The Campaign Builder's Guild

So the Orcs, those green skinned folk (Or grey depending, maybe Brown?) Do a lot of people use them? If so how?

We all know of the Tolkien evil mooks, or the blizzard shamanistic kinda good kinda evil guys? But what else do people do with them? I've tentatively considered adding something Orcish to my campaign world and have only the vaguest of concepts.

Quote from: Tzi
So the Orcs, those green skinned folk (Or grey depending, maybe Brown?) Do a lot of people use them? If so how?

We all know of the Tolkien evil mooks, or the blizzard shamanistic kinda good kinda evil guys? But what else do people do with them? I've tentatively considered adding something Orcish to my campaign world and have only the vaguest of concepts.

I don't use trollish things in my campaigns usually, but I do really like how they're implemented in Eberron. Basically the Orc race waged war against an invading force of lovecraftian horrors, and now exist as a dwindling druid sect.

Da boyz iz da best! We rool da landz cuz da hoomies iz weak an' da boyz is strong.  Da hoomies are too stoopid to rool or day wood no we iz unbeatable.

For me, orks are always an embodiment of savage, deformed evil things to bash. Calling something else "orks" doesn't make them orks.  This is coming from someone that doesn't use nonhuman races, generally.  Ymmv.

Many years ago, in the time of AD&D 1e, I made a race of super orc as one of the key features of the campaign world call Arron Taulk (translated as "home stone").  

They were called garrison orcs, aka war orcs or mountain orcs.  While they did share ancestry with the common orc they were generally stronger and also had at least average int and wis.  Many cultural, religious, and philosophical factors were similar to the common orc.  They were excellent weapon and armor smiths as well as better tacticians than normal orcs.  But in general they were just as destructive, marauding, evil tempered, and smelly as normal orcs while being about a foot taller.  The rank and file garrison orc had 5d8 hit points and wore chainmail armor, lieutenants had 6d8 hp and wore field plate armor, while captains had 8d8 hp and wore full plate armor.   Their witchdoctors were fun, for me.

I used them as a more advanced mid-level adversary capable of complex tactics.  The additional advantage being that, as a custom monster, the players would have to get all knowledge of them in game.  Between garrison orcs and yuan ti levels 4 to 10 were a blast for that campaign.

There are lots of ways to spin them - I've frequently played orc or half-orc characters (depending on setting tropes, etc.) and find they present excellent foils to the so-called "good guys" - whether that refers to individuals or racial tropes. As to using them myself, I most certainly do, although not in the usual fashion. My setting has 2 divergent races:  Khurorkh (http://www.thecbg.org/wiki/index.php?title=Khurorkh)  (http://www.thecbg.org/wiki/index.php?title=Khurorkh)) and Pahrorkh. The first are deeply spiritual ("good guys") defenders of nature against the perversions of Gaurashiage  (the soldiers in Mother Nature's army), while the latter are the result of such perversion through the work of her "daughter", Pahkreet (goddess of hatred, revenge, malice, pain, etc. i.e., your basic brutal psychotic bitch from hell). I

I wanted to see orcs more playable in settings and recalled a series of books (which I haven't read, they were promoted a lot in a Sci-fi/Fantasy bookclub in which an ex' was a member) based  on the premise that orcs are the (honourable) soldiers of the Fae realms (I'll have to find that - I'd like to read it sometime) and ran with it while still maintaining the more standard "bad guys" trope via Pahkreet and the Kith War (the when/where/how of their origin). It should be noted that the fall of the Pahrorkh was concurrent with that of the Druin (Drow).

As for using them (Pahrork) in play, I go back to a literal interpretation of the 2nd edition D&D MM entry (http://www.lomion.de/cmm/orc.php) in which they are Lawful evil and, as written, not dumb at all. Needless to say, they're not your average mook - the Pahrorkh are in many ways tougher than their Khurorkh cousins (evolution having been artificially advanced/accelerated- including intelligence). So, there are a lot of them and they're much smarter than one would think possible. They're still a common "stock-in-trade" encounter, but no one will be slash-happy-prance their way through them leaving behind a trail of dead bodies - they're very good at doing what they do and what they do is fight. A lot. Fight anyone/anything they perceive as a challenge and when that's done they start fighting each other.

I don't use orcs in my settings.

The only orcs I care much for nowadays are the ones of Middle-Earth, and that's with the interpretation of them originally being elves that were transformed into monsters by torture.

I have Orcs in a few of my settings.  In Avayevnon, there are different regional varieties.  The Xaoonoi Orcs are based on Sparta, and are very regimented, honor-minded, and strict.  The Northern Orcs, on the other hand, are pretty standard faceless savages, just REALLY hairy, and adapted for extreme cold.

In my kitchen-sink setting Camulus, the orks are either pirates, or something inspired by a combination of the Wildlings and the Iron Islands from ASoIaF.    They believe that they have a right to whatever they can take, and that their gods are trees that demand human(oid) sacrifices, and so their raids are driven by the urge to assuage their wrath.  They take tokens carved from the wood of these trees with them wherever they go, with the symbol of the eye and hand, so that their gods will always have an eye to see and a hand to act anywhere they are needed.

I do not have orcs in Cad Goleor.

I depict orcs/orks the same way criminals or mobsters are often depicted in movies. They're thuggish, crude, and sort of stupid; they're fun to interact with, having wacky accents, colloquialisms, and conventions, but being stupid thugs, nobody feels *too bad* about seeing bad things happen to them. After all, live by the sword, die by the sword, all that stuff. If they didn't want to catch an arrow to the neck, they'd have stayed home and farmed.

That said, I don't make them automatic "bad guys," I just make them a disenfranchised race that struggles against bigotry. If an elf walks into a town to sell his hand-crafted wares, he'll probably be welcome. If an ork tries the same thing, he might catch a crossbow bolt to the gut for his trouble. It's not very different from real-world racism. Most orcs, rather than supplicate and beg for acceptance from people who cruelly discriminate against them, would take the low road and become the tormentors rather than the victims. It's up to the players how they want to deal with that. As such, orcs and human bandits are often found in the same roles, although human bandits would rarely fraternize with the orcs; after all, they may be bandits and criminals, but they're not Savages!

Also see Shadowrun's portrayal of orcs; that's the game that most informed my outlook on the green-skinned menace.

I get more and more uncomfortable the more orcs are used to explore issues of racism.

Quote from: Luminous Crayon
I get more and more uncomfortable the more orcs are used to explore issues of racism.

You gotta do what you feel comfortable with, for certain; but: http://badgods.com/view/orc/

Quote from: Luminous Crayon
I get more and more uncomfortable the more orcs are used to explore issues of racism.

expand on this.   
i'm normally pleased to see issues raised; instead of making generic alignment-biased races.   i like to spin the culture vs race thing, as well,


hell, i did this a lot, and also used magic to try to intelligently bring up and address gender issues. 

I like my orcs craven, vicious and irredeemable. They are walking, raping, cannibalistic war-crimes.

If I want to explore real world issues I will use actual people thankyouverymuch.

I don't really use orcs, or any Tolkien-staple race like hobbits, elves, and dwarves. Just saying the word "Dwarf" invokes images of dour, rough, bearded men who use axes and drink beer. While I think there's a certain convenient simplicity to being able to say "these are orcs, these are hobbits, and these are elves" and people just get it, I don't personally see the appeal.

The only time I really find orcs and other such common fantasy races interesting is when they're really pushed outside of their boundaries, and even then I find myself rarely calling them elves, orcs, or hobbits. Kind of a catch-22 for me there.

Back when I GMed regularly, I seldom used orcs, because they were too much like humans.  On a mechanical level, there's little they can do that humans can't (at least in D&D, you've got darkvision and... darkvision), and on a thematic level, there's nothing I ever needed orcs for that I couldn't accomplish with cruel, malicious, or simply servile humans.

oh, and the quick and dirty of the  Ogrillite Races  (http://celtricia.pbworks.com/w/page/44901947/Ogrillite%20Races) of Celtricia.  
I most certainly included them to be familiar, but ,moved them later down from their original purpose, to a time past that as culture was overtaking race as the primary determinant.  Also, orcs are one of the two most common and thus dominant races in Celtricia.   Not humans.  Hobyts and Orcash are inheriting the Waking Dream...

Quote from: LordVreeg

Quote from: Luminous Crayon
I get more and more uncomfortable the more orcs are used to explore issues of racism.

expand on this.

Okay, but first I am going to let a couple of other people summarize my problems:

Quote from: S_AIf I want to explore real world issues I will use actual people thankyouverymuch.

Quote from: polycarpand on a thematic level, there's nothing I ever needed orcs for that I couldn't accomplish with cruel, malicious, or simply servile humans

This is sort of difficult for me to fit words around, but I'm going to try to hit it real fast:

1.) The players in your game are all human. When a character in your game is nonhuman, they are substantively other. When nonhuman characters are used to illustrate real-world issues of race, you are, at best, edging towards some unfortunate associations by othering minorities. (At worst, you are straight-up linking the idea of race with a caricature-- see Shadowrun and "orksploitation", because, holy sgit this is a thign.)

2.) Orcs in a lot of games (and in the "gamer zeitgeist" in general, if that's a thing) serve the purpose of being the bad guys that it's okay to kill-- because they're innately evil, because they're subhuman, because they're inevitably pawns of the true evil mastermind, whatever. The fact that we're having this thread is, I think, a demonstration that it's not really possible to totally get away from that. The minute you start to do the whole thing of "in this setting, orcs represent [ethnic group]" for any reason, you're linking [ethnic group] with the idea of being permissible targets. You can have whatever lofty sociological ideals you want, but at some point some player is going to hear your "I'm using orcs to illustrate what it's like to be a minority and face prejudice, let's all explore these complex issues with empathy and thoughtfulness" and respond with "whatever, I just shoot him, he's just an orc" because that's what games are conditioned to find acceptable. And then all you've done is created something uncomfortable.

3.) Because I'm just some dumb white dude, and what the hell do I know about being a minority that would make me feel able to make any kind of meaningful point about a minority's experience using as hamfisted a metaphor as a "race" (goddamn, what a challenging word, especially in the context of this discussion) in a roleplaying game. Especially given how much you're basically got to speak in generalities when you're writing game material. Do you want to produce material on what orcs are like, and what orcs think, and what orcs do, knowing all along that orcs are your covert (or overt!) stand-in for an actual minority group that exists, a member of which may read this material? I don't, because honestly that makes me feel hella weird.

But again, what do I know about it, just some white dude.

I agree. I generally don't use nonhuman races because I don't find enough to distinguish them without potentially relying on some trite and potentially offensive associations to real-world races. If I'm going to have the "these guys are basically the [Country X] race" or some other simple allusion, then the least I can do is make them human just like the actual people who live in Country X-- and that works better anyway because I hate mono-cultural races.

That said, Asura has the Ammonitians, who are definitely the other, and, in some ways, their other-ness and convenience to use as an antagonist means that they're my setting's "orcs." However, they are telepathic cephalopod Lovecraftian horrors, so their other-ness is, well... pretty 'other' from anything resembling humanity. So I think I'm safe from upsetting anyone, unless Cthulhu is reading Asura.

Yeah, heck, it's fine to have an other and it's fine to have a dedicated antagonist, I just think you have to be really careful how you define them.

One of the main ways I painted myself into a corner with Jade Stage stuff is by using a bunch of nonhuman species when I probably should have just used "people" and saved myself a lot of trouble, but hey, you live and learn.

LC, do you run away from gender issues as well?  Sexual issues?  Or does it not occur that being some white dude (dude being operative) would make that just as charged?  

The fact that we cannot get away from this has little to do with a fantasy race being equated to something reality as it does the fact that racism, classism, sexism, nationalism actually do exist.

When we are kids, we played cowboys and indians or the equiv.  Or Gurls vs boeys.  I had no issue in 1976 with orcs and goblins being evil races and the whole idea of supposedly sentient races being unable to break from the alignment yoke.  

I consider it sort of part of my evolution creating more complicated and deeper setting stories; trying to not only play with races or genders or mores or cultural issues, but to set up the setting specific realities that challenge the fantasy paradigms.  I don't just game to escape; I game to challenge myself and my players artistically and intellectually.

Not saying you are wrong in anything you said; for god's sake, I love our discussions.  Orcs in my settings are less of a stand-in for an actual minority as they are one of many minorities, and more of a focus on the way a thing can BE versus how it is perceived.

Quote from: LordVreeg
LC, do you run away from gender issues as well?  Sexual issues?  Or does it not occur that being some white dude (dude being operative) would make that just as charged?  

What I do not do is: have some elaborate construct of fiction stand in for women so that I can examine women's issues without using characters who are women, only caricatures of women. Because that's the thing that's really analogous to what we're talking about here.

ed:

like, for instance, what if I wrote a world where there was one species, with high psychological/morphological contrast between the sexes? The males are all just, you know, regular human dudes. The females are mermaids. They're one species, though, just the men are like this and the women are like this. Also, the females are all obsessed with shiny objects and jewelery, and their emotions are cursed to change with the phases of the moon, and society generally considers them inferior at math and science. But remember, I'm just writing this so that we can explore gender inequality issues!

you'd probably consider that to be pretty weird and gross. because it is! because it's taking a societally disadvantaged group and othering and stereotyping that group at the same time

ed ed:

honestly if you want to use games to open up a conversation on bigotry and privilege I think that is great, but using monster species as the tool to do this with seems like a very problematic way to approach that issue

Any time you create a fantasy world with different rules than reality you create an elaborate construct that stands in for what we see as a gender role, a social class, etc.  Do magic using sentients analogize with the higher social classes?  Your gender roles are exactly as we have them in 2013, and so you are using males and females exactly as they are today, as opposed to using an elaborate construct of fiction known as your setting's reality?

These differences can be immature and mature, gross and delicate, poorly done or well done.  The same as fiction.  Creating an RPG setting, in this wise, is similar to writing a story.  It can be gross, or timid, or written for the lowest common denominator.  Or it can try to deal with this shit, as best as a writer can.  I don;t claim any high ground, LC.  I am an old writer and psychologist, and unwilling to not try.

I really want to answer those questions but I am super tired so it's going to have to be later; prod me if I don't get back to this.

Quote from: Luminous Crayon
I really want to answer those questions but I am super tired so it's going to have to be later; prod me if I don't get back to this.

good night, man.  Great talking to you

Quote from: LuminousBecause I'm just some dumb white dude, and what the hell do I know about being a minority that would make me feel able to make any kind of meaningful point about a minority's experience using as hamfisted a metaphor as a "race" (goddamn, what a challenging word, especially in the context of this discussion) in a roleplaying game.

You might be saying this in jest, but we "minorities" are no better equipped to talk about these things than you are. What you're talking about is called empathy. "Dumb white dudes" have as much of it as anyone else.

Quote from: Salacious AngelIf I want to explore real world issues I will use actual people thankyouverymuch.

Having said this...

Sci-fi and fantasy being what they are, there are infinite varieties of otherworldly issues we might raise that are sufficiently familiar as to reflect or recontextualise our own experience.

So it's not that orcs in any permutation - or even Luminous' vapid bauble-loving mermaids - are useless storytelling tools. The trap lies in false equivalences.

Quote from: J. R. R. TolkienI cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

To your point, Sailor, even the idea that racial issues always equate to a majority/minority position, so much as a dynamic issue, is up to the author and should not be assumed for the point of this communication.  I ran and played very different games back in the 70s and 80s, with common, simplified stereotypical orcs, goblins, etc.  And that was fine then.

One of the reasons to use them in particular now, but to enrich and deepen their culture and history as well, is in juxtaposition with the trite, alignment-based, 'enemy-race' I used then that is still common.  My Steel Isle group fought against some tribal ogrillites and allied with others (Trine Guldana), and that was accomplishing one of the goals in bringing their sentience to the fore. 

Quote from: LordVreegeven the idea that racial issues always equate to a majority/minority position, so much as a dynamic issue, is up to the author and should not be assumed for the point of this communication

I don't know what this statement is in response to.

EDIT: Is this tangent sufficiently on topic or should it get its own digs?

Quote from: LordVreegOne of the reasons to use them in particular now, but to enrich and deepen their culture and history as well, is in juxtaposition with the trite, alignment-based, 'enemy-race' I used then that is still common.  My Steel Isle group fought against some tribal ogrillites and allied with others (Trine Guldana), and that was accomplishing one of the goals in bringing their sentience to the fore.

This is fine when you're deliberately subverting long-held expectations.  Back when orcs were overwhelmingly uniformly evil, it was even cutting edge commentary.  Given the history of your games that you've described, it makes a certain narrative sense to be subversive in that manner, given that that's the direction you want to go in.  When designing a setting from scratch, however - from the ground up, without that previous baggage - the expectations you're subverting are ones you yourself have just created, which doesn't quite have the same effect.

Personally, I just don't feel that "orcs are people too" is meaningful in the present cultural moment.  It feels a bit played out, like a tract condemning chattel slavery in 2013.  Perhaps that's a narrow cultural view - there are people younger than me for whom, presumably, the only "orcs" they know are the uniformly wicked ones in the LotR movies - but it seems to me to be a relevant subcultural view.  Someone posting an "always chaotic evil" humanoid race on the CBG today, particularly an orcish one, would feel like a weird throwback to me, and thus a more "neutral" take on orcs intended to challenge that seems sort of irrelevant.

Quote from: Polycarp

Quote from: LordVreegOne of the reasons to use them in particular now, but to enrich and deepen their culture and history as well, is in juxtaposition with the trite, alignment-based, 'enemy-race' I used then that is still common.  My Steel Isle group fought against some tribal ogrillites and allied with others (Trine Guldana), and that was accomplishing one of the goals in bringing their sentience to the fore.

This is fine when you're deliberately subverting long-held expectations.  Back when orcs were overwhelmingly uniformly evil, it was even cutting edge commentary.  Given the history of your games that you've described, it makes a certain narrative sense to be subversive in that manner, given that that's the direction you want to go in.  When designing a setting from scratch, however - from the ground up, without that previous baggage - the expectations you're subverting are ones you yourself have just created, which doesn't quite have the same effect.

Personally, I just don't feel that "orcs are people too" is meaningful in the present cultural moment.  It feels a bit played out, like a tract condemning chattel slavery in 2013.  Perhaps that's a narrow cultural view - there are people younger than me for whom, presumably, the only "orcs" they know are the uniformly wicked ones in the LotR movies - but it seems to me to be a relevant subcultural view.  Someone posting an "always chaotic evil" humanoid race on the CBG today, particularly an orcish one, would feel like a weird throwback to me, and thus a more "neutral" take on orcs intended to challenge that seems sort of irrelevant.

Sometimes it is hard to be all that cutting edge all the time when you are talking about something you did over twenty years ago.  I apologize.  The setting is turning 3o next month, however.
But, yes, the scene was a bit different then.  Human-centric worlds were not just the norm, the friggin' rulebooks said that was what it was built for; so creating a world where humans were no longer the dominant race, where Orcs and hobyts were more common, to the point of the OP.

I've never intended to nor have I seen orcs used as an allegory to any specific real-world racism. Okay, here's where I get preachy. If you don't want to read about me standing up on my soap-box, skip the spoiler.
[spoiler]I, personally, just can't get away from the idea that orcs can experience racism just like humans. Orcs are not an allegory for african people, native americans, or any other group of humans who have suffered from racism; they're orcs. They're not exactly human, but they're practically the same. They're alive and they make choices just like people.

I can't believe in an entire species that inherently does wrong. It can happen in an RPG setting, of course, and those settings can be great; it's just something I can't wrap my head around. To me, orcs are alive, and living things make choices, and those choices determine how they deserve to be treated in a just world.

To a guy like me, giving orcs a chance is not about challenging my friends with edgy slam-gamemastering about racism; it's just a fact of any world I imagine. There's no such thing as an evil living thing; there are only living things which make choices that cause others to view them as evil.

I'm not recommending the use of orcs as an allegory for real-world racism; orcs are often an example of fantasy-setting racism. If you persecute and attack a sentient living thing because of their appearance and not because of their actions, that's racist. If the orc didn't do anything wrong, he shouldn't punished or harmed. Assuming that an orc did wrong and deserves to be harmed on the sole basis that he's an orc is racist.

Unless, of course, the setting assumes that orcs are completely inherently evil (although I'd always be dubious of the method by which this is determined). In that case they don't get the same benefit of the doubt that most other living things do.
[/spoiler]
The short version is that orcs need not be an allegory for real racism; if they're truly inherently evil, like a demon, than it's okay to behead them on sight. However, if they're not inherently evil, and one orc gets hacked and/or slashed for what some other orc did, that's racist.

Quote from: PolycarpPersonally, I just don't feel that "orcs are people too" is meaningful in the present cultural moment.

I can see it as being an overused convention, but it's still relevant. Have you ever heard an American refer to a resident of Iraq as a "Hadji"? Dehumanization isn't a 20th century problem, is a human problem.

If anyone's every played Victoriana, they made the oh-so-tasteful choice to make the orcs "noble savage" natives of Africa and then tried to very quickly justify away all the incredibly-unfortunate implications of such.

Regardless of what Tolkien's actual intent may have been, you can't pretend like a mongrel race of dark-skinned degenerate cannibals with broad noses and slanted eyes threatening to destroy Nordic-inspired civilization (alongside several even more overtly Orientalist villains) isn't incredibly insensitive at the very least, particularly because that particular trope wasn't as central theme in fantasy writing at the time.

Quote from: VeloxHowever, if they're not inherently evil, and one orc gets hacked and/or slashed for what some other orc did, that's racist.

Agreed.

In this respect orcs make intriguing "acceptable targets". I'll never GM a game in the Antebellum American South, because my forebears were plantation slaves and that subject really doesn't sit well with me, but if my players wanted to play the human slavemasters of subjugated orcs (or the orcs themselves) I'd jump all over it. We aren't discussing the experience of African chattel slaves (again, a false equivalence), but we can explore the psychology of the slaver and the slave, the abuser and the abused. Sometimes my players want to play cruel, amoral, selfish characters and sometimes they even want such inhumanity to have consequence. Fantasy is how we make this happen.

It's like Luminous' Daft Mermaids. Using the mermaids as stand-ins for human women would be cheap strawmanning (womanning?), but that fiction could legitimately discuss human male identity. The world described is a world without women, containing only their caricatured perversions. What, then, becomes of their counterparts?

Quote from: SuperbrightRegardless of what Tolkien's actual intent may have been, you can't pretend like a mongrel race of dark-skinned degenerate cannibals with broad noses and slanted eyes threatening to destroy Nordic-inspired civilization (alongside several even more overtly Orientalist villains) isn't incredibly insensitive at the very least, particularly because that particular trope wasn't as central theme in fantasy writing at the time.

No need to pretend. I for one don't think it's insensitive at all. The "more overtly Orientalist villains", being explicitly human, are another matter...

To address again the preachy and condescending tone I fear might be present in my previous post, let me say it's also true that I have trouble envisioning a world where orcs wouldn't struggle with racism. As a resident and worker of the south-side of Chicago, racism is something I encounter and fight against on a near-daily basis. When something is part of a daily struggle for you and your social group, excluding it from the shared narrative is more disconcerting than including it.

I can respect a gamer and their game if it's run in another fashion.

I think I already chimed in here, but I'll do it again just in case.  I generally dislike nonhuman humanoids in my serious settings.  They tend toward one of two extremes in most every setting I've read: straw man caricatures of irl cultures and peoples or thinly veiled mashups of the former in an attempt to not be caricatures.  I find both irritating.  Also, keeping everyone human let's a mature group actually address social issues if they choose.

In any non serious gaming (like beer and pretzels dungeon crawling), lots of sapient fantasy species embodying different cultures is the norm.  And within that norm, green skins exist to be aggressive living sources of loot and experience, so slay them without mercy and take their stuff.  This is a world where murdur hobos are considered great men, so screw sensitivity.  Go kill some greens and take their stuff.  You want justification aside from "they have stuff," then, yes, they are evil and bad and gross and want to eat your babies.

That's my approach. Ymmv.

The only way I've seen nonhuman humanoids actually work in a way that resonates with me is to have them there pretty much for the sake of variety. Generally speaking, they essentially are human, they just look different. Any inherent biological variations are modest and within one human standard deviation or so. Culturally, they merge with humans in cosmopolitan nations, and even isolationist countries consisting solely of them have a wide variety of different cultures.

This isn't 100% "realistic," as it's more of the "rubber forehead aliens" approach, and I probably wouldn't do it if I was trying for hard sci-fi or whatever. However, for doing more traditional fantasy without falling back on race-cultures or other really trite (and possibly offensive) tropes, it works pretty well. I'll probably do this if I decide to incorporate Synapsids (my lizard-people from First Age) into Asura, as well; the kind of zany grab-bag feel of Asura would also work well with this approach.

Quote from: Velox
I have trouble envisioning a world where orcs wouldn't struggle with racism.

Orcs in Lord of the Rings don't seem to be struggling. They probably couldn't care less what humans elves and dwarves think about them; it's not like they need to. After all, they're about to break the back of mankind and usher in the era of orcs!

I find it interesting that people seem so quick to cast orcs in the role of the oppressed minority, when to me, they seem to be far better fit as the oppressive majority. If they weren't so inclined to consume their foes as food, classical RPG orcs would be pretty easy to portray as discriminating, slave-taking colonizers striving to subjugate and exploit other races they've deemed their inferiors.

Quote from: GhostmanOrcs in Lord of the Rings don't seem to be struggling. They probably couldn't care less what humans elves and dwarves think about them; it's not like they need to...I find it interesting that people seem so quick to cast orcs in the role of the oppressed minority, when to me, they seem to be far better fit as the oppressive majority.

That's a good point, and also makes for a good setting or story. The orcs in LotR are employed by Sauron as thieves and murderers, and ostensibly they find that employment to be to their liking (although I am reminded of the scene in the cartoon where Sauron's orcs and Sauron's humans crossed paths and fought for supremacy - was that in the books? Because that's the same shit I'm talking about).

I suppose the setting I envision, wherein orcs are part of an oppressed minority, the real caricature is the racist human jerk. I just assume that there will always be a kind of human who finds differences in other sentient peers as a reason to treat them like crap. That's definitely not the best or only way to portray humanity; it's just what I usually do and what you see in games like Shadowrun.

In any case, this thread has been severely derailed; maybe it should be split into another thread about racism and non-human races in RPGs? Maybe even three threads: one about Orcs/Greenskins, another about Racism in RPGs, and another about whether or not to use non-humans in an RPG at all (because that comes up often). Is thread splitting something we do in the CBG?

Quote from: Polycarp
Back when I GMed regularly, I seldom used orcs, because they were too much like humans.  On a mechanical level, there's little they can do that humans can't (at least in D&D, you've got darkvision and... darkvision), and on a thematic level, there's nothing I ever needed orcs for that I couldn't accomplish with cruel, malicious, or simply servile humans.

I've adapted them to some extent or plan to. I have a world that lacks humans so there is space for them but I'm unsure of how to have the work.

My iteration of them might be simply a misunderstanding. All races have some common origin, Thus the "Tyr Elves," and "Orcs" might be related however distantly. The Orc's form the most diverse and numerous race having survived on the world during a period when the world was rendered nearly uninhabitable and throughout the chaotic process of terraforming and rebirth. It is plausible these being's the Tyr Elves call Orc, are in fact Humans who have withstood the obstacles and have taken on a more feral appearance having to adapt to difficult circumstances.

However they are a race somewhat on the retreat as the Tyr Elves have outmatched them in terms of technology and Psionic powers. However the Orc's are endlessly resilient and breed rapidly. Culturally they are as diverse as humans, meaning some have built cities states akin to Sumer, others live in simple tribes and clans, some have forged empires and others have begun to uncover ancient devices and relics to give them an edge as most of the Tyr Elves regard them as a mere nuisance or obstacle to their colonization and rule of the reborn world their ancestors the Sylvan Elves promised them.