[D&D] What is a 'Half' Orc?

This may seem like a question with an obvious answer, so I'll do my best to explain.

Are half-orcs individuals with a parent from each respective race? Or they a human subrace which carries visible traces of orcish blood (in that they have bred over generations)

I'm asking chiefly in regard to the 3rd edition Forgotten Realms setting, and after a fair bit of research over time have found conflicting answers. I really do lean the latter of these answers; that this is a subrace that exists within orcish and human societies. A kind of 'impure' underclass.

I run an online FR world, and over the years have noticed that around 90& of players RP (and indeed understand) half-orcs as to be exactly that. Personally I've tried to break the trend and adopt a more nuanced approach to the race, but am keen hear the considered opinion of D&D veterans.

Has this question come up in the past? Is there a popular opinion one way or the other?

If I had to explain Half-Orcs then I may say, they happen when a Human and an Orc love each other very much.

But I guess you could have a Human (or Orc) show genetic features inherited from an older generation.

I've always been of the opinion that half-orcs can come about in several different ways - Orcish traits are nearly always genetically dominant, so the mating of an orc with another humanoid or the mating of two half-orcs will invariably produce a half-orc, while the mating of a half-orc with another species has a slightly higher than 50% chance to produce a half-orc...

Also, any creature with at least 1/32 orcish blood has a chance of exhibiting some degree of minor orcish cosmetic physical traits, although this wouldn't affect their game stats in any way.

Humans and orcs are genetically the same species, so a half-orc is anyone with ancestors and traits of both. They could be the off-spring of two half-orcs, or they could be the cross between a human and an orc. The could even have one parent that is entirely human, or entirely orc, where the other has mixed blood.

In game terms, a half-orc is a character to whom the half-orc racial adjustments are a better representation than either the human racial adjustments or the orc racial adjustments. If two half-orcs get married and have three children, one of them might be a half-orc while another is considered a full orc and the last one is considered a full human; but even the human is likely to show some minor cosmetic features of their mixed ancestry.

I can't speak for the Realms, in particular, but one of the founding assumptions from earlier editions is that half-orcs are incredibly rare. There aren't enough of them to form a self-propagating race, because it's rare for humans to mate with orcs in the first place, so the chance that two half-orcs would ever come across each other (in a pseudo-Medieval European setting where teleportation magic is almost unknown) is not worth contemplating. Look at Middle-Earth as an inspiration, and consider how many half-elves there are.

Faerun isn't Middle-Earth, though. Faerun is a ludicrously high-magic setting, where travel is much easier than you might expect. Maybe there are places where human civilizations are immediately adjacent to orc civilizations, and they have a border with a substantial half-orc population.

In my campaigns, most half-orcs are the result of a campaign of conquest and atrocities. But that was not an absolute and I would not prevent a PC from having a different backstory.

Alternatives:
- A society of half-orcs (or a sub-culture) could arise someplace like Waterdeep (individuals coming together)
- A society of half-orcs could arise near Many-Arrows, as both humans and orcs had to be around each other without automatically fighting or getting into dominance contests
- Individual humans or orcs leave their home society and make a place for themselves in the other - see Thesk for an example.
- Use the model of Beren and Luthien (from JRR Tolkein's Silmarillion)
- Somebody wants to be Drizzt with a difference
- I would also recommend half-orc stats to somebody who wanted to be an orc but I didn't want to RP out the 'stranger in town' effect every time the group went to a new place.

I have written a 'national background' for a half-elven nation that resulted from a tribe of humans conquering a frontier province of an elven Empire. The humans held that a true warrior would take in the wives and family of the opposing warrior they slew, and provide for them. Of course some children eventually resulted. If orcs in your campaign are not Classic Orcs, you could do something similar.

Lord Irongron said:

Are half-orcs individuals with a parent from each respective race? Or they a human subrace which carries visible traces of orcish blood (in that they have bred over generations)

Click to expand...

The classic answer is that half-orcs are mostly the aftermath of raiding/warfare. So, human mother who survives the experience raising an orcs child.

A more rules-oriented answer is that they are a playable race alternative to orcs as monsters, they could be literally halfbreeds with a human parent, only fractionally one or the other, or even a full blood raised in the other culture or an 'evolved orc' or 'orc with a soul' (free will with regard to alignment).

If orcs aren't always-evil monsters to begin with then there's a lot more nuance available. For instance, in one campaign I ran there was a harsh frontier region in which humans sometimes even preferred to take an orcish wife...

I've set it up various ways for different games. I guess I've typically assumed that it was the offspring of a male orc raider and a female human.

My favorite interpretation is that it is similar to the mating of a Horse (64 chromosomes) and a Donkey (62 chromosomes). You get a hybrid. They're genetically similar enough to produce an offspring, but the result is a Mule (63 chromosomes). The Mule is sterile. Thus, Half-Orcs were sterile.

That setting was also fun that the Halflings were changed such that they had very short lives and large litters of children of which several were likely to perish in their childhood to either curiosity or predators. They would mature to young adult after 2 years, and typically die of old age at age 8. A halfling player could have a family lineage in the same amount of time other characters just matured.

Half-orcs are the orcish version of halflings, obviously.

I’ve never cared for half-races for the myriad questions they raise. If elves and humans can have fertile offspring, and so can orcs and humans, then all three must be subspecies of the same species. That means half-orc-half-elf should be equally possible. Furthermore, if these three races are the same species, how do we account for some of the more significant differences like elves not needing to sleep and being immune to sleep magic when humans and orcs don’t share this quality? Either half-elves and half-orcs should be sterile, or else humans should have some quality that makes them compatible breeders with any other humanoid race - a little like the Asari in Mass Effect. But in the latter case, we should also have half-dwarves, half-halflings, half-gnomes, etc.

Half-Orcs and Half-Elves are literally a legacy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (though half-elves do appear in mythology and I think at least one king in Scandinavia was supposedly a half-elf).

Any further details is really up to your determination (or the setting's creator)

But if you look to our own planet, there were once several species that were interfertile. Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Denisovan seem to have been. I don't know about Habilus or Erectus.


(Also ate least in AD&D terms, halfings are interfertile with other species. Tallfellow halflings have elf/human blood, stouts have dwarf/gnome, I think leprechauns are supposedly halfling/brownie or halfling/pixie)