- BattleTech: The New Belt Pirates are, as might be expected, opportunistic raiders, amoral scavengers, and general scumbags, but even they don't want to have anything to do with the Word of Blake.
- Bleak World: Pops up from time to time.
- All vampires are bloodsucking undead nightmares (except Wendigo who are cannibalizing undead nightmares), but even they can't stand the nightlords, who are essentially a one man mafia of rape, cannibalism, enslavement, and random slaughter For the Evulz. Furthermore, most of them hold themselves in a higher moral ground than Primal Vampires.
- Witches are all dead chicks who were resurrected by a pagan god in exchange for eternal servitude and the occasional sacrifice. But even The Host of Corpses and The Host of Fire are uncomfortable with the Host of Demons, who kidnap, torture, and kill children to gain more power.
- Legions are plagued with a head full of demons and ghosts, there is only so much these demons can stomach though and if a Player Character Legion goes over the Moral Event Horizon, you can bet that demon will pull a Split-Personality Takeover.
- All ghosts feed on human emotions and usually manipulate them into feeling that emotion more often. However they are not willing to stomach the Creeping Reapers who kill and eat other ghosts for more hold.
- Changeling: The Dreaming:
- One of the few, largely universally held opinions agreed upon by both Seelie and Unseelie fae is that the sluagh are a bunch of fiendish, blackmailing villains who have all the charm, grace, sex appeal and odor of the undead lovechild between a dead baby and a large spider. Even the savage, thuggish redcaps are simultaneously sickened and frightened by the sluagh. The more ambitious among the redcaps, however, hold sluagh in pitying disdain, lamenting about how sluagh hold the power to shake changeling society to its core due to the fact that their blackmail victims and information clients readily jump through whatever hoop is placed before them, but squander this power by doing nothing with it. The Unseelie sidhe who rule the Unseelie and Shadow Courts also disdain the sluagh for numerous reasons, as well, including the facts that sluagh can never be trusted to never take Seelie clients, that there are no sluagh out there who will willingly become a thankless, ever-groveling sycophant, and, perhaps worst of all, the uncertainty of whether the exorbitant prices sluagh charge for their various services are a prank at the Unseelie sidhe's expense, or some diabolically sinister portion of a nefarious plot at the sidhe's expense.
- Sluagh, in turn, look down at the redcaps, as sluagh are mortally offended by the redcaps' deliberate lack of tact and subtlety in causing fear and terror. The sluagh also derisively laugh about how redcaps hold no secrets worthy of attention beyond "who's for dinner," and even then, barely.
- One of the few fae held in even less regard than sluagh are their Thallain relatives, or "dark counterparts," known as the bogies. Bogies are saggy-fleshed, slimy fae who need to feed on and cover themselves in the various bodily fluids of the many, many (usually human) victims they murder, lest they dry out and starve to death. One Unseelie sidhe stated outright that he would rather take a sluagh as a lover than approach a bogey over anything other than ordering a messy assassination. Sluagh, themselves, don't mind too much over how bogies try to hide themselves in Changeling society by impersonating them, or even how bogey murder sprees are blamed on sluagh. On the other hand, sluagh loathe bogies partly because the latter are unhygienic jerkasses who track bodily secretions everywhere, and partly because sluagh are, as a whole, worshipful fans of Humphrey Bogart, and are perennially upset by the fact that their film noir idol shares a nickname with the aforementioned unhygienic jerkasses.
- Cyberpunk: Zig-zagged. Rache Bartmoss has some kind of code, in that he dislikes innocent casualties, but he hates MegaCorps and anyone associated with them so much that his definition of "innocent" is much narrower than most, and his bar for "acceptable casualties" much higher.
- The Dark Eye: Those who forge a pact with the demon lord of tyranny and vengeance are, despite their evil will, direct enemies of the servants of the nameless god. The demon lord's demon subjects may even demand this attitude of their human "masters" no matter how well they are controlled.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Drow, evil elves who live underground, are brutal, fascist conquerors whose society is based around lies, deceit and betrayal, are prone to brutal infighting, and live by the unpredictable whims of their batshit insane goddess. And yet, even they are disgusted by the horrifyingly insane Derro, so much so that they're willing to put aside whatever evil plot they're currently concocting to put a stop to the Derros' own plots.
- The Al-Qadim setting encourages this trope with regards to honor, citing examples from the Arabian Nights and Arabic folktales in which a variety of murderers and thieves hold the Sacred Hospitality rite of taking salt to be an unbreachable code.
- Numerous examples occur in the Elder Evils guidebook, where evil beings side with the heroes to oppose the Eldritch Abomination featured in the scenario, seeing what the creature is doing is something they cannot allow. The most extreme example is given in the backstory for Zargon, which claims that Asmodeus sided with the forces of good to halt the Elder Evil's first rampage. (The book does suggest, however, that this may have been at least partially a case of Pragmatic Villainy on Asmodeus' part, seeing as Zargon was the former ruler of Hell who he had overthrown, and he did not want the guy around.)
- When 4th Edition pared down the Character Alignment system, this became the primary way of differentiating between Evil and Chaotic Evil. An Evil character can still be a complete and utter monster, but usually their vision for the world is relatively tolerable. A Chaotic Evil character, on the other hand, has such horrific goals (however loosely applied) that even Evil characters are horrified by them. There's a reason the main holders of the alignment in 4e are Demons and Slaadi. This means a Chaotic Evil villain is the kind of thing that can make Good, Unaligned and Evil characters team up to beat its head in.
- Greyhawk: Any hint of either Tharizdun or the Elder Elemental God getting loose from their respective cosmic prisons is enough to get all the other gods working together. After all, both Tharizdun and the EEG's end goals are to destroy the multiverse note and no multiverse means no worshippers willing to sacrifice halflings to you, so better for you as a respectable evil deity to engage in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork with Pelor or Beory or Saint Cuthbert than to be made surplus to requirements.
- Demons are not generally known for their strong sense of morals, and will readily tolerate extreme levels of treachery, violence, depravity and general evil. However, even demons consider Soul Eating to be disgusting and obscene, and nabassus — a type of demon who delight in eating mortal and fiendish souls alike — are considered hated outcasts and forced on the fringes of demonic society.
- In 3.5, the vasharans (an Evil Counterpart species to humanity itself) seek to commit deicide. However, as a natural extension of this, vasharans despise tyranny; their home plateau of Vashar is actually a democracy, ruled over by a council of elders, because vasharans would rather kill themselves than serve a single all-powerful leader.
- In the Eberron D&D setting, evil is not dependent on one's personality or goals, but rather, on how much one is willing to compromise. The queen who wages a bloody war to conquer the kingdom is good while the king who tries to maintain peace and security is evil. Why? Because she has standards; she wouldn't stoop to underhanded assassination plots, for instance. The king? He'd throw puppies into a woodchipper to achieve his goals. Evil does not have standards in Eberron (at least, not means-based standards).
- Hunter: The Vigil has quite a few examples of this:
- Although the Ashwood Abbey are noted mostly for being depraved deviants who rape, torture and even cannibalize the monsters they hunt, which incidentally means most other hunters despise them, the Spirit Slayers sourcebook mentions that "nobody sober" would admit to their actually skinning the now-human corpses of slain werewolves to make clothing, rugs or other trophies out of them.
- The Ashwood Abbey are also on the receiving end of this from Beasts, creatures with an innate hunger for human fear, who view the Abbey as utterly despicable and go out of their way to make the hedonists' lives as miserable as possible.
- The Promethean Brotherhood, a bunch of magic-envying hunters whose whole compact is dedicated to the idea of using Human Sacrifice to steal magical abilities from mages or anyone who has magical power, are noted as regarding the branch of their compact dedicated to deducing how to make the ritual more reliable with disgust for the things they do in pursuit of their goal, which include eating hearts, drinking blood, and wearing peoples' skin.
- The Night Watch are comprised of gangbangers, petty hoods and other "ghetto trash" who decided they couldn't stand having vampires running around in their neighborhood.
- Almost none of the Hunter organisations, even the ones who are utter bastards, are particularly fond of Heroes from Beast: The Primordial, who are more often than not glory-obsessed egomaniacs with no real concern for collateral damage.
- The fan-supplement Hunter: The Vigil – Dark and Light reveals even the Ashwood Abbey are utterly disgusted by the the Magisters of Economie's practices of brainwashing regular mortals into Mooks and forcing Princesses into comas to use them as power sources.
- In Nomine features a caste of demons called the Shedim, Body Surfing Puppeteer Parasites who survive by degrading their hosts to the lowest possible moral denominator. While other demonic castes will sometimes hold a grudging respect for one another, not a single one of them wants anything to do with the Shedim if they can absolutely avoid it.
- Mage: The Awakening:
- Even the least conventionally "good" Pentacle orders, such as the Guardians of the Veil and the Silver Ladder, will come down on you like a hammer for messing about with other people's souls without consent.
- The Seers of the Throne, power-hungry fascist assholes to a man, try and avoid dealing with the Eldritch Abominations in the Abyss; while the Seers want the Abyss to exist, to limit Awakenings, they don't want it to destroy everything.
- Both Seers and the Pentacle also understand that Banishers are trouble.
- The Archmasters can do almost anything, but must abide by the Pax Arcanum or risk being attacked by every Archmaster faction. Even the Abyss-sworn Aswadim and the tyrannical Tetrarchs abide by the Pax.
- And nobody who knows about it has time for the Lower Depth that is the Inferno. One fiction piece has a captive Scelestus say that at least the Abyss just wants nonexistence as its endgame; Inferno wants suffering.
- Pathfinder:
- Ogres are so depraved, so brutish and so destructive that even other species of otherwise brutal monsters, like hill giants and trolls, hate them and will violently attack ogre tribes who try to move into their lands. In turn, even ogres revile thawns as mindless killers and bogeymen, attacking and slaying them on sight.
-
Devils are bent on dominating all that is, bringing order to the universe through tyranny and treating mortal souls as tools, slaves, and currency. Demons enjoy desecrating the flesh and warping the souls of mortals, seeing them as playthings. Both devils and demons will put their differences aside and work alongside angels to stop daemons, who only want to eat and destroy mortal souls and scour the multiverse clean of life. - Rovagug, god of Omnicidal Mania, tends to invoke this among the other gods. Asmodeus (God of Tyranny), Zon-Kuthon (God of Envy, Darkness, and Loss), and Lamashtu (Goddess of Madness, Monsters, and Nightmares) are opposed to his being released, largely because hey, not even they benefit from the end of the world.
- The empire of Cheliax is ruled by the Thrice-Damned House of Thrune, who sold their souls to Asmodeus in order to gain power. The current monarch, Queen Abrogail II, has a Pit Fiend for an advisor. This would be scary enough, but it's indicated that his primary job is to keep her from acting on her more evil impulses. That's right, a literal servant of Hell, of the most feared race of devilkind, has to keep Abrogail from going too far.
- Ravenloft: Many of the big-name villains of the setting have standards, even if their other crimes overwhelmingly outweigh them.
- Strahd von Zarovich, though he preys upon them himself, vigorously protects his Barovian subjects from outside threats.
- Dr. Mordenheim has treated the injured even if it didn't advance his research to do so.
- Azalin takes his obligations as a king very seriously, despite the fact that he despises his kingdom.
- There are also different degrees of evil among the darklords. Azalin has nothing but contempt for the cruel tyrant Vlad Drakov, the lord of the neighboring Falkovnia; same with all the darklords of the realms who border Falkovnia, actually. And the ironic part is, Drakov has no supernatural powers at all. He's fully human. But his cruelty is greater than almost any darklord who does.
- Azalin also looks down on Meredoth, because, while Azalin may be a tyrant who executed his own son for treason even before he became a lich, at the very least he tries to run his kingdom effectively. Meredoth is a violently misanthropic Aloner who murdered all his subjects in a necromantic experiment when he came to power over them. It's unsurprising that they did not get along, and it's probably just as well for everyone, because their curses dovetail in ways that would be destructive: Azalin is a magical genius who can invent spells but is mystically blocked from learning them, while Meredoth has the opposite problem, so if they worked together there would be all sorts of mayhem.
- Rifts:
- The Obviously Evil Coalition States are lead by Emperor Prosek, who will cheerfully plunge his nation into pointless, horrific wars for the sake of power. He is absolutely ruthless when it comes to destroying non-humans and magic users. He even has a facility used to create mutant animals to be used as canon fodder. However, genetic experimentation on humans is strictly forbidden. The only thing keeping Dr. Desmond Bradford from being executed for high treason due to his experiments is that he and Emperor Prosek were childhood friends, so it would take clear and incontrovertible evidence of his deeds for the Emperor to believe them, and Bradford is too smart to leave any.
- The "Aberrant" character alignment is essentially this — an Aberrant character is unambiguously evil, but at the same time follows a strict personal code of ethics. They may (for instance) kill without a thought, but never without reason, and are disgusted by characters of the "pure evil" Diabolic alignment.
- Scion:
- Loki initially backed Hitler's rise to power in Germany in the hopes that a united Europe would allow him the power needed to stave off Ragnarok (it makes sense in context), but he was unaware of the Holocaust and would not have condoned it. After World War II, the Nazi high command faced the greatest punishments Hel could deliver... but Hitler's soul never appeared in the Underworld.
- While some gods aren't exactly the nicest of individuals, they still do care for humanity on some level. Even the most bloodthirsty of the Aztec pantheon would not callously slaughter huge numbers of mortals For the Evulz. This is what sets apart the Titans and the darker Gods.
- Sentinels of the Multiverse:
- Citizen Dawn is a Super Supremacist with fascist over-, under- and occasionally totally-enveloping-tones, who tortured her daughter in the hope that it would convince her to develop superpowers. At the same time, she'll accept anyone who has superpowers as a Citizen of the Sun, without caring about ethnicity or sexuality; she doesn't even demand that powers be genetic or heritable, as long as they're a part of the person rather than any equipment they use. She also makes reluctant common cause with the heroes during OblivAeon.
- Baron Blade, much like his obvious inspiration Doctor Doom, at least tries to keep his home nation of Mordengrad independent and relatively functional, although it still has conscription and Baron Blade is a dictator.
- Ambuscade hunts heroes for sport. Only heroes. Not civilians. He'll occasionally endanger civilians with his nonsense, but under no circumstances will he deliberately target them.
- Wager Master will abide by any agreement he makes, even when the heroes screw around with Exact Words. For example, at one point he accepts the Scholar's deal "I will give you the Philosopher's Stone if you go away", and abides by it even though Scholar summoned the Stone back ten minutes later; after all, the deal was that Scholar would give him the Stone, nothing was said about letting him keep it.
- Stars Without Number: The Hochog believe everything comes down to reputation, and will do virtually anything to increase the reputation of their pack without showing any kind of regret. A Hochog will gladly devastate your planet and never feel a shred of remorse. However, they also strongly disapprove of any kind of cruelty. Many a crime boss has woken up without his Hochog mercenaries and missing rather a lot of blood after getting a little too "enthusiastic" with a punishment.
- Vampire: The Masquerade has several levels of standards, especially considering the players are playing corpses repeatedly engaging in what is essentially cannibalism. Most clans despise the Sabbat (for being Ax-Crazy nutcases with seemingly no regard for the Masquerade), the Giovanni (for being incestuous necromancers) and the Setites (for being dealers in generic sin). These in turn despise the Ba'ali (for being worshipers and servants of powers wanting to end existence). Certain sub-factions of the Ba'ali further despise the other subfactions.
- The Ventrue are the Blue Blood rulers of the Kindred, and the highest enforcers of the standards expected within the Camarilla.
- Vampire's Humanity mechanic allows players to invoke, invert or subvert the trope any way they choose. But they can never really avert it because of the long-term gameplay impact, which reinforces the trope as an essential theme to the game. "Monsters we are, lest monsters we become." In some ways, the Virtues of Compassion and Self-Control mimic this. Low Compassion or worse, its opposite, Conviction means you can do horrific things without even suffering the slightest pang of guilt, but high Self-Control keeps the Evil in check — if you had low Self-Control you'd be Ax-Crazy, leaning towards Blood Knight.
- Many of the more inhuman moralities have this trope in full effect. Two examples would be the Path of Lilith and the Path of the Night. Those on the path of Lilith believe that pain is a good thing, and will happily kidnap and torture people for no better reason than a passing kindness of making them more jaded and realistic. Murder to a lilin is seen in exactly the same light as to a follower of Humanity; "dead mortals feel no dread". The Path of the Night views vampires as agents of Hell. They choose a victim, investigate them until they find a sin, however minor, then torment and traumatize their victim with the aim of making their life a living hell. Emphasis on living once again, killing is still wrong. Some books lean into the idea that the only thing stopping the Sabbat — who, again, are a sect that are not immune to the idea of being completely free from obligations to both humanity and Humanity — from declaring the Path of Night and Path of Metamorphosis (the outlook that drives the Tzimisce to do increasingly fucked up things to themselves and other people in the name of true enlightenment) outright heretical is that the Lasombra and Tzimsice are considered the heart and soul of the sect.
- The Guide to the Sabbat sourcebook encourages players to play Sabbat characters who go about murdering, raping, torturing, and generally raising Hell, metaphorically at least. But if you literally try to raise Hell... the book mentions in several places that demon summoning is a Bad Thing, the GM is under no obligation to allow the players to do it, and, if they do, the GM should be willing to drag their characters off to Hell on a whim. In-universe, the Sabbat, who make a point of being pure and utter monsters, with no regard for human life and no care for anyone's safety, will haul you out of your haven and throw you into acid if they find out you're messing around with demon-invoking.
- The Lasombra, in spite of (or rather because of) their Social Darwinist ideals, absolutely loathe racists and fascists, and save a special spot of hate for Those Wacky Nazis. As far as they are concerned, declaring your in-group to be "superior" in spite of frequently overwhelming evidence to the contrary is the worst kind of rank, degenerate stupidity. Clan Lasombra, meanwhile, prides itself on Embracing anyone who can meet their standards of competence, mental fortitude and ambition.
- Vampire: The Requiem: Despite being vampires, the Kindred still have depths they refuse to sink to.
- Draugrs in 1e are vampires who have totally given up every remaining scrap of humanity. They come in two varieties: utterly evil, insane monsters who can at least think, and mindless beasts driven entirely by their dominant Vice. Vampires hate Draugrs in general, but the mindless type get it the worst. Especially bestial Draugrs driven by Lust, who are noted as A: sparking city-wide death-hunts when their presence is revealed, and B: being one of the few times vampires can actually feel heroic.
- Belial's Brood are, similarly to the Ba'ali above, hated for being vampiric demon-worshippers who consider it a sacred duty to grind their humanity into the dirt and spread the power of their infernal masters.
- 2e has the historical Children's Crusade, an entire conclave of juvenile vampires, who were eventually hunted down and destroyed for reaching a level of cruelty and depravity that even other vampires found intolerable. They were willing to work with the Strix, a species of shadowy demon that hates all non-Draugr vampires for being too human.
- Warhammer: You can be an Ax-Crazy berzerker, a sadistic torturer, or a demon worshipper, but you never fire at a melee, because that would hit your own troops. The Skaven are the sole exception in both game lines, and even then it's usually only when Slave Mooks are involved.
- Khorne, the Chaos God of rage, murder, and general Ax-Crazyness, will fuck you up if you try to present him skulls of the defenseless. However, this is less because he has standards and more because he wants skulls of Worthy Opponents (trying to present him a bunch of baby skulls would be cheating). Similarly, Khorne loathes the use of trickery and deception. As a result, he's the only Chaos God in Fantasy whose followers cannot use magic. Similarly, in 40k, none of his followers can use psychic powers (even his daemons) and need to resort to more conventional (in comparison: a plasma cannon is anything but conventional otherwise) methods of dealing ranged damage. However, he doesn't have any problems with ranged weapons.
- This crops up any time the followers of opposing Chaos Gods butt heads. Slaanesh dislikes Khorne's lack of "artsmanship" in causing death and suffering, just as Khorne hates Slaanesh's wasteful sadism and hedonism, although less than he hates Tzeench's cowardly plotting and sorcery. Tzeentch, meanwhile, hates how Nurgle just makes everything rot and fester and corrode without any greater purpose, just as Nurgle hates Tzeentch's constant plotting and twisting schemes for no greater purpose than scheming for its own sake, and the way Tzeentch treats its followers and other mortals as disposable pawns. Khornates even pull an unintentional Villainous Rescue for some Imperials from Slaaneshi cultists in an Imperial-viewpoint novel.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The Inquisition is an organization with no qualms about calling Exterminatus if circumstances call for it, annihilating an entire planetary biosphere to deal with a major rebellion. Yet even they have some limits: Inquisitor Kryptmann was exiled from the organization following the Third Tyrannic War, because his go-to tactic of sterilizing every inhabited planet in the Tyranids' path, to starve them of resources and manipulate their trajectory, was considered too cruel and wasteful even for them. They also have an internal group, the Ordo Excorium, that checks as to whether blowing up the planet is actually necessary: while 40k is notable in scifi settings for its wide use of planet busters, in-universe, Exterminatus is considered to be the Godzilla Threshold; if an Inquisitor jumps the gun and calls an Exterminatus without proper justification, they can become the target of Inquisitorial sanctions, up to and including Final Sanction, though in some cases death would be considered too merciful, and they use other punishments instead.
As for using it as an offensive weapon against Tyranids, the accepted strategic doctrine is to keep a ship in a stealth orbit while the planet fights to the last man, if necessary. In the case of Tyranid victory, the ship will hit the world with Exterminatus while the Hive Fleet is at its most vulnerable as it feeds on the biomass present on the world, including their own dead, denying the Tyranids their spoils and the resources they used to conquer the planet and diminishing the Hive Fleet. This generally weakens the Hive Fleet tendril, defeating it in some cases, though even the Imperium notes that they need a better strategy if they hope to defeat the Hive Fleets without running out of planets. As for Kryptmann's strategy, one instance of it succeeded in driving Hive Fleet Leviathan into the Ork empire of Octarius. Though Kryptmann thought that the victor would come out greater for it, but proving a lesser threat than both combined, Imperial analysts estimate that this would not be the case. - The Redemptionists, a splinter sect from the Imperium dedicated to burning things even remotely heretical, are so deranged that the Imperium is frightened by them. That said, some factions in the Imperium (like the Ecclesiarchy and the more fanatically Puritan groups in the Inquisition) find them useful in a "let's point these deranged idiots at an enemy and enjoy them slaughtering each other and then massacre the survivors whoever wins" way. In some planets, Redemptionist Cults are openly active and are tolerated because law enforcement genuinely needs the help, or can't be bothered to care due to being otherwise too busy. In other cases, individual devotees can rise higher in rank and large groups recruited by the Imperial Guard work as excellently motivated troops against an appropriate enemy.
- Khârn the Betrayer is so Ax-Crazy that other Khorne Berserkers refuse to associate with him. The thing about Khârn is that he's not just an unstoppable murder machine, which by itself would be fine; he's an erratic, team-killing unstoppable murder machine. In the novels involving him he's actually surprisingly skilled at navigating Chaos's internal politics by playing up his Psycho for Hire reputation; he'll then wait until the moment where it will maximize his bodycount to betray everyone. Note that his behaviour is perfectly acceptable by Khorne's standards — "Khorne cares not from where the blood flows, only that it flows" is one of his faithful's many catchphrases. "The Betrayer" moniker actually comes from an incident where Khârn's Legion and their enemies stopped fighting in order to find shelter from subzero temperatures. Disgusted at such blatant cowardice, such as stopping fighting in the name of self-preservation, Khârn grabbed a flamer and torched every single shelter he could find to force the fighting to continue to its natural conclusion. Since that day, the World Eaters and Emperor's Children legions have scattered to the point of functioning as scattered warbands rather than full Legions. Before you feel bad about the latter, the Emperor's Children fell to Slaanesh and kept the name out of mockery.
- In the Horus Heresy tie-ins, even the Iron Warriors — who committed genocide on their home world to suppress a rebellion, and who are among the most ruthless and bitter siege troops in the setting — think that the Emperor's Children have become badly fucked-up and a disgrace, and they are appalled by Mad Doctor Fabius Bile's... experiments on other Space Marines.
- The Iron Warriors had another moment during the War of the Beast; not only do they set aside their grudge with the Imperial Fists long enough to ally with the Black Templars against the Orks, they are disgusted to find that the orks have drugged up hundreds of human slaves to serve as "cattle" for the greenskin hordes. This is more than a little hypocritical, as the Iron Warriors are notorious for the brutality of the Human Resources, only behind the Drukhari, and perhaps their cousins in the Word Bearers.
- At another stage in the Horus Heresy, Konrad Curze, a sadist and psychotic murderer who considers psychological cruelty a useful tool and spends an entire book attempting to psychologically break one of his brothers, describes the Word Bearers' Possessed Marines as being "rancid" with corruption. Curze, in many ways, embodied the worst of what humanity had to offer, but in many ways, he was just that: human. Curze considered Chaos to be a corruption, and its followers to be vainly offering themselves on the altar of the illusion of power. Following his death Kurze's legion, the Night Lords, are the least Chaos corrupted traitor legion (except possible the Alpha Legion, but for the Alpha's it mostly depends on the Warband in question) but even they have succumbed to a degree and have become sadistic mass murderers without even a lip service to Curze's twisted ideals of justice.
- The Necrons are basically genocidal, imperialist Egyptian robot skeletons. But even they are creeped out by the Flayed Ones' psychotic behavior and the nihilistic, life-hating beliefs of the Destroyers. They also have a rule that Deathmarks are only to be deployed against against cowardly and dishonorable foes, and are outright forbidden to be used against other Necrons. However, most Overlords operate on a policy of "dishonorable until proven otherwise".
- The Imperium hates and despises all those it deems genetically flawed or aberrant, as mutations are a possible manifestation of Chaos corruption note . The Black Templars are particularly known for their fanatical hatred of mutation, being amongst the most intense zealots of all Space Marines. But even the Black Templars were so appalled by the fanatical genocides that the population of Lastrati were carrying out in the name of "genetic purity", which had reduced a population of 14 billion to 2.5 million, that they denounced the Lastrati as Chaos-corrupted heretics and violently ended the reign of those who had enacted the genocides, in a campaign known as the Second Purging of Lastrati.
- Chaos Space Marines share little in the way of their cousins and rivals in the Imperium, but like the Imperials, they have an intense dislike of cloning. Both factions seem to have little problem in the way of vat-grown humans made from scratch, or...analogues, but in a setting where Genetic Memory and metaphysical limits apply, creating a direct copy of somebody has the dubious achievement of invoking a sense of disgust and unnaturalness in both the Imperium and Chaos. Fabius Bile, the foremost geneticist among both the Chaos Space Marines and the galaxy at large, hasn't been killed off by his peers for his cloning experiments (and successes) because his mercenary nature and skill at making pod people making him too damn useful to just up and off.
- The Inquisition is an organization with no qualms about calling Exterminatus if circumstances call for it, annihilating an entire planetary biosphere to deal with a major rebellion. Yet even they have some limits: Inquisitor Kryptmann was exiled from the organization following the Third Tyrannic War, because his go-to tactic of sterilizing every inhabited planet in the Tyranids' path, to starve them of resources and manipulate their trajectory, was considered too cruel and wasteful even for them. They also have an internal group, the Ordo Excorium, that checks as to whether blowing up the planet is actually necessary: while 40k is notable in scifi settings for its wide use of planet busters, in-universe, Exterminatus is considered to be the Godzilla Threshold; if an Inquisitor jumps the gun and calls an Exterminatus without proper justification, they can become the target of Inquisitorial sanctions, up to and including Final Sanction, though in some cases death would be considered too merciful, and they use other punishments instead.
- Warhammer Fantasy:
- The Beastmen are a bunch of murderous, psychotic savages who want to spitefully annihilate civilisation and so they have few rules, but one of them is never harm a shaman. This is something that should be told to Gorthor, who actually wore the skins of his rival shamans, giving him a reputation of The Dreaded even among them. His name in Bray-tongue means "cruel".
- Goblins, a race of comically evil little sneaks who cheerfully backstab, rob, murder, betray, swindle and even eat each other with minimal provocation, think hobgoblins are treacherous bastards and will shoot them on sight.
- Stromfels is a vicious god who exalts in violence and teaches that the strong shall prey on the weak, but he also views himself as part of the natural order and teaches his followers to excercise self-interested restraint — after all, a predator that hunts its prey to extinction will soon starve. As a result, Stromfels' cult is firmly opposed to Chaos, which perverts and destroys the natural cycles that predators rule. Note that Stromfelians tolerate mutants and often accept them among their ranks; it's worshippers of the Dark Gods that they view as enemies.
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