D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Yaarel]

Probably, having at least one great grandparent, is enough to claim identity within an ethnicity. But obviously, the more assimilated one is out of that ethnicity, the more one needs to find a community to participate in to make an effort to sustain that identity.

Relatedly, an ethnicity has customs to formally adopt an outsider as a member of that ethnicity.

 

[Vaalingrade]

D&D traditions seem most likely to go wrong while misrepresenting "primitive" "tribal" "savages".

D&D was heavily influenced by Howard and Lovecraft (among others) and the inertia of its traditionalist faction has prevented it from turning the corner past that.

 

[Yaarel]

Normans?

Normans are knights, but they probably stop being vikings around the same time that they start speaking French.

Varangian guards in the Byzantine Empire feel somewhat knightly vikings.

I was thinking about the Post-Viking Period 1100s to 1300s. There is an influx of foreign Christian influences, a consolidation of national monarchy, even some crusading. But they remain part of Viking Period culture, and dont feel knightly, tho I am unsure why not. Maybe something to do with horses? Maybe knights dont sail? They did have chain armor and the weapons, and allegiances tho. By the 1400s, they are medieval, but after the decimation by the bubonic plague in the 1300s, no longer viking culture.

Since the 1400s, at least Norway languished in extreme poverty until the 1900s.

 

[Maxperson]

Because the D&D orcs are a "race", American tropes tend to play them out as Native Americans, conceived as a race. In GAZ10, the tropes and connotations play out overtly as "red orcs".

D&D traditions seem most likely to go wrong while misrepresenting "primitive" "tribal" "savages".

Outside of GAZ10(which I found out about from this thread) I've never seen anyone play or depict orcs as peoples of the nations. Not once. Not even a little bit. That includes a few dozen DMs that I've played with over the decades and even more convention games that I've played in.

 

[Voadam]

What you don't get are Vikings knights, for example.

If you mean heavy armor full plate sea raiders then there are the Ironborn from the A Song of Fire and Ice novels (Game of Thrones). If you mean Norse heavy lance horseman forces then you have the Riders of Rohan from Lord of the Rings. The Normans are generally considered an example from history of vikings who became knights.

There are plenty of interesting different ways to mix and match such elements in a fantasy game/setting.

 

[Voadam]

The fantasy Mongols from the Hordelands and the Fantasy Chinese from Shou Lung with their great Dragon Wall and Chinese style imperial bureaucracy, and the fantasy Genghis Khan storyline from the Horde trilogy of novels of conquering Fantasy China then conquering West did not seem generic Asia/fantasy Japan to me at all. They seemed specifically fantasy Mongols and Fantasy China with no hint of samurai stuff that I remember.

I have not read the Kara Tur setting and module stuff in depth to comment on how they handle the fantasy China or Tibet stuff.

OA itself had the Japanese Samurai based mechanical honor system, which I did not care for, and a lot of specific feudal Japanese based culture stuff as the baseline, which does not always fit well overlaying with other non-Japanese, non-samurai contexts.

 

[Yaarel]

Outside of GAZ10(which I found out about from this thread) I've never seen anyone play or depict orcs as peoples of the nations. Not once. Not even a little bit. That includes a few dozen DMs that I've played with over the decades and even more convention games that I've played in.

D&D tends to lump all the "savages" interchangeably, and in this way play out the cowboys versus Indians tropes, plus a dash of "Terra Incognita" Africa from earlier fantasy literature.

 

[Maxperson]

D&D tends to lump all the "savages" interchangeably, and in this way play out the cowboys versus Indians tropes, plus a dash of "Terra Incognita" Africa from earlier fantasy literature.

No. I reject the notion that every use of the word savage in D&D must mean someone of the nations(native american). You've made a claim that D&D orcs are "tend to be played that way", yet no one I know of has ever played that way or to my knowledge encountered someone playing that way. I doubt that I'm unusual in this regard.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Outside of GAZ10(which I found out about from this thread) I've never seen anyone play or depict orcs as peoples of the nations. Not once. Not even a little bit. That includes a few dozen DMs that I've played with over the decades and even more convention games that I've played in.

I haven't read Gaz10 so I have no real opinion on that book in particular, but I encountered the same as you. I didn't see anyone comparing orcs to native americans until discussions on threads like these. Up to that point I always assumed they were for any external threat or unknown (often taking inspiration from a variety of tribal and nomadic cultures but more from ones in the old world, not the new). And mostly in actual campaigns they were so divorced from anything recognizable (or such a jumble of multiple cultures) you wouldn't even really connect them to a given culture (like the GM might give them Japanese Guzoku armor or roman lorica segmentata because he thought it cool, but then they would have 4-5 other cultural features from completely different places. Or they might be generic 'barbarian'.

 

[Bedrockgames]

D&D tends to lump all the "savages" interchangeably, and in this way play out the cowboys versus Indians tropes, plus a dash of "Terra Incognita" Africa from earlier fantasy literature.

I find this argument very confusing. I can see if a given book specifically has red orcs, how that would be a straight line in that case to Native Americans. But I can't see how making a hodgepodge of "all the 'savages'", makes it play out the cowboy and indian trope more. At least I don't see how it would be specifically cowboy and indian. Lots of places have frontiers and lots of places have people outside their settled regions they regarded as hostile and uncivilized. But more than that, I never even really thought of orcs as tribes on the frontier so much as monsters in the unknown. And lots of genres have this idea too (you see it in wuxia for instance). I think the concept of orc is so abstracted that these arguments have never been particularly convincing to me (again barring a case where there is some specific instance of a culture being invoked: but even then there is still ample room to debate what that means and if it is even a commentary or if superficial cultural elements are simply being used for flavor). I feel like we have had this discussion an awful lot. I don't think many people have changed their opinions. I know I still think the whole orcs are racist argument is just not persuasive in the least.