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

[Mind of tempest]

I don't think it's about class as such, but rather anti-modernist sensibilities as such.

It's very much about conformity to the will of the divine; and the closely-related workings of providence. So no one's heritage or social situation is a meaningless accident.

I personally don't get any nihilistic vibe; that's something I associate with REH's Conan, which is utterly modernist despite the trappings. (The closest to an exception is The Hour of the Dragon.)

nihilistic would be the wrong word if you look at it from the right perspective terror would be the name for what you feel.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Maybe.

But just thinking through some of the modules I know:

* B2 Keep on the Borderlands - the default is that the PCs are self-appointed; there is no hint of a requirement that they receive the imprimatur of the Castellan before taking on the Caves;​

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* B10 Night's Dark Terror - the PCs help homesteaders on the frontier without any sort of endorsement from the local nobles (eg the Grand Duke of Karameikos) and then run their own assault on a slave ring, independently of those authority figures;​

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* Five Shall Be One - the PCs are wandering down a city street and get drawn into an adventure only because they are ready to use violence of their own volition;​

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* Speaker in Dreams - I think this is fairly similar to Five Shall Be One in how it starts; there is no suggestion that the PCs need to engage with the town authorities as part of leading the resistance against the take-over of the town;​

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* H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth - the PCs are assumed willing to ignore, or even take on, the mages who rule the dungeon area;​

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* P2 Demon Queen's Enclave - the PCs overthrow the Drow authorities in the area they intervene in.​

That's not a random sample; but I think these are representative enough.

My most epic campaign as player was night below. And what drew me to it later as a DM was the possibility of nonviolent interaction with the inhabitants of holdenshire.
The Idea, that goblins are not necessarily to be killed, but that they are people too.
(in my first run through as a player, however I remember putting them to sleep... andd I think we killed them afterwards...)

 

[pemerton]

nihilistic would be the wrong word if you look at it from the right perspective terror would be the name for what you feel.

Are you talking about REH, or JRRT?

If the former, I think nihilism is correct - it's a world without inherent value, only that imposed by human will.

If the latter, I don't think either nihilism or terror are correct. JRRT is not Luther or Calvin - it's a Catholic sensibility that underlies his work.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

To be perfectly honest, early D&D was VERY gamist and not THAT interested in 'story'. It was about 'beating a dungeon' and the point of the RP part was to actualize an open-ended framework type approach where you could declare any action and the Referee (GM) would decide if it worked or not, and what happened in consequence. Nobody would have ever asked "what are we doing here?" or "Why are we doing this?" Not that it didn't arise as a question fairly soon thereafter, but mostly in specific cases, not as a general thing. Other games explored story, but D&D didn't really get there until OA (1985).

I was hoping that one of the things that the work of Peterson, et al., would do would be to curtail the essentialist narratives.

Early D&D was just as (if not) more diverse in terms of approaches and playstyles than we have today, depending on when and where you were. It was not just about "beating a dungeon, and was more viewed as a toolkit to enable play in the 70s. It is simply error to try and incorporate our views from today back then; even people who grew up playing in the 80s have a very poor view of what the game was like in the 70s.

In other words, most of this just isn't true. The Elusive Shift explores this in more depth, and there have been numerous threads on the subject.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Are you talking about REH, or JRRT?

If the former, I think nihilism is correct - it's a world without inherent value, only that imposed by human will.

If the latter, I don't think either nihilism or terror are correct. JRRT is not Luther or Calvin - it's a Catholic sensibility that underlies his work.

to someone as alien to faith as me, that is not much different from what would exactly would the difference be?

 

[Bedrockgames]

to someone as alien to faith as me, that is not much different from what would exactly would the difference be?

I don't know that that question can be fully answered without people violating the forum guidelines. But there are a lot of differences

I think one thing it shows though is that a writer is more than just their nationality. JRR Tolkien was definitely very Catholic. And that shaped his writing (so did him being English, but the point is there are more things shaping what a writer does). And if you say down a random English Catholic, you wouldn't get Lord of the Rings, it took JRR Tolkien specifically to write that. These things that shape who we are, are important, but they aren't the only thing. JRR Tolkien came out of Catholicism, but then, so did Luther. And as any Catholic will tell you: we do have free will.

I think this is one reason why a number of people bristle a little at the whole: D&D is American so it must be shaped by this essentialist understanding of what it is to be an American (the frontier! individuality!, etc). Those things are bound to be present, but there are plenty of Americans who are more interested in European history than American history. And most Americans at this point are descended from various waves of immigration (which has fading significance with each generation but it means you have other values present besides some sort of pure American protestant work ethic and a notion of individuality bound up in western expansion and the free market). And if we are indeed a nation that value individuality, well it makes sense that people are free to shape their own identity however they want: i.e. you don't have to watch westerns or care about them (and at this point, few people do really).

Also for the purposes of this discussion, it is worth pointing out that many Americans are Catholic. Granted, I am pretty sure Gygax wasn't, and Howard wasn't. But a lot of gamers and designers are. Catholics are something like 22% of the population, and in some place we are a majority. So it would make sense to me you will have many Americans who see the world more the way Tolkien did than the way Howard did. And all that said, you are still dealing with individuals, so I don't think you can reduce people or the things they create to them being Catholic, or them being American.

 

[5atbu]

I was hoping that one of the things that the work of Peterson, et al., would do would be to curtail the essentialist narratives.

Early D&D was just as (if not) more diverse in terms of approaches and playstyles than we have today, depending on when and where you were. It was not just about "beating a dungeon, and was more viewed as a toolkit to enable play in the 70s. It is simply error to try and incorporate our views from today back then; even people who grew up playing in the 80s have a very poor view of what the game was like in the 70s.

In other words, most of this just isn't true. The Elusive Shift explores this in more depth, and there have been numerous threads on the subject.

If early D&D was based on Braunstein mixed up with wargaming then it would have exhibited strong narrativist and gamist trends, probably at the same gaming table through the night.

I don't find this odd, it's how we play RPGs now and how we played them in 1980.

There really isn't One True Way.

 

[Scott Christian]

Let's be careful here, what do you mean by "our" generation? I was born in the 70s, after the domination of the western in popular entertainment had ended, but I always enjoyed watching old television shows and movies westerns. The funny thing is, starting with Ft. Apache in 1949, the American Indians started being portrayed in a sympathetic light as complex people who were getting a raw deal. Certainly not in all movies or television shows, but the era of the Indian as a simple bad guy you could knock off with impunity was coming to an end.

The funny thing is that I rarely saw orcs being treated in such a sympathetic light or as complex people in D&D supplements. There were occasional examples of domestic life, but for the most part they just existed to provide us with experience points.

I would second this strongly. Just about everything I saw growing portrayed Native Americans as positive and complex characters - and 99% of the time they were bad asses as well. (Charles Bronson's movie Chato's Land comes to mind when I think of the bad ass example.) But everything I saw as a kid and adult made the expansionists the bad guys, or at best, mistreat the Native Americans with double-crosses. From my experience, this is the opposite of how orcs were portrayed in D&D.

Side Note: Heck, one of the greatest American lies, that exists in many families, is the notion that someone is part Native American. I know of very few families that don't believe this. DNA tests have proven most of this to be false. But the myth is still perpetuated. Imagine Keep on the Borderlands where all the NPCs insisted that somewhere in their lineage they were 1/4 orc.
Chato's Land

 

[Bedrockgames]

The funny thing is that I rarely saw orcs being treated in such a sympathetic light or as complex people in D&D supplements. There were occasional examples of domestic life, but for the most part they just existed to provide us with experience points.

And I think that is because in those campaigns, they weren’t filling the role of natives. They were filling the role of evil to be vanquished. I think where complexity comes in is many settings and campaigns did start looking at orcs in more morally gray ways: where they had their own culture and an ability to move outside the restraints that culture imposed. When you start doing that, it obviously gets more thorny. But if orcs are just symbolic of evil I think it is different

I should say personally I always preferred campaigns where orcs weren’t there simply to be killed. But I can enjoy campaigns where the world has monsters and those monsters are evil. I can also separate a creature that carries real world cultural features as an aesthetic to make it interesting, and a setting where the creature is a sign board for the real world culture in question.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Let's be careful here, what do you mean by "our" generation? I was born in the 70s, after the domination of the western in popular entertainment had ended, but I always enjoyed watching old television shows and movies westerns. The funny thing is, starting with Ft. Apache in 1949, the American Indians started being portrayed in a sympathetic light as complex people who were getting a raw deal. Certainly not in all movies or television shows, but the era of the Indian as a simple bad guy you could knock off with impunity was coming to an end.

I would second this strongly. Just about everything I saw growing portrayed Native Americans as positive and complex characters - and 99% of the time they were bad asses as well. (Charles Bronson's movie Chato's Land comes to mind when I think of the bad ass example.) But everything I saw as a kid and adult made the expansionists the bad guys, or at best, mistreat the Native Americans with double-crosses. From my experience, this is the opposite of how orcs were portrayed in D&D.

Side Note: Heck, one of the greatest American lies, that exists in many families, is the notion that someone is part Native American. I know of very few families that don't believe this. DNA tests have proven most of this to be false. But the myth is still perpetuated. Imagine Keep on the Borderlands where all the NPCs insisted that somewhere in their lineage they were 1/4 orc.
Chato's Land

It's a pretty mixed bag. The Looney Toons reruns included the ones with 'Indian attacking the settlers or wagon train' adventure points well into the 90s. Stagecoach definitely exemplified an era where Native Americans were the villains counter to cowboys. There was probably move towards sympathetic instead of unsympathetic with the rise to prominence of revisionist westerns in the 60s and 70s with things like Chief Dan George's turn in Little Big Man and The Outlaw Josey Wales and similar.

Pertaining to SC's side note, there seems to be a running narrative in certain families that such and such great (-great-great...) grandmother was a Blackfoot* or Cherokee 'Princess.'
*note: no such thing. The tribe is Blackfeet, not Blackfoot

The funny thing is that I rarely saw orcs being treated in such a sympathetic light or as complex people in D&D supplements. There were occasional examples of domestic life, but for the most part they just existed to provide us with experience points.

EGG put humanoid children in the caves in Keep on the Borderland, and I believe earlier, because I think the 'is it lawful to slay children of chaotic humanoids' debate predates the module. So there is the inkling of the overarching issue from pretty early on. Combine that with the notion that you often would negotiate with (else for what is the reaction table meant?), rather than fight, intelligent enemies and it seems that the game was primed for this debate from the beginning. That said, I think sympathetic views of humanoids started in full when there were whole sections of text dedicated to playing them (rather than the earlier 'you can play anything as long as it is balanced' kind of stuff). 2e's Complete Book of Humanoids certainly recasts all of the humanoid races as (often) eco-friendly isolationists who just want to protect their own, or similar. BECMI's Orcs of Thar didn't really make humanoids sympathetic, but it did make them silly (smelly feet jokes and them loving trashy versions of items and other kid-show stuff), which can easily make them 'pet villains' more than actual villains. Of course those are optional supplements, but it's certainly a point where the waters get muddied.

And I think that is because in those campaigns, they weren’t filling the role of natives. They were filling the role of evil to be vanquished. I think where complexity comes in is many settings and campaigns did start looking at orcs in more morally gray ways: where they had their own culture and an ability to move outside the restraints that culture imposed. When you start doing that, it obviously gets more thorny. But if orcs are just symbolic of evil I think it is different

I should say personally I always preferred campaigns where orcs weren’t there simply to be killed. But I can enjoy campaigns where the world has monsters and those monsters are evil. I can also separate a creature that carries real world cultural features as an aesthetic to make it interesting, and a setting where the creature is a sign board for the real world culture in question.

I think always-evil villain species are possible. It works for non-humanoids (manticores, giant scorpions, stirges, etc.). They don't even have to be 'evil incarnate' things like demons or devils. What does have to happen, however, is that you keep this unflinchingly consistent across the IP (and, for D&D, the inspired works, since clearly WoW and Warhammer and various D&D inspired webcomics, manga, and computer games influence how people see orcs). The ship has sailed for orcs, but WotC with 5e tried to make gnolls the resident 'it's always okay to fight these guys' monster, and it has sorta worked (minus a few people who had favorite gnoll PCs or the like. Honestly it would have been better to introduce a completely new monster for this role).