ORCS or Half-Orcs?

[Simia Saturnalia]

Heroic fantasy may live well in black & white, but there's plenty of fun stuff in the gray margins, as WBDB suggests. Thieves' World anthologies were my introduction to fantasy, so I'll always have a soft spot for that sort of stuff.

That said, orcs are so ubiquitous my players have trouble believing in them as "evil" any more. I'd be happy to see them in the PHB. Half-orcs....eh. They get legacy screwed mechanically and just aren't worth the page space.

 

[Umbran]

I'll take A Song of Ice & Fire, Thieves World and Black Company over Yet Another LotR Clone, thanks.

To me, the half-orc is clearly the shade of grey, rather than the black or white of one side or the other. The orc as a PC would not be nearly as good a "shareds of grey" character, thematically speaking, imo.

 

[Mighty Veil]

Wasn't 1E teh edition that said that 1/2 orcs were almost always the product of rape?

Not even close. 1e said that player's half-orcs are among the 10% that look and acted human enough to fit into society. The rest are as wicked and ugly and cruel as an evil savage orc.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Not even close. 1e said that player's half-orcs are among the 10% that look and acted human enough to fit into society. The rest are as wicked and ugly and cruel as an evil savage orc.

Evil = ugly? I don't think that will "fly" nowadays.

 

[pawsplay]

I don't think LOTR really has black-and-white morality. There are clearly good and evil forces, but the mortal characters certainly are not. Boromir, hello? Narnia would be a much better example.

 

[The Merciful]

The thing is nowdays you have two orc archtypes. The newer one is a savage but more or less of noble orc (Morrowind etc.). The older versions is Tolkien's kannibalistic, brutal and hateful demons in mortal flesh. The former makes fine PCs and fill the savage type hole in PC race types, the latter is not really suitable even for an evil party.

So the questions is, which ones your orcs are.

 

[Wormwood]

Wasn't 1E teh edition that said that 1/2 orcs were almost always the product of rape?

Nope. They were just Saruman's spies with the serial numbers filed off---poorly.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Nope. They were just Saruman's spies with the serial numbers filed off---poorly.

I think it's been suggested that they were the products of rape, simply because half-orcs are so rare it's hard to believe there's enough of them to maintain their own breeding population, and of course the general revulsion towards humans having sex with things like orcs or dragons. I don't know if the 1e authors actualy wanted to say "your character is probably the product of rape" anywhere in the book.

Eberron has enough half-orcs that they generally breed with other half-orcs, but that's pretty rare in other settings.

 

[Wepwawet]

So the questions is, which ones your orcs are.

Orcs as seen in Warcraft 3.
A race of savage barbarians with noble traditions. And cute too Not ugly as in LotR.

 

[wordsmithpdx]

Orcs as seen in Warcraft 3.
A race of savage barbarians with noble traditions. And cute too Not ugly as in LotR.

Not that Warcraft (and WoW) haven't had some good ideas, but I have a knee-jerk reaction against the "Warcrafting" of D&D. A ton of the concept art has seemed very Warcrafty to me, as have the racial/class choices (Tiefling warlock anyone? How about those fire elemental guys who are, for some reason, wearing armor?).

Can anyone convince me that the Warcraft influence would be a good thing? The roots of the original D&D tropes are generally LotR rip-offs, yeah...so this would just be another rip-off. But the WoW themes and characters are so much more high-fantasy, fantastical, and just plain goofy. The LotR stuff at least gives you a solid, somewhat gritty baseline, and you can "fantastic it up" into Forgotten Realms or Eberron if you want. But if the baseline is Eberron or WoW level of fantasticness, then us gritty players/DMs will probably start looking for a system that more closely reflects that.

No final judgements here, obviously, just some ideas and speculation. I'd love to be convinced otherwise!

-Rob