The Human Target
Adventurer
Irda Ranger said:Yeah, your personal conception of what Ocs "are" will heavily influence your ability to accept them as a PC race.
In my campaigns Orcs have always been the Tolkien variety: corrupted flesh, or mortal demons. There were plenty of primitive human tribes (or Kagonesti-like elves) that served as good sources of the "noble savage" character.
My question for the 4E designers is: if Orcs are noble savages now, what the "baseline humanoid badguy savage"? That's an archetype that's fairly important to a lot of campaign worlds. Hobgoblins are too organized; goblins too weak; bugbears too strong; etc. etc. If Orcs are PC, there's now a hole in the humanoid lineup. Is there a proposed fill-in too?
I hope so, and it better be good.
Admittedly, what I'll probably do (if Orcs are in fact PC's), is rename them and adapt them into a Dragonlance-like Minotaur race. "Orcs" are already established as the corrupted mortals IMC, and so they will remain.
They could alter Goblins. Bugbears, Hobgoblins, Gnolls etc to better fit that archtype.
Or they could make up something new.
Or they could choose to leave the baseline humanoid badguy savage empty.
HeavenShallBurn said:Hopefully they'll get over the 'these are good races' and 'these are bad races' paradigm for regular humanoids and emphasize that the rampaging barbarians might be ANY race at all, even those traditionally thought of as good. In fact the points of light setting concept seems tailor made to do this by emphasizing the barbarian/civilized divide instead of the elf/orc divide.
Thats what I'd like to see too.