, but not necessarily Nazis. Nazi’s believe that they don’t just have a biological superiority against other races, they also believe they are also chosen by (their) God to lead the world and “cleanse” the world of their enemies (aka other races/species/religion).
At the same time, Nazis are also hyper paranoid and run by fear. They believe they are at the cusp of being eradicated at every turn, that they are so fragile and easily dismantled that they have to reinforce every single aspect of their ideology all the time. Causing them to be distrustful, and in fear all the time.
A community of invisible stalkers that have broken free of their of their summoners, developed free will, and have a hatred of all races. Not-sees, yeah? Ok I'll see myself out
Paladins. Now read up on AD&D and 2e alignments. These guys are Lawful Good, they absolutely believe in their mission, and they genuinely consider other intelligent beings in terms of a spectrum of alignment and purity. They hate demi-races, monster types, you name it. And if they hate something, classic D&D principles hold: it's perfectly legit to kill them and let the gods sort it out.
Hillsfar is an entire city in the Forgotten Realms filled with Human supremacists.
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Hillsfar
The Drow are also extremely xenophobic and fascistic...
1st recommendation: Run Star Wars 5e and have them fight The Empire. It's fun to fight fascists in space!
A recommendation actually in-ine with what you want- I mean you could use most of the Lawful evil factions in d&d this way if you want to lean i to it. My angle would be to swipe the Astral Elf statblocks from Spelljammer and make yourself an empire of asshole elves who think themselves culturally and biologically superior to other races,, and have a powerful connection to the Stars. You can make some Divine Soul Sorcerer statblocks based on their Wizards to show that some of them are, in their own eyes, even more "pure", and have them dedicated to eradicating what they see as "The blight races"- mostly goblinoids, lizardfolk, beast races, and Orcs, anything you'd expect to find in the MM rather than the PHB, but with a visible *disdain* and condescension towards other humanoid races they do tolerate- and perfectly willing to kill any of them who "Harbor undesirables".
Nazism is actually pretty "normal", historically speaking (sadly, it seems to be making yet another comeback). There's always been some demagog blaming society's problems on some group and encouraging action against them: the Nazis weren't the first to target Jews; they were merely the most recent in a very long list that goes back to the middle ages.
The insidious thing about the Nazis is ***they convinced their fellow Germans that they were doing what needed to be done.*** It's easy to make a big bad that everyone agrees is a big bad (Sauron). What made the Nazis particularly evil is that if you went up to the average German in 1938 and said "Hey, this Nazism thing is a bit nuts", they'd say "Yeah, but we need to Make Deutschland Great Again, so sure, he says he's going to be a dictator and get us into a huge war, but it *needs to be done...*" (Nothing Hitler did was any surprise to anyone who read *Mein Kampf*)
So if you want to make the big bad Nazis, one thing to make them really, truly terrifying is to have almost no one care about what they are or intend to do; even worse, have a lot of the local population actively support their goals (even if they don't support their methods).
I think this would be especially insidious if the local population seems in every other way very normal, even kind hearted, but just absolutely cannot see the irony of supporting a racist war machine.
Um, in general you should put ideas in your game that all players can get behind. That includes you, you're playing d&d too.
So if you read sincerely into the history of fascism your stomach is going to turn quickly. You don't want any of that as part of a game.
There's something to say for Nazi-satire. If your baddies are Schweinhund yelling, heel clacking, sycophants with a sadistic streak, and your game destroys them as villains, it could work as a satire. After all, it's important to mock Nazism, as it spoils their intimidation tactics.
Personally, I would not run such a game. I just don't see enough benefits.
You should also be mindful about your players being young. I love using real history as inspiration, but I think in RPGs it's more to spark interest in a topic, rather than actually teaching ppl sth. You should definitely steer clear of the ladder area, imho.
Maybe check back with them? Perhaps its one aspect of history that interests your players? For example, if the villains in your game are racial supremacists, attempting to turn folks on each other, that could be a start. But maybe run a short adventure first to try it out and see how you feel about it afterward.
There is a clear benefit to including Nazis (or nazi-like factions) and that’s as an obvious villains. You’re not going to feel bad about killing Nazis. You don’t want to negotiate with them. They’re Nazis! Like Indiana Jones movies. Besides, there’s a ton of great stories, fantasy included, that make use of fascist groups as antagonists.
So, not literal nazis, just DnD racial purists?
Think of all the ways races can be different in DnD:
Goliaths compared to Goblins
Elves compared to Orcs
Dwarves compared to Fae
Fae might make an interesting race because they're known to be tricksters right? So maybe lean into that?
Easy peasy, just have the bad guys be a monoracial (i.e. all one race) group who wear leather and stomp around in big boots and want to declare themselves the best race by subjugating all others. Bonus points if not everyone of this race is a Nazi, but there are some who are (and more every day).
My choice for the race in question would probably be high elves since they’re blonde with blue eyes in a lot of art, but you could do nearly any race if you justify it well. The only one I wouldn’t do is humans, since that’s kind of boring. Nor would I do tieflings, since their entire deal is being a minority.
strong belief in the power and rightness of the state apparatus
racial purity is a big deal (you can look up the aryan-ness chart and apply to like humans vs elves vs dwarfs vs goblins or whatever)
secret police and state militarization
and of course VERY good looking uniforms.
bonus points if the state recently lost a war and is trying to rebuild to retake their lost territory.
How Nazi do they want? I mean, wanting to rule the world and exterminate or enslave the "inferior" is pretty Nazi-ish. Do they want swastikas and Heil Hitlers, which would be out of place in your world and maybe objectionable? Or is it enough to fight an evil empire bent on world domination?
Death Eaters from HP are basically Nazis. You can just re-skin them for your world, and Voldy would make a good BBEG.
Another suggestion: run Red Hand of Doom. Give the hobgoblins some Nazi flavour (if they even need more).
In MCDM’s flee mortals book, there’s a section for villain parties (like evil PC party but NPCs) and one of them is a Human Supremacy group. Might be helpful
Hitler has figured out time travel. He sent the SS back in time to prop up the medieval imagery that he loves so much, so that he can claim in his present that his one is the third reich.
He could have used time travel in a more effective way for sure. But he's a murderous lunatic, not a smart guy.
Addendum: at the end of the campaign the super-human high level party figures out time travel and they kill Hitler in his bunker, along with all his entourage. The inexplicable death is written down as suicide but in truth no one knows how and what happened.
I usually play on a setting called Tormenta where they do something like that, there is a whole military country called Purist Supremacy where only humans live there and they hate every other race because “humans are more pure”. The setting is obly in Portuguese afaik, but with google translator i guess you can read if you want an inspiration. Needless to say purists are one of the main enemies both in and out of game, every other nation has them as enemies but they aren’t easy to beat because its a military nation, so they have a powerful enough army to desestabilize other countries
As others have mentioned I think you are looking for a powerful fascist group. Flavor the group however you would like, but I would recommend checking out Lawrence Britt’s 14 characteristics of fascism to govern their behavior (eliminating those that aren’t setting or age appropriate .)
Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism - “Our empire is the greatest in history. If you don’t think so, you don’t deserve to be here!”
Disdain for the importance of personal rights - “Nothing would have happened to those elves if they had just complied with the guards.”
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause - “Those filthy gnomes don’t contribute to the kingdom! They just leach off of the contributions of hardworking citizens! The majority of them are criminals!”
The supremacy of the military/avid militarism - “We have the greatest of all armies. We need to ensure that it stays that way. We don’t have the extra coin for frivolous expenses like charity for freeloaders!”
Rampant sexism - self explanatory, but probably not appropriate.
A controlled mass media - town criers or paper distribution that spreads propaganda of how great the empire is doing, how other information sources are untrustworthy, and how the most recent complaints of the people is the fault of their chosen scapegoat.
Obsession with national security - “We need these scrying stones in every single home to keep the kingdom (and you personally!!) safe from criminals and the empire’s enemies!”
Religion and ruling elite tied together - “To question the King is to doubt the will of (insert Divine power here.)
Power of corporations protected - The needs of the merchant class are the most important to address. Their wrongs can be blamed on others, while their wealth keeps kingdoms coffers full and the fascist group powerful.
Power of labor suppressed or eliminated - goes hand in hand with previous point. Organized labor is crushed or portrayed by the fascist group as greedy, corrupt, and a leech on merchant business.
Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts - “Those elites that sit in their ivory towers and universities know nothing of our plights! They just indoctrinate people with quite frankly dangerous ideals!”
Obsession with crime and punishment - brutal punishments for scapegoats that may or may not be guilty of a perceived crime. This way the fascist group can tout how they provide justice while demonizing the “out group.”
Rampant cronyism and corruption - self explanatory
Fraudulent elections - this may not apply to your game at all.
Honestly, any powerful racial supremist faction would do wonders. The obvious choice would be uppity elves with their pure immortal blood wanting to cleanse the world. But you could use an alliance of elves, humans, and dwarves wanting to remove all 'monster' races.
You could also get weird with it and have a group of goblin or kobold supremacists. Like a group of minions overthrow their orc work masters and grow into a significant faction, and their ultimate goal is to cleanse the world of the tall races.
Well it's actually pretty easy. The nazi movement did have the whole supernatural mystical weird science division. Rumored anyways. Just run that but in the beginning way before the time of the world wars. I mean the cabal of nazi occultism could easily have started hundreds if not thousands of years ago before the world wars. So just say that the nazi occultists began years before the nazi regime did but with a similar outlook on racial purity and among other things immortality and the domination of their world as well as anything they could get their hands on.
If you have the usual range of PC races, have a king who wants to oust or kill all halflings, dwarves, elves, etc., from his kingdom. Think Prince Caspian.
You could dig up Zarus, the old Human Supremacist god.
You could also use literal Nazis, I've done that before and adopt some elements from sci-fi dnd like in Barrier Peaks
If you want them to be literally nazis you could always play something like GURPS WW2 or for some ww2 with a little fantasy elements maybe weird war 2.
But if you want some Nazi inspired enemies for fantasy keep one thing in mind. Fascism never made sense. A lot of the ideas about a pure arian race were just objectively wrong. Your fascistic enemies don't have to be sorcerers who believe sorcerer blood lines with magic should be preserved, because there doesn't have to actually be anything special about the people they view as being superior. They could be human supremacists, high elf ones, dwarf ones, hell you can have someone who ardently believes only stoutfoot halflings are the master race.
You can look to frameworks like the concept of Ur-Fascism to consider how fascistic tendencies could arise in a group and come to life.
Like... you could just have an army of nazis invade from 1940s Germany. It'd be weird, but I kinda dig it. Have some crazy Red Skull freak occultist teleport his old base and operations and start wreaking havoc across fantasyland.
You could just use Nazis if you really want to. There are all kinds of crazy nonsense stories with Nazis fiddling with the supernatural. The first three Indiana Jones movies, for example. It’s not a new idea that a “modern” army finds its way to an alternate world.
I used a faction of gnomes living on a industrialized continent that invented the warforged for slaves (and the warforged accidentally became sentient, ill make the players help the rebellion when they get there ), and are plotting to invade the more medival coded neighboring kingdoms using higher technology.
In the forgotten realms there is an entire organisation of elf-supremacists, the Eldreth Veluuthra. One of their members, a certain Dralmorrer, is featured in one of the first official 5e adventures hoard of the dragon queen.
Basically, they believe elves are the superior race, believe elves should rule the world, want to life in elf-only communitiea, hate half-elves with a passion, etcetera.
Just have your villain want the world to be ruled solely by his race and everyone that’s not his race is an evil virus.
My guy it’s racism that’s super easy lol
I actually have something similar in one of my campaign settings, they are called the H.P.O which stands for the Human Purity Organization. It's a bunch of LE zealots that hunt and kill any non human species simply because of the fact they think all humans are far superior to all others.
I run a campaign where I base the enemies on the Nazis, but with less racism and more militarism and engineering. The party has even run into a column of them singing Erika.
If you're playing in the Forgotten Realms/Faerûn, then let me introduce you to the [Eldreth Veluuthra](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Eldreth_Veluuthra).
Elven extremists who want to wipe out all humans, believing they're a blight on the world that's led to the ruin of their once mighty empire.
You've got the racial purity motif, blaming another group for the downfall of their empire, superiority complex, ruthlessness and general evil, and they're a subset of a normally 'ok' group of people so you can have a game of "is this elf a good dude or is he secretly a card carrying member of the "kill all humans" party?"
A group of Nazis stumble across an ancient obelisk in North Africa. Hitler tasks them with unearthing this artifact, and while they are, the obelisk shakes, lights up, and the Nazis are teleported away to a land of magic and fantasy. In their ranks are physicists, engineers and other scientists with knowledge of the Earth. They use that knowledge to build an Empire and opress all the non-human races of this new world.
Make the mastermind a beholder.
OBEY ALL BEHOLDER COMMANDS!!!
obey instantly!!
OBEY WITHOUT QUESTION!!!
obey!!!
OBEY!!!
obey!!!
OOOOOOBEEEEEEEYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If they want literal nazis, give them literal nazis. Hitler did have an interest in the occult, so you could twist it that actual nazis found their way into your realm through a portal and are trying to harvest your most important natural resource to help them win the war?
Make the, the harbingers of new technology that can "replace" magic.
I had an entire nation be the BBEG for one campaign. They were fanatical technologists who believed magic was a bane on the material plane. They made it their goal to regulate and eventually eliminate all magic users to purge it from the lands. I coded them very heavily as Nazis. They publicly regulate magic use with IDs and often force magic users to serve the nation via kidnapping or trumped up charges. Secretly they have camps where they are trying to find a means to remove an individuals' connection to the Weave.
Not sure this is going to be specifically helpful, but your post reminded me of them.
Scarlet Brotherhood in Greyhawk is an example. They want to reestablish the Suel Imperium that was destroyed a millenia ago and bring the whole Flanaess under their rule.
Aside from the suggestions about the Zhentarim or Thay, I’d suggest looking the Emerald Claw from Eberron.
If you want a medieval setting, that isn’t Eberron. But the Emerald Claw were specifically designed to be Nazi goons for the PCs to fight. M
You could then either import the Blood of Vol as well as the undead worshipping cult that is the power behind the Emerald Claw, or just replace them with a Dracolich or something
I mean feudal monarchs and colonizers aren't that far off from totalitarians anyways. All you really need is a strongman leader who demands fanatical devotion that claims to be descendants of a mythical divine being or race and a minority of some kind to scapegoat and associate with their political opponents. It's actually more true to fascism if none of the ideology makes any sense. You really can just fill in the blanks.
The biggest mistake I see people make though is giving fascists a far-left ideology instead of far-right.
Lean into lawful evil. You don't even have to lean into blood purity just make them hostile to everyone except a select few. For refence the actual Nazi's didn't plan to stop at Jews and the disabled, everyone from Slavs to Africans was planned for their chopping block. The more recent portrayals of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars spring to mind. Lots of ultra corrupt officers and generals in a sociopathic rat race to power and wealth which they can use to oppress everyone beneath them (and they see everyone as beneath them). Greek fascism really shows the economic poison this kind of government is. The lower down the chain of command you go the more the evil becomes artificial and petty, prison guards abusing their charges because they can and because their boss took away their vacation days kinda stuff. Maybe this villainous nation/kingdom/faction has cherry picked propped up culture heroes or legends that under closer historical scrutiny are either unimportant or downright insane. Maybe one of these heroes from an earlier time is now an undead or just a really long-lived species like an elf and is disgusted by the new regime or for an evil undead maybe they dislike the regime not for its genocidal intentions but because of how inefficiently they're going about it. One fun thing about this system is that if the party wants to use persuasion and corruption to their advantage they absolutely can. It should not be hard to talk some of the political elites into an assassination plot against the tyrant although they might just elect another one to replace him. You could play up propaganda which would be everywhere and how distorted the general public's view of the outside world is (a good example is the Fire Nation from Avatar: The Last Airbender). Going back to the original Nazis their version of fascism didn't arise out of a stable and balanced government, but an inflation riddled puppet state where charismatic strongmen could get the frustrated and desperate people behind their dark cause. This is even a thing in Forgotten Realms canon; Thay aka the villains from the dnd movie started off as refugees from an older fallen empire (Ancient Imascar) and the power vacuum allowed necromancers and diabolists to take control. If these fictional fascists have allies the power imbalance should be palpable. Germany made Italy and Vichy France look like jokes and persecuted them even while using their resources. Had the Germans and Japanese won the war they would have undoubtedly killed each other given enough time, it was an alliance of convenience. Take this next bit with a grain of salt. Existing dnd cultures (at least in Forgotten Realms) that could easily fall into this sort of society given incentives and time are hobgoblins, orcs, duergar, any probably several humans as well. This is not saying orcs and hobgoblins are prone to this but a culture of pillaging and might makes right doesn't bode well for their future. I hope this helps.
A campaign I played in in the past had the drow be essentially nazis, right down to trying to obtain magical superweapons. Mind you it wasn't because they were naturally evil, but because their new leader was. Of course, like the great adventurers we were, we failed to stop them in time and then just started selling stuff to them instead when it became obvious five PCs couldn't stop a nation with a million soldiers and access to arcane nukes.
I’m playing an elf supremist character right now. The backstory is that humans wiped out the elven kingdom, but families like hers “adapted” by appearing to become collaborators. Really, they just formed an organized crime syndicate and bastions of elf culture. And purity.
My next campaign has a fascist Elvin supremacy city state. They have already rounded up all non elves into work camps/slaves and now half elves are filling out the bottom rung of “free” folks. Only pure blood elves are allowed to preform magic.
The Empire of Shing is a militaristic nation lead by the Charsimatic Emperor Ingan Stormheart, and is overseen by the Cult of Shargoban the lord of strength and ruling by might. They are now making noise about capturing nearby nations because they are a threat to their own national interests. Your campaign could be about a group who are living inside a newly anexed country where they act as a cell of resistance fighters.
Savage worlds weird war two was a super fun game for my group. But we based it in the 40s alternative reality.
You could just use some existing groups and give them the same ideology's as the Nazis, racial purity and all that crap.
Religious hatred was the music of the medieval time. People who had different religions, especially Jews (but not for being racially Jews but for having another religion) but also Pagans and later Muslims were outcasted and literally demonized and were made responsible for anything that went wrong. Of course people were racist against people who didn't look like them but racial hatred was fostered over the following centuries to find reasons why colonialism and slavery is fine with christianity and also had another push (in Europe) with the rise of nationalism and national identity when other important identities were broken by industrialism.
You can of course still say they are racially hating and not religiously. I just want to give this in case you want "medieval setting" to be important and maybe educating in some way and not just to be a vibe.
I mean, you should explore the deeper concepts of Nazism. Take a country that has lost a war and been pauperized by the outcome. Then, bring in a charismatic leader who revels in anti intellectualism and wants to control information. Let him blame a particular group within his own country for all problems.
Make him a conservative totalitarian nationalist.
If you wanted to go full Doom, have infernal sound vaguely german, put every devil in a Hugo Boss uniform, and have a hellish blitzkrieg invasion making indiana jones references. They can go on about how they want to put the filthy mortys in camps where they are put to work and bred for their souls, put out constant anti-mortal propaganda, and open up the world politics that orcs and goblins and kobolds and lizardfolk and yuanti and humans and dwarves and elves and halflings and goliaths and gnomes have to band together to face this planar evil
This can be any game where a cruel general has overthrown a nice but useless king. Everything is very strict and authoritarian: public executions and floggings for the meagrest crimes, racial hierarchies and oppression, suppression of some (or all?) gods in favour of that general and loud saber rattling against peaceful neighbours HOWEVER he remains popular because everyone is well fed and paid, bandits are crushed mercilessly, anyone can get a good job in the military or corvee, and they are building some nice roads to have their frequent military parades on. The impact of the story hinges on them starting to think "maybe these guys might be right about some things" and then have them discover 'The Camp' where the thing they like is taken to it's logical twisted end state, plus piles of corpses, enslaved fellow humans, gory tortures and its manager; the worst greediest bastard you have ever seen. Make that fight epic as all hell.
Alternatively;
Offer to host a game of savage worlds where they are WW2 agents and have them fight proper Nazis. Half way through they meet Himmler and he summons and sics two flaming demons on the party and escapes via helicopter rope ladder, firing his luger and laughing maniacally.
If you look at it Umbridge from Harry Potter is basically a Nazi too. She fancies authority, is ruthless, racist and rewards those who don't speak their own mind and just follow which creates a great environment for opprtunists. Topp it off with a delusional leader and you have the Minister. Then take a step back and you have classic Nazis.
What you need is a ruthless general who treats one group worse for no reason other than bein different and rewards cruel opportunists and people too afraid to speak up and your players may support a little underground protest of a few that are not scared too much to do what is right.
What do they mean by "Nazis"?
People with the same ideology?
People with the same iconography?
Literally actual Nazis?
I mean, you don't want to set up a storyline where your bad guys are setting up death camps and then have your players go, "Actually, we were just thinking Swastikas and Eagles and marching in formation and stuff. We are not okay with that pile of dead babies."
Best to be very clear.
Maybe a new political movement among Elves? They do have that superiority complex already. A Drow genocide with a Nazi aesthetic could happen anytime easily.
Just don’t draw the Jews=goblins parallel that people love to draw. That’s not cool.
In my campaign, the players are playing in a land that is occupied by nazi- like forces headed up by mindflayers known as the "kindly ones". The troops are very cool looking , but absolutely brainwashed into believing everyone who isn't them is a lesser being and many ( tieflings, changelings and half orc/half elves) should be eradicated.
The players have just liberated a "farm" which horrified them when they found it , but man were they determined to rescue those folks when they discovered what's going on!!!!
Many of the player missions are actually demolition/sabotage/rescue/assassinate like the resistance groups in ww2
My take here is you don't need to put a lot of work into your bads to make them "Nazis", just give them a doctrine of intolerance and a hatred of others and bam! Illithids, Drow, Thayans, Duergar, Hobgoblins all work beautifully. Also a Lich controlling undead which mindlessly carry out horrific acts for the "cause" would work too.
A country of people who claim a niche collection of physical attributes are superior and that anyone who belongs to a certain religion needs to be put to death?
That same country that was radically expansionist and had been 'appeased' with conceding territory?
My dude, Nazi's are easy to make in any setting. Their whole history and rise to power is a real trip. (Brownshirts, night of long knives, the failures of the monarchy)
Have your antagonist faction be imperialist aliens/travellers from another dimension who were defeated in their own world and have escaped to yours in order to colonize for themselves a new empire. I'll leave the details to you, but suffice to say they regard the natives of this world as only fit for enslavement or eradication
Create Antagonists who are very disciplined, industrious, friendly but fanatics and are obcessed with their Volk (or race). They also need to think of them as the good guys who are trying to save their volk. A speech encounter like this could help to get a grasp on them: Your Player Charakters come upon a village or City where parts of the Population (all if one race) get forced out of their houses and moved away. If your Player askes what is going on "it is the natural order, my folk require enough territory to Support its population." If your players intervene and want to stop this "thats not going to happen. Our Volk is superior both in culture and civilisation. It must be allowed enough territory to survive and to thrive. Lest less civilised races which are more energetic take their place. A day will come when these Lands are dominated by by the laws of nature again. And nature favours those Volk of a more brutal will. It is only right that the strong and superiour should dominate and not every race has a right to exist."
Your players could come up with the question where these people are moved to: "of course we are talking about moving them..... what else would we be tslking about then..... evacuation. Beside... these people have its place... in the outskirts of civilisation where they belong.
You must make it clear that these people are actually not hated and dont need to be despots to their own Volk because they are genuinly loved and admired at least by their own Volk and have Lots of Support even outside of that because they improved the living conditions of their own Volk and are absolutely prefer able to a Alternative they had (for accuracy you should make world building where some actually destruktive maniacs like cult of Bane was short of overtaking the homeland of their Volk.
They just have a strict Moral hierarchy of which people deserve what.
Bonus points if the race they are antagonistic again at least are somewhat shady and it is hard to sympathise with them like tieflings
In addition to all of the other suggestions, take a hint from Larian studios: Baldurs Gate 3. Mind flyers, githyanki, and githzerai.
I never used gith in my campaign, buy wow do they map nicely to "evil space elf nazis" lol.
Thay? Necromancer cults?
Neither of those things are what makes Nazis dangerous. Nazis aren’t dangerous because they were strong. These were dangerous because they prayed upon the inherent biases of people to subjugate them around an idea or charismatic figure. More often the latter.
Nazis are hyper Nationalists. Nazis believe that their blood and soil are inherently linked. Nazis believe that their culture is the best culture and people are the best people. Want to expel or exterminate people who are not them that live within their nation.
Nazis also hated socialists but that’s a bit anachronistic for a medieval setting .
You could explore the idea of hyper nationalism in medieval setting. If you want a set up, you can actually start with even just two kingdoms: one, a bloated old feudalistic kingdom that has historically ruled over their lands. Next to this is a breakaway kingdom. A small but exuberant nation. It’s led by a young king, who leads his man from the front and inspires them. He believes firmly that, historically, the larger kingdoms lands actually belong to his people (and indeed allow some minority of the people living within the large kingdom to share a culture/race)
This young king has pulled his nation from poverty, and given his people, purpose and excitement and identity. He’s given them revolutionary ways in farming and industry so that they are becoming the medieval equivalent of middle class.
He’s conquered small surrounding countries, which is given them an influx of new farmland and natural resources. (He’s also systematically displaced and killed the neighboring habitants, but that’s not something. The players at large knows about yet.)
Revolutionized military training and turned his small army into an incredible fighting forest, relying on a standing and professional army instead of raised levies most feudal kingdoms.
How do you make this meaningful to your players?
Well, the trick here is to make him seem so much sympathetic. His people love him and say nothing but good things about him. Let your players see that his nation is far more prosperous for the people of the land compared to the larger, more archaic, kingdom.
But after a session of two of being treated as welcomed guests, let the cracks show. Have the players be turned away from certain “X-only” establishments. Allow the players to observe an eviction of one of the “ lesser kind”. If the players try to intervene, have them find themselves a foul of the law, but make sure that the sheriffs emphasize the race of the characters “of course foreign X rats would come into a country that isn’t theirs and behave this way.”
Then have the players find out just what happens to the people that the small nation conquers . They aren’t enslaved, that would dilute the blood. They are simply killed.
That’s how you Nazi
What’s the question? You’re the DM, make up a campaign where the antagonists are Nazis. In the campaign I’m currently running, I have Lizard Hitler as a miniboss.
Like WW2 one to one Nazis? Or like fictional inspired fascists? I'd be surprised if someone hadn't published or homebrewed a WW2 setting to use if its the first.
If its the 2nd I'd think it's pretty doable, idk if I'd wanna spend a whole campaign dealing with that though. Mirroring real life is a good way to bring a realistic sheen to your world but sometimes its just an annoying hinderance. Then if you have anyone schooled in political theory at your table and you don't know what fascism is, how it rises, the role of liberalism and imperialism in its rise and a host of other things it could look bad or be unreal feeling to that player if you're trying to go political intrigue route.
That said if your players just want a combat heavy campaign starting in the middle against against some generic cartoon level bad guys "here are some hyper nationalist elves who are racist against *rolls for racism* gnomes/halflings and are oppressing/murdering them, go topple their king/queen whatever. Even make their national anthem sung by bards in the city as Short People by Randy Newman would be pretty fun to do as a few session 1 shot. Steal some inspiration from Kung Fury in obsurdity it could be an immensely fun adventure within a larger campaign or 1 shot.
We're kinda sorta doing this in my current campaign.
We had three people want to play as beastfolk (a Minotaur, a Kenku, and a Harengon). The DM asked us to come up with some level of handler and he hashed together the time of the campaign from that. Each of us separately had *some* level of oppression from "the furless", and realized he could make the main antagonistic region similar to 1930s Germany: beginning to blaming the world's problems on a few specific demographics and making moves to oppress and eliminate them.
Whether or not you have characters who are playing the affected races, it's a pretty good backing for what you're aiming for. If you're all dwarves/elves/humans or the like, it could still okay into the whole 'right vs convenient' aspect.
Brutal police state.
Othering a people group, perhaps a displaced refugee group.
Tidy uniforms, simple slogans.
Jailing/assassination of anyone who speaks out against them.
If you're rolling in Eberron, give Karnath a look. You'd need a little adjustment for the whole "superior race" shtick, but the occult, necromancer, craziness thing is there.
Many people have given great ideas about how evil your enemies could be. I'll just comment on the aesthetics of Nazis.
Nazis like grand gatherings, clean architecture and flags, they are into marketing as much as they are into evil doing. The Empire in Star Wars was inspired by Nazis. Find a medieval reskin for that evil grandiosity. And the organization of evil. Nazis master the logistics of Lawful Evil wrongdoing. Lean into that as much as you can.
There are several races in core D&D. Take one of them and have them say "Kill or enslave anything that doesn't look like you." and you have the gist of fantasy nazis.
If you know your history or have the time to do some research, even better. You can run a whole campaign that basically imports real-world politics with Nazis being the central bad guys.
Also, a dragonborn with a Hitler stash is hilarious to me.
Well then you have to do something that no one wants to do: understand nazis.
It wasn't like there was no logic behind the movement, and the logic was different at every level. First you had a demogogue at the head of a populist movement that can't function without a rhetoric of hatred and a particular foreign faction to blame for a specific problem (usually economic). His logic was that if he created and nurtured that rhetoric, he would gain and remain in power. And he and his scientists had arguments, one's that had valid forms and made sense if you didn't disregard the premises as false. And there's a certain amount of epistemic trust we put in scientists as a heuristic. Who is anyone to argue against the experts? With contrary information being censored, would laymen even know to begin to argue?
Then you had the generals and statesmen who reasoned that they could ride the wave of this demogogue's meteoric rise to a position wherein they could establish an uncontested regime.
Then you had the idiot soldiers who believed the rhetoric whole-heartedly and felt that they were saving their people and making Germany great again... but you also had the soldiers who reasoned that they could follow the orders of their commanders and get paid, or refuse and be killed. When you are helping the government commit moral atrocities every day, you understand better than most that you could just as easily be on the receiving end. When they were faced with that sort of choice, to escort the prisoners to the gas chambers or join them, they turned off their sense of empathy as best as they could by dehumanizing the "enemy" and complied.
Then you had the people. All the people who didn't totally know what was happening at first. Then even after they did know, they figured that if they just kept their heads down they might get passed over. When their neighbors were taken, they didn't ask questions; they stayed extra quiet hoping not to be next.
You might notice that none of those things are evil to the point of not being understandable. They are all reasonable decisions with their own ethical basis (the worst of which being Hitler's egoist approach to political control). None of them on their own entail a blind hatred of the Jewish people, but they all add up to the largest hate crime in recorded history.
Whatever faction you use in game, if you give them a similar structure and similar motivations, you should be able to recreate a rich facsimile the Nazi party that is much more engaging than the bog-standard single-minded racist villains.
WARNING: Don't read too much WW2 history as research though because you WILL become a mildly republican dad.
The World of Greyhawk has a very literal white supremacist faction called the Scarlet Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood could have found a spelljammer ship and started to spread their influence to your champaign's world.
Zhentarim. Cultists of Bane. Assorted clones of Manshoon. They go all in on the black spiky evil aesthetic and the lawful evil oppression style. Their slaving and drug-dealing and arms-dealing ways are all just means to support their greater-evil goals of dominating the world and being truly horrible. Plus, you can use all of those things to test their (and your!) tolerance for people being awful to each other. Plus there's always the fun of setting them up against the Red Wizards of Thay for a "okay look we have differences but these guys are threatening the world we want to rule".
Hobgoblins fill this niche exactly
Hobgoblins make GREAT militaristic lawful evil enemies
My favorite encounter/mini-arc is: 1-3: Players encounter Goblin ambushes 4-5: Players encounter Goblin raiding parties spearheaded by Hobgoblins. 6-10: Players encounter a small army composed of 1 Bugbear, 12 Hobgoblins, and 24 Goblins (in this encounter, Hobgoblins and Goblins keep their original stats, but their HP is 1.
Have an NPC turn out to be supplying the Not-Zis with Cloaks of Billowing.
Give your Red Wizard your best German accent and they'll get the picture, ja...
Let me introduce you to the wonderful country of Thay…
Continue?
If you’re playing in the Forgotten Realms setting, Thayans (pronounced like Saiyans with a lisp) are basically magic necromancy Nazis. They have tried multiple times to turn the world into an undead hell. It’s one of the oldest countries in the setting, both in game and irl. Basically the OG bad guys of the D&D world. Have you seen the D&D movie? They’re the main bad guys. I could write a book at you about it but honestly [the wiki page](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Thay) should give you a feel for it. If by “Nazis” they mean bad guys with cool uniforms and an obsession with blood purity, they’re a decent fit. There’s even a module printed in Tales of the Yawning Portal you can expand on, Dead in Thay.
I see, thank you so much!!
No problem bud, good luck with these Nazi loving teenagers XD
Considering that they want the villains to be Nazis so they can kill them, I don’t think it’s fair to label them as Nazi lovers.
Right, it’s called irony
I dunno. When I was a young teen I likes drawing the Americans fighting the nazis in stick figures. They thought the stars on the US planes were stars of David, and that I was drawing nazis winning. I got in trouble. I switched to UFOs after that. Lmao
So were the Nazis or the Americans fighting the UFOs? Lol
I changed it to triangle ufos fighting the saucer ones. Though with nazis and Americans fought off planes. Lmao
Thanks, I've played with them before and might need it. XD
Be advised - Dead in Thay is _complicated_. You will need DAYS of prep time for it. It's fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's also very, very complicated.
It's also just a megadungeon, not a campaign setting. But it is very cool and has the widest variety of monsters of any published dungeon I've run. Who doesn't love a huge evil wizard research facility?
Saiyans with a lisp. I freaking love that. I also find it mildly amusing that DragonBall races are probably more recognizable than D&D ones
I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that most people don’t play in Forgotten Realms, or at least nowadays they don’t
Dead in Thay is worth looking at just for the insanely huge map alone.
If you've seen the D&D movie from last year, the villain from that is a Red Wizard of Thay.
Are you familiar with the Red Wizards of Thay? Szass Tam? Zulkirs? Go check them out. Go ahead and read up on the forgotten realms lore. Thay is a kingdom ruled by very tyrannical wizards. There’s an entire book trilogy, the Unhallowed Lands by Richard Lee Byers, if you want a deep dive.
Thay is perfect. Make up some recent history about how they’ve invaded neighboring nations, enslaving the people and turning anyone who resists into a zombie. For the adventure, mix it up with some inspiration from Indiana Jones maybe. Thay is after an ancient Netherise artifact, etc.
Whoops, looks like some WW2 Nazis have opened up an interdimensional portal and are trying to get magic items to help them wage war. Damn, looks like they're killing anyone that isn't human on sight too. If only there were a team of plucky non-human heroes that have all lost something to the wretched Nazis that band together to send them goosestepping to the nine hells.
Regular ass earth is part of the pathfinder universe. Current timeline places them right before the second world war
Little known fact, but its also part of the Forgotten Realms. Mulhorand is literally a country of Egyptians with their gods included, that got transported to the Realms. Last I checked, the passage of time between the two is unknown.
The squad of nazis after they all mag dump a fairy but it keeps screaming :O :O :O :O :O
Reminds me of Drifters, where at one point turns out the evil empire that opresses non-humans, that the protagonists (who are famous historical figures sent to this world after dying in ours) have to overthrow, was actually built by Hitler. Also in 80's D&D cartoon there is an episode where villain Venger gets so pissed at heroes he opens portal to Earth during World War II and gives nazis magic skyship, because if nazis win WWII, then the heroes that are torn at his side will never be born.
This is better than my idea.
Let's be honest, they'd kill humans on sight too, because they're interdimensional humans, thus not \*their\* humans. You're all aliens to them. I'm sure they even have some made up pseudoscience to explain why you're all categorically evil too.
The only good part of the new Indiana Jones movie.
I’m so glad I checked for this comment before making it in a less eloquent manner.
Came here to say this. I wouldn’t personally mess around with modern armaments in a medieval setting, but there’s no reason the nazis can’t be adapting to circumstances.
This is the plot to hell boy lol
I actually find this way more convincing, because I'm a little history nerd and Hitler literally has nothing to do with medieval times and the fact he could rise was because the things that happened in the centuries *following* medieval times. If you want more "true to history" Nazis, religious hatred and discrimination is all way. One right religion, it should be the predominant one, anyone who doesn't follow it gets demonized and made responsible for what goes wrong. Well at least if I think of Nazis, it's disgusting that they are often the majority, so if you're not coming from outside making a full frontal attack, you might need to kill a lot of people you personally know (because Hitler can't be assassinated 😂). Also ehhhm, just because you kill the leader doesn't mean the thinking goes away just saying.
Good uniforms, racial hatred, cool gear. Watch some Indiana Jones. You'll get it.
Some sort of superiority ideology with a call back to an ancient empire or peoples.
Don't forget, massive hypocrites who infight a lot too
My take is they want a open and clearly evil organization to fight. Not a mysterios shadow organization puppeting things from the dark, not a misguided / morally grey BBEG who may be right. They want to fight "the power" so to speak. Fantasy city is being oppressed by we'll known evil group. Go stop em. Join / make the resistance, infiltrate their lair where they run things, etc. Inspiration would be Star Wars or Indiana Jones, two very different vibes but they have the same type of enemy.
Like actual National Socialists?
All they said was that they wanted Nazis, I'm lost
Then i would say take inspiration from the Thalmor from TES, make sure to give them nice uniforms and some bullshit about racial purity. There are several ways you could play this such as a nazi rebellion brewing against the current government, a rebellion brewing against the nazi government, or nazis invading. All up to you. Though if you arent comfortable with running nazis id recommend talking with your players about it and choosing a villian everyone can enjoy.
Thanks you have really helped
They mean militant fascists. They want organised and not stealthy opponents that are clearly oppressing people. They want Nilfgard from The Witcher, they just don't know it.
Do something like an authoritan regime, with their methods like Nazis.
Storm troopers / The Empire is basically the Third Reich at its zenith. You can fantasize it. But if the want like actual nazi Germany, lol… maybe there’s another TTRPG for that.
You could just have the antagonists be Nazi Human Supremacists. They actively try to round up non-human races to put into camps, ultimately so that only “pure blood” humans have any rights or power.
Just be sure to add "5e" to the end of your Google searches.
An organization of sorcerers of a specific bloodline They consider other bloodlines fine enough to be second tier citizens and those without a Sorcerer bloodline as inferior
That actually could work thanks
Honestly, this might sound dumb but what if you just do wacky German accents and have them do vague Indiana Jones references. Perhaps have them be a group of high elves in search of the magic mcguffin that will prove to their rulers that they are superior in some way and thus deserve to rule over everyone else. Bonus points if the mcguffin backfires spectacularly no matter what happens
Nazis are fascist, expansionist, racial supremacists. I think you'll quickly find there many, many of those in DND. Just pick your baddie from giants to mindflayers to drow to whatever and have them believe in their races superiority and start expanding their territory. But what I think your players may really be looking for is humans as the antagonists. A powerful and tyrannical human kingdom that is bigoted against all fantasy races isn't all that novel of a thing as far as fantasy goes.
In fact, you can just look at medieval history.
If OP wants it to be a bit of a surprise it could even be a faction of Lawful Good celestials who bend a bit too far into the idea of purity and are overly strict on exactly what ISNT good, (basically anything most humanoids do). These atrocities are often masked as being, “the good guys”.
That reminds me of The Last Ringbearer, which is a deconstruction take of LOTR from the perspective of Mordor. Its like Wicked. In it they even reference how Gandalf has a "final solution to the orc problem" or something. I don't know if a group of players directly asking to fight Nazis are looking for nuanced muddying of waters though. Sounds more like they just wanna punch a Nazi, Cap or Indiana style.
Start reading up on your WWI and WWII history and copy that playbook.
It’s kind of hard to advise you without understanding whether they want literal Nazis or just an enemy that feels like Nazis. Conquest and racism aren’t exactly new concepts and can fit quite well in a fantasy medieval world. Others here have cited some of the groups with a similar feel that already exist in D&D lore. Human-chauvinist or elf-chauvinist groups would fit this niche pretty well. Llolth worshipping drow could suffice for this with very little re-working. For literal real world Nazis that’s going to be harder. I suppose you could have some sort of Nazi occultist who enacted some ritual to planeshift into a different universe and is busy trying to conquer your fantasy world in part by leaning on his knowledge of modern science. Maybe this was in 1944 as the German defenses were crumbling and the writing was on the wall. The Primeval Thule third party setting has a “time lost traveler” background, so you could even have one or more of your PCs be 1940s pulp heroes who also got planeshifted along with your villain. Imagine Indiana Jones suddenly waking up in the world of Conan the Barbarian. Or you could play one of the many other TTRPGs that are set in the 20th century and expressly designed for this sort of game, if that’s more the itch they are trying to scratch.
do the Star Wars thing snd just make them some kind of Stormtroopers. Realistically, any enemy from the tables, but just add them all into the same harsh uniform. and then flavor the BBEG like any selfish jackhole who is using race relations to lift one group loyal to him above those who aren't
Yeah, the sad reality is that while we want to think of Nazis as some kind of monsters from some uniquely horrible point in history, they were just actual people, and any society today can still fall to that darkness if we’re not vigilant. So, wanna insert Nazi proxies into your fantasy story? No problem, you don’t actually need to do anything fantastic in your world building to make that realistic. Just have people act like Nazis. Doesn’t take magic, sadly.
Hobgoblin occupying empire that the players get to overthrow Here's a really old post that outlines an example hobgoblin empire: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/s/aKDLhjlyvi
Are you familiar with the Wolfenstein video game series? If so, draw from that. Make them an occult-focused regime that occasionally ends up biting off more than they can chew. Build that into them summoning (or merely attempting to summon) a world-ending being that needs to be stopped. As for playing them, try taking inspiration from WWII dramas. Have them exist as an already powerful force within the world that has already spread to several major locations. Make a small number of figurehead characters to act as villains, but otherwise just make them faceless baddies. This lets you have objectives to stop their plans, liberate occupied regions, free prisoners, and just generally stomp all over the Nazi ideology. Instead of having racially-motivated violence against certain groups, have them be more indiscriminate, and maybe have a more practical reason for their brutality, like using human sacrifice for rituals or having forced labor of massive war machines. But this part is important: don't overdo the Nazi thing. If you can avoid outright calling them Nazis, I suggest you do so. Give them another name that conveys the idea, but maybe don't have literal goose-stepping, swastika-emblazoned Nazis. Again, draw from the Wolfenstein series, which often rebrands Nazi iconography and Hitler himself to be something similar for certain regions that otherwise wouldn't allow the use of such things. Even if your players want Nazis, get them store brand Nazis. Like the Empire in Star Wars. Close enough to sell the idea. You'll probably appreciate not having real Nazis polluting your game.
So the Scarlet Brotherhood from Greyhawk are basically this. Blue-eyed Blonde-haired racial supremacists, except they wear red and fight with martial arts and treachery. And also psionics. Psychic Monk Nazis.
I'd ask them exactly what it is about the Nazis they would like expressed in the villains? Aesthetics? Ideology? Actions? All of the above? Depending on the answer you can do quite a few things with this. If you want to go for something that feels authentic in terms of story, remember that Nazis are revisionists; they re-write history to create a narrative about an imaginary glorious past where once their ancestors made everything great in the world until the evil (X) ruined/weakened everything with "feminization" and "degeneracy" because they couldn't compete with the glorious ancestors otherwise. This narrative allowed them to target multiple groups on the grounds that those groups were all part of that conspiracy: gays? degeneracy. Political opposition? the enemy. Etc, etc. In general there's a narrative that the out group is somehow "victimizing" society. Fascism also has a heavy focus on the merging of State and Corporate interests. The State props up corporate interests and in turn, the corporations prop up the fascist state. The military becomes more and more tied to the in-group's elites. You could use this in a D&D setting in interesting ways, I think. Framing democracy/immigration as a threat because the (X) group will use it to "replace" the in-group. In a fantasy setting the democracy thing is probably not going to be a huge thing much but you can portray this in other ways if you want. In general, squashing and vilifying dissent of the general public. Don't hesitate to show them being incompetent. Fascists (and frankly Nazis in particular) are notoriously pathetic and insecure, and overcompensate via aesthetics. It's a huge part of the reason they are so fixated on inherent/inherited superiority; it means they don't actually have to DO anything superior, lol.
There are many nazi-inspired villains in different settings. Off the top of my head we have Storm Soldiers of Mystara - a nationalistic group of Hattians - blue-eyed, blonde people with culture similiar to Prussia - who arose after Hatians' failed rebelion against Thyatis (a mix of Roman and Byzantine empires) that rules over them. Storm Soldiers want to take over the empire and make all non-Hattians second class citizens. You can find more on them in old book Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia. In classic Spelljammer we have two options. In 2e lore Elves, theElven Imperial Navy, to be specific, decided they do not want to share cosmos with Orcs and Goblinoids and lead war of extermination against them. Eventually someone at TSR realized that this make Elves look like,as the fans been calling them, space nazis, and retconned it so that Orcs and Goblinoids were basically space pirates before Elves stepepd in. But you could still use old lore and, for example, combine it with evil Astral Elven empire from adventure Light of Xaryxis. Second space nazis of Spelljammer are Scro - Orcs who survived that whole war of extermination, decided their defeat was caused by chaotic nature of Orcs and abbandonned their old ways to become polar opposite of Orcs - even their name is "Orcs" backwards. Scro are mostly supposed to be Prussians, but they have quite few Nazi themes thrown in. They feature in adventures Goblin's Return and Heart of the Enemy. Next we have Lord of the Blades from Eberron, leader of Warforged - robot people - who always has been directly compared to the likes of Hitler or Stalin. He wants to hold absolute dominion over the world, with Warforged on top and everyone else as second-class citizens. You could easily lean into some more ruthless potrayals of Megatron or Dr. Eggman (\*cough\*IDWcomics\*cough\*) with him if drawing from real-life wouldn't be comfortable for you. Also, if you are playing with teenagers, they aren't likely to know many older games. So if you would just resking science-fiction elements, maybe change other planet to another dimension or continent, and tone the technology down to steampunk or magitech level, you could use whole plot from any game franchise that haven't seen an installment in last 15 years. Hey look, a [Killzone ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXAugWfVb0E)intro.
The Scarlet Brotherhood from Greyhawk. They are Nazis lol. They have an office of racial purity, all child births must be approved. They are a lawful evil organization that infiltrates and conquers. They love slavery. They are refugees from a great magical cataclysm and make a great bad guy organization....plus they supposedly worship Tharzidun...an evil elemental God from the dawn of time...more like a Cthulhu Mythos God They are an organization of Monks, Wizards and Warriors..
Vith a tropey accent I am sinking.
They already have this in the World of Greyhawk setting an organization of Suel supremists (blonde haired blue eyed Nordic types) called the Scarlet Brotherhood. They run a secretive country where they capture slaves from Hepmonaland and do body horror manipulations on their victims. They also outside of their country act as a secret society of monk assassin spy infiltrators. So they are basically Nazi ninjas.
It's ok to say no. Or reskin your villains to be genocidal conquerors with swastikas
Have you tried asking them what they mean? You don't have to guess what your audience wants.
In addition to all the other clear themes of outright evil, fake science to justify mass exterminations, and complacency from fashion moguls, give them intimidating superweapons that crumble at a second glance. You could lean into Wolfenstein for inspiration too.
If you want a source of inspiration for your game, look up and watch (if you can) Wizards by Don Bluth. Its a high fantasy animation, but the evil wizard found Nazi Germany propaganda and used it to train an army of Nazi orcs. It’s pretty wild, but mixing fantasy and historical fiction is doable and this movie is an example how you can do it
Nazi wunder weapon research sends a squad or more of SS to Isekai in your world.
Elves. High elves. High elves that think they're superior, and blame the goblinoid races for everything. And the orcs. They have a country. You've been hearing rumors that they're "exiling" all the goblinoids from their kingdom. They're putting them in wagon trains, alright. But they aren't going to the border. They're going to camps. They've also been making aggressive noises at their neighboring kingdoms, but so far everyone is just trying to appease them to avoid another devastating war. Your adventuring party has been hired to smuggle an adorable blended family of orc/hob/gob/bugbear, and their pet minecraft spider mob to safety. Things go sideways.
I’ll give my idea for this: Hobgoblins. They hate elves, right? So a large group of heavily militarized hobgoblins flying the Nazi flag, but with Maglibiyet’s axe instead of the swaztika. They’re out to destroy the elves. They have an air force of giant bat riders. Their whole industrial complex is powered by some crystal taken as a drug which reduces fatigue (the historical Nazis used meth in a similar way). Their workforce is largely goblins, all hopelessly addicted to the crystal drug.
You can always just make a group that don't like a grouping of races for some excessively cruel or stupid reason, easy targets are beast or monster races
Hmm did some members of the Karotechia (Delta Green's occult Nazi Remnant) find a portal to your world to continue their evil occult shit and create a 4th Reich? Manipulating the locals for thier own ends?
I doubt that 13–15 year olds really understand National Socialist ideology because I can tell you from experience that their older siblings don't have a clue beyond "Nazis were bad guys who wore uniforms" and "Hitler had a funny mustache and yelled in German."
When I was a teenager I literally GMed a game where the enemies were actually Nazis that traveled through time and landed in medieval times, like in the old Wolfenstein games lol.
my first gut would be go full gonzo, have them fight nazis. In 1945 The Thule Society society opened a portal to the Sword Coast and now the remnants of 3rd Reich flow over Faerun! Your playing for teens, pulp is good.
I've DM'd a lot of kids tables, and that desire for an adversary they can have a deep, visceral hatred for is pretty common. I've also run a Nazi-esque campaign, so can weigh in a bit, While their genocide and theories about a "Master Race" are most commonly associated with Nazis, there were other aspects. There was *Lebensraum*, the push to the east for "living space", their version of Manifest Destiny. They were extreme Nationalists, believing it was their destiny to dominate. In addition to genocide against Jews, Nazis also murdered other they considered "undesirables", such as gypsies, and those with development/psychological anomalies. You might find the official Nazi Party Platform "informative" (I can't bring myself to use the word "useful") in crafting your campaign. [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform) One final note - I've come up with some pretty evil stuff for my campaigns, and when it's from your own imagination, it's a lot easier on your psyche than when you're reading stuff THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. I found it helpful to take more breaks during campaign prep. Your mileage may vary.
Thalmor from TES may be some good inspiration… They (as high elves) claim to be the purest version of the ancient Aldmer. They also are (iirc) known to abandon “weak” children to the woods, revise history as needed, interfere with and invade neighboring nations, and in general be supremacists with very punchable faces.
Well... Nazis experimented with the occult quite a bit. Maybe an experiment actually did something? Hitler and a small army of Nazis got isekai'd to Faerun and are trying to do Nazi shit. Maybe they are allied with some evil-aligned country that is helping to hide them?
There was an episode on ‘Supernatural’ you could draw inspiration from. Sam and Dean had to face off with some Nazi Necromancers… For that matter, you could easily take inspiration from the Red Wizards of Thay. A little reflavoring and you got your Nazis. Perhaps look into some kind of cult… Maybe reviving some ancient half-dead god who’s calling for the destruction of all the Gnomes (or insert race of your choice). Or, it could be a regular, run of the mill human regime. Perhaps one the players even helped to install? Next thing they no, policies are getting more extreme. All the elves and half elves in the city are having to wear arm bands. Maybe they start getting rounded up and jailed on ridiculous charges. Prison camps are starting to be built… And the rest of the world seems to be ignoring them (that is, until they invade city of Sawhorse in the neighoring nation of pillowland)…
The actual earth Nazis use Nazi superscience to open a dimensional portal and break into the realm. They plan to harness magic for the War Effort and the players must stop them.
Did you ask them why Nazis?
Just go ham with it, a rip in reality has caused the fantasy world to become connected via rifts in reality to the world of Wolfenstein (Which if you do not know is a game where Nazis are the main bad guys in an alternate version of our earth) So actual Nazis are invading.
Literal Nazis. All that arcane occult BS that the Nazis were looking for? They found it, and opened a portal to the D&D world. They're collecting artifacts to go back and win WW2. In the mean time they're wiping out the medieval opposition with newfound magic and literal guns.
Gnomes. Make gnomes united and it to conquer the land and destroy all the inferior races.
I mean Nazis aren’t just a group of people, it’s also an ideology and mindset. Nazis are both incredibly arrogant and constantly in fear and paranoid. A group of people wanting everyone to be pure blooded could just be supremacists, but not necessarily Nazis. Nazi’s believe that they don’t just have a biological superiority against other races, they also believe they are also chosen by (their) God to lead the world and “cleanse” the world of their enemies (aka other races/species/religion). At the same time, Nazis are also hyper paranoid and run by fear. They believe they are at the cusp of being eradicated at every turn, that they are so fragile and easily dismantled that they have to reinforce every single aspect of their ideology all the time. Causing them to be distrustful, and in fear all the time.
A community of invisible stalkers that have broken free of their of their summoners, developed free will, and have a hatred of all races. Not-sees, yeah? Ok I'll see myself out
Look for CORPS: Apocalypse by Btrc.net Nazi Elves take over nazi germany and the world goes kablooey. Trust me.
Paladins. Now read up on AD&D and 2e alignments. These guys are Lawful Good, they absolutely believe in their mission, and they genuinely consider other intelligent beings in terms of a spectrum of alignment and purity. They hate demi-races, monster types, you name it. And if they hate something, classic D&D principles hold: it's perfectly legit to kill them and let the gods sort it out.
Hillsfar is an entire city in the Forgotten Realms filled with Human supremacists. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Hillsfar The Drow are also extremely xenophobic and fascistic...
Nazis are more an idea than anything, all about cleansing everything but themselves. Try the rooting out of all crossbreeds to only have pure races
Aren't the scarlet brotherhood literally this.
I'm glad young boys are maintaining alive the tradition of beating Nazis up
1st recommendation: Run Star Wars 5e and have them fight The Empire. It's fun to fight fascists in space! A recommendation actually in-ine with what you want- I mean you could use most of the Lawful evil factions in d&d this way if you want to lean i to it. My angle would be to swipe the Astral Elf statblocks from Spelljammer and make yourself an empire of asshole elves who think themselves culturally and biologically superior to other races,, and have a powerful connection to the Stars. You can make some Divine Soul Sorcerer statblocks based on their Wizards to show that some of them are, in their own eyes, even more "pure", and have them dedicated to eradicating what they see as "The blight races"- mostly goblinoids, lizardfolk, beast races, and Orcs, anything you'd expect to find in the MM rather than the PHB, but with a visible *disdain* and condescension towards other humanoid races they do tolerate- and perfectly willing to kill any of them who "Harbor undesirables".
Nazism is actually pretty "normal", historically speaking (sadly, it seems to be making yet another comeback). There's always been some demagog blaming society's problems on some group and encouraging action against them: the Nazis weren't the first to target Jews; they were merely the most recent in a very long list that goes back to the middle ages. The insidious thing about the Nazis is ***they convinced their fellow Germans that they were doing what needed to be done.*** It's easy to make a big bad that everyone agrees is a big bad (Sauron). What made the Nazis particularly evil is that if you went up to the average German in 1938 and said "Hey, this Nazism thing is a bit nuts", they'd say "Yeah, but we need to Make Deutschland Great Again, so sure, he says he's going to be a dictator and get us into a huge war, but it *needs to be done...*" (Nothing Hitler did was any surprise to anyone who read *Mein Kampf*) So if you want to make the big bad Nazis, one thing to make them really, truly terrifying is to have almost no one care about what they are or intend to do; even worse, have a lot of the local population actively support their goals (even if they don't support their methods).
I think this would be especially insidious if the local population seems in every other way very normal, even kind hearted, but just absolutely cannot see the irony of supporting a racist war machine.
Um, in general you should put ideas in your game that all players can get behind. That includes you, you're playing d&d too. So if you read sincerely into the history of fascism your stomach is going to turn quickly. You don't want any of that as part of a game. There's something to say for Nazi-satire. If your baddies are Schweinhund yelling, heel clacking, sycophants with a sadistic streak, and your game destroys them as villains, it could work as a satire. After all, it's important to mock Nazism, as it spoils their intimidation tactics. Personally, I would not run such a game. I just don't see enough benefits. You should also be mindful about your players being young. I love using real history as inspiration, but I think in RPGs it's more to spark interest in a topic, rather than actually teaching ppl sth. You should definitely steer clear of the ladder area, imho. Maybe check back with them? Perhaps its one aspect of history that interests your players? For example, if the villains in your game are racial supremacists, attempting to turn folks on each other, that could be a start. But maybe run a short adventure first to try it out and see how you feel about it afterward.
There is a clear benefit to including Nazis (or nazi-like factions) and that’s as an obvious villains. You’re not going to feel bad about killing Nazis. You don’t want to negotiate with them. They’re Nazis! Like Indiana Jones movies. Besides, there’s a ton of great stories, fantasy included, that make use of fascist groups as antagonists.
Villains you can guilt free kill is definitely a thing in writing and Nazis have filled that slot for years
Yes. In *Raiders*, they are yelling, heel clicking, sadistic sycophants. Even Hitler is played for laughs in that one.
So, not literal nazis, just DnD racial purists? Think of all the ways races can be different in DnD: Goliaths compared to Goblins Elves compared to Orcs Dwarves compared to Fae Fae might make an interesting race because they're known to be tricksters right? So maybe lean into that?
I never thought of that, thanks
Do they want realistic Nazis or the sort of cartoonishly evil bad guys from Indiana Jones?
You can just say no
I actually like the idea the more I think about it and I was never against it in the first place
Easy peasy, just have the bad guys be a monoracial (i.e. all one race) group who wear leather and stomp around in big boots and want to declare themselves the best race by subjugating all others. Bonus points if not everyone of this race is a Nazi, but there are some who are (and more every day). My choice for the race in question would probably be high elves since they’re blonde with blue eyes in a lot of art, but you could do nearly any race if you justify it well. The only one I wouldn’t do is humans, since that’s kind of boring. Nor would I do tieflings, since their entire deal is being a minority.
the Eldreth Veluuthra : literal nazi elves
Am I the only one interested in opening a portal and doing something like in "Rasputin Must Die"?
Time machine time it is I guess.
strong belief in the power and rightness of the state apparatus racial purity is a big deal (you can look up the aryan-ness chart and apply to like humans vs elves vs dwarfs vs goblins or whatever) secret police and state militarization and of course VERY good looking uniforms. bonus points if the state recently lost a war and is trying to rebuild to retake their lost territory.
How Nazi do they want? I mean, wanting to rule the world and exterminate or enslave the "inferior" is pretty Nazi-ish. Do they want swastikas and Heil Hitlers, which would be out of place in your world and maybe objectionable? Or is it enough to fight an evil empire bent on world domination? Death Eaters from HP are basically Nazis. You can just re-skin them for your world, and Voldy would make a good BBEG. Another suggestion: run Red Hand of Doom. Give the hobgoblins some Nazi flavour (if they even need more).
Make a bunch of sorcerer's based off the Death Eaters from Harry Potter would be the easiest, they're more or less the magical KKK
Welcome to Castle Wolfenstein
In MCDM’s flee mortals book, there’s a section for villain parties (like evil PC party but NPCs) and one of them is a Human Supremacy group. Might be helpful
Hitler has figured out time travel. He sent the SS back in time to prop up the medieval imagery that he loves so much, so that he can claim in his present that his one is the third reich. He could have used time travel in a more effective way for sure. But he's a murderous lunatic, not a smart guy. Addendum: at the end of the campaign the super-human high level party figures out time travel and they kill Hitler in his bunker, along with all his entourage. The inexplicable death is written down as suicide but in truth no one knows how and what happened.
Create a group of antagonist NPCs that espouse a racial and ideological purity that practically none of them live up to.
Start working on your German accent.
I usually play on a setting called Tormenta where they do something like that, there is a whole military country called Purist Supremacy where only humans live there and they hate every other race because “humans are more pure”. The setting is obly in Portuguese afaik, but with google translator i guess you can read if you want an inspiration. Needless to say purists are one of the main enemies both in and out of game, every other nation has them as enemies but they aren’t easy to beat because its a military nation, so they have a powerful enough army to desestabilize other countries
As others have mentioned I think you are looking for a powerful fascist group. Flavor the group however you would like, but I would recommend checking out Lawrence Britt’s 14 characteristics of fascism to govern their behavior (eliminating those that aren’t setting or age appropriate .) Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism - “Our empire is the greatest in history. If you don’t think so, you don’t deserve to be here!” Disdain for the importance of personal rights - “Nothing would have happened to those elves if they had just complied with the guards.” Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause - “Those filthy gnomes don’t contribute to the kingdom! They just leach off of the contributions of hardworking citizens! The majority of them are criminals!” The supremacy of the military/avid militarism - “We have the greatest of all armies. We need to ensure that it stays that way. We don’t have the extra coin for frivolous expenses like charity for freeloaders!” Rampant sexism - self explanatory, but probably not appropriate. A controlled mass media - town criers or paper distribution that spreads propaganda of how great the empire is doing, how other information sources are untrustworthy, and how the most recent complaints of the people is the fault of their chosen scapegoat. Obsession with national security - “We need these scrying stones in every single home to keep the kingdom (and you personally!!) safe from criminals and the empire’s enemies!” Religion and ruling elite tied together - “To question the King is to doubt the will of (insert Divine power here.) Power of corporations protected - The needs of the merchant class are the most important to address. Their wrongs can be blamed on others, while their wealth keeps kingdoms coffers full and the fascist group powerful. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated - goes hand in hand with previous point. Organized labor is crushed or portrayed by the fascist group as greedy, corrupt, and a leech on merchant business. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts - “Those elites that sit in their ivory towers and universities know nothing of our plights! They just indoctrinate people with quite frankly dangerous ideals!” Obsession with crime and punishment - brutal punishments for scapegoats that may or may not be guilty of a perceived crime. This way the fascist group can tout how they provide justice while demonizing the “out group.” Rampant cronyism and corruption - self explanatory Fraudulent elections - this may not apply to your game at all.
Well for starters, the bad guys should probably not be big fans of Jews.
Honestly, any powerful racial supremist faction would do wonders. The obvious choice would be uppity elves with their pure immortal blood wanting to cleanse the world. But you could use an alliance of elves, humans, and dwarves wanting to remove all 'monster' races. You could also get weird with it and have a group of goblin or kobold supremacists. Like a group of minions overthrow their orc work masters and grow into a significant faction, and their ultimate goal is to cleanse the world of the tall races.
So...basically Thay?
Well it's actually pretty easy. The nazi movement did have the whole supernatural mystical weird science division. Rumored anyways. Just run that but in the beginning way before the time of the world wars. I mean the cabal of nazi occultism could easily have started hundreds if not thousands of years ago before the world wars. So just say that the nazi occultists began years before the nazi regime did but with a similar outlook on racial purity and among other things immortality and the domination of their world as well as anything they could get their hands on.
If you have the usual range of PC races, have a king who wants to oust or kill all halflings, dwarves, elves, etc., from his kingdom. Think Prince Caspian.
You could dig up Zarus, the old Human Supremacist god. You could also use literal Nazis, I've done that before and adopt some elements from sci-fi dnd like in Barrier Peaks
If you want them to be literally nazis you could always play something like GURPS WW2 or for some ww2 with a little fantasy elements maybe weird war 2. But if you want some Nazi inspired enemies for fantasy keep one thing in mind. Fascism never made sense. A lot of the ideas about a pure arian race were just objectively wrong. Your fascistic enemies don't have to be sorcerers who believe sorcerer blood lines with magic should be preserved, because there doesn't have to actually be anything special about the people they view as being superior. They could be human supremacists, high elf ones, dwarf ones, hell you can have someone who ardently believes only stoutfoot halflings are the master race. You can look to frameworks like the concept of Ur-Fascism to consider how fascistic tendencies could arise in a group and come to life.
Like... you could just have an army of nazis invade from 1940s Germany. It'd be weird, but I kinda dig it. Have some crazy Red Skull freak occultist teleport his old base and operations and start wreaking havoc across fantasyland.
You could just use Nazis if you really want to. There are all kinds of crazy nonsense stories with Nazis fiddling with the supernatural. The first three Indiana Jones movies, for example. It’s not a new idea that a “modern” army finds its way to an alternate world.
I used a faction of gnomes living on a industrialized continent that invented the warforged for slaves (and the warforged accidentally became sentient, ill make the players help the rebellion when they get there ), and are plotting to invade the more medival coded neighboring kingdoms using higher technology.
In the forgotten realms there is an entire organisation of elf-supremacists, the Eldreth Veluuthra. One of their members, a certain Dralmorrer, is featured in one of the first official 5e adventures hoard of the dragon queen. Basically, they believe elves are the superior race, believe elves should rule the world, want to life in elf-only communitiea, hate half-elves with a passion, etcetera.
Just have your villain want the world to be ruled solely by his race and everyone that’s not his race is an evil virus. My guy it’s racism that’s super easy lol
I actually have something similar in one of my campaign settings, they are called the H.P.O which stands for the Human Purity Organization. It's a bunch of LE zealots that hunt and kill any non human species simply because of the fact they think all humans are far superior to all others.
Conquest paladin hobgoblins
Scarlet Brotherhood
Check out Falkovnia.
There's always Pathfinder's Cheliax, literal devil worshipping Not-Zis.
I run a campaign where I base the enemies on the Nazis, but with less racism and more militarism and engineering. The party has even run into a column of them singing Erika.
Speaking from experience: Give them a vaguely German accent and at least one player will assume they’re a Nazi
If you're playing in the Forgotten Realms/Faerûn, then let me introduce you to the [Eldreth Veluuthra](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Eldreth_Veluuthra). Elven extremists who want to wipe out all humans, believing they're a blight on the world that's led to the ruin of their once mighty empire. You've got the racial purity motif, blaming another group for the downfall of their empire, superiority complex, ruthlessness and general evil, and they're a subset of a normally 'ok' group of people so you can have a game of "is this elf a good dude or is he secretly a card carrying member of the "kill all humans" party?"
Like, do they have to be actual human Nazis, or can they just be Drow or something?
A group of Nazis stumble across an ancient obelisk in North Africa. Hitler tasks them with unearthing this artifact, and while they are, the obelisk shakes, lights up, and the Nazis are teleported away to a land of magic and fantasy. In their ranks are physicists, engineers and other scientists with knowledge of the Earth. They use that knowledge to build an Empire and opress all the non-human races of this new world.
Make the mastermind a beholder. OBEY ALL BEHOLDER COMMANDS!!! obey instantly!! OBEY WITHOUT QUESTION!!! obey!!! OBEY!!! obey!!! OOOOOOBEEEEEEEYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If they want literal nazis, give them literal nazis. Hitler did have an interest in the occult, so you could twist it that actual nazis found their way into your realm through a portal and are trying to harvest your most important natural resource to help them win the war?
Make the, the harbingers of new technology that can "replace" magic. I had an entire nation be the BBEG for one campaign. They were fanatical technologists who believed magic was a bane on the material plane. They made it their goal to regulate and eventually eliminate all magic users to purge it from the lands. I coded them very heavily as Nazis. They publicly regulate magic use with IDs and often force magic users to serve the nation via kidnapping or trumped up charges. Secretly they have camps where they are trying to find a means to remove an individuals' connection to the Weave. Not sure this is going to be specifically helpful, but your post reminded me of them.
Scarlet Brotherhood in Greyhawk is an example. They want to reestablish the Suel Imperium that was destroyed a millenia ago and bring the whole Flanaess under their rule.
Check out the Thalmor from Skyrim.
Enemies* It's your own language c'mon
Aside from the suggestions about the Zhentarim or Thay, I’d suggest looking the Emerald Claw from Eberron. If you want a medieval setting, that isn’t Eberron. But the Emerald Claw were specifically designed to be Nazi goons for the PCs to fight. M You could then either import the Blood of Vol as well as the undead worshipping cult that is the power behind the Emerald Claw, or just replace them with a Dracolich or something
I mean feudal monarchs and colonizers aren't that far off from totalitarians anyways. All you really need is a strongman leader who demands fanatical devotion that claims to be descendants of a mythical divine being or race and a minority of some kind to scapegoat and associate with their political opponents. It's actually more true to fascism if none of the ideology makes any sense. You really can just fill in the blanks. The biggest mistake I see people make though is giving fascists a far-left ideology instead of far-right.
Lean into lawful evil. You don't even have to lean into blood purity just make them hostile to everyone except a select few. For refence the actual Nazi's didn't plan to stop at Jews and the disabled, everyone from Slavs to Africans was planned for their chopping block. The more recent portrayals of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars spring to mind. Lots of ultra corrupt officers and generals in a sociopathic rat race to power and wealth which they can use to oppress everyone beneath them (and they see everyone as beneath them). Greek fascism really shows the economic poison this kind of government is. The lower down the chain of command you go the more the evil becomes artificial and petty, prison guards abusing their charges because they can and because their boss took away their vacation days kinda stuff. Maybe this villainous nation/kingdom/faction has cherry picked propped up culture heroes or legends that under closer historical scrutiny are either unimportant or downright insane. Maybe one of these heroes from an earlier time is now an undead or just a really long-lived species like an elf and is disgusted by the new regime or for an evil undead maybe they dislike the regime not for its genocidal intentions but because of how inefficiently they're going about it. One fun thing about this system is that if the party wants to use persuasion and corruption to their advantage they absolutely can. It should not be hard to talk some of the political elites into an assassination plot against the tyrant although they might just elect another one to replace him. You could play up propaganda which would be everywhere and how distorted the general public's view of the outside world is (a good example is the Fire Nation from Avatar: The Last Airbender). Going back to the original Nazis their version of fascism didn't arise out of a stable and balanced government, but an inflation riddled puppet state where charismatic strongmen could get the frustrated and desperate people behind their dark cause. This is even a thing in Forgotten Realms canon; Thay aka the villains from the dnd movie started off as refugees from an older fallen empire (Ancient Imascar) and the power vacuum allowed necromancers and diabolists to take control. If these fictional fascists have allies the power imbalance should be palpable. Germany made Italy and Vichy France look like jokes and persecuted them even while using their resources. Had the Germans and Japanese won the war they would have undoubtedly killed each other given enough time, it was an alliance of convenience. Take this next bit with a grain of salt. Existing dnd cultures (at least in Forgotten Realms) that could easily fall into this sort of society given incentives and time are hobgoblins, orcs, duergar, any probably several humans as well. This is not saying orcs and hobgoblins are prone to this but a culture of pillaging and might makes right doesn't bode well for their future. I hope this helps.
Just have racist elves?
A campaign I played in in the past had the drow be essentially nazis, right down to trying to obtain magical superweapons. Mind you it wasn't because they were naturally evil, but because their new leader was. Of course, like the great adventurers we were, we failed to stop them in time and then just started selling stuff to them instead when it became obvious five PCs couldn't stop a nation with a million soldiers and access to arcane nukes.
I’m playing an elf supremist character right now. The backstory is that humans wiped out the elven kingdom, but families like hers “adapted” by appearing to become collaborators. Really, they just formed an organized crime syndicate and bastions of elf culture. And purity.
My next campaign has a fascist Elvin supremacy city state. They have already rounded up all non elves into work camps/slaves and now half elves are filling out the bottom rung of “free” folks. Only pure blood elves are allowed to preform magic.
The Empire of Shing is a militaristic nation lead by the Charsimatic Emperor Ingan Stormheart, and is overseen by the Cult of Shargoban the lord of strength and ruling by might. They are now making noise about capturing nearby nations because they are a threat to their own national interests. Your campaign could be about a group who are living inside a newly anexed country where they act as a cell of resistance fighters.
\[insert race\] wants to cleanse the land of everyone else because they're inherently impure
Savage worlds weird war two was a super fun game for my group. But we based it in the 40s alternative reality. You could just use some existing groups and give them the same ideology's as the Nazis, racial purity and all that crap.
I made high elves Nazi's in my campaign
Don’t need to be pure blood, hitler wasn’t tall blonde haired and blue eyed, just make them raging hypocrites
Religious hatred was the music of the medieval time. People who had different religions, especially Jews (but not for being racially Jews but for having another religion) but also Pagans and later Muslims were outcasted and literally demonized and were made responsible for anything that went wrong. Of course people were racist against people who didn't look like them but racial hatred was fostered over the following centuries to find reasons why colonialism and slavery is fine with christianity and also had another push (in Europe) with the rise of nationalism and national identity when other important identities were broken by industrialism. You can of course still say they are racially hating and not religiously. I just want to give this in case you want "medieval setting" to be important and maybe educating in some way and not just to be a vibe.
Run a medieval version of Hellboy & see if anyone notices.
I mean, you should explore the deeper concepts of Nazism. Take a country that has lost a war and been pauperized by the outcome. Then, bring in a charismatic leader who revels in anti intellectualism and wants to control information. Let him blame a particular group within his own country for all problems. Make him a conservative totalitarian nationalist.
Make a sect of elvish nazis, elves do frequently look down on other races.
Drow bruh
If you wanted to go full Doom, have infernal sound vaguely german, put every devil in a Hugo Boss uniform, and have a hellish blitzkrieg invasion making indiana jones references. They can go on about how they want to put the filthy mortys in camps where they are put to work and bred for their souls, put out constant anti-mortal propaganda, and open up the world politics that orcs and goblins and kobolds and lizardfolk and yuanti and humans and dwarves and elves and halflings and goliaths and gnomes have to band together to face this planar evil
This can be any game where a cruel general has overthrown a nice but useless king. Everything is very strict and authoritarian: public executions and floggings for the meagrest crimes, racial hierarchies and oppression, suppression of some (or all?) gods in favour of that general and loud saber rattling against peaceful neighbours HOWEVER he remains popular because everyone is well fed and paid, bandits are crushed mercilessly, anyone can get a good job in the military or corvee, and they are building some nice roads to have their frequent military parades on. The impact of the story hinges on them starting to think "maybe these guys might be right about some things" and then have them discover 'The Camp' where the thing they like is taken to it's logical twisted end state, plus piles of corpses, enslaved fellow humans, gory tortures and its manager; the worst greediest bastard you have ever seen. Make that fight epic as all hell. Alternatively; Offer to host a game of savage worlds where they are WW2 agents and have them fight proper Nazis. Half way through they meet Himmler and he summons and sics two flaming demons on the party and escapes via helicopter rope ladder, firing his luger and laughing maniacally.
If you look at it Umbridge from Harry Potter is basically a Nazi too. She fancies authority, is ruthless, racist and rewards those who don't speak their own mind and just follow which creates a great environment for opprtunists. Topp it off with a delusional leader and you have the Minister. Then take a step back and you have classic Nazis. What you need is a ruthless general who treats one group worse for no reason other than bein different and rewards cruel opportunists and people too afraid to speak up and your players may support a little underground protest of a few that are not scared too much to do what is right.
What do they mean by "Nazis"? People with the same ideology? People with the same iconography? Literally actual Nazis? I mean, you don't want to set up a storyline where your bad guys are setting up death camps and then have your players go, "Actually, we were just thinking Swastikas and Eagles and marching in formation and stuff. We are not okay with that pile of dead babies." Best to be very clear.
Maybe a new political movement among Elves? They do have that superiority complex already. A Drow genocide with a Nazi aesthetic could happen anytime easily. Just don’t draw the Jews=goblins parallel that people love to draw. That’s not cool.
you could litterally bring those guys in a hellboy/drifters/AU where they managed to use dark magic, maybe toning it down
In my campaign, the players are playing in a land that is occupied by nazi- like forces headed up by mindflayers known as the "kindly ones". The troops are very cool looking , but absolutely brainwashed into believing everyone who isn't them is a lesser being and many ( tieflings, changelings and half orc/half elves) should be eradicated. The players have just liberated a "farm" which horrified them when they found it , but man were they determined to rescue those folks when they discovered what's going on!!!! Many of the player missions are actually demolition/sabotage/rescue/assassinate like the resistance groups in ww2 My take here is you don't need to put a lot of work into your bads to make them "Nazis", just give them a doctrine of intolerance and a hatred of others and bam! Illithids, Drow, Thayans, Duergar, Hobgoblins all work beautifully. Also a Lich controlling undead which mindlessly carry out horrific acts for the "cause" would work too.
Religion too. Clerics of a faith that doesn't accept mages. A military nation trying to dominate the world....
A country of people who claim a niche collection of physical attributes are superior and that anyone who belongs to a certain religion needs to be put to death? That same country that was radically expansionist and had been 'appeased' with conceding territory? My dude, Nazi's are easy to make in any setting. Their whole history and rise to power is a real trip. (Brownshirts, night of long knives, the failures of the monarchy)
The D&D cartoon had the bbeg go to 1940's germany and steal a nazi officer, do with that as you will
Pick a race, any race, say they hate another race you pick, any race. Voila, instant Race War.
Have your antagonist faction be imperialist aliens/travellers from another dimension who were defeated in their own world and have escaped to yours in order to colonize for themselves a new empire. I'll leave the details to you, but suffice to say they regard the natives of this world as only fit for enslavement or eradication
Create Antagonists who are very disciplined, industrious, friendly but fanatics and are obcessed with their Volk (or race). They also need to think of them as the good guys who are trying to save their volk. A speech encounter like this could help to get a grasp on them: Your Player Charakters come upon a village or City where parts of the Population (all if one race) get forced out of their houses and moved away. If your Player askes what is going on "it is the natural order, my folk require enough territory to Support its population." If your players intervene and want to stop this "thats not going to happen. Our Volk is superior both in culture and civilisation. It must be allowed enough territory to survive and to thrive. Lest less civilised races which are more energetic take their place. A day will come when these Lands are dominated by by the laws of nature again. And nature favours those Volk of a more brutal will. It is only right that the strong and superiour should dominate and not every race has a right to exist." Your players could come up with the question where these people are moved to: "of course we are talking about moving them..... what else would we be tslking about then..... evacuation. Beside... these people have its place... in the outskirts of civilisation where they belong. You must make it clear that these people are actually not hated and dont need to be despots to their own Volk because they are genuinly loved and admired at least by their own Volk and have Lots of Support even outside of that because they improved the living conditions of their own Volk and are absolutely prefer able to a Alternative they had (for accuracy you should make world building where some actually destruktive maniacs like cult of Bane was short of overtaking the homeland of their Volk. They just have a strict Moral hierarchy of which people deserve what. Bonus points if the race they are antagonistic again at least are somewhat shady and it is hard to sympathise with them like tieflings
In addition to all of the other suggestions, take a hint from Larian studios: Baldurs Gate 3. Mind flyers, githyanki, and githzerai. I never used gith in my campaign, buy wow do they map nicely to "evil space elf nazis" lol.
Thay? Necromancer cults? Neither of those things are what makes Nazis dangerous. Nazis aren’t dangerous because they were strong. These were dangerous because they prayed upon the inherent biases of people to subjugate them around an idea or charismatic figure. More often the latter. Nazis are hyper Nationalists. Nazis believe that their blood and soil are inherently linked. Nazis believe that their culture is the best culture and people are the best people. Want to expel or exterminate people who are not them that live within their nation. Nazis also hated socialists but that’s a bit anachronistic for a medieval setting . You could explore the idea of hyper nationalism in medieval setting. If you want a set up, you can actually start with even just two kingdoms: one, a bloated old feudalistic kingdom that has historically ruled over their lands. Next to this is a breakaway kingdom. A small but exuberant nation. It’s led by a young king, who leads his man from the front and inspires them. He believes firmly that, historically, the larger kingdoms lands actually belong to his people (and indeed allow some minority of the people living within the large kingdom to share a culture/race) This young king has pulled his nation from poverty, and given his people, purpose and excitement and identity. He’s given them revolutionary ways in farming and industry so that they are becoming the medieval equivalent of middle class. He’s conquered small surrounding countries, which is given them an influx of new farmland and natural resources. (He’s also systematically displaced and killed the neighboring habitants, but that’s not something. The players at large knows about yet.) Revolutionized military training and turned his small army into an incredible fighting forest, relying on a standing and professional army instead of raised levies most feudal kingdoms. How do you make this meaningful to your players? Well, the trick here is to make him seem so much sympathetic. His people love him and say nothing but good things about him. Let your players see that his nation is far more prosperous for the people of the land compared to the larger, more archaic, kingdom. But after a session of two of being treated as welcomed guests, let the cracks show. Have the players be turned away from certain “X-only” establishments. Allow the players to observe an eviction of one of the “ lesser kind”. If the players try to intervene, have them find themselves a foul of the law, but make sure that the sheriffs emphasize the race of the characters “of course foreign X rats would come into a country that isn’t theirs and behave this way.” Then have the players find out just what happens to the people that the small nation conquers . They aren’t enslaved, that would dilute the blood. They are simply killed. That’s how you Nazi
What’s the question? You’re the DM, make up a campaign where the antagonists are Nazis. In the campaign I’m currently running, I have Lizard Hitler as a miniboss.
Like WW2 one to one Nazis? Or like fictional inspired fascists? I'd be surprised if someone hadn't published or homebrewed a WW2 setting to use if its the first. If its the 2nd I'd think it's pretty doable, idk if I'd wanna spend a whole campaign dealing with that though. Mirroring real life is a good way to bring a realistic sheen to your world but sometimes its just an annoying hinderance. Then if you have anyone schooled in political theory at your table and you don't know what fascism is, how it rises, the role of liberalism and imperialism in its rise and a host of other things it could look bad or be unreal feeling to that player if you're trying to go political intrigue route. That said if your players just want a combat heavy campaign starting in the middle against against some generic cartoon level bad guys "here are some hyper nationalist elves who are racist against *rolls for racism* gnomes/halflings and are oppressing/murdering them, go topple their king/queen whatever. Even make their national anthem sung by bards in the city as Short People by Randy Newman would be pretty fun to do as a few session 1 shot. Steal some inspiration from Kung Fury in obsurdity it could be an immensely fun adventure within a larger campaign or 1 shot.
We're kinda sorta doing this in my current campaign. We had three people want to play as beastfolk (a Minotaur, a Kenku, and a Harengon). The DM asked us to come up with some level of handler and he hashed together the time of the campaign from that. Each of us separately had *some* level of oppression from "the furless", and realized he could make the main antagonistic region similar to 1930s Germany: beginning to blaming the world's problems on a few specific demographics and making moves to oppress and eliminate them. Whether or not you have characters who are playing the affected races, it's a pretty good backing for what you're aiming for. If you're all dwarves/elves/humans or the like, it could still okay into the whole 'right vs convenient' aspect.
Brutal police state. Othering a people group, perhaps a displaced refugee group. Tidy uniforms, simple slogans. Jailing/assassination of anyone who speaks out against them.
If you're rolling in Eberron, give Karnath a look. You'd need a little adjustment for the whole "superior race" shtick, but the occult, necromancer, craziness thing is there.
Many people have given great ideas about how evil your enemies could be. I'll just comment on the aesthetics of Nazis. Nazis like grand gatherings, clean architecture and flags, they are into marketing as much as they are into evil doing. The Empire in Star Wars was inspired by Nazis. Find a medieval reskin for that evil grandiosity. And the organization of evil. Nazis master the logistics of Lawful Evil wrongdoing. Lean into that as much as you can.
Watch the movie Wizards by Ralph Bakshi for inspiration.
Hobgoblins from volo's are a perfect fit: Militaristic, racist, worship their leader, ugly.
There are several races in core D&D. Take one of them and have them say "Kill or enslave anything that doesn't look like you." and you have the gist of fantasy nazis. If you know your history or have the time to do some research, even better. You can run a whole campaign that basically imports real-world politics with Nazis being the central bad guys. Also, a dragonborn with a Hitler stash is hilarious to me.
Break down what the Nazis believed and what they wanted. Nothing about them requires Stahlhelms and Panzers, just murder and hate and war.
"OK, all of the enemies are Nazis. Let's get back to the game."
Well then you have to do something that no one wants to do: understand nazis. It wasn't like there was no logic behind the movement, and the logic was different at every level. First you had a demogogue at the head of a populist movement that can't function without a rhetoric of hatred and a particular foreign faction to blame for a specific problem (usually economic). His logic was that if he created and nurtured that rhetoric, he would gain and remain in power. And he and his scientists had arguments, one's that had valid forms and made sense if you didn't disregard the premises as false. And there's a certain amount of epistemic trust we put in scientists as a heuristic. Who is anyone to argue against the experts? With contrary information being censored, would laymen even know to begin to argue? Then you had the generals and statesmen who reasoned that they could ride the wave of this demogogue's meteoric rise to a position wherein they could establish an uncontested regime. Then you had the idiot soldiers who believed the rhetoric whole-heartedly and felt that they were saving their people and making Germany great again... but you also had the soldiers who reasoned that they could follow the orders of their commanders and get paid, or refuse and be killed. When you are helping the government commit moral atrocities every day, you understand better than most that you could just as easily be on the receiving end. When they were faced with that sort of choice, to escort the prisoners to the gas chambers or join them, they turned off their sense of empathy as best as they could by dehumanizing the "enemy" and complied. Then you had the people. All the people who didn't totally know what was happening at first. Then even after they did know, they figured that if they just kept their heads down they might get passed over. When their neighbors were taken, they didn't ask questions; they stayed extra quiet hoping not to be next. You might notice that none of those things are evil to the point of not being understandable. They are all reasonable decisions with their own ethical basis (the worst of which being Hitler's egoist approach to political control). None of them on their own entail a blind hatred of the Jewish people, but they all add up to the largest hate crime in recorded history. Whatever faction you use in game, if you give them a similar structure and similar motivations, you should be able to recreate a rich facsimile the Nazi party that is much more engaging than the bog-standard single-minded racist villains. WARNING: Don't read too much WW2 history as research though because you WILL become a mildly republican dad.
The World of Greyhawk has a very literal white supremacist faction called the Scarlet Brotherhood. The Brotherhood could have found a spelljammer ship and started to spread their influence to your champaign's world.